It's Tuesday Once More

I started work on our personal bookwork today and got the first two months done. It was fun entering items from our time in Florida last winter -- it brought back many good memories.

Tom's car ended up fixed late this afternoon, so Forry took him over to pick it up. They ended up back at Tom and Juni's, so eventually I walked over to join them for a glass of wine. I had been on the phone talking with Sister Sherry when he left and we were still talking when he got back.

Sherry and I had gotten started talking about our Dad and the horses he bought for us soon after we moved to the farm following our Grandfather's retirement. We both have vivid memories of driving up the old steep winding Lewiston grade in his pickup with a pregnant mare (Blaze) and her yearling colt in the back. I can truly remember being very, very scared!

We reminisced about learning to ride horseback by just riding. No such thing as lessons for us. We could both remember being surprised by comments in later years about such things as "leads." Sherry trained the colt Blaze had at her side and I trained the one that was born later -- again neither one of us knowing much more than getting them used to us on their backs and eventually saddles...

Anyone listening to a couple of 70+ year old ladies talking about their youth would have gotten a chuckle out of our conversation. We talked for over an hour. A fun way to spend part of an afternoon!

Shipshewanna and a Table for Forry

We decided that we would stay on another day at the Elkhart Campground so that I could do some long overdue laundry and cleaning. Late this afternoon we went visit the Amish shops in Shipshewanna to see if we could find a small narrow table for Forry's computer. Shipshewanna is about 23 miles from here.  As we got closer, we began to see horses pulling Amish buggies trotting along on the shoulder. (Sorry about Toad's "buggy" windshield!)

There were multiple buggies tied up alongside one of the grocery stores.  It was interesting to see the juxtaposition of the grocery carts and the buggies --

The shod horses have worn a wide groove on the paved shoulders of the road --

We did find a neat table for Forry's laptop at the second store we checked.  Landmark Woods doesn't use credit cards.  We did not have enough cash to pay for it nor had we thought to bring a check.  The owner insisted that we take the table with us and mail him a check!  I offered him the hundred or so dollars I had in cash as a partial payment, but he wouldn't hear of it.  He gave me a stamped addressed envelope -- you can be sure it will be going back to him along with a check tomorrow morning! The table is a narrow Mission style with a small shelf on the bottom (already filled with TV controllers!) It's about 26 inches high, 24 inches long and 12 inches wide.  It's not cherry like the rest of Auntie Violet's cabinetry, but it doesn't look too bad.

We made a stop at Blue Gate Restaurant and Bakery for a slice of pie and a cup of coffee before we headed home to have leftovers for supper.

In Farrier Coulee...

The home place of Tree Heart Ranch Ltd. is located in Farrier Coulee which runs through the middle of the farm. We don't know if the man who bred and raised horses up by the big springs was named Farrier or if that was his occupation. There are still remnants of the stone corrals where he kept horses. Forry says that he turned his domestic stallion loose with the wild horses, then caught and trained the ensuing colts. All of the many springs that used to line the coulee are long gone, victims of the dropping water table due to the deep wells used for irrigation. When we were first married, we got our domestic water from a now-defunct spring across the coulee that was piped into a cistern in the house yard.


When Forry was a boy, he found lots of arrowheads along the creek (which has long since been dry except for spring run-off) and his older brother talked about finding an area where it looked like the Indians had chipped rock for arrowheads.



There are about four hundred acres of unfarmable land in the coulee. We used to raise about twenty head of cattle here. Along with the farmland that is in the Conservation Reserve Program, Forry spends a great deal of his time in the spring spraying out the noxious weeds in the coulee.

It's been interesting to see all the varities of wild flowers that bloom in the coulee. There are lots of yarrow plants that bloom in amongst the sagebrush: