Tornadoes, Trimmers and Steve

Along with our long, mild much needed rainy spring here in Iowa have come a couple of tornado outbreaks, first in mid-April, then at the end of that month. We didn’t suffer any damage here on the acreage, but we do feel more vulnerable living in the country than we ever did in the city. You just never know out here. The photo above was taken within twenty miles of where we live.

The fields have mostly all been planted, our lawn mowed, the trees are leafing out and the flowers are coming up. Speaking of our trees, this is the year for the power company to trim trees in our part of the county, to keep branches from interfering with or falling on power lines. Their first visit to our acreage was busy, out at the street. The second visit was semi-busy, in our driveway, with around a two hour lunch then not much else until they left around 4:30 in the afternoon. The third was back out at the street, with the safety cones out just in case they decided anything else needed to be done. The fourth visit involved parking a truck in the street in front of our house, safety cones out, with some light cleaning of the truck, a long lunch, then nothing. They might have been napping in the truck cab, or playing on their phones. Whatever they were doing they found a nice quiet place to play hooky for a while.

One night a couple of weeks ago I let our dog Steve outside, and as soon as I opened the screen door he rushed at a opossum that was drinking from Steves water dish on the back porch. They disappeared into the darkness and I couldn’t see or hear anything else. Around ten minutes later he was ready to come back in, and acted like nothing had happened. He had no injuries, and the next day I looked around and there was no sign of the opossum. Just a couple of nights later Shelly went out to call for Steve and there was a opossum standing at the bottom of the porch, eating a bit of old dog food Shelly had tossed out. Steve came trotting up to the porch, right past the opossum, which he completely ignored, and into the house. Shelly and I both stepped out on the porch and looked at the opossum, which regarded us with disinterest, and continued eating. We wondered, did they make some kind of a deal? What is going on? To be continued, I suppose…