Houses

I have this friend. He is my favorite former boyfriend (ok, actually, I have a few favorites). And, you know, various and sundry things have happened in his life and it ends up that he has this house/farm that is for sale and he sent me a link to the online slide show for this property. A.m.a.z.i.n.g. Beautiful. (if you know me for real and want it, I just might send you the link)

And I am so incredibly and entirely and completely unattracted to it. I appreciate it. I realize that it is shown in its best Southern Beautiful light. But it leaves me cold. Not the garden, not the barn, not the land, not the pond, but the house. I can almost always imagine living in any space. I do this quite a bit because I do think who we are and what we choose is influenced by our environment and so I imagine what living in this or that space would actually live like. And it seems very clear to me that changing your life changes your environment, isn’t that right Halcyon? I mean, have you seen her back yard? And I’m pretty sure that her attempts to change her life while maintaining a more mainstream home environment weren’t conducive to her mental health. So maybe you can see what I mean.

John Lennon had his piano pretty much right there, didn’t he? Hey Cielo, I dare you to take your piano and put it where your TV is. I love it when I can drive by and see people’s gardens, and I bet the real underlying reason for the objection to front yard food growing is about the example it sets, and the independent mindset that grows out of that. Do you really want some crappy little knick knack to be the centerpiece focus of your life? Or would you prefer to know the story of the bottles that sit in the windowsill, because there is a story even though that is obviously a screw top Miller bottle of no import.

Most houses, and all show houses, are designed to sell, not to live in. The house I grew up in was a great house in which to have guests or to throw parties, which is probably why now it is a group home. My grandparents’ house, which I LOVE – they lived in essentially two rooms of it, plus an excursion at night to the bedrooms upstairs.

So why not boil the whole thing down to really living? It makes houses a lot simpler, and a lot smaller. If I could design any house, I'd have a pitcher pump for water and a bucket toilet for that. No bedrooms per se, but sleeping areas. I have a daughter who calls one area of our house, where there are harp parts and a sewing table and horse tack and a computer for learning Japanese and this computer too and the cardboard for making shipping boxes for what we sell "the creative zone". We are not mowing maniacs. Things here are not perfect. Or neat. And perfect and neat is what everyone has in their heads.

That isn't "it". What you love is it.

High Summer

It is high summer. There have been times in years past when we hadn’t been able to get into the garden for weeks at this point, the weeds having overwhelmed us. We started out with ambitious plans when we marked the center of the universe all those years ago. One might say that they were too ambitious, or that we failed a lot, or were overwhelmed, or didn’t know enough. None of those explanations quite satisfies me though.

We had this idea of a life, and of what it would take to live it. And we embarked on that, all the while also living in the dominant paradigm, and that was what was too much but necessary. And we learned and we evolved. And we still participate in the dominant paradigm albeit differently.

We’re no spring chickens here but we can work more than most people half our age because we’re used to it and because we value it. Things do change some as we get older – we’re a bit more aware of our limits because we aren’t immune anymore if we happen to breeze right past them; there are some aches, some stiffness, some caution sometimes.

I run in to people who tell me about thinking about how they will garden as they get older. My mother’s husband did it by raising his beds, container gardening, and (mostly) paying slaves to work for him. A guy I knew on the internet was going to do much the same but the real estate market fell out from under him and he’s disappeared. A lady at the barn (hi Tess) was recently talking about it as we discussed us both having round gardens and what we did with paths between deep beds and the use of machinery and Gene Logsdon. I’ll give Tess this: she’s the only person I’ve ever met, ever, who was familiar with all the agricultural writing that I’m familiar with. It is pretty cool to be able to reference Fukuoka, Jeavons, and Berry (and even Gussow) without having to then try to explain what they were talking about.

I think this thinking about getting older is common because getting older is happening to every one of us. But I think it is a lot like when one is getting ready to have a child: There are a lot of assumptions made that turn out to just not be true, and if you raise your child (or age) according to your assumptions rather than in accordance with your experience and values, then you miss out and wonder what in the heck happened.

The truth is, I have no clue what getting older will look like for me/us. Just like 20 years ago, I didn’t know this house would look quite like it does. I can still see what I thought it would look like in my head though. We had a direction we were going in, and a vision, but the manifestation of that vision inevitably looks different from what you imagined it might. We have a cooperative family: It is my hope that that continues and evolves and serves us all but lawd knows there is no model for what that could look like.

One thing I’ve learned is that you don’t need a huge garden if you don’t have a lot of people to feed, and if you have a lot of people to feed, there are a lot of people to work a huge garden.

One thing I’ve learned is that nothing has to look any particular way – it just has to function.

One thing I’ve learned is that there are things you can’t control and even wanting to is a danger sign.

Danger Will Robinson. Danger.

in the fullness of being

Except for the youngest, the kids are, by and large and for all intents and purposes, grown. They are their own people, and while that's been true since they were born, it is true in a different way now. And it is always possible that some big intervention of some sort would be needed, but not likely at this point given who they are.

It was very easy to be a natural, attachment parenting parent when the kids were really little and the biggest question was whether or not to vaccinate. There was no way I was going to ever let them cry it out. Ever. Or not let them nurse on demand. But when my nipple started dissolving in one's saliva, I did say to the child, I can't do this -- and she did cry -- and that, people, is why it takes two parents (ideally one of whom has boobs and one of whom does not). So yeah, if warranted I would get their attention in a parental, introductory-guide-to-this-life, manner.

As they grew, they ate what and how much they wanted to, within the fact that we have three meals a day and that comes first. So, if your snacking interfered with meals, the snacking stopped. If you didn't like something, we made sure that there was something that you did like but mostly expected a bite of whatever it is that was for supper . . . most of the time. But when one doesn't like cheese grits for breakfast, a small pot of oatmeal is prepared. That is no sweat off anyone's nose, and not nutritionally compromising either. There was one child who just didn't, for the longest, like any veggies cooked -- he always had them raw. He also didn't like things touching. Or mixed together.

But anyway, even with all the nuances, the things that are reasonable requirements (eating, brushing teeth) tempered with compassionate self-direction, attachment parenting and unschooling were easy choices early on. Then came the middle years, and late reading, and odd interests, and sometimes defiance, or moodiness, or somewhat persistent fantasy worlds, or whatever. It was somewhat harder then but only in the sense of questioning "Am I ruining their lives?" But all it took was one look around at the "normally parented" kids to decide, nope, we're fine thanks. Likewise, I look at kids who've had no direction and can plainly see that kids do indeed need parents, not reliving-their-childhood abdicators. Time and again, we shuffled through the choices and came to the same conclusions -- whoever they are on their own, with our love and guardrails, is better than anyone we can make them into. Heck, one look at us proves that it doesn't work out that you are who you "get raised" to be anyway . . . and not engaging in that sort of power trip is, we hope, far less fraught with useless baggage for the kids to carry.

