Last week, we finally opened the top on the five-gallon barrel of comfrey compost tea. No, it is not tea for me to drink at 4 in the afternoon with a couple of cookies. It is compost for the garden. I’m spending these weeks of not traveling doing all the things I won’t be able to do when the touring season resumes next week.

Comfrey compost stinks. Really stinks, like hog poop stinks. I am not exaggerating. Almost exactly like that. We were straining it through a strainer and into a gallon sized plastic jug and it splashed on my cotton gloves and my right shoe.

I am wearing those shoes right now. I washed it off, left it on the porch for days but decided to try wearing them again today when I went out into the garden, in the vague hope of rubbing the stink into the damp grass.  It didn’t work so as I am doing “paperwork” (which involves little paper but lots of keyboard stuff), I can smell the faint but unmistakable stench of hog lagoon.

In other news, I will be leaving here in about 10 days to do what I am jokingly referring to as my Ohio Summer Solstice Tour. Should I have t-shirts made? I go to Cleveland to teach a class at the Buckland Museum, sign books at Loganberry Books, do a booksigning and mini class at Goddess Elite then head south to Wisteria for Appalachian Summer Solstice where I’ll be teaching three classes and leading an informal quilting circle.

A Feral Church is in the final stages of editing and the ending still makes me cry, so I guess it’s ok. I haven’t seen the final cover art but it’s not scheduled to be released until early 2025, so we have time for all the necessary new book shenanigans.

I am sure I will get to a place of deep and pertinent writing at some point but for right now I am trying to live a good, reasonably pleasant life.

I invite you to do the same.