Around here, Candlemas means crêpes by candlelight (even if it is the middle of the day).

We (mostly Rachel!) made a decent dent in this weekend’s project. It’ll take at least one more round to dig out the … oh I don’t know … ten remaining tons of rock and landscape fabric.

How it looked last summer versus current state:

So one of our projects is to rip out (almost) all of the landscaping on the south side of the house and replace it with flowers and food. I was planning to start helping Rachel this afternoon (I was job working this morning) but then came out and she already had a great deal of it done! She said “buy a girl a pair of coveralls and there’s no telling what she’ll do.” ❤️ But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of work left for me to share in. 😄

Video of Bronson Cave, Spring Mill State Park

Prayer after Eating
Wendell Berry

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

[published in The Country of Marriage]

I love this Imbolc essay from Rhyd Wildermuth.

It’s 7pm and that has come to mean one thing at the Abel house this winter: it’s time for tea and Azerbaijanians.

Gardening is afoot! Rachel is planting sweet peas and prepping some other indoor containers for seed starting.

At the moment, my plan is to continue reading Wendell Berry’s fiction until I’ve read it all. Using Tom Murphy’s site as my source (and excluding some hard-to-find small press titles), here’s how it stands:

• ✔ Nathan Coulter
• A Place on Earth
• ✔ The Memory of Old Jack
• The Wild Birds
• ✔ Remembering
• Fidelity
• Watch With Me
• A World Lost
• ✔ Jayber Crow
• ✔ Hannah Coulter
• That Distant Land
• Andy Catlett: Early Travels
• Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World
• A Place in Time
• The Art of Loading Brush
• How It Went

Not only is memorizing Dune’s “Litany Against Fear” during childhood not silly, I commend it as a solid practice for an adult. I did it in my early forties and I’m not even much of an SF reader. And I have a button on my backpack.