A Slow Burn

'Tis Spring.  Late Spring but there technically.

There are some things I miss about Spring on the farm. The first one would be watching my dad in the field on his red tractor with the plow churning up the fresh dirt.  It required absolutely no work for me which may contribute to the "funness" of the memory. Overhead flew dozens of seagulls which had appeared from seemingly nowhere. I liked watching them but it was only a drop in the bucket of the joyful feelings the pioneers in the SLC valley must have felt when they saw the flocks of seagulls swooping down to eat all the crickets that had been eating their meager crops. 

The newly-turned clods were big and full of worms and if you stepped on a clod, it would disintegrate under your shoe, kind of a fun feeling. Once my dad brought a baby rabbit home for us to tend. The mother rabbit had met her demise from the equipment.  We watched the baby rabbit all afternoon but Dad took it back to the field before nightfall. I think he was quite mad at himself for disturbing nature but mostly because he knew it would probably not survive and that would be even more tragic.

Another memory I like is the burning of the canals. I'm not talking about any fire that got out of control or were started in fields or on the mountains. This was the kind that was tended and was set to defeat the weeds that would have clogged up the water to the fields had they been allowed to grow as they wished. I hate weeds though I don't spend anywhere as much time killing them as did my parents but when it had to do with our livelihood, as so many things did, it was instinctual to fight them to the death.

I loved to see the fields with their rows and rows of potatoes or corn or grain or really anything in those straight lines that went on as far as the eye could see...