Dog-Gone-Doggies

The dogs ran away on their nightly walk and I am waiting a few minutes for them to come back before I go to bed. I am pretty doggone tired and not in the mood to wait for them. I had another sheep escape today. Looked out across the field to find a bunch of them across the road on Jan's field. What a pretty picture. I went inside to get my staff and Izzy, figuring he might help me round them up. As I was hiking down the road to where the sheep were I turned to see a line of kitties following me! What a sight! I guess they were curious about where Mommy was going. A car stopped by the sheep, a neighbor who knew they shouldn't be there. My sheep do have a way of getting me acquainted with the neighbors. This neighbor, Jake Spooner, lives about a mile down the road and I have often been curious about who works that farm. Well, now I know. As I was coming up on the sheep I yelled, "IZZY! GET 'EM UP!!" That's his command to push the sheep. Izzy was more interested in who was sitting in that car and ran up to it barking like crazy. The sheep panicked when they heard me yell for Izzy to go to work and promptly stampeeded back across the road. I thought, wow, just the sound of his name does the job! Farmer Spooner wanted to know all about the new owner of the best hay field in Brookfield. He said, you mean, Weaver won't get this hay now? Aaron Weaver is a local farmer who was mowing the field and taking all the hay. I said, nope, he won't. The hay will be sold to anyone Jan wants to sell it to. I wonder if there was bad blood between Spooner and Weaver. I have a lot to learn about local people politics. Hay is life, remember, and land is the precious provider of hay. I said goodbye and turned to go back to my flock and chores but he followed me in his car. I got the feeling he had been wondering about me for some time and now he had me captive. He talked about how magnificent my farm had been when all the land was intact...and how sad it was now that it was all broken up. Tell me about it, I said to myself. Mr. Spooner said his father just passed away and now he and his three siblings owned the 153 acres he had been farming. If he was to keep it he now had to buy it from his sisters. Good luck I thought, this land is a bit more valuable than he is probably aware of. I wonder if he will be embroiled in a property dispute the way I am with my brothers. My mother's house is still not on the market because one brother refuses to leave. Family business is the most difficult and complicated kind.