Down our long dusty driveway....

I love walking down our driveway, whether it's just to retrieve the mail or to take the girls for a little outing. There's something comforting about walking down the driveway and not a sound can be heard except for the wind blowing across the tall grass and through the trees, the crunch of gravel under my feet and the pump jack moving up and down. It's such a peaceful place; some days I think I could just plop a lawn chair down in the middle of the driveway and stay there all day.

Part of our driveway was formerly the bed for the train tracks. The trains and the tracks are since long gone and now, in addition to being our driveway, the road that's left leads to the pasture and out to the pump jack and tanks. I can remember driving along the road to go check cattle or riding horses out here when I was a little girl. The road is bumpy and dusty and long and beautiful.

My babies like the driveway, too; sniffing, exploring and checking stuff out. There was a huge pile of cotey poo in the middle of the driveway, about halfway to the road. Biggest pile I've ever seen. I know you wanted to know that.

This is some sort of animal hair, I assume from a dead rabbit, that I found on the edge of the driveway. We call rabbits "petes", short for Peter Cottontail. I also assume he met a violent death from a cotey or some other predator. Poor pete. Also, fyi, quail are called "bobs", short for Bobwhite. It's important to know your terminology, so take out your pen and paper and write that down - add it to the definition of cotey from last week.

This is a funky looking plant and I have no idea what it is. The tall shoot came up several months ago and the smaller ones sprouted in the last couple of weeks. Any clue as to what it is?

This is a wad of metal, wood and barbed wire that I surmise are remnants of a feed trough and fence. See, I'm smart like that, I can just look at a pile of crap and figure out what it used to be. We found it bound up in the tall grass when we were plowing a food plot for the deer.

And these are bones of the old train tracks - broken, busted up and rotted out railroad ties. They also turned up when we plowed. It's amazing what you find abandoned and forgotten in the tall grass.

These are killdeer eggs. We watched the mama killdeer lay her eggs over the course of a few days, then she sat on them for the next 4 weeks and then poof! there were four baby killdeer running around. Rather than stay in the nest and wait for mom and pop to bring them food, baby killdeer can stand and run shortly after hatching. About a month later, they're on their own.

This is the mama killdeer pretending to be injured to distract me so that I wouldn't take pictures of her babies. I was not swayed.

This is a 4" x 4.5" cat track that I found in the driveway last year. We haven't seen the cat that made the tracks, but he must be a monster!

These are the things that entertain me - my babies, cotey poo, dead animal fur, funky plants, old rusty metal, rotten wood, hatching birds and big cat tracks. My husband is so lucky that I'm not high maintenance. And if you'd like to come relax and plop down in a lawn chair with me in my driveway and watch the day pass by, BYOC.