My memories of my Aunt Hattie's farm are these: the wonderful white farm house with little bedrooms high up with roof-shaped ceilings... a type of screened sun-room porch where she had houseplants... the kitchen garden... the long low rail fence along the dirt road up to the house, where ramblers had to be hacked back all the time or the roses would simply take over the road... riding the old workshorse over fields and seeing those lying before and around me, checked like a quilt, and dotted here and there with haystacks. I could think of nothing more delicious than living there! It did strike me as tedious that Aunt Hattie and her daughters began their day milking, fetching eggs, pulling something from the garden, making breakfast for the family, then cleaning up the kitchen, wiping their brow, pulling something from the garden, getting something from the smokehouse or springhouse or whatever, making lunch (mostly for the men -- we ate after the hard workers left), cleaning up -- just in time to fetch something from the garden and begin making dinner. In between were bouts of clouds and sprinkles and clear skies repeated on the ten-minute mark. As my grandmother used to say, "It'd cloud up and rain forty-'leven times a day." So my first picture here (I can't remember if I truly watercolor painted it, or watercolor pencil + water after'd it) was the Norman Rockwell version that's in my happy-place memory. When I discovered a "water-spotted" effect on the photo program, I cast it over the picture to represent the forty-eleven other times a day.
