Sounds of civilization

New chicken coop. It will be painted and pretty-ed up once we get more sun.

After what seems like a marathon move, I'm pleased to report that everything we own is finally in one place, our chickens are safe and dry in a REAL chicken house once again, and we have both TV and internet service.  These seem to be the foundations of civilization as we know it (in our household, anyway) and so it feels like once again all is well in the kingdom....the kingdom of unpacked boxes, ladders and paint cans, of course.

There are still more projects than I can count. But I did finish the yellow library walls before the furniture that's too heavy to easily lift got moved in!

I'm trying to pace myself on everything else, and enjoy the spring and the garden. There are three raised beds built over the septic drain field, which will now be used for flowers and ornamentals -- not food, ever. Big Ag will be building some other large beds not on the drain field and that is where we'll grow our food. Putting those three original beds over the leach field is a puzzler, as are a few other things, which I'm sure I'll be sharing in the coming days. I guess you never know what the previous owners were or were not thinking when they did stuff (I know they grew food there because there were still tomato cages in place).

Just say no to food grown over the septic system.

The best thing about living where we do now is that while we have two acres, we have all the sights and sounds of a neighborhood once again. I always felt very isolated in the vineyard. Sure, I loved the natural beauty that was present everywhere and yes, even the silence, but there was not a familiar face to be encountered anywhere except for Prince Albert, the resident and lone turkey on the property. Living on 200 acres is one of those things you think sounds great until you actually experience it. I discovered I really missed seeing other people -- just folks walking by, working on their yards, or driving past.

I miss Prince Albert, the vineyard's resident turkey.

I think that's because ultimately we are social creatures, even if we don't want our neighbors too close. I suppose there are a few Henry David Thoreau types who really could live in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no sight or sound of other people. But even he had his mom stop by to help with laundry and make dinner for him sometimes.

In this neighborhood, we have a lot of walkers, kids coming up the street on their way home from the school bus drop-off, and the occasional car, although since we live on a dead-end road the traffic is minimal. There's people out mowing their grass anytime it's not raining. You can hear the highway in the background, the trains running through the nearby town of Turner each morning, and also assorted domestic livestock noises from horses, roosters and sheep. But we're also less than 10 minutes from true civilization in Salem, where there is shopping, healthcare, and entertainment. The nicest part is, when we're done with the city, we can leave it and come home here to where there's plenty of space... but not too much. I have to be honest, I think we're in the Goldilocks Zone of property zoning and size. Lucky us. 

About a Pine

Small damaged things...

So as I think I've written before, once our move to Oregon was a definite thing, I dug up the Scotch Pine I'd bought as a seedling from a friend's son (part of a Boy Scout Christmas fundraiser) a few years ago. 

Back when I received it, I tended to the pine in its tiny plastic pot until it was ready to go into the ground, and then I planted it in our backyard in Paso Robles. But after a year of typical brutal sun and wind, one side of the tree was completely scorched, to a point where I thought it might die. And since pines don't like alkaline water and our well water was high in alkalinity, even the manual watering I provided was just not to its taste. Literally. 

But I refused to give up on it. I have great sympathy - maybe too much -- for anything that is originally planted in the wrong place, because that is the story of my life. Born in the middle of the city, should have been in the country. I spent most of my childhood acutely aware that somehow, I'd been mailed to the wrong address, and yet I still stayed for 30 years or so before finally getting the guts to jailbreak myself out and into a small country town in Central California, which was better, but still not the four-seasons climate I always felt I belonged in.  

...become big and beautiful in the right places

So when I noticed the pine tree was failing, of course I decided to dig it up and put it into a temporary container and bring it along with us to the Pacific Northwest.

It is no easy task bringing plants along when you're moving 14 hours north. They take up a lot of space that could be used for other possessions and by nature, potted plants are not always stable when riding in the back of a car or truck.  But when Big Ag brought a bunch of things north a couple of months before we moved, I made him put the pine tree in the back seat of the truck and told him to find a shady spot for it someplace around the property we were going to be living on. Which, God bless him, he did. 

It sat here in Oregon for two months, with no water other than what the rain provided. But lo and behold, when I finally got up here, it looked better than it had during its entire time in Paso Robles. Lots of new needles, and the burned side (above) at least appeared to not be getting any worse. 

Sometimes the circumstances don't need to be perfect for us to leave and go to a new place; we just need to gather our courage, and go. As Goethe once said, "whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

And sometimes there is even more than one right place!

Since it's been growing each day since it's been here, today I transplanted the Scotch Pine into a new, larger container, which will hold it nicely until we find a home we like and can plant it on the property somewhere. The scorched needles have dropped, and slowly new growth is appearing all over the tree. So it is when you end up in the right place. Old wounds from being in the wrong place begin to heal, and you begin the process of growth again. 

But it's the beginning it that's the key to everything, I think. Dreams were not meant to stay dreams forever; that's not what we were given the dreams for. And that's true whether you're a little Christmas pine tree longing for the cloud forest or a human being longing for a new home.

Begin it.

About a Hive

The hive's within.

So we now have a beehive...in the base of our backyard decorative fountain. This is the thing about living in the country -- you never know what you're going to get. You might have deer, a fox or even a mountain lion roaming your property