When the spousal unit's brother sold his house almost fifteen years ago, the house at the base of our driveway, it was bought by a couple who'd been renting it for a few years.

They and their young son were annexed into our family. They came to all the family holiday meals and their son called my mom-in-law Grandma.

The young boy is a man now and that man is in Afghanistan with the Canadian military.

You don't hear much about what the Canadian soldiers have been doing in Afghanistan, but the thing is that they've been the sharp point of the spear, serving in the most dangerous places. Our losses in proportion to the troops there are far higher than any other country's.

The young man has been specially trained in both Canada and the U.S., sent to Afghanistan to do the most dangerous of the dangerous work. He is smart, strong and extremely well trained. But will that be enough to get him home safe?

I feel helpless. There is so little I can do. So I e-mail him goofy letters, little slices of the silly normal that make up life in the boonies. It's the stuff I would write here, but instead I give it to him so that when he comes back into his base camp there's another little slice of home sitting in his in-box.

We've had a frantically busy spring. When the spousal unit's brother decided to clean up the damage in his maple bush from windstorms over the last few years, we didn't know what we were getting into.

The spousal unit and I have blocked and split more firewood than you can imagine. If you leave firewood in a jumble, it rots. It has to be stacked and the top covered to keep water out. There is so much wood to stack that not only have we filled our entire woodshed, we've built temporary wood cages and are now in the process of stacking huge cubes of wood on landings near our home.

We have christened these cubes The Borg Cubes. The spousal unit actually wrote "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" across the wood supports in one, which pretty much summarizes how I feel about it all.

There was also maple syrup season. Oh, my small home business. And now gardening season is about to explode and say, did I mention that I have my new baby pond to finish off and another stone wall to build? Oh and I want to stain the house and finish staining the woodshed. Oh, and we're building a new garden shed and that will need to be stained, too.

Something has to give, and it appears that that something is The Big Adventure.

I'm sorry if I've worried my three loyal readers with my radio silence. It's not that I haven't wanted to write here, it's that what tiny amounts of creative energy I might have get poured into goofy letters to the young man in Afghanistan.

Once the insane push to get all that wood stacked is over, I will have more energy.

That's what I tell myself, anyhow.

--Marn