And now, for the most part, here they are, emerging into another fullness. They have a solidity, a groundedness, and yet an ability to fly, take off, dream. They know stuff, a lot of stuff, but what I value most is their knowledge of themselves, and their inability to be swayed, their unwillingness to doubt that knowledge. They haven't been raised in boxes that can be replaced with other boxes. They don't need people's stares in order to feel better about themselves, nor do they wear masks or costumes. They aren't performing their lives, they are living them.

I don't know. I never feel like I have words enough for the family, for unschooling, for our adventures whole. It is easy to explain how we planted this or that, or how to make a loaf of bread, but a lifetime relationship with family that is full and growing and reciprocal -- you can't explain that.

The girls and I very often have nighttime giggle sessions. I go to bed and somehow, they end up on the bed with me and we talk about anything and everything and I can usually be counted on to say something that makes one of them say, "You are not the typical Mother."

And I laugh and get that fire in my eyes, and say, "No, I am not bwahahahaha!" or, if I'm feeling more tame, "Thank your lucky stars honey."

And each night the youngest tells a goodnight story of his own invention to his dad. And the older three have their own business ventures and we all have chores and work together in the garden and, well, just so many things.

I am comfortable that they do know stuff. And that starts with how to read, how to find stuff out, how to grow stuff, how to eat, how to stay warm, how to figure out what they don't know about any of that stuff. And I think they will be able to find their own place in the world, their own place, their own way, with a superego that is their own voice, not Eisenhower's, or even the Capt'n Crunch Kids. I believe we have worked out relationships that can always be worked out, developed; relationships that are rich and fertile. Everyone is a resource for everyone else, so that it truly is, one for all, all for one.

We went by their house with milk, this family we've known for some years now, I don't know how many, but mostly peripherally. We have some things in common (interest in healthy food and in growing things), and some things not in common (religion). I always expect friends to be more than this somehow. But when Pat died, suddenly and unexpectedly, it really hit close to home. The milk was all we knew to do for them -- their church & family would do the rest.

But I feel so much for them, for their loss. We stood on the porch talking. She told us how it had happened. She said she was comforted by her faith but she was stomping her foot at God about it anyway. I do not share her belief system and yet somehow I know her God can take her foot stomping. It made us both smile.

And I had the most amazing feeling. Sometimes there is no "other", it is all same-same, there is no separation.

I am not one who believes that we all really deep down believe the same thing. I don't actually have a problem with someone thinking I'm going to hell; I really don't feel the need to convince them otherwise. We believe (whether this is religious/spiritually or the things we believe about people or about how the world works or ought to work) very different things. And these different things lead to different actions which lead to different results. It isn't all the same just like a Twinkie isn't the same as a carrot.

Standing there on that porch, holding her hand, with a gulf of different spiritual beliefs between us, we were still same-same. I still love her, and I feel like she still loved me, without any need to make me smaller or less for our differences. And I am glad she has her beliefs and is comforted by them.

The funeral is Saturday. I don't like funerals, mostly for their religious content. But I wouldn't not stand up for him.

I also think our goat is going to die. That has nothing to do with this and yet everything. Work is less joyful because I feel betrayed by my boss. The road is badly washed out. The roof leaks when it rains hard. Is the new old van going to quit too? It is just one of those times. But I look at Pat and Deb and I know they struggled just to find a piece of land, to put roots to a dream. We could pull back to this farm, to only this farm, and I am happy here with these people and have plenty to do and plenty I am interested in . . . but I don't want to give up horses again. How close was I to dying a few weeks ago when I couldn't breathe. Does anything matter? Does it matter if it doesn't matter?

My family matters. My farm matters. Beyond that, I am lost.

The goat is ancient, like 12 or 13 years old. She is the daughter of our first milk goat. I'd always dreamed that we'd always keep her line going and yet, she's still the only one we have of her. We've sold some, we've eaten some, all boys. Of the girls, the bear ate some, and one died from some neurological something in December. I was a bit surprised that she had conceived again. I think she has a kid lying transverse. If the kid is transverse, and if I can't get in and fix that, she's dead. A vet could section the baby and have some chance to save her but this would cost more than a young, pregnant nanny. It doesn't make sense to do it and so we won't. I may not ever actually know what was wrong with her, but I think she's dying.

This reminds me of when the dogs came and killed all the geese. I felt like an irresponsible goose person, like I'd let them down. I feel that way toward this goat, and her line. I've done all I know to do, and I haven't violated my ethical system, but it sure makes you want to violate it. Like having the car break down yet again makes you want to violate it, even when you know a "new car" is no guarantee of it not breaking down. What I get for my ethical system is to be with my family, to know this earth, to not run from my spirit, so many things really.

But what I feel right at this moment is entirely not good enough.

So I'm going to go trim the horse and donkey and other goat hooves. If I don't get all the dishes and floors done, so be it.


(yes, the goat did die, peacefully, this afternoon -- an era has passed -- but the trim work and the house work all felt good)

(I hope some day one of the girls can write about our journey through the woods to the goat today, and trying to help her, and then knowing we couldn't. I think the best of me was there.)

love in falling

If you could see the pile of apples and pears in our floor! And the older cow came home after visiting with her bull for three months, and we're milking the newer cow, and the calf is almost as big as her mothers. The turnips that were seeded on the potato hills after the potato tops had died back have made themselves nicely. We had a great crop of winter squash this year, and also got the hard corn harvested (but not shucked or shelled yet).

I've decided to absolutely embrace this time of year again. As a child and young adult, fall was my favorite season. With age or with children or maybe with a house without central heat, when fall came I just started thinking of winter, and being cold. But winter is really just a different rhythm. Cold and snow and the like really can make everything much harder but then again, there is less to do too. Without a heated house, it is helpful if someone can stay home to keep it warm but then again, sometimes a day alone is a welcome thing for each of us . . . and we can take turns.

So this fall came and it has been beautiful. The color lasted a long time and while perhaps not a vibrant as some year, it was nonetheless wonderful. Today I was just taking note of how many trees were still holding on to their leaves, now various shades of brown from ochre to mahogany to dull. The pines have darkened. The mountains, although they really couldn't be seen today for the mist and low ceiling, have their "bones" visible now -- their ridges and lines, their sharpness and age. When you look through the woods, if there is a clearing on the other side, you can see it now. And to walk now is like being in a riot of noise from the leaves. This rain will make it a little quieter.

