Busy Hands Homestead

Strong, cold wind blows down the beach, the water is so cold my toes tingled and the kids still get soaked from head to toe, splashing in the space between solid land and sea. The kids shriek and run.  They gather up rocks, poke at pieces of jelly fish, and these moments alone would have been worth the drive.  The moments with friends and the most decadent camping food, in the history of camping, would have been worth the drive. But, the excuse for this trip, is a moment 1 minute and 55 seconds in length. Intellectually, I had been prepared for this moment. We had listened to podcasts, heard other people's stories, shushed the children on the eleven hour drive split between two days: "Shhh!!! Listen, to this story.  They are talking about what we are about to see." "Don't look at the sun without your glasses.  It's dangerous." The sun was bright, the temperature dropped, our shadows become duplicate, the spaces between the leaves turne...

For an entire week our mornings and evenings were filled with the chink, chink, chink of cherry pits. Two cherry pies, cherry danishes , and quart bags of pitted cherries are in the freezer.   Jars of apple cherry jam are on the shelf. Once a year we drive up to Finley Point to pick cherries in the summer sun and then jump into the clear  cold water of Flathead lake.   The silver fruit picking ladder gets warm  in the sun and is almost to hot  to touch against my skin as we move from one tree to the next. The sticky, sweet, dark red juice runs down my fingers as I fill the same basket over and over, carrying it up and down the ladder, and we fill the cardboard boxes we brought along. The kids pick cherries for a while, and then get distracted and sprawl on blankets, eating lunch and running through a sprinkler the owner’s of the orchard left on. Between my feet and the ground, between where I stand on the ladder and where the ...