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A place strangely like home

This woodblock art print, by Emily Gray Koehler,
is wonderful enough to deserve a place here even though
it's completely unrelated to today's blog post.
FarmWife is a journalist, and one of the wonderful things about that line of work is that she gets to know a great many interesting and inspiring people. Today, she went out into the Cascades to meet a wonderful gardener/farmer/activist, but that is a story for another day (for Dec. 29, actually, and the first 2012 issue of Grow Northwest).

While she was there, her phone began to ring. Or did it? FarmWife heard the familiar bray of her beloved mule and fished about in her purse. She pulled her phone out. She stared at it—black, unmoving. The bray rang out again.

Being a woman of only one ear (well, she has two, but one's just for looks), FarmWife spun about for a moment trying to pinpoint the origin of the sound. It certainly sounded like it was coming from her purse, but then with just one ear she can never quite be sure.

She asked her hostess—the interesting farmer—if there happened to be a mule on the premises. It turned out that the neighbor, in fact, keeps three. One of them sounds quite exactly like me, Fenway Bartholomule! Of course, this means he also sounds exactly like FarmWife's ringtone. Poor confused woman.

The farmer's house was beautiful and bore an uncanny resemblance to the house of FarmWife's dreams, which she has modeled in SketchUp but which she probably won't get around to building for another decade. The barn was wonderful and bore a less uncanny resemblance to . . . well, a wonderful barn. The horses (yes, this farmer keeps equines of her own) were wonderful, as was the Aussie pup. A good time was had by all, and by all I mean FarmWife, her three human daughters, the horses, the Aussie pup, the interesting farmer (we hope), and, presumably, the neighbor's brayful mule.

It's too bad I wasn't there to see these wonderful people who were like-FarmWife-yet-not-FarmWife. I'm sure they would have liked me as much as my family liked them.

Ears to you,

FenBar

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