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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Breakfast Before Dawn

The days are getting shorter now. The autumnal equinox is behind us. Last night was the Harvest Moon.  In Taiwan they are celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival. In Israel they are celebrating Sukkoth. But here in the Ozarks, it's just another day.

You would think that we would get up when the sun does. That is the natural thing to do. But in a world full of alarm clocks, and with school buses that children have to catch, we get into a certain pattern, and it's hard to break it, even on the weekend. So it is that this morning it was very dark when we had breakfast, Bow and I.

Last night, I took a picture of the harvest moon shining above our house.  Most years I would not have noticed it, or having noticed it, I might not have placed it, thinking "My, the moon is bright tonight," but not quite remembering why.
But since my book, Our Lady of Kaifeng, has just come out, and I have been writing little articles to promote it, I could not remain unaware of the significance of that moon shining over my house.

For Bow, however, this is just another day when we have breakfast before dawn. The grapes are delicious, and all is right with the world.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

A Little Bit of Nostalgia: Pictures from Years Gone By

My friend Victoria commented on the last post asking about Teyman. This got me looking for a photo of Teyman from the good old days, when Bow was a baby, and Teyman was in good health, roaming the woods and hunting rabbits.

Of course, once I get digging through the old files, I get distracted by a lot of things I hadn't thought of before. So, to feed everybody's curiosity about how things were when I first started Project Bow, I thought I'd share some snapshots from 2002.


 Here in the photo below, we see Teyman, the mighty huntress, emerging from the woods with her prey -- or what's left of it!




Teyman was at this time less than a year old, but she was quite the warrior and bread winner.



Teyman much preferred to hunt for her own food than to eat industrially prepared dog food, and because she left her dog food untouched so often, I didn't have to buy much of it to feed her. On the other hand, she had to be de-wormed often.


In comparison to Teyman, Sword and Bow, during that same period, looked child-like and innocent. Sword at the time was not yet three, and Bow was an infant in arms.



Today, when Sword is a teen and Bow is a headstrong ten year old, but Teyman is an elderly dog in need of special attention,  it seems hard to believe that not so long ago, everything was so different for all of us!




 Can you recognize Bow? I think he still has the same face!



Friday, September 21, 2012

Strange Weather, Strange Thoughts

The weather has been odd lately. Following a drought that killed one of our peach trees, it has been raining recently almost every day, and the grass, which had been dry and wilted, grew green and tall and had to be mowed several times in the past couple of weeks.

At night, sometimes there are thunderstorms. Bow has been waking up in the middle of the night and vocalizing. Once, I asked him why he woke us all at 5:00 am. He told me he had had a bad dream. He was worried.

On days after a bad night, Bow tends to  nap a lot.

Today, he asked to go out to the outer pen after lunch, and there he assumed a motionless position, presumably napping. I took this opportunity to walk Teyman, and during our walk I saw birds of prey circling over our house. This seemed like a bad omen, but as I got closer, I saw they were really hunting for rodents above our pasture.

When I went back in and to the outer pen to check on Bow, he was still kind of dozing. Even after he woke up, he assumed the same position for a long time. When you have been vocalizing and thumping around during the night, you tend to get sleepy and philosophical during the day.