April Day Ohio

After Thanksgiving, we spent a few days at our cabin in Ohio. The weather was miserable. Cold, drippy, grey and dreary.  Not the kind of weather that inspires pretty poems, so it seems like a good time to recycle April Day Ohio  from  Free Verse and Worse, one of my two other blogs that I'm closing down to keep things simple. 
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The stubbled fields are brown and bare,
the daffodils wrapped tight.
The cat-tailed pond displays a hundred downy tufts.

A woodpecker wraps on a distant door,
a groundhog ducks through a hole
in the abandoned kennel.
As we come near, the blue heron rises clumsily from her spot
by the stream and wings away over the cornfield.

Near the crest of the pebbled hill,
on the way to town,
we edge round an Amish buggy.
Three deer stop grazing to watch us pass.
A lone turkey crosses the road ahead.

At Reuben's farm,
white sheets tug at the line.
Denim pants and jackets
dance in the wind
with the goats in the field.
We soon reach Reuben's one-room school.
It's noon. He's playing second base.
A black-bonneted girl in an aqua dress
tags the small boy who hoped to steal a base.
A batter in a blue dress thwacks the ball--
a homerun for sure.

At Malabar Farm,
white-painted gourds atop a pole
invite the purple martins to summer there.
A white duck paddles on the pond,
his tail a saucy curve.
The Clydesdales turn away,
but Drifter, the quarter horse,
nuzzles my hand at the fence.
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Whenever we're in Danville, I always pick up a copy of The Vendor at Miller's Hardware and turn immediately to the ads for Amish buggy and draft horses. This time an ad for a "10-year-old Belgian mare" caught my eye. "Well broke single or double," the seller wrote.  Her height was 16.2 hands and her weight approximately 1800 pounds. "Too much horse for me," he added.