We have a fire. Chores have moved an hour earlier. The rhythm and steps of the dance change constantly. The apples and pears move in and out of the dehydrator.

On the practical side, we drive bottom feeder vehicles, a sort of protest of having to drive at all. And recently we've experienced all sorts of problems with them. Recently being since about April. But just take the most recent, last night, an axle going, and today, in the midst of trying to deal with that, a neighbor comes up and gives us 30 hens (he raises roosters, if'n you know what I mean). So right there, you have this abundance. There was abundance in me calling my boss and her saying, I can handle today, it's ok; abundance in the in-laws willingness to pick up the new axle and bring it out here; abundance in a new axle costing so little that we could afford it; abundance in that our family made it home safe and sound after a rare and exceptional night out before that axle went. And perhaps even grace in my husband not entirely forsaking me when all I could do was hold my head in my hands and try to breathe after the axle broke.

Vandalizing

What have I been doing for the past month? Well, not all that much crocheting, I’ll tell you that. (Those dish rags will be going out but have not yet. I’ve never been good about getting stuff in the mail, just one of my many quirks. Don’t give up on me! And you bad people who haven’t sent me your address, send it already!)

Well, it has been more than this. And honestly, it has been a distraction. But sometimes life is distracting. The part of it most relevant to this blog has been the van. We have kids, we live way out, we don’t go in a lot compared with “normal” but we do go in. And sometimes we like to go in en famile. We first bought the van 12 years ago. It was a good van. Notice the tense of that verb. Was. It had about 150K miles on it when we bought it and we put over 100K miles on it ourselves, but I was driving it home when it started making a horrid noise and I started asking it to just please get me home. Please get me home. And it did, bless its heart. But I knew it was dead.

We had a vehicle fund, a small fund with which to buy a vehicle. Having this sort of thing has saved us more times than one. It wasn’t a larger fund for several reasons, among them that not a whole lot of money has flowed through this household in the past few years, but more importantly it is that we don’t really want a newer, larger, nicer vehicle. A car is just a box on some wheels to get you from one place to another not an extension of the illusion of self. Not that I don’t fantasize about a Suburban, but a Suburban costs a lot more money and uses a lot more gas. And gas, or peak oil, is another reason our vehicle fund was small . . . who wants to buy a nice, or more expensive, or new(er) vehicle when really, oil is going to run out (become prohibitively expensive). Besides, traveling hither and yon is just not attractive. Time to move on to other paradigms.

Ah, but the process of shopping for a bottom feeder van! First we had to fathom through what did we really want and what were our options? Did we want to look at a Suburban? (no) Did we want to look at a smaller car with better mileage but that wouldn’t hold us all? (no) And as to vans, what kinds would we really seriously consider? In the end we decided to go with the kind of van we’ve always had and know how to work on, and we avoided complications like all wheel drive because they are just something else that can tear up.

But the process is obviously looking through all those different things. And the process is not without emotional involvement. The truth is that when one is looking to buy a vehicle that people who live in government housing projects are looking to sell, well, it can be a bit disconcerting. That we seriously considered the “naked she-devil” van with a broken out window and two doors that didn’t work was quite disconcerting.

What was downright funny was the speech the she-devil van’s dealer gave me about why we needed to finance his overpriced piece of junk - because in a few months, when we found a better car, it would be easier to “move up” into it if we already had something financed, and besides that, he sells furniture and appliances too and if our stove went out, why, if we had a car financed, we could just call him and for $100 dollars he’d bring us a new stove. !!! Can I even count how many things are wrong in that sentence? I stood there in the rain that day and just looked at him. I suppose that’s why he kept talking for that long. I finally told him I hadn’t financed by bleeping house, I certainly wasn’t going to finance a car, much less a beat up piece of junk van with 150K miles on it.

The other side of the emotional involvement was the people who helped, or offered to help. It is one of those “ho I am full” things, and something I in no way take for granted. Friends. Real friends. It has been a long time since I had them and I am thankful.

What happened was this: The van died. We gathered our resources and looked really hard for a week and everything we looked at was eliminated for one reason or another until finally, defeated, we had nothing left to go look at. At that point we decided to back off a bit and to accept an offer of help (a loaner car so we wouldn’t just have one antique vehicle subject to unexpected breakdowns). We had just picked up the loaner car and spent a relaxed morning at the barn riding and were on our way to town to do a few errands and eat a bite. We’d just said to each other, wow, it feels good to relax about this, and now that we’re relaxed, something suitable can show up. Less than a block after we said that, there was a van for sale. I pulled in and we dialed the number. Less than 24 hours later the deal was made.

(but I will also point out that relaxing before putting in the work doesn't manifest this same magic, just so you know and are not mislead into being a lazy bum)

Here is what else happened: The new van is an older van, only slightly newer than our old one. It didn’t have its rear seats and several doodads were broken. Ah, but our old seats fit it and after we got it home we set about fixing all the broken stuff on it with stuff off our old van. It is really very much fun to have parts of our old faithful van traveling with us. And you know David’s coat of many colors? Well, it doesn’t have anything on our van!

Here is hoping this new old van stays with us until the end of oil.

There Is Never a Good Time

or When It’s Easy, That’s When It’s Supposed to Happen

Now, it may seem as though the above titles are diametric opposites, but they are mystically the same thing.

The first one became known to us when we decided to have our first child. That’s when it first occurred that there would never be a good time, when everything was smooth and everything was ready and nothing seemed in the way. We figured if we waited until it seemed like the perfect time to have a kid, we’d never do it.

So we had four.

The second one I remember saying to a fiend about a desire I have to assist a large animal vet. I still believe there just might come a time when it becomes possible (easy) for me to do this. Because while I definitely decided that I have no desire to actually BE a veterinarian, I would still like to know everything a vet knows (if only to discard most of it as allopathic hogwash).

It seems like I’ve been cow shopping forever. I’ve had out feelers, been telling everyone I know for at least a couple of years. We finally found what seemed a suitable and affordable cow back in November, but she was one hundred miles away. And then everything that could get in the way of it did. There were reasons we couldn’t borrow this trailer or that one, then when we were going to rent one, the truck we were going to use blew its engine, then there was snow and cold and more snow and more cold and all that goes in to handling that. Then we found her a ride and were waiting to coordinate it with this horse owner and that horse trainer and the cow folks when suddenly it became easy.

