Still no camera. The barn pic yesterday was taken back when I had one that worked. I'm waiting to hear from the repair place to see if it can be fixed under warranty. The barn sits about 50 feet behind my house and serves as shelter for two horses that got new shoes and a manicure last week. Mostly they just hang out in the pasture and enjoy life with tails swishing every which'a'way to keep the flies from biting.

Stubborn fool that I am, I've been in the attic the past couple of nights bringing boxes of pictues and childhood memorabilia down to the cool where I can sort through them at my leisure. There is something about touching precious things from the past that makes it easier to let go and move forward, right Vicki? There are boxes all over the living room, ready to receive the offerings of church camp art and pre-school progress reports. My mother puts me to shame as an organizer of things. The scrapbooks that she made for me as I was growing up ( and for the two brothers as well ) are divided by school year and age and include every rat killing we ever took part in plus every holidays' joy. My system broke down after keeping up with the baby book for about four years. From then on it was all saved, but with no rhyme or reason. I hope to bring some order to the chaos in the coming weeks and months.

When we moved into this house eighteen years ago, it had been home to a horse man for around fifty years. The last ten of them he spent here alone after his wife died. It took six months of hard labor just to get the place ready to move in. You can imagine what a mess is left behind by an elderly farm guy living alone. There were bags of rabbit food in the attic and the basement was a study in dirt and cobwebs plus piles of trash and metal. BabyGirl was four at the time, so any further work took a backseat to being a mother and earning a living. As she grew older, I managed to tackle one project a year, because they were always major. One year I spent cleaning up the foot of pine needles that covered up one side of the yard, and putting in a shade bed. Another time it was dragging stuff out of the basement to make room for my own little escape. This year, I've finally gotten the urge to change the look of the main floor from the "country heart" motif that we've had for eighteen years. It has been a labor of love, every minute of it.

I distinctly remember sitting on the back porch steps years ago, dreaming about converting the weedy corner next to the basement entrance into a flower bed. It took awhile, but I made it happen, antique stones and all. There's a pile of bricks and odd shaped rocks piled up out there now, my patio in the making. There is history all over this farm just waiting to be told.

Y'all stay cool if you can. And keep the faith.