Looking Back

Waxing nostalgic tonight, and looking back over the time since I started blogging about our lives here at Calamity Acres.  We have had so many animal members of our family in the seven years we have been here, that it seems like we have lived here much longer.

Here is our dear old pony Beau, and his goose friend, Samantha.

Samantha had a mate, Timmy, who was killed by a coyote attack, and all we found of him was his back and wings against the far fenceline.  Samantha loved Beau, and ate and drank with him daily, following him around the pasture.  She would pick straw from his coat as he laid in the sun, and I caught her doing it with the camera one day.  Sadly, something attacked Sammy and she suffered for days while I kept treating her wounds with iodine and salve... but missed a wound under a wing, and that got her. She was a lovely goose.

The brave Mama Llama, who came here to guard against coyotes after Sammy and Timmy died, with her then-little cria, Tony.

What a wonderful old girl she was!  She taught Tony and Inca well, and that's why Aztec is growing up so well today.  Sadly, Mama Llama has since died... inexplicably, in her home pasture at my friend Joni's. As Joni said, when you buy an animal at auction, you often do not know how old they really are. 

Sweet little Addie Mae, our first little pug.

Our beautiful geese and ducks.

We are hopefully going to have waterfowl again later this year. 

My little doll, waiting for me as I cleaned house.

People have come and gone too, stepson Brandon finished high school here with us, and is now living and working back in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Grandson Chris comes and goes, helping out, and Nathan comes frequently to visit us, including this weekend.  We are hoping that once I am retired, we can frequently have family over for cookouts.  It seems now that the weekends either fly by with errands, or we are so tired that we just don't put forth the effort to have company.  I think that will change with this coming summer.

It seems like just a short time since we moved here... I had had surgery on my knee and couldn't walk, and Keith, God bless him, moved us BY HIMSELF.   I don't to this day know how he did it!

He actually painted the whole interior of the house before he started moving us, and moved me in a pain-medicine daze after he got the furniture moved.  And yet, we have had so many adventures since we moved here... Keith has built so very much.... the place has gone from a plain house sitting on five acres to a house with a pasture, with a barn, with fencing, with a garden, an arbor, flowerbeds.... it's a different place than what we bought and moved into.  It's a family place, it's home.