Upheaval

You are not going to believe this, but this morning the sun was out. In light of the light (Ha! I kill me!), the goatmother decided it was a good time to get the strawberries all set for summer. This is a good thing, mind you, because I happen to like strawberries. Not as much as Peanuts, but still .... Anyway, I was all for it. Besides, I didn't have to do any of the work, so what's not to like?

So the goatmother started out trimming away dead plant stuff from last year. You see, she has the garden surrounded by cement blocks, and the strawberries are planted in each of the holes in the blocks. With the size of the garden, there are over 100 strawberry plants. Now the soil tends to settle in the blocks and each year the goatmother has to add more soil. Well, it took her until lunchtime to get all the dead stuff trimmed away, and by then it was cloudy again. Oh, well, we knew it couldn't last, didn't we? After all, according to the comments on my last post, we were only borrowing the sun from New Zealand and Norway anyway. I mean I feel privileged to have gotten to see it at all.

But I digress. (That sure seems to have become a habit with me. Okay. Don't say anything. I'm a goat who can recognize her faults - what few there are.) Anyway, by the time the goatmother finished lunch, it had started to rain. Again. Or is it still? I don't know, but dummy that she is, the goatmother decided she just HAD to get those strawberries finished today. Out she went into the downpour to finish putting soil (only I think by now it was mud) into the strawberry holes.

I was watching from the barn, INSIDE the barn, and everything seemed to be going along pretty well. Then all of a sudden I saw the goatmother stop dead in her tracks, jump back and say, "What the ........???!"

Well, you see, it was like this. The soil had gone down quite a bit and the strawberries had rather long necks on them. So the goatmother would hold up the plant and stuff soil around the edges and underneath. At one point she stuffed the back, the sides, and the front. When she finished with the front, the green plant started looking as though it were about to heave up its lunch. (Do plants eat lunch?) The more the goatmother stuffed, the more the green thing heaved back. Turns out there was a rather large, green frog under there who took great umbrage at being buried before his time. Since he was exactly the same color as the emerging strawberry plant, the goatmother was having visions of 'The Little Shop of Horrors'. (She's kind of near-sighted too.) The more she stuffed, the more that poor frog tried to get out.

Eventually the frog prevailed, but I can tell you he came away with a story to tell his grandchildren. I guess it was an honest mistake, but on the other hand, perhaps the goatmother ought to be more careful. Oh, well, obviously she doesn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain anyway.

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass; it's about getting out there and dancing in the rain." - author unknown.