New lens and more perspective

 We have insulation in the new library/attic just in time for the weather to warm up.

... 'course it did snow twice last week.

 Sal on the temporary floor before insulation.

I have no photos post-insulation because I am deathly afraid of fiberglass.

No joke.

Is it blogger, or me?

Seems random but often my pictures show up sideways and then I just want to scream

Because (big surprise from Ms. Technology 1998) 

I don't know how to fix

anything.

The house project will take approximately until all five children are through graduate school.

(Latest: We may move the dining room wall eight feet.

The library remains in boxes.

The kitchen ceiling is still that nastysquare(asbestos?)tile stuff.

My bedroom has "art quilts" on the wall because they double as (sshhh!) insulation.)

I don't eat wheat. As of Monday.

Seems to be okay so far.

Until I see some really good artisan bread; you know, it's impossible to resist.

I don't think I'm gluten intolerant.

I just am messing around with my new psoriatic arthritis diagnosis.

Blah blah blah diet changes blah blah blah stress reduction blah blah blah avoid steroids.

(And can I sew 45 leotards before June 3rd? Of course! 

It might take my mind off the joint pain. Right?)

The peas and spinach are up!

My new garden is huge but never been tilled, apparently,
so we will be starting from scratch with raised beds.

On the plus side there exists an established strawberry bed, 

a good row of raspberries and four blueberry bushes.

And a quince!

Also we planted new dwarf pears, cherries and plums..

I will miss our old grapevine so much but there are baby vines here.

A garden is a challenge and adventure of its own.

Two Spot watches me from his stall as I walk under my new old apple trees.

They are huge and out of control.

We don't have visible neighbors here at the new farmsuite.

But we have met a few folks from our road in these cold months.

They seem nice.

In that cup-of-coffee-on-a-walk way.

It is still sometimes lonely, with limited internet and phone reception.

But loneliness and peace are two different sides of the same coin.

And then there's always the near-daily drive to dance lessons if I'm in my head too long.

I don't know how to fix anything.

But I sure like trying.

Seriously. Some insulation would be nice.

Oh. Did you come here for some December prettiness or a farmlike update of how I tackled the trio of ancient apple trees just before it was too late to prune or did you perhaps want to hear all about how 17-month-old Salvador will enunciate "up," "truck," "ball" perfectly clearly for his dad but never pour moi?

Check back later maybe.

Today my inspiration is this: I'm getting real.

Does anyone see the toilet up there? It's supposed to be out of the frame, to the right, where the new Suite upstairs bath will live. And straight ahead? That's the library.

Imagination helps. So would a little insulation.

We are still having fun even if we have to wear outerwear, well, indoors. It's been Western Oregon cold here, in the low 20s at night and high 30s all day. Crispy clear with a side of Jack Frost on the shady side of the house and barn. I have been ever so grateful that our new barn has automatic waterers and heat tape on the supply lines. This morning the big girls ventured to the end of the horse pasture, where we have a boggy little pond that Mr. Suite is excited to return to wetlands. Lo and behold the pond was frozen!

This never happens here. So the girls decided to ice skate in their boots and of course you know what happened next. Luckily it's all of a few inches deep at the edges.

So, in slightly warmer news, the new library will be about 12x12. One wonderful feature of this new old house is its decent room size, by "old house" standards. The master bedroom is 14x13 and boasts a 9x9 (!) walk-in closet. Of course to continue with the "getting real" theme of the day I have to tell you it is currently doubling as Salvador's bedroom. Each of the other two bedrooms houses two girls currently and while a new dormer bedroom is planned for Salvador, it's out there in construction phase eighteen or so. After a lot of discussion we decided turning the current attic space into a library is priority number two, right after finishing safety issues including the open staircase.

My "dining room" is a pass-through that houses what used to be my kitchen table... because my dining table doesn't fit. My "office" is an unheated back porch that used to be a laundry room. My laundry room is also a bathroom in the shop. My "family room" and "formal living" are one and the same.

The creek runs crystal clear under deep cover of fir, cedar and maple trees. A spring high on the hill feeds it. The apple trees and cherry trees are neglected but charmingly gnarled. The girls' rooms are paneled in 1970s paneling that they lovingly and happily painted Martha blue and sea glass green. Because new drywall in the bedrooms? That would be phase twenty-nine of the remodel.

And it's my dream. That's getting real.

More packing, more playing

I not only feel as though I owe you, dear friends and readers, an update or a dozen. I feel as though I owe it to myself to chronicle a fraction of the beautiful craziness that has been this move.