Suddenly as in tomorrow! A sick horse needed to go to the university large animal hospital for some tests and coming home we could pick up the cow. Tomorrow. My first reaction was, oh goodness, there is no way. But then I thought, why not? There is never going to be a good time, a time when we feel like we have everything all ready and all lined up for her, and this trip was just so easy so it must be supposed to happen. See how those things do too go together? And so very suddenly we were on the road at 7 am, and back at the barn, well, I don’t know what time it was but it was dark. She spent the night in the brood mare stall, the horse who was living there generously offering it over to us for the night. She freaked out a few horses as she made her way down the barn aisle but none too badly. She brought in sightseers (horse people) from far and wide to get a glimpse of this cow in a horse barn. Even the vet got a look at her the next morning. I milked her for the first time (and it was also the first time she’d ever been hand milked ever), there, in that stall, untied, with an audience.

Then we brought her home. My horse barn boss, who was doing the hauling, knew vaguely where we lived but had never been out here before. She said she has more respect now for how far out we live! And the day the cow came home, the weather was the worst, cold, raining and blowing hard, and it had rained so much that the bridge was flowing with water which I don’t think I’ve ever seen it quite do that before. But the cow got off the trailer at the road and crossed that flooded bridge and came on up here. She’d evidently never seen chickens before and missed going in her temporary pen the first time because of them. But after a quick trip around the pasture and some quick herd introductions, she made it in the pen on the second try. She has settled in, so far, so good.

Of course, nothing is all the way easy, thus that weather, and thus her really small teats which are quite the challenge to milk by hand. And she isn’t giving a whole lot of milk just now but she is due to freshen in a few months. So there is still stuff to work out. But there always is.

I’m not doing too well with photos lately so none yet, but there will eventually be some.

where the longing for love beat out the struggle for the legal tender

I think I probably spend a lot of time on this blog extolling the pleasures of this lifestyle. So forgive me if I indulge in one quick moment of whining: I don’t believe the temperature here has been above freezing in 20 days at least. It has been three weeks now that the highs haven’t been out of the low twenties -- I know because highs in the twenties require insulated coveralls to work in and this is the third week I’ll be wearing them. With the highs in the twenties, the lows have been single digits. Every night they predict lows in the teens but every morning we wake up to single digits.

That much cold starts making things hard. Wood is frozen and sawing frozen wood is, well, imagine using a bread knife saw through frozen steak. When bucking up a big log with only a buck saw while snow’s on the ground , a chainsaw begins to look tempting even to us. The van’s fan belt broke and we can’t fix it until it warms up. The truck’s choke sticks. I’ve gotten the truck stuck twice on the steep part of the hill which has meant backing it down the steep part of the hill (and then all the way back out to the road) twice now -- once I was successful and once I needed a come along to finish turning the truck around after it slid exactly crossways in the road. There’s a valve in the water pressure tank that is protected in the basement and even it has frozen three times. The house is considered warm if it gets up to 60 degrees.

ENOUGH!

Here’s what I have to say. We could easily fix all those things and never ever have to put up with them again. We could have a four wheel drive vehicle that isn’t officially an antique. We could have a working chainsaw. We could have a damn tractor. We could have all the trappings of civilization. We could have all the thing’s everyone else has.

And here’s what we’d have to give up to have it. Everything. Because to have the chainsaw on the one day it would come in handy, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year. Likewise, in order to have the nice, nearly new family vehicle and 4WD truck and a tractor, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year.

And that living to afford it means not living like we do live, the personally, family, socially, globally, environmentally, spiritually (and every other way) responsible life we’ve grown together here on this mountain.

It is a privilege to huddle together over the fires sharing a cup of tea and figuring out how to get the minimum done while we enjoy each other and wait for it to warm up just a bit.

And even people who give up everything to have all the thing’s everyone else does have times that challenge them too. They don’t get out of that -- they just give up the possibility of everything else.

I've come to talk to you again

The first morning it happened there were still leaves on the trees; colorful, mostly dry leaves, but leaves on the trees. I was taking the day turn-out horses out -- two horses plus me and a dog crunching through the gravel. Inside the gate I removed halters and the horses ambled away and I watched them, always in love with horse flesh.

And then I heard it. A sound. I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the wind in the leaves of the trees in the back fence row? No, there was no wind. Birds? There was no movement in the leaves, in the sky. I stood there and listened. And suddenly I knew what it was, as improbable as it seemed: it was

the sound
of frost
melting.

Wow. I had heard the sound of frost melting. Was there even such a thing?

And then, a few days ago, I was out getting the only two horses still turned out overnight. The welt of my boots was banked with the frost I had walked through. Their halters, hanging on hooks by the gate overnight, were white with frost. I started to speak to them and then I heard it again. It is a different sound than anything else I’ve ever heard, and this time there weren’t dry leaves to amplify it, but it must have been the frost on the fencing and the twigs on the trees and the weeds still standing from summer but dried out for the winter.

The sound of frost melting.

Day of Snakes

First I was at the barn. When I wheeled the big double wheeler wheelbarrow into the sawdust bin, I thought there were mushrooms or something growing what with all the recent rains. A closer look, however, revealed they were not puffballs or some other fungus but snake eggs. With snakes partway out of some, all the way out of others, and lots of them. The sight made me jump a bit first, and look way more closely. I hollered to my friend who was riding in the arena asking if she’d seen them earlier. No, she hadn’t. They were dead . . . but how had they gotten there? I tried to remember my snake physiology -- I was sure that copperheads were viviparous (born alive) and so fairly sure these were not poisonous dead snakes, which are not as dangerous as poisonous live snakes but still. Personally, I think all snakes are worthy to be handled with caution. And respect.

And so it was that a trip to the sawdust bin turned into a science class with the other people who were at the barn at the time. We looked and talked and poked and finally threw them over into the neighbor’s field to finish rotting. It turned out that they had been found buried down in the old sawdust the day before and left out for me to find. There was also a squished toad frog in the driveway entering into its maggot phase which by afternoon had entered into its dried up phase.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, err, farm . . . well, how I found out about it was when I got home and younger son ran to the vehicle to greet me as he always does, he said, “Nakes! Nakes! Cat’s killed a nakes and the chickens ate it!” He is very funny in that if you try to get him to say “Snakes” he will, but then he will say it like this: “The Scats Skilled a Snakes and the Schickens sate it!” But he’s also the kid who will turn to you and say, totally on his own and plain as day, “You know, my English is not so exact.” Anyway, what happened was that younger daughter found a baby copperhead and after she found it, the cats found it. They surrounded it and as fast as the snake was, the cats were faster. Then when the cats found it, the chickens found it too, and it went back and forth a few times. The snake did not manage to bite a cat but did get at least one chicken:
Looks like she's got a chaw of 'backer, don't it? Luckily, snake bites, even poisonous ones, don’t generally affect animals as severely as humans. You might remember the dog getting bit a couple years ago.

