From the editor’s manger
Dear readers, kids, and the person still looking for a parking spot at a fair that ended Saturday:
The Expo is over. The shade cloth has been rolled. The plucker, if it found a new kitchen, is already making a different kind of noise. What remains is the part of homesteading that never fits on a program: Tuesday morning, a dry spring, and a burn ban that arrived after the state said the drought alert could go home.
Jefferson City can expire an order. A creek with a name only the neighbors know does not read executive stationery. Southern Missouri is feeding hay in September. Joplin’s pair market took a breath and sat down. Fire districts from Ozark to Howell have asked you not to set the hillside on fire for the sake of a brush pile. Arkansas, not to be outdone, colored the whole map the same color. If you must burn something, burn last week’s to-do list. Leave the fescue alone.
Monday is teal. Next Tuesday the woods remember us: archery deer and fall turkey open together, which is the calendar’s way of saying the hills are about to fill with people who whisper. The goats do not care about a draw weight. They care whether the hunter’s truck still has room for a water jug on the way home.
Perryville is twenty-four days out. Sequins yes. Dogs no. Dixon, up in Pulaski County, will raffle a live cow the weekend after next, because the Ozarks remain the only place where you can win livestock and a funnel cake in the same sentence. Howell County still has September 28 on the docket. This paper prints the date. It does not print a verdict, and it will not dress six dead goats in a costume.
Button has filed an armadillo dispatch. Inkhorn has gone to the fence line where the deer already know the season better than the regulation booklet. Scoop walked the Marshfield square after the vendors left and counted what stayed: soap, rumor, and a Nigerian Dwarf operation that never needed a ticket to be the local story. Nanny Belle is measuring sequins against the remaining daylight.
Usual orders: be interesting, be kind, and do not invent a fever a goat did not earn. I have edited their copy with a red grease pencil and the patience of a wether who has seen too many humans confuse a weekend of classes with a finished farm.
A skill you bought on Saturday is only a skill if Wednesday’s water is still in the tub.
Everything else is a tote bag.
Fill the second tub. Leave the matches in the drawer. Look twice at a hole in the yard before you blame the dog. October will bring a parade. This week belongs to the ordinary work that keeps the hills from going quiet.
— Professor Gruff
Editor & Publisher