One day a while back, my husband was hauling gravel to fill in ruts on a path in our woods. We use this path to reach our sap lines, and the deluge of rain that came down a while ago did a number on it. He was in the woods with the tractor, trailer and skidder making all kinds of racket.

A notice on one of his trail cameras popped in. Stopping to glance at his phone, he wondered what it had taken a picture of. It made his jaw drop.

For over 20 years I’d had a nice little doable raspberry patch on the farm. It was ever-bearing and in turn, produced raspberries early summer and again in the fall, until a heavy frost put them to sleep for the winter.

Running errands around Shawano, I noticed a little light had popped up on my car’s dashboard. I was gun-shy, as just a few weeks earlier another little light had appeared — that one much more serious than this one.

This light was one I could decipher easily. A tire was low. Reasoning with myself, I figured I could probably make it home and have my husband pump it up with our air compressor.

Anguish flooded my heart as my brain registered what I saw. There, on the road just past our driveway, lay my sweet kitty, Fred. Lifeless.

My husband and I were on our four-wheeler, and immediately I felt the need to get Fred off the road.

“Let’s go back and get a guinea sack,” my husband suggested quietly.

Beloveds within my immediate family dynamic — and, to be honest, everyone who knows me even casually — understand that I am severely directionally challenged.

When my husband and I first married, we weren’t golfers. One day, a good buddy of his asked him if he’d like to golf a round. My husband got hooked and dragged me along with him in his quest to conquer the links.

Ending up buying our own set of clubs, we’d golf with friends and family or on our own, just for fun. With anything, practice makes perfect, but even if one practices, a golf game will seldom be perfected.