So that was our day of snakes.

On other fronts, well, we had a very decent spring garden, and the fall salad garden seems to be coming along, but in most respects the summer garden was wimpy. The hard corn was puny to begin with and then we’ve had to trap raccoons out of it or we wouldn’t have had any left. On the good side though, we’ve got plenty of good hard corn still from last year, and I think we still have some from the year before too. And we’ll probably get a years worth anyway out of this crop. So that ain’t shabby by the sufficiency standard. We also seem to have a more than decent potato crop, and a husband who has sworn that this year we’ll dig and cache it so that we can plow the rectangle garden in the winter and have it better prepared when planting time comes. A new crop for us this year that seems to have done well is Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes, so now the challenge will be learning to incorporate them into our regular diet.

We still haven’t gotten a new cow and the management plan is always a bit flexible. Like we could get a new cow and put the old one in the freezer. Or we could get a new cow and find a bull for the old cow to run with to see if she’d get pregnant if exposed more although that would almost certainly be a beef bull rather than a milking bull so we wouldn’t be passing her most excellent genes on to the next generation of homestead milk cows. Right now we’re still getting by on her production and, well, it just hasn’t gotten on the front burner. We’ve also had goat milk until this week. The girls milked her this year and did a fine management job and now she's obviously pregnant again. We’re putting the babies up at night still but mostly to protect them from the bear potential. How we’ll manage that probably depends mostly on how many nanny goats the mamma has in her next batch. Right now we’re thinking we'll keep the girls and may look toward a new billy come next year. I really like our current billy though. But I’d rather have nannies we’ve raised ourselves.

This year has been a very good year of independent to the farm exploration. Our interests, individual and collective, have born sweet fruit. And the farm and a basic subsistence lifestyle has allowed us to be able to do that -- and sustained us in the doing.

wide sky visions and green tunnel joys

A month since I blogged? I don’t believe I’ve ever gone that long in the five years I’ve kept this blog.

The barn I work at is in the river’s valley, a very broad valley, and the sky there is a wide sky. Today it was too too blue dotted with the big fluffy clouds that look like you could bounce on them, and wide open. When I see that I always think that it looks like skies that are in paintings. My husband always says, “Yeah, wonder where they got that idea?” At least I am amused by him. At the barn you can often see what weather is coming if you know what direction it is coming from. I like the feeling of possibility there with that sky.

At home we more often hear and smell what weather is coming than see it. Our home is high up on the mountain and the vista here is more narrow, at times even acute. The mountains, the hollers and the draws are steep and the trees are tall. I like the feeling of being in the loving embrace of mother earth.

I had a friend who walked the entire Appalachian Trail, bottom to top in one fell swoop by himself, way back in 1981. He said most of it was like walking inside a very long green tunnel. Two or three times you would come out on a bald mountain top, like the Roan or Whitetop, but that's about it. In Pennsylvania the trail was for a time beside a road and that was a relief, but most of the time it was just one very long, very green tunnel. He was on Katahdin about a day’s hike from the end when three days of rain set in and he was stuck in his tent, sick, and with only corn meal to eat. He did not stop short but persevered to the end. Then hitchhiked home.

We’ve been homesteaders, or back-to-the-land-ers, or otherwise independent cusses for a long time now. That’s our big sky vision. We’ve spent time on it, developed skills, mapped out the cloud formations of it, and bounced on them to boot. We’ve done it long enough (and are competent enough at it) that maybe we don’t have to think every day about how and why and what to do anymore. In fact, we’re competent enough at it that we can branch off and explore other paths along the green tunnel, without getting lost because we have the big sky vision to guide us.

Without vision, all one has is the tunnel. If all one has is the tunnel of daily existence, one can mistake a smoother, level, sandy path as “the path I’ve always known I should be on”, and one can mistake a rocky outcropping that one slides down a bit painfully as some big setback or something other than just how life is sometimes. Without the vision, one is only wandering aimlessly calling random events epiphanies or tragedies.

Ah, but vision doesn’t guarantee that one will not end up sitting in a wet tent with a runny nose for three days eating only corn meal mush. Sh*t happens. But sh*t that happens in pursuit of vision is a good story, while sh*t that happens without vision is just whining. Vision gets you up the mountain, lack of it just thinks maybe it might be nice to do.

Husband was explaining to one of the kids the other day why time seemed to go slowly for kids and quickly for adults. He said that life changes a lot for kids, what with them growing, changing, developing but that adults tend to get stuck, doing the same old same old day after day after day, living for the weekend or vacation or retirement or otherwise some other day than today.

I’m still milking the cow and making the bread and washing dishes and pulling weeds and playing with the family. But I’m also working at the barn and riding more and daring to teach just a bit and even riding someone else’s horse in a horse show (to train the horse).

I have wide sky visions and green tunnel joys.

for Cathy.

Morality Lost

“I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” Philippians 4:12

I do not think that life is whole without a spiritual aspect to it. I think one of the most useful spiritual views is that of self-actualization, which is basically when what you want to do and what you ought to do are the same thing.

Abraham Maslow was the psychological theorist who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs as it related to human motivation. Most importantly, he was the first to look at exemplary humans rather than mentally ill or neurotic people; to look at what is going on inside of extraordinary people. (In fact he wrote: "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” This is an idea I extrapolate to a whole lot of areas.)

It starts with the physiological. You need to breathe to be alive, eat, be warm (shelter, clothing), sleep, have water, pee, and have sex. Homeostasis. One might be concerned about what one eats after one has enough to eat. Then there are the safety needs -- a world that is predictable and orderly and where those basic physiological needs have the likelihood of being met continually. Owning a house and having some established food production are key here if you ask me.

The next level are the social needs, belonging and acceptance. Some people go so far as to form cults or gangs to satisfy these needs but most of us suffice with family and friends. Esteem is the next level, and if you don’t know how to esteem yourself, here you will seek the esteem of others by external means. Self-esteem is always an internal phenomenon, manifested most usually as confidence and self-respect. It isn’t something that can be taught, or given, or learned, or earned but is far more of a decision of independence.

