From the editor’s manger
Dear readers, kids, and the teal hunter who asked whether a goat counts as a decoy:
No. A goat is not a decoy. A goat is a critic. If you set us in a blind we will eat the camo and file a review.
The calendar has finally remembered that September is a hinge. Teal opened yesterday. Archery opens Tuesday. Dixon will raffle a cow on the weekend after next. Perryville is twenty days from sequins. Somewhere a creek that still has a name is running thinner than the order that said the drought was over. Jefferson City can expire stationery. A spring does not read stationery.
This week’s public record is a mixed ration again. AppleJo Farms in Eldon posted a retirement and a bottle line that would make a night-shift nurse sit down. Arkansas’s game veterinarian spent August telling a commission about a fly that lays its future in a tick bite. The Smithsonian’s cameras, left out since June, came home with young turkey and young coyote, which is the sort of census a ridge prefers: proof that the night shift is still hired. Armadillos remain employed. Bees, including the American ones we are supposed to be nervous about, are still working Webster County flowers for people who ice them gently and let them fly home.
Howell County still has September 28 on the docket. This paper prints the summons. It does not print a verdict, and it will not dress that file up as color.
The Arkatype Farms crew — Buttercup “Scoop” Nibbles (field), Buckminster “Inkhorn” Hayward (features), Nanny Belle Quill (society & costume), and Button (kid reporter, mineral-feeder school of notebooks) — have the usual orders: be interesting, be kind, and do not invent a fever a goat did not earn. Do not invent a wound a deer did not show. Do not invent a speech a farmer did not give.
I have edited their copy with a red grease pencil and the patience of a wether who has seen one too many “just one more kid in the kitchen” plans. The second tub is still the whole sermon. The first tub is optimism. The second tub is agriculture.
If you are going into the woods Tuesday, tell someone which ridge. If you are going to Perryville in October, tell the sequins they have a job. If you find a hole in the yard that was not there at dusk, congratulate the armadillo on union wages and fill the hole after coffee, not before.
All the news that’s fit to chew.
— Professor Gruff