If you had told me six months ago that I'd be planning a new garden, tearing down nasty 1970s paneling, leaving my 1890s country-church-turned-farmhouse for a cottage of indeterminate history and a century barn that's better built than the house, well, this sentence clearly cannot support the number of clauses needed to describe my surprise and delight (and everysooften horror) and peace that has blessed us on this move to more acreage and more adventure and what we hope will prove to be an even simpler life than we found for five years in the tiny village we loved and left.

The all-new farmsuite is a mere 30 minutes from the former (still sweet but no longer the object of my hermitlike homemakery obsessions) farmsuite. The new place may be named Hoot Owl Hollow, if it's up to my children, and since (let's face it) I like to choose my battles, HOH it is for now. The circular drive that sweeps past my new little farmhouse and curves before my big antique barn I've tentatively named, optimistically, Geranium Lane.

While there are many charming plantings and outbuildings here, there are even more projects and situations the optimist in me calls "possibilities."

In fact this blog may go the way of a remodelaholic in place of its overly introspective writing ramblings, mommy musings and the like.







My husband, the dear engineer, has his work cut out for him at work and at home.

But, you know, as long as I have my barn.

Just short of a month into the move we still don't have phone or internet at home. But thank goodness for chocolate. (That and the red hair makes me know Salvador was surely not switched at birth.)
And the new house has nearly as many big leaf maples as the old house.

Just as many dogs and babies.

You know you're still reading the same blog because the pictures are ever so random. That's Josiah, one of my very favorite people. Too bad his family loves him because I just want to snatch him. Seriously.

And speaking of children I love... Sarah had an incredibly moving flute recital three days after we, a-hem, moved. Way to practice, honey. And to not lose your music in the packing boxes.

AND, since we're on the subject of performances, all three big girls are dancing in the Nutcracker this season. Because we have nothing else going on, that's why. So four rehearsals a week? No sweat.

Whenever I'm not wandering the propery, picking up heart-shaped rocks in the creek or tracing the square-headed nails in my barn walls, I'm stitching day-of-the-week towels. You know, when I should be unpacking. Or teaching geometry. Or taping drywall. Or driving in to cell range to make a phone call.

I miss you all! Please keep checking back... farmsuite is still here... just not as frequently.

If I think too hard about this

We have lived and loved here for more than five years. It was our move to the country that turned out to be a Total Lifestyle Makeover, a journey 23 miles from town but worlds away from what I now see was a relatively materialistic existence.

I've never thought of myself as loving the mall, per se, but the allure of spendy coffee shops and the urban thrill of a great antique find or of an amazing night at the theater... these are in my blood as much as the ponies and the garden (again, this year, with the 'kick me off the homesteader show' garden) and the free-range children.

I wrote a bit about the move here and its shifting of our resources, to put it plainly, to more time spent on fencing and more money spent at the feed store. We drank fewer lattes and the pricey children's boutique owners can hardly remember my name anymore. We brought home two babies to this house. We baked bread and we homeschooled and we started a little bunny business.

Living in this little, tiny, unincorporated rural village has been an enormous blessing. Living in a restored heritage church building has been a dream realized, even in light of the spotty heating and the all-too-open-while-tiny floor plan and the propensity of ranching old timers to stop for coffee as they used to do when the home was owned by a multi-generation founding family.

We have learned to make do, to make the best, to make joy and realize it.

We have walked to the post office, to the wood-floored, wood-heated general store-slash-deli, to the school, church, grange, to neighbors' barbeque parties, to rural art center events and to the abundant blackberry patches. We have spent entire weeks without opening the Suburban doors. We have loaded the shop and the barn and the entire small acreage with memories.

We have watched the fire hall's weekly training sessions from our front yard. We have watched Cycle Oregon's two thousand participants gather and marvel at our front porch. We have watched weddings at the next-door B&B and we have given countless directions to wine country tourists.

And now we are moving again.

My father-in-law gave me a little bit of wisdom that I want to share even though it's not fully sunk in. Yet.

Even in the face of exciting new adventures, it's okay to take a moment or two to appreciate what's passing, to mourn the loss of the known, to recognize what's been good before planning the new. In fact, it's probably counterproductive to start planning before recognizing that this change, though welcome, is hard.

Our new home, also a century or so old but without the known history of this place, is a grand gift and a new chapter to be sure. I just have to finish the last few pages of this one before the story can move on.

Finally, the blackberries ... a birthday... and a little ice cream

Our summer moves more quickly, and more slowly, than any I've remembered. It was late this year, the weather in Oregon not sure what to do with itself. Kinda matched my mood, frankly.

My physical self rushes around, driving country roads on the way to camp. after. camp. after camp.

