The Fruit Of Mrs. HM's Labor

This evening I inherited the chore of feeding the chickens and the goat and the mini pony, because Farmer H has forsaken me for Sweden. That's not an underage pole dancer. That's the country. He's away on business, or a spy mission.

The chickens were rude cluckers who would not come down out of their tree to eat. I think the overcast sky made them think it was bedtime a couple hours early. The goat screamed like a little girl when I started walking toward the pen. He's like that. Kind of excitable. The mini pony gave a whinny and shouldered the goat away from their trough made of a piece of plastic PVC pipe cut in half. Then he proceeded to run his nose down the length of it, pushing sweet feed off the uncapped end and onto the ground by his feet. He's either an evil genius, or a slob. The goat only had about 1/5 of that feed, but it's his own fault for running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and stepping into the narrow trough with his front feet, trying to look over the fence while I scooped out the food.

As I left the feeding area, I spied something on the gravel road that runs past Shackytown. What in the not-heaven?

As I looked at it, Juno ran up and grabbed it in her soft jowls and took off to taunt Jack with it. Huh. When did Jack and Juno get a ball? I proceeded to the outside spigot next to Jack's litter-box swimming pool, and ran a half-bucket of water to carry to top off the goat and pony's tub. While providing their hydration, I noticed two more of those things inside their pen. And they were broken on one side.

Oh. Those must be persimmons! It's that time of year! I can cut one in half and check on the seed shape for my blog buddy Sioux, to corroborate (or not) this year's Woolly Bear caterpillar long-range winter forecast. That's how Mrs. HM rolls. Always ready to help a friend who's still in the workforce.

Juno had lost interest, and left the persimmon in the yard while she rough-housed with Jack. I picked it up and put it on the decrepit picket fence that Farmer H insisted on putting along his brick sidewalk. As soon as I showed interest, I knew Jack would want it. So I put it out of reach for him until after my walk.

Huh. I've always asked Farmer H and The Pony to get me a persimmon. Now I have one. I've never cut one open before, because they would forget, and then tell me it was too late, because the goats had eaten them all. When I was a kid, my cousins and I used to get the persimmons that fell off the tree in my grandma's hog lot, and over the fence into the yard. We didn't cut them open, though. We ATE them. Or threw them at each other in a persimmon war.

Grandma's persimmons were not this big. And not this round. They were kind of flattened on top. More orange. With kind of a grayish dusty look to them in places. As long as you didn't eat the very sour skin, they were tasty. But these looked like giants compared to the persimmons of my youth. Maybe there weren't ripe yet. I need to go look up at the tree branches and see if there are more.

Anyhoo...after walking and giving the dogs their nightly treat, I went to the kitchen to prepare for my persimmon dissection. I put it on a paper plate, and got out my newest knife. Not the big butcher knife from Farmer H's factory, not the small paring knife that is my favorite. A knife that Goldilocks might have termed just right.

No matter how hard I pushed, or how many times I tried to slice, I could not get that knife more than a couple of millimeters below the rough surface.

Occam's Razor. Sometimes, a dog ball is just a dog ball.