And then, finally, there is self-actualization wherein lies morality, creativity, acceptance,
the ability to solve problems -- and while Maslow didn’t put it in here, to my mind, spirituality. Peak experiences is the catchphrase that comes to mind.

Maslow was not without his detractors, mostly people who dispute how strict the hierarchical nature of the needs is. It makes some sense that one cannot really think that deeply about morality when one is trying to figure out, from scratch, where one’s next meal is coming from. At the same time, creativity can be all the more important if what one has to eat is some form of beans and corn every day. And that is sort of where I am coming down in this exploration.

I think people are shortsighted and foolish to not consider their physiological and safety needs beyond “I can make the payment this month” and that any exploration of kinship or morality or creativity in the absence of taking care of the physiological and safety needs is a pretense. It is the sort of pretense that costuming serves when one lacks real self-esteem -- one pretends as a character instead of being a character.

But at the same time, and this is the key I think, one cannot surpass the physiological and safety and social needs to reach esteem and spirituality. It would be my posit that the only real way to explore, say, morality would be to grow one’s own food and build one’s own house because only in that way does one understand the labor and resource cost of such and take that into the moral consideration. I think that is why most monastics lead a simple life -- to stay in touch with the physical realities.

In a sort of “hither world, thither world, all worlds are one” way, there is no spiritual reality without the physical, nor any physical without the spiritual, and there is a great deal of suffering that results from the illusion of one separated from the other. It is why what you choose to eat matters to a small girl in Tahiti; it is why where you chose to drive today matters to a Inuit; it is why what you chose to speak to your friend matters even to someone you have yet to meet, and how you choose to conduct your business and the example you weave for your children matters. It all matters. To everyone and everything.

You only know the price and the gift of the chicken if you hatched it, raised it, looked it in the eye, fed it, worried over it, then chopped its head off and cleaned it and examined its bowels and aged it and cooked it and ate it. It isn’t awful or grand; it just is. But it is something that almost no one has experienced anymore. And it is in that that we have lost our morality.


thanks to Madcap and to Penelope

doing and being are one

When we were finishing up the planting of the corn, that old song “Family Affair” started playing in my head. Pretty much everything for us is a family affair.

The day finally came around to get the corn planted. First there were the plowing and the disking days, of course. Then the potatoes got planted, about 170# of them. Then it set in wet again, and busy-ness and commitments and things we had to do besides, and the corn was just a tad late for us. Not that it matters all that much. A lot of times stuff planted early sits there and doesn’t grow much while it is cool but when planted when it is warm it really takes off fast. This is why sometimes in the summer when we are trying to stagger things being ripe by planting things every two weeks, stuff not planted at the same time will mature at the same time anyway. Seeds don’t actually obey the seed packets you see. But still, it feels antsy when things are late getting planted.

The day to plant the corn had been anticipated; the “I think we’ll get to plant it on Thursday,” sort of anticipation. And the day before, “I think we’ll call all hands to the garden tomorrow for the corn.” And again the morning of, “If we thaw some chicken and make some deviled eggs, we can gather salad from the garden and have a big chef salad with grilled chicken after we plant the corn.” So everyone knows it. And everyone has seen it done and done it before so they know the work, know what to do.

Everyone made sure they ate something for lunch. Lunch for us usually isn’t very formal but a picking out of which leftovers you want so you don’t starve before supper. Breakfast and supper are more formal in that we make something and we eat together. Not that we don’t eat lunch together, we usually do. And not that in the hot part of summer, we don’t have dinner in the hot of the afternoon and snack for supper, we do. I guess maybe you have to be part of this family to understand how it flows and works like a well-oiled machine.

Husband went to the garden first to start the preparations. Before long the kids actually got antsy and said, “Isn’t it time to go down now?” Yeah, ok, let’s go. Boots on and bathing suits under clothes. A big jug of water. The big tomato plant we’d wintered in the window sills. A bucket and knife to graze for the rabbits. Food for the dog. Ready. Set. Go.

In the garden, husband had started laying off the rows. The girls placed the seed while eldest and I covered. I should have remembered my gloves because I got a blister on my palm from the rough handle of the shovel so I switched to the hoe. Youngest had a job but I was so busy with mine, I don’t remember what his was. I don’t know how many rows there were, each of two kinds of corn (bloody butcher and hickory king), but a lot. Because we grow a lot of corn. It takes about a pound of corn to make two big pones for our family for supper, and it takes about 2 ½ ears to make a pound which is a little over one corn stalk per meal and we’ll figure on eating it every day. That’s how we plan on feeding ourselves. And we’ll try to grow at least twice that much. We’ve had several good corn years but if there’s a failure we want to have enough in storage to see us through. Think of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows.

We planted the sunflowers too, lots we hope (we have no idea what the germination will be). The potatoes are mostly up and it will soon be time to hill them. Before ten days or so we’ll need to make the thread net over the baby corn plants so the crows will leave them alone. We harvested lovely lettuce and spinach and garlic and onions for the salad, and I toured the rest of all that is growing. The kids swam in the creek.

I asked the kids at one point, “Did I make you come to the garden to do this, or did you choose to come to the garden to do this?” Because, you know, I hadn’t really asked, I’d just coordinated with “It‘s time to go to the garden now” thing. They looked at me like I was a crazy lady but then said, “Because we wanted to plant the corn.”

No doubt that it helps that they know where food comes from. And that isn’t the store.

And it rained on the just planted corn last night! Even now the thing-that-is is stirring, swelling, growing, moving from a kernel in an ear to making an entire plant with two more ears full of kernels. It produces something, is productive, and thus is a model for me in my own life, doing and being.

Oh, and desert was blueberries frozen from last year, and fresh cream whipped that was as yellow as the buttercups the cow lays down in.

May Means

chicks

and locust blossoms (fried)

and spinach (and salad from the garden)

Spring Auction

That's the scene when you walk up outside at the fairgrounds for the Draft Horse and Mule Auction, spring edition. Lots of trailers, lots of trucks, lots of people, lots of horses. Most but not all of the people have on hats. All of the "real" people have on appropriate footwear. It is your footwear that gives you away. Interesting.

Isn't that a pretty pair? They were a Percheron/Spotted Draft cross but neither came out spotted.

This is taken exactly at my eye level; my attempt to provide perspective as to how big these good ole boys were.

A mule for my daughter. There was also the cutest little yearling mule there with four white socks. But in the end, I always go for the classic mule look.

This is Betty Sue if anyone remembers her from her being here a few years ago. My neighbor had bred her, foaled her, her baby died, he sold her, the new owner foaled her, she didn't catch this year so she's at the auction for sale. I think she remembered me, I swear I do.

