March is a month of odds and ends getting done at the farm. Here we have an image of Sage and Alley walking vines off a neighbours field. Some farmers are death on having any vehicles drive on the vines, so walking off is the order of the day. Not the easiest way to bring in a ton and a half of vegetation.

Our cranberries at Sandhill are showing signs of coming out of dormancy. The terminal buds for this year are starting to swell and the winter purple is slowly changing to green.

Next week we will start scattering prunings from our farm over about three and a half acres. When stippled, and if they take as new plantings, this bit of work will increase our actual planting by a little over ten percent. Mind you, the vines going in this year will not yield a harvestable crop for three years, but, that's farming.

My EfM journey is almost complete after four years of effort. It has been interesting, over these past three months, to move along the latter stages of the process of trying to discern what ministry we might be individually called to. For me, the more I have thought about it the further I have felt from any sense that I am being called to a specific task or to fill a new role. Fortunately my companions on this journey have come up with a suggestion that I would not have come upon by myself and I will make a best effort to follow their direction for me.

Alley had a nasty bout of pain last week which turned out to be a ruptured ovarian cyst. An ultrasound on Friday past should reveal whether surgery will be necessary to take out any others that are in her. Following a couple of days on that was Jessie telling me that she was going in for surgery in early April to remove ovarian cysts. I had quite forgotten that she'd had a diagnosis of this problem when she was 14 years old with advice to have them out when she was in her early twenties.

It seems quite impossible that in six short weeks Jessie and Joe will be moving to Halifax. Every parent has to deal with the kids moving away, but five thousand plus miles seems a bit much! Thank God his family lives in New Brunswick and will be close enough to provide love and support. I'm going to miss having her here something fierce.

This moving out and into their own spaces of my kids has drawn into sharp relief the major consequence of my not having been able to craft a deep relationship within my own life. Alone is not a place where I particularly want to spend my post-kids-at-home years. Oh well, perhaps it is true that we reap what we sow...

Enough of this maundering...having before me the choice of cleaning the house or going for a walk along the dike out at Pitt Lake, I will choose the latter.