Farmers' Date

Happiness is: 2 nights with no kids, and all four of my power landscaping tools working (yes, 4: ride-em mower, push mower, handlebar weedwhacker, push weedwhacker). And oh ya, my beautiful wife here too. Where to start?

We started the night before by doing what we love best - making a list. Not just any list, but divided up by categories: farm, house reno's, inside clean-up/reorganizing, Friends, and just out of a sense of duty, a little column called "Fun." Fun has a dinner out, theatre tickets, and yoga. Period.

Fact is, it's that other stuff that we consider fun. The chance to finally get the septic field cleared, 13 more species of plants and trees in the ground, and multi-coloured spoons hung on the kitchen cabinet doors is our idea of foreplay.

We were so excited about the list that we started out by skipping yoga to come home (from Galen's delightful first piano recital) to the garden. Planted broccoli, corn, tomatoes, chard, fennel, a mulberry tree and an autumn-olive tree, finished setting up irrigation tubes in the greenhouse, and raked up grass clippings for the cows before a brief twilight respite in the hot tub. Then inside to sort laundry, re-organize the guest room, and an early bed-time too happily tired to even enjoy the fruits of our funky foreplay.

Our first ever date after moving here was to a Backyard Poultry Disease Prevention workshop at the Best Western Hotel, so I suppose this is all nothing new. In Vancouver we used to go out to restaurants alot just because we weren't sure what else to do on a date. No shortage of ways to enjoy each other these days...

Increasing the overlap of work and play, obligation and passion - that's what infuses happiness and fulfillment into this marriage, this life, this rambunctious walk on the WildSide.