annual autumn communique'

Hello friends,

well, this fall instead of including the entire text of my favorite fall poem i'll just give you a link to follow if you so desire. as always, the poem is "when the frost is on the punkin" by james whitcomb riley.

http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/when_the_frost_is_on_the_punkin.html

here it is again, the first day of autumn. i don't know how you spent yours, but i spent mine running errands and sitting on my front porch (cement step) watching my kittens play around me. we've got quite a little family here. almost as soon as we moved in tim said, "let's get some kittens. i like to have critters around." so we looked in the classifieds and brought home an adorable little black and white kitten, bubba. we fed him and loved him and watched him grow for a couple of weeks, and then decided he needed a playmate. i went to a farm that had lots and lots of kittens, all colors. i had my heart set on a grey one or an orange one, but tim likes the brown striped variety--tabby, i hear they're called. well, this place had at least four orange kittens, two tabby, and some black/black and white. the little tabbys were adorable so i knew i had to have one, but i didn't want to get tim's favorite and not get mine so i called him for permission to bring back both a striped and an orange. my loving husband said to me, "it's up to you. i will love them all."

it's refreshing living in the country, though nothing about this move turned out to be as wonderful as we thought while we lived in lincoln. it's alright though. i've been putting in applications and i have an interview tomorrow and things will work out alright. the view is beautiful from our house, and if you ride the four wheeler up the prairie road between the fields just north of our house, it's almost, well, it just makes you feel peaceful to look at it, especially at sunset. so it should be a nice fall and i hope it finds all of you well.

love,
amy

corning glory

if i had a digital camera i would post a picture on today's blog. the picture would be of morning glory vines with blooms of deep purple and lighter lavendar twining up dry golden cornstalks on the edge of a cornfield. tim and i take a semi-back road to get to the airport in the morning. it takes us down a gravel road, through a gate, then back around a prairie road that runs along the south and west sides of a cornfield on the airport's property. it's on the south side that we see the flowers in the corn.

i've always liked morning glories ever since i started playing "trees and flowers" years ago. their deep purple hue with lighter centers shooting out like a sunrise and their simple phonograph-shape appealed to me. i was so excited to actually see them for real when we visited my Barber grandparents in Denver one summer. they were climbing up a trellis on the front of their house, and i was like "wow, those are morning glories! they really exist!" (and i was, of course, proud of myself for being able to identify them.) maybe i didn't get out much, but it didn't seem like we had many of the "flowers" flowers in our area (though i know now that prairie roses, at least--from the D family--we have in abundance).

ever since that summer, morning glories remind me of grandma and grandpa barber. we usually only saw them once a year, in the summer, when mom and grandma would meet in the middle (usually deadwood, sd) to pass off us kids and dad would come to colorado to spend a week or so with us. we had good times going to movies and playing scrabble into the night and seeing our cousins. a few years later grandma and grandpa moved out of that house to a trailer house, then grandpa's parkinson's and alzheimers got bad, then somehow we didn't make it out there much anymore. finally one february when most of us were in high school, grandpa died and we went out to denver one more time. after that grandma got very lonely, until dad called in the middle of the night when angela and i were in college to tell us that she was gone too. we didn't even go out for her funeral.

it makes me sad to think of how we let them slip away. the connection was fragile anyway because of the circumstances and distance and it was just too easy not to keep in touch, but in growing older there are always things to regret. i guess we'll always have those morning glory days to remember.

christmas caulking

today i was a caulking fool. we went to menards for some window caulk and tim bought eight tubes. i told him he was crazy. he said "there's a lot of caulking to do." and i said, "yeah, but eight tubes worth? i doubt it." well, today alone we used six. tim started outside around the windows, cleaning off the spider webs and spider sacs while he was at it, then later he handed it over to me and i did the inside windows and the bathroom cabinet. while i was working i was listening through some albums on iTunes, just letting it run through the library. i started out with Mel Torme, "Right Now!" which was followed by Tony Furtado, "Roll My Blues Away," which led to Andy Gullahorn's "Room to Breathe", eventually leading to Selah's "Rose of Bethlehem." i thought about skipping to something else, but i love Selah and their christmas album is one of my favorites. good music is good music no matter what time of year it is. so i'm all standing on a chair . . . on the bathtub . . . on the couch . . . belting out yuletide tunes and having a great time. and i thought, "wow, working around the house to christmas music is a great idea."

i associate christmas music with some sort of activity: decorating the christmas tree, putting up decorations, rearranging or cleaning to make room for holiday decor. it's work, but it's fun work and it's even more fun when you have fun christmas music on to sing along to because you know all of the words and can dance around while you arrange the garland. so maybe when it's not december, say it's june, or september, or march, and you're ever feeling uninspired to do the same old household chores, maybe those Songs of the Season could work their same magic. try throwing on some Harry Connick, Jr. "When Your Heart Finds Christmas" and see what it does for your mood. i think it just might do the trick.

still a barber

it is important to me that people remember this simple fact: i am still, and will forever be, a Barber. i was trying to think of a name for my blog (ndfarmer was taken, which irks me) and i looked at angela's (barberland) and jeremy's (jeremyjbarber) for reference. see the similarity? they're barbers. way back in the day, i was the first one of us to have the barber___ email address, "barbergirl," soon to be followed by barberboy (ben) and barberbro (jeremy). but now i'm married and my last name isn't barber anymore. i'm happy to be married to a tanner, but it makes me sad to think that maybe people will slowly stop associating me with "the barbers." we've sort of made a name for ourselves among those who know us, and i love that. being a barber means something. it means, first of all, that you have red hair (or at least have a hint of strawberry). it means you're from north dakota and you grew up on a farm. it means you're part of a musical family. it means you are friendly and have a big smile (some show it more than others, but i still have it) and people in general think you're pretty nice. it means you like to play games. it means that close friends are family. i love my family.

and i miss my family. tim and i moved to iowa two weeks ago to a place in the country. it's a farmhouse three miles from the nearest post office, seven miles from the nearest gas station, fifteen miles from our church, and thirty miles from the nearest super store and movie theatre. i've been sick and we've been too busy moving in and getting the house in shape to think about being lonely, but in the quiet times, like weekends, we kind of wish we could go to someone's house or someone would come to ours. last weekend i had the best surprise ever when my mom and grandma came to visit. i knew they were coming, but when they pulled into our driveway, another car pulled in behind them and out poured kayla, ben and ashley, ben, and john. all week tim and i would talk about getting the house looking nice for when people come, but then we'd say, "but it's not like anyone's going to visit us anyway" just to get ourselves used to the thought that we're 80 miles from our nearest friends. when i saw my brother and my best friend and the rest, i cried. it was completely unexpected and i was moved to tears. their effort showed me that we weren't forgotten, that they loved us and went the extra mile to show it. it meant the world.

so thank you, my family, for the best surprise i have ever gotten. thank you for remembering me. and i hope i will post every now and then and you will check my blog and we can keep in touch, because we're family.