Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

This was my view from my kitchen window last summer.

Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by too much. Summer is the time when the "ants" work -- laying in feed for the winter. I am a "grasshopper." While I understand what the ants are doing, I'm still secretly annoyed by it.

This summer, mercifully, I did not have a haystack in front of my kitchen window. There is still a lot of hay around the ranch, but someone gave it a little more thought, and it's been stacked in less obtrusive places. Also missing from last summer: the hay truck, loaded with hay, and abandoned in front of our living room window. It sat there

all

summer

long.

I came home from work one autumn evening and the truck and its load were suddenly, magically gone, thank goodness, but they could very easily have become a permanent part of our landscape. At least the load of hay was worth enough for someone to come deal with the ancient, decrepit, pretty much worthless truck.

As the days get cooler, the grass becomes less interesting to the cows, and you have to feed more hay. The funny thing is, the only time we have bright green grass around northern California is the winter and early spring; regardless, cows draw a lot of their winter nutrition from hay. So the ants bring more hay, and stack it.

Just not in front of our house this time.