My all-too-active inner self soaks in the sunshine and reflects, light and otherwise.

This summer marks my dad's 60th birthday, my son's first birthday. My girls are playing multiple instruments apiece (we're apparently starting up a traveling family band).

I miss my grandmother something fierce this season. She and I used to pick blackberries every year. Our stained fingers filled the pails and she filled my mind with stories of her growing up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin; growing up in the Great Depression, having her first children in a log cabin, moving bravely across the country to San Francisco to raise all four babies through wars and an uncertain economy and civil unrest and gardening and on the whole living an amazing, rich life.

Yep. I miss my grandmother. So much so that a visit from her daughters, my dear aunts, brought me to tears. Just hearing Sandra's voice, so like her mother's, and seeing Pat's expressions, so like my grandmother's... this was the essence of summer fruit, sweet but tart. We wait a long time for that first bucket of berries, and then the ice cream and the pies and the cobblers crowd together so thickly that we think we can freeze some of it to enjoy later. But we can't. We have to gobble it up, this life. We have to take it as it comes ripe and say, this is what it is to live in the moment. Tomorrow's joys will be better, and fresher, if they're uniquely tomorrow's.

So this week we are enjoying the last camp (can you see me, ready to slump?) of the summer. Madeleine and Grace are fiddling around. (Har har.) They are playing Cajun music and loving it. The camp is across the road, run by the rural arts, and I am loving that. No driving. No driving myself crazy packing up the whole family. (Did I mention no driving?)

Paradoxically to my whole fresh fruit/live the now theme: Next week we may start canning, although I will likely have to buy produce at the farmstands since my garden has suffered the effects of a late start to the growing season and a general chaos in my being.

Not that I'm dramatic much.

I have missed you, friends. I hope your summer is as delicious and fresh as ours has been.

More pictures worth thousands... of words

...because honestly...

I can't keep up.

Camps, glampouts, road trips.

The very occasional backyard nap.

More family drives.

A few farm projects.

A theater debut.

Homemade and homegrown pesto. Bruschetta. Much bettah.

Chicks become pullets.

Ponies become pets.

Roses reach higher.

Friendships blossom.

Characters develop.

Grandparents are made, not born.

We heat up, we cool down.

Sometimes speed up, then slow down.

We realize: It's the journey.

Jet lag anyone?

Last weekend we walked across the lane to a little-known international airport.

A few dozen neighbors and family members joined us on our flight.

Head stewardess Madeleine announced that we needed to keep our trays and seats in the upright position because we were to expect a whilwind tour of what took the girls months to absorb and repackage into a travel brochure come to life.

Sweet friend Lyndsey set up her German souvenir shop while Grace, Sarah and Madeleine did the same for their respective countries of study: France, India and Mexico.

The Brementown Musicians performed.

Lady Liberty recited. Ghandi spoke too. Beethoven played. Geronimo was on hand to tell tales of war. Marcel Marceau performed a riveting mime.

A trip to the Palais de Fines Artes in Mexico City was a treat, where we witnessed some spirited dancing as well.


All the countries we visited had traditional dancing, even with some "tourist" participation. Papa and Grandma danced. Friends Cameron and Quinn and cousin Maiya danced and took part in a quirky French "fashion" show. The girls acted as tour guides and I have never enjoyed a trip around the world quite so much.




In India the snake charmer was a big hit while the air sitar played and Sarah shared some facts about ancient spice trading.

But the big hit of the day, not surprisingly, was the international food court.

The girls' and my favorite part of their end-of-year cultural program was the food, and more specifically, the desserts. Sopapillas (Mexican pillow pastries), gateau au chocolate (French chocolate cake), lassi (Indian sweet yogurt), chai tea, stollen (German braided bread with fruit and cardamom) and more exotic choices that I frankly can't spell weighed down the cafe tables while family and friends feasted after the performance.

There weren't very many leftovers.


But we were certainly left with fun memories.

I always say that the only thing I miss about traditional school is the chance to see my children perform in programs. I love the moments of stage nerves. I love the rehearsals and the messy prop creation. I love the camaraderie and the confidence gained. And now I know that just because we homeschool we needn't miss out.

(I also know those teachers at traditional schools are grossly underpaid and overworked when it comes to such events. Because people? I'm tired. And I'm now storing several lovingly transformed appliance boxes that somewhat resemble an elephant, an Austrian cottage inside and out, the Eiffel tower and some cactii. Sans prickles, thank goodness.)

Thanks for joining us! I hope to be all rested and returning to your regularly scheduled hodgepodge of farmgirl philosophy and crafty goodness very, very soon.