Mud

Back in the garden. After two days of rain, it was cold and misty out yesterday but perfect weather for weeding. It’s good to have wet soil while weeding because it keeps the crops happy through the trauma of having their roots a little disturbed. Sorta like giving a kid an ice cream cone after a scraped knee I guess. Also, it made the ground nice and soft and easy to poke around in for roots of the weeds. I weeded by hand in the morning and got covered in mud! My dress was too long and I spent the morning in fear that I would trip and land face first in the carrot bed. In the afternoon I switched to weeding with a hoe a border along the main walkway which had grown out of control. That was pretty much the whole workday. Not very exciting but it was satisfying to have gotten so much done at the end of the day. As I was leaving, the girls at the dye station called me over to join them in roasting marshmallows over their fire pit, after closing time of course. It was funny to see the mix of people in modern and 19^th century clothes eating marshmallows and hanging out. 

Help! It's dark in here!

Back in the school house and much less fun this time, I’m sad to report. It was rainy and cold and there was only one visiting school group who didn’t even make it up to the school house. I sat in the dark by myself for most of the day. In the morning I attempted to wind a tangled skein of yarn into a ball. In the afternoon I found a book to read by a window. I escaped at 3:40 when the trickle of visitors to my door had ended and went up to Freeman to help Sue feed Button her bottle. Bess rejected Button so we needed to bottle feed her sooner than usual. Sue & I figured out that I was her daughter’s camp counselor a few years ago, which was exciting. It’s pretty cool to meet a parent of one of your campers a few years later and find out how much their child had talked about you at home J

Finally Freeman!

 Finally in the Freeman Farmhouse, the part I was most excited about! We baked bread pudding which was delicious, I highly recommend it! There was a great group of women and girls there on Wednesday which made it extra fun. Sue, Victoria (both staff), Rebecca and Haley (High School Interns) are all fantastic. It was raining all day so we had an especially slow afternoon. We all sat in the parlor together, knitting and chatting and making plans for future scrapbooking parties. Altogether a delightful day!

Weeding Onions

I worked in the kitchen garden today. Laura came in on her day off to help in hopes that she will be there when Buttercup has her calf. Bess had a calf last Friday who, after a few days of hemming and hawing, has finally been named Button because she is cute as a…. We were again working without someone to shadow but at least it wasn’t Laura’s very first day. We were able to answer most of the visitors’ questions and decided the safest thing to do would be to weed and water. No thinning for us! We didn’t want to do something more complex and ruin the crop. It was a nice day out and we even had a few kids ask to help us which was pretty cute. By 3:30, we had weeded an entire onion bed and were feeling pretty hot and tired so we spent the rest of the afternoon inside knitting and getting to know the staff.

In da School House!

My first day interpreting! I started in the school house today. In the interview process I was told that I would be trained, then shadow an experienced interpreter in each area before working with visitors on my own. That didn’t happen. At morning check-in, Kim realized I was on my own for my first day! I might not have worried so much if she hadn’t seemed so concerned but I survived and actually had a lot of fun! Anne was great and walked to the school house with me before opening to help set up and give me a quick refresher. Today was our last busy day of visiting school groups. It was fun to see the little school house full of children and to get to talk to them about the ways school was different in the 1830s.