Shade before the dome
ARKTOPIA COUNTY — September in the Ozarks likes to arrive dressed as July’s cousin who does not call first.
The crew is not printing a forecast as gospel. The crew is printing a memory, because memory is the only weather service a goat believes. This summer took Crisco of Backbone Bluff, fifteen years on the map, in the July heat. Strangers with boats treated his body as if it mattered, because it did. That obituary already ran. This is the callback that keeps another name off the same page.
Scoop’s late-August checklist, posted where even a buck can see it if he would only look up:
- Water in more than one place. A single tub is a rumor. Two tubs are a plan.
- Shade that is actual shade at 2 p.m., not the optimistic shadow of a fence post.
- No midday hauling unless the veterinarian is already on the way.
- Watch the old ones and the dark-coated ones first. Watch the stubborn ones always.
- If a goat goes down and will not get up, you are no longer in a homesteading essay. You are in a truck.
Heat is not a villain with a mustache. Heat is a barn with the door shut. Open the door before you write a poem about resilience.
Professor Gruff’s margin: “Do not make Crisco a mascot for safety pamphlets. Make the water closer. That is the whole sermon.”
Labor Day weekend will put extra people on extra gravel in Marshfield. Extra people forget that livestock do not get a three-day weekend. If you leave for the Expo, leave the herd as if the dome already parked on your ridge.
The east-shed wormhole still smells like hot tin. Dolly says that is just September. Charlotte says it is a warning with poor manners. Scoop split the difference and refilled the tubs.