A picture is worth a thousand words.
However, Mom (Mrs. Castleberry) likes words, too. Enjoy the captions!
I have no idea why, but sometimes this picture is showing up twice. Sorry!
Here are some of our cows on a misty morning in one of the pastures. You can just see a couple of the boys in the left background, putting up fencing. Northern Wisconsin is cool most early mornings, even in summer, and cools off again almost every evening. (The weather in summer is a wonderful reward for enduring those long cold winters!)
Here are some of the children hilling potatoes in our enormous potato patch! It’s down by the river on our good neighbor’s property. No, we can’t eat that many potatoes, but they did so well there last year that we doubled the patch, and the children plan to sell the extras to people who would like organic potatoes.
This is one of my favorite pictures! The pies were made the day after we picked 326 pounds of strawberries at Johnson’s strawberry farm, about 20 minutes from our place. One of the pies was for Todd Bitner, our good neighbor who lets us pasture cows and grow potatoes on his land. See the bear cookie jar behind the pies? I bought that at an auction when I was pregnant with our youngest, who will be eight years old soon. Where does the time go? When he was a toddler, I would show it to him and tell him that I was the mama bear and he was the little one. Sigh.
This is Elijah, age 14, coming in with a load of bales from a hayfield a few miles away. I usually follow him in the car if he will have to be on Hwy. 13 to come home, because cars travel WAY too fast on that road, and they do crazy kinds of passing on double yellow lines at 80 mph. Even if it doesn’t really help, Mom feels better about it if she’s there. I’ll always be that mama bear!
Steve and his younger boys are in the basement here, laying out pipe and deciding how to re-plumb the basement bathroom. You can just see one boy’s knee left of the pipes, and the other child standing there with a bag from Poplar Hardware on his head watching Dad. Guess he got a bit bored – he’s always in motion!
This is reason enough to be glad we live here on a summer day. It is a truly beautiful place, and can the skies be so blue anywhere else?
You can see a summer storm building up here to the south of our farm. The red shed is one that Steve and the children built a few summers ago for our cows, and that some of our neighbors call “the giraffe barn.” I suppose it is a bit tall . . . but hey, if we ever decide to raise giraffes, we’re ready!
Now I’m not sure what is going on in this last picture. Looks like Dad (Steve) and Ben are trying to figure out something with the four-wheeler, and Jeannie is quickly and quietly leaving before they ask her to go for parts again. Our little guy is just enjoying life as usual – when you’re seven, you don’t have to worry about fixing four-wheelers or going for parts. You just get lots of fun and rides and hugs and cookies from the mama-and-baby-bear cookie jar, because you’re the youngest, and no one can resist that smile.