Now, this little mare is also in that first photo up there. She's a Percheron cross (it didn't say with what but something not too big, my first guess would be quarter horse) and she's in foal to a big Thoroughbred. I'm always a sucker for the pregnant mares, the two for one deal and if I were to pick one I wanted to buy before they went up for sale, she'd be it.

Not all the horses looked this good. A few were skinny. So many needed some work done on their feet. And since they won't sell horses until Saturday, most of the ones for sale aren't even there yet.

I had a mission this year. My horse has lost some weight as he's aged and I needed to get a smaller collar. I knew I only had enough money for a used bargain one but I was quite shocked at the rise in price of the new ones since I bought mine. Like double or triple. Leather has done this too, partly because environmental regulation has made it pretty impossible to tan leather on any scale anymore. I'm all for the environment but I think we should think about some of this stuff twice. And don't get me started on the stupidity of the slaughter legislation.

This is my friend Billy. I grew up with him. His horse's name back then was Rex, a big grey racker who could park out, hoo boy. Billy's girlfriend's horse was Teardrop. My best friend's horse was Honey. They were all such good horses and good times. Billy helped me critique the available collars of the appropriate size and I got a good deal without even having to bid. Man, you had to bid fast today if you were going to get in so I was glad to not have to do it although I did have my number.

Next we'll have to see how it fits.

on a recent sunny morning

hen laying in nest box

hens dusting and preening

grass growing
(my favorite)
(and see the cow way back there?)

coltsfoot

fiddleheads and jewel weed seedlets

spinach bed
(this will soon be harvest-able)

onions backed by heal all blooming

wise old sage plant

turnips backed by music garlic
(thanks to my friend who gave us that bulb those years ago)

seedling bed

blueberries mulched & peach trees blooming

Appalachian Blue and Green

Werewolves of the Holler

Our Halloween: a ghost magician, an old timey witch with cloak, an elfin huntress, and Link; a pumpkin chocolate cake with orange icing and a chocolate drippy glaze, popcorn balls, black and orange jello, pumpkin soup, haunted sugar cereals for breakfast, and whole wheat sugar cookies colored and in shapes of ghosts, bats; a house full of decorations; jack-o-lantern carvings; hokey videos of the season; beer; adventures that you can't even imagine in your wildest imaginings, Wild Things sorts of adventures, except real of course.

Bear Medicine

It started several months ago. "Have you see [this or that] goat today? [He or She] wasn't with the herd tonight." And we'd all try to recount when was the last time we'd seen that particular goat, and then we'd all spend time on rounds trying to find it or its body.

To no avail.

We had too many goats. More than we like to carry on the place. We only had them because we'd been too lazy to slaughter and hadn't needed the meat. Since they cost us nothing, are meat on the hoof, why not? Well, there are lots of reasons why not actually, but anyway. They started turning up missing.

And I went through everything. What about my management of these goats was killing them? For surely they were dead, even though we weren't finding bodies. Could it be worms? I wormed everyone. Could it be selenium? I bought a block with extra selenium and put it where only goats could get to. Never mind that we'd never had these problems. What else could it be?

When they continued to disappear, my mind went further afield. When you hear hoof beats, it just might be zebras, after all. Those crazy neighbors down there -- could they have something against us and us not know it? Job Corps kids with nothing better to do? Teenagers who bust up mailboxes decided to get more ambitious? It wasn't hunting season and besides it would take an awfully drunk hunter to mistake a goat for a deer, especially more than once.

We walked the perimeter. We studied the goats who were left. We searched for clues.

To no avail.

When Hotsauce went missing, I knew something extra ordinary really was up. He wasn't at all sick with anything, he was big and healthy, he wasn't stupid, he wasn't too young or too old. But what was it? No body. No clues.

The goat who had gone missing before him, the kids had found the body, in the creek. Which I thought was an awfully odd place for him to have died. But a few hours later, when the adults went to check it out, there was no body.

So it could be coyotes. Everyone around here blames everything on coyotes it seems. We haven't ever seen or heard coyotes or any evidence of them. Doesn't mean they aren't here, of course. Our biggest predator problem is people’s loose dogs, but we usually catch sight of them before the mayhem and dogs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of the body like that. They are usually too stupid to actually eat what they kill.

Then one of the twins was there when I milked at night but not there the next morning. As soon as the regular morning chores were settled, I went looking. I took the dog with me. Quite often, if you watch the animals, you can get clues as to what is happening around you that you are otherwise ignorant of. So if you are in a field and you see an animal looking in a particular direction, chances are there really is something in that direction to look at. So I took the dog with me knowing that if she went off in a certain direction that I would want to look in that direction.

I went all through the woods. A goat can just be asleep behind a tree and be nearly invisible so I looked pretty hard but didn’t see anything at all. Well, I did note the likely route of getting firewood out of that particular area. I scanned the back field. I walked up to the rise there so I could see the entire breadth of it. It is hard to describe how you look for something that might be dead because it is just noticing something a little out of place usually. Something dead is close to invisible until you are right up on it usually. Unless the vultures have come already but there were no vultures yet.

I walked down to the creek. I so enjoy our creeks. Someone once said I laughed the way a creek laughs. I hope so. In October in this fourth year of droughts the creeks are low but still delightful and full of life. The creek is rocky so I walked up it. Then I noticed the dog had disappeared. I called for her. She came from the direction of the long flat through the woods just off our property and into national forest. She had a goat sized backbone in her mouth. I knew that wouldn’t be the backbone of the recently disappeared but one that had disappeared previously. I kept moving in that direction.

Then I saw it so suddenly it startled me. There in the creek. Exactly where the kids had said the one they found had been, with a bluff on one side and an open retreat through the woods on the other side. A fully intact goat except that it had a hole in its flank and all its innards were laying about two feet away from it. And all the delectable innards, the liver and the heart in particular, were gone. What was left was all the light colored stuff -- the lungs, stomachs, intestines.

Coyotes would never leave that. Dogs wouldn’t do that. Bear. I hadn’t really thought of bear, but we do live in a bear preserve and we’ve seen them and experienced some loss from them before when they ate our bees. There is plenty of mast for them this year, but since they are fattening up to hibernate right now, small fatty goat livers must have proved quite the temptation.

