Thought & Memory

               I grew up on farms, both in New England and Virginia. My parents still live on a small farm about an hour away, the one we first moved to almost twenty years ago.  When I say small, I do mean small. We have five acres and on that five acres we have nine goats, four sheep, and five chickens. We have three dogs and a small colony of stray cats that my dad feeds on the back porch. They each have a name. But in addition to our small menagerie there is a barred owl who lives in the woods that we hear at night, along with a chorus of toads and whippoorwills. Once while weeding the garden, my sister almost picked up a small green snake instead of a handful of deadnettle. Hummingbirds, honey bees and clear-wing moths gather in the bergamot flowers that are planted all over to tempt pollinators into the garden. Sometimes at dusk, deer graze at the edge of the pasture. And when night falls, fireflies compete with the stars in their flickering brightness.