Armor, bees, and the rest of the yard
Button filed the armadillo first, because Button files holes the way other reporters file press releases. Nine bands. A shovel. A night shift that does not clock out for drought orders. The official word from MDC, still the one that matters, is that they are here to stay. Milder winters hired them. The yard is the office. There is not much that deters an employee who brings his own armor.
Scoop added the bees. In Webster County a man nets bumblebees, ices them just enough to read the stripes, and lets them warm and leave. Three American bumblebees in one small catch is the kind of number that makes a conservationist sit up and a goat, who does not eat bees on purpose, still benefit from the clover they keep honest. Highway 13 is trying to become a butterfly sentence from the north counties down toward Branson. Milkweed is not décor. Milkweed is infrastructure.
Inkhorn took the rest of the yard card and refused to let it become a directory. Whiskey Throttle is still making soap two days a week on the Marshfield square, which is what a town looks like when a herd and a storefront agree to share a week. Treasured Acres still has Mayhem and Midway, the late doelings who arrived while the family was at the fair, and Selene still has her Grand Champion sentence. DeLapp is still the Colorado-to-Hartville story. The Robertsons in the Arkansas foothills are still the 200-sheep, 50-goat, poultry-and-pigs-and-dogs operation that makes a 280-acre place work like a bigger one. The Goat Ranch in Dade County is still named for animals last kept there in the 1950s, which is the most Ozarks joke that is also a map.
Nanny Belle measured Perryville against the remaining daylight. October 3. Sequins yes. Dogs no. Twenty days is enough to finish a cape and not enough to start one if you have never met a glue gun. The municipal goat park will be working. The vendor list is already full. Dignity and glitter can share a halter. Anyone who cannot hold both ideas may stand at the soap booth and think about lye.
The crew’s shared note, written on the barn calendar under “second tub”:
Drought alert expired. Creeks did not. Burn bans are local law even when the governor’s letter has gone home. Teal this week. Bows on Tuesday. A cow in Dixon next weekend if your ticket and your fence both say yes. Howell County on the 28th is a court date, not a story we get to dress.
Professor Gruff signed the page with the only headline that still fits a Sunday:
Fill the tubs. Watch the wounds. Leave the armadillo’s hole until after coffee. And if a bee lights on the clover by the mineral feeder, that is not an interruption. That is the rest of the yard doing its job.