We’ve made several trips to Lovelady in the last few months. The first one was a quick, one day trip. We walked to the Back 50 and to the pond. It was an extremely hot August day. The effects of the late summer heat was apparent: the grass was wilted and the level of the water in the pond was down. There were lots of prints around the edges of the pond from the animals that had come to the pond…cattle, hogs, deer, and who knows what else. We spent a lot of time under the huge tree in the front of property – including a nap! Even in the heat, there was a gentle breeze!

Our next trip was a BIG working weekend. Jason was home and ready to put his Dad to work. I think this is payback for all of those teenage years when we put him to work taking care of the yard at home! Charlie and Jason mowed grass and sprayed the fence line on the road to begin clearing it out. They trimmed branches and checked fence lines. (Do you notice how far away I was from them? Yes, I was sitting under the shade trees drinking water and talking with Natalie!)

I noticed that the two mailboxes on the road had disappeared. The mystery was solved when I called the post office. Since both trailers had been moved off of the property, the post office removed the boxes since there were no residences there. This lead to another mystery that we needed to solve: we had THREE addresses. A call to the Emergency Management office resolved the issue by determining after discussing where the road onto the property was and where we were going to put our house. Because of the way the other residences were situated, those addresses were considered “subdivision” addresses. Sounds like a family compound, doesn’t it? Apparently there was another residence on the property at one time or another.  Now we need to contact all of the local agencies (Post Office, tax office, etc.) and let them know the “Official” address. Very interesting moving to the country.

We were pleasantly surprised to see how everything had greened up!

The next two trips had the guys mowing (yes, again), checking the property, adding trimmed branches to the burn pile and sweating! They bought and hung a gate at the entrance from the country road. They bought some pipe to build a fence on the lower pasture so we can have cattle graze down there also. The fence will be around the area where we will be living at first.

On their ride down the road to the Back 50, they found a visitor in a shady spot on the cool grass that Jason had just cut.

He didn’t seem to be in any rush to leave even with the noise from the 4 wheeler. No one hunts in that area and we have lots of woods behind us so hopefully we’ll have more of these visitors in the future.

Next weekend trip: We have water and electricity to the property so we’ll be able to move the travel trailer onto the property. We are looking at adding a temporary water source to the lower pasture so we can run cattle down there to help control the growth of the grass. The pipe is waiting for those fences too! Since the trees have started losing their leaves, this time I have fig trees to trim along with the other plants and flowers in the “front yard.

Check out the Photo Gallery for new photos from our recent trips.