City Folk

If you were to ask me if I were a country girl or a city girl, I would definitely say, "Country Girl!". City girls? They live in New York or Chicago. They have fake fingernails. They have a Gucci bag. I grew up on a farm. With cows! Of course I'm a country girl!

Not so.

Proof #1.

This is a picture of a tree in our front yard. A few feet away we have our mailbox which is surrounded by several sedum plants. Bees love sedum. We have to bring in our own smoke to check the mail. Bees everywhere. I noticed these strange little things on our tree. Some had hardened, while others were still fresh and pliable. I smelled them. (I smell everything. A strange trait inherited from my mom.) They smelled sweet.......like honey. So, with my college education and dairy farm upbringing devised that these bees were somehow making little honey balls on the side of my tree. No hives. No sir. Honey balls. Bless my heart. Thank goodness my neighbor set me straight. It seems that my tree was producing sap. It's a cherry tree. I didn't know they could sap. We've been here three years now and it's never sapped before. My friend later explained that the tree must have undergone some stress and that would be the cause of the sap. Well, if those big yellow trucks and the pruning from the landscapers didn't give it stress I don't know what would. A country girl would have known these things.

Proof #2

Weeds. Since we've gotten our nice new landscaping I've become quite adept at removing weeds. I take great pride in finding them while they're small and lifting them out of the soil, root and all. Behind our backyard fence the construction guys threw down straw and grass seed. It's environmental property and not really used by anyone. Most of the grass has filled in, but as no one is really tending to that area, there have been an abundance of weeds to crop up. One day I looked back there and saw the biggest weed in the entire world. Huge. As big as me. I was amazed. Until, again, our neighbor set me straight. (Our neighbors are a sweet couple who keep their grandkids during the day, so we meet frequently for all the kids to play together in the afternoons) That's a corn stalk. Not a weed. A country girl would have known that, too.

Sorry Dad.