Our neighbors had complained some time ago about property damage on their place and I would now bet it was this bear. I’d bet he is a young male and I bet his territory is getting crowded up on the mountain. I did find a track, and a trail, which was pretty exciting. We talked to the kids about how to get home if they were out somewhere and ran across the bear -- to not run away but to not challenge him either and basically try to get home and I think mostly they’ll be hanging a little closer to the house until he goes to sleep this year. We will probably need to put an electric wire up along the creek to discourage him from coming onto our property and eating our animals. We hadn’t done that since our animals are not tempted to walk off into the woods. I’m not sure what else we could do. We can’t legally shoot him or trap him and the wildlife people are, well, shall we say, yet more stupid government bureaucrats. The donkey should be a deterrent. A guard dog would be a better one perhaps. A fold to put them inside before dusk should work.

Meanwhile, we still have our biggest strongest goats and they are really the only ones we should have had anyway.

the title has a link to a little information about bear energy if you are interested but trust me, living with it is a holy [sic] different proposition than meditating on it

it's the simple things in life, like when and where

I’m old. Sam Elliot is hot but that’s not the only thing that makes me old. Oh no. It takes more aspirin now to get me through a day sometimes but that’s not really it either.

What it really is is that I give directions by what used to be there. The new Virginia post office? Well, that’s where Rose’s used to be. Oh, Rose’s hasn’t been there in thirty years? Well, then, remember where Kroger’s was? Same place and at least that wasn’t quite so long ago. The new Kroger’s? Where the hospital was before they tore it down. How do you get from there to here? Turn left at the blue store. Except wait, they painted it white fifteen years ago and it’s named Green’s but it’ll always be the blue store to me.

My gawd, they changed the exit numbers on the Interstate in 1990 and I still know them first by their old numbers and I have to think to figure out their new numbers.

That’s why I’m old. It’s ok. I really don’t feel bad about it.

Like the other day, I got to reminisce about when I was 20 years old. About how we used to shut down the bars and ride the mechanical bulls and drink a lot too much and get up and go to work the next morning. Well, the same morning it would have been. And the people I remember, the people I had these adventures with, it is extremely possible that if they remember me at all, they remember me with ugly sorts of names because it definitely was a wild child period for me and a lot of times people like to remember the other person as worse then they were. Me, on the other hand, I probably was that bad. No wonder I didn’t accomplish much of substance. But I’ll tell you this; I had fun. It was a whole heck of a lot of fun and I remember those people with nothing but fondness.

I’ll tell you what else; I don’t need to go back and do it again. I wouldn’t be that stupid again for all the world, I sure did have fun, there are very few things I actually regret, and I don’t need to hang on to it. Or to wash my hands of it.

I was a privileged child, an outraged teen, a wild young adult who life came down on hard, like a pile of bricks. So then I was a very serious young adult, earnest young married with the highest ideals. I was a totally immersed mother while my children needed a totally immersed mother and now when a totally immersed mother would be harmful to them I have managed to take my seriousness and idealism, my motherhood and wife-hood and person-hood, my outrage and my privilege, and create this cowgirl’s current life.
Yeah, being old ain’t bad, ain’t bad at all.

many thanks to my cowgirl friends Cathy McG and the Divine Ms. D for the photo of me and Dollar and to my husband for saying, "you are so cute dressed up like a storm trooper" and to Kidd Rock for the song from which I get the title, a great song, All Summer Long

Uphill Both Ways

We’ve been reminiscing lately about how our gonads must have been as big as the Mississippi is long for us to have come out here and done this. We had just gotten married when we bought this piece of land. We moved out here some months later, after having started the house and the garden and the chickens and learning that we just couldn’t get it all done not being here. We were pregnant for the first time when we moved out here and lived in a tiny and ancient unheated trailer (we heated with kerosene heaters those winters).

There was no bridge across the creek then -- we simply forded it. If water was high we parked on the other side and hiked home, or if we were caught with the vehicle on this side of the creek, we stayed home until it subsided. When we parked on the other side, which we had to most of every winter back then, every item was carried home, uphill -- children, laundry, groceries, every single thing, more than a quarter mile, often in really bad weather and in the dark.

It never crossed either of our minds that we could fail. It simply wasn’t a possibility. Yet lots of things did fail. Those first chickens were killed by a pack of dogs that then got themselves trapped in the chicken coop so that we not only found every single chicken dead, we then had to kill three dogs. And I can’t tell you how many times we planted apple trees and grape vines. Everything took longer than it took. Except the children. We kept having children. Until my mother called the last one “problem number four” although that wasn’t why we stopped.

We built a house that is truly home. It looks like some mushroom sprung up in the woods. It is not large but you can’t see it entire from any angle because it has so many corners. I remember when we had the roof on but the ceiling wasn’t in. We’d been working very hard and yet hadn’t yet reached that last year’s push yet. My dad came up, probably his last time up it turned out. My dad, bless him, was always proud of me and baffled by me both. I absolutely honored everything I ever learned from him yet always took off at some ninety degree angle that he couldn’t quite understand. He looked up at the timbers in the house and asked how we got them up there. My husband answered, “One at a time.” My dad still gazed. Husband expounded. “A good day was when I got one rafter put up.” All that wood, everything up there, everything all around him, my dad understood all at once that we had done all that with only our hands. I think he also grasped that the only other person he’d ever known who had done that had been his own grandfather.

It took two more years to actually get us in the house. That last winter husband simply made a point to work at it every. single. day. And except for the days I took the kids to a homeschool meeting or to see my mom, I worked at it every single day too. In the mornings he went off to town to work and I cooked and cleaned and did all the work of running a household full of kids and in the afternoons and evenings, often until midnight, in the cold dark wet winter, we worked on the house. The kids ate a large number of frozen burritos that winter. That was a trade off. That and that after we were in the house, we didn’t want to speak to each other for several months. Ah, but they still got homemade bread and jam and eggs and potatoes every day too, and eventually husband and I found we again had things to say to one another.

And we didn’t buy much of anything except building materials and sinks and toilets and such. And legos. I really like my kitchen sinks and my roof by the way. And the kids still play with the lego sets.

And all of that and ten times more is still not the half of it. It sure wasn’t easy. But you know what? It wasn’t hard either. Or rather, it was very hard but worth every drop of blood, sweat and every single tear. It was fun. It was fulfilling. It was challenging and provoking in the best of ways.

on a different note: I had three posts written on a different computer that went phftz. One of them, I can't even remember what it was really so no hope of re-writing that! (and you are no doubt better off without it) One is the very nice award Alecto has given me, and I will have that up before long, I promise, because I have a whole new idea for it. And the last was the story of the cow's artificial insemination which did happen this week and I really don't want to re-write that so maybe if we can find the NT disk around here somewhere, we can get it off and I can post it. In the meantime, its the meantime and life really is good.