Much of the snow is now gone from the open fields, leaving just the bigger drifts and snow piles. If I had the time I could take a good leg-stretching walk. Those kinds of walks are a luxury for me in winter. I never quite got used to the North American winter in this respect. In Britain, you can almost always take a walk of the kind where you stretch your legs out to their fullest stride. That Yorkshire hillman's gait, which looks so funny, walking down the high street, is one of my genetic inheritances, perhaps from my paternal grandfather, who was one of the organizers of the Kinder Trespass, and a lifelong hiker and outdoorsman.
My sister has the same walk.
In winter, in Maine, even though we essentially live in the outdoors, those kinds of walks don't exist. There's snow, which requires you to pick your legs up more, or ice, where you progress more carefully. Or you're on snowshoes or skis, and not really walking.
I get to take these kinds of walks the rest of the year, and when we go to Virginia each holiday season to see Aimee's parents. But, in Maine for four or five months a year, my hill-walking muscles atrophy.
Instead, there are other kinds of exercise. Shoveling snow, cutting, loading, splitting and stacking firewood, getting cars out of ditches, hefting hay bales. A homestead or farm is a "green gym."
Everyone should have one. I hear you can get them mail-order. Only ten payments of $19.99.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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