glacier

 We are past my birthday in mid February now and can see hope for spring's warmup.  Days are longer, light returns, but winter hangs on like a sour sullen old man.  Our livestock working area has become a glacier, winter's regular snowfalls melting under the increasingly powerful sun, then refreezing at night into a sloping treacherous surface.  Out of storage come the pull on spikes so necessary to staying upright.   

It is snow season with ten plus inches expected this week and steady high winds.  We will have to remind ourselves that the ice is down there.  But soon the winter will slowly leave our south sloping yard exposed to thaw and firming up.

Meanwhile the lilacs at our back door show swelling buds, telling me that the time to prune might have been two or three weeks ago.  Green shows under snow in the pastures.  We hurry to keep up with Nature's steady pace. 

Unit train

 I turned right in town and drove to the west past the unit train loading outfit. As I drove I fell to thinking about this place, what it is and what it was.  Sixty years ago, I knew it simply as "the elevator".  It bought and sold six or seven kinds of grain, sold feeds and feed premixes as well as seeds and provided coal for home heating.  Instead of today's constant line of semi tractors and grain trailers there were mostly farm tractors pulling farm wagons, sometimes hitched in pairs.  Some of the more up and coming farmers drove products in on single axle trucks.  A feed delivery truck ran constantly between the elevator's feed mill and surrounding farms. When grain left the community it did so by boxcar, perhaps several being loaded at a time.

Today there is no feed mill and no feed delivery truck.  The elevator sells no coal, no seed, no fertilizer.  It sells grain by the unit train, fifty two cars or 104 cars-all hopper bottom-at a time.  That is all it does.  There is no loading platform and no gaggle of teenage boys sitting on it smoking cigarettes and watching the town after hours. 

We were richer then and didn't know it.