From the editor’s manger
Dear readers,
Labor Day is a week off and already the hills are arguing about it. One camp wants the last swim. One camp wants the first fescue. One camp — the correct camp — wants to know whether Marshfield will have enough shade cloth by Friday morning.
The Sale of Champions has been counted. Elsie Barton’s seventy-five-pound dream became a thirty-thousand-dollar fact, and Khaden Litton’s reserve penned another twenty-four. We printed their names last packet. We print the echo this packet, because a fair check is not a one-day weather event. It is winter hay in July’s clothing.
What we will not do is pretend last Friday’s stories are still breaking. Mayhem and Midway have been named. Selene has been hung with her banner. Crisco has been buried once, properly. The Goat Ranch in Dade County remains a ranch that remembers goats the way a church remembers a steeple it took down. Washington County Fair has folded its tents. Let them rest in the archive where they belong.
What remains is the work in front of the hooves. Five days to the Ozarks Homesteading Expo. Thirty-four days to Perryville, where the municipal goat park will pretend it is not nervous about eight thousand people. Twenty-nine days to a Howell County courtroom that will hear a property-damage charge and will not, on that morning, give this paper a verdict to typeset.
Dolly and Charlotte checked the wormhole behind the east shed at dawn. It smelled like hot tin and woodsmoke, which is September trying on a costume. They did not step through. Sometimes the ordinary calendar is the rescue.
Drink water. Move the water closer to the shade than to the gate. If you come to Marshfield, buy the session and not only the soap. If you cannot come, send the kid who can.
The quill is sharp. The tea is too hot. The herd is watched.