I take our visual work on the farm seriously, and so does Maria. I started taking photos to improve the credibility of the blog. Even the conspiratorial underworld can’t figure out how to make pictures lie, although, with AI, they have a better chance.

An example: One of the so-called animal rights people who are forever angry with me for not letting Zip sleep in the house for the winter (most of them have never heard of a barn cat) wrote to me yesterday suggesting that Zip didn’t have a heated cat house in the barn (he does not know Maria) because I wasn’t posting it on the blog. He demanded to see one.

I started to point out to him that it is  90 to 100 degrees up here in the hills right now, and he would be waiting a long time before we plugged it in and put a photo of it up on the blog again (I’ve done it three times). When Maria put it up, he hadn’t bothered to look.

I decided not to do his homework. Lazy,  stupid, and arrogant are a deadly combination for me.

I wondered if he knew it was 90-plus degrees here and in half the country. Sometimes, even photos need to be changed. I asked him if he knew there was a heat wave, but he ran and hid by then.

And then, I deleted the message without replying further—no more enabling of people like that.

The most fanatic of them were hoping I’d get arrested for having a barn cat live in a barn—one called the sheriff to accuse me of animal abuse. (He loved the heated barn house, by the way.)

That ranks as the dumbest struggle I’ve had on the blog and the most significant waste of time. I wish I could explain it to Zip; he would get a kick out of it.

The heated barn cat will be plugged in sometime in November or October. It does make a neat photo; this will be the fourth or fifth time I post one.

Maria introduced me to the heated barn cat house. When our previous barn cats, Minnie and Flow, got old, we set one up for them. It still works great for me.

To our knowledge, Zip only went into his heated cat house once. He likes to sleep in the haystack in the hay loft in the winter or, even better, search for hungry mice in the snow. He is a winter cat, for sure.

I feel bad for the world’s animals; they seem to have no natural advocates who are sane or rational and have a lot of money. Where, I wonder, did all the people who cared about the welfare of animals go?

The Zip/winter issue is boring to me now, given what is happening worldwide and in our country. This kind of thing is one of the reasons out here that people hate liberals so much, and I am one.

But at the time—the more fanatic animal rights trolls were calling the sheriff—I was glad to have pictures of my life. Maria feels the same way.

Images tell our stories, the stories of our life on the farm. I had my troubles, but I was smart enough to grasp the importance of photography in my life, not just the farm. That came later.

I never imagined this would transcend animals and go to flowers in such a big way. Life is deliciously mysterious that way.

Maria’s blog is lovely because it uses photography to capture life authentically.  I do, too. I’ll be posting it every Monday.