The bucolic farm

Some of you think life on a farm is bucolic and peaceful and wonderful. About 2% of the time, it is that, if you are very lucky. Today, I found myself with my back to an absolutely demolished raspberry bed--chewed down to nubs--and my front to a deer fence crushed by a fallen tree, only two days since I last walked the fence, which was perfect at that time. So you get fence repair tools and materials, and a saw. You cut the fallen tree at the spot where the heavy end can fall outside your fence, and you horse around the lighter end, to get it off your fence. Then, as you stand in 4" deep muddy muck, the rains start up again. The sharp ends of barbed wire cut you as you make patch after patch, on a five-wire barbed wire fence over crushed Davis field fence. An hour later, you have patched the deer fence, but it looks so crappy compared to itself when it was new that you are embarrassed. You realize that trees are not these majestic, permanent, botanical silent sentinels displaying Nature's majesty--no, they are instead diabolical time bombs waiting to go off by crashing, in numbers you cannot believe, onto whatever is important to you. You realize that the "experts" who know the country well--the ones who said, "Oh, if you have a dog, you will never be bothered by deer" are idiots. Ah, yes, the glory of the farm.