The first week in June on the prairie...not too bad.
At seventy–plus, this is my first summer of unemployment since I was nine.
It's a little disconcerting, but I have to admit I'm liking it.
The biggest perk? Ruining fewer shirts.
I can't tell you the number of dress shirts that have ended up in the work shirt drawer after I spilled some sort of greasy food on them because I was eating and driving, scurrying from one thing to something else. I'm doing far less scurrying now. For instance, a couple weeks ago a friend of ours had a book signing and we decided to drop in. We left home an hour or so early, saw a little cafe and stopped in for a leisurely breakfast. Several cups of coffee later, I hadn't looked at the time, hadn't checked my phone...it was great. I had no idea people did stuff like that!
I'm spending more time observing spring than I have other years. I've always loved springtime because it was such a harbinger of hope, of possibility. I mean, if I hadn't enjoyed springtime, a career as a farmer would’ve been a waste of time. But I've always done my springtime enjoyment at a dead run. Clearly, the pace has slackened. Tonight, I'm doing my writing in a swinging chair that hangs from a walnut tree in the yard. It's surprisingly comfortable, even with the smoke from the Canadian wildfires adding a haze to the skies. Anna's yellow rose started popping out today, the snowball bush is in full glory and my wife's iris and lilacs look glorious. A few wildflowers are blooming on (!) and around my office, and I just spent a half hour with some targeted weed killer trying to encourage them by thinning out the burdock and Canadian thistle. The garden is looking good. We had four new fruit trees blossom this year and even my experiment trying to grow potatoes in a laundry basket looks like it will be wildly successful. And I gotta tell you, “wildly successful” and “my experiment” are sequences of words that don't very often fit into the same sentence. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm ahead of the weeds, but I'm certainly still in the game and on Tuesday, Number Three is going to start coming over to help with the projects that require four hands, or some brute strength. In the larger world, my wife and I were happy to see three baby swans nestled between two giant protective parents.
My calendar is still pretty full, but almost everything on it would fit into the “optional” category. For example, after roughly 100 times as much work as the project is worth in preparation, I finally stocked a former, by 30 years, hog lagoon with some baby bluegills. It already had minnows in it that will serve as bluegill food, and then next spring we’ll introduce some smallmouth bass to keep the bluegill population at a healthy number. Somewhere in there, the plan is for me to interject myself to skim off a little of the ecosystem for myself. I have a clear vision of me in a lawn chair with a fishing pole. Truthfully, whether or not there are fish in the pond is probably not the most important part of the dream.
Spring on the prairie. If you can't find something to love, you're probably not paying attention.
Copyright 2025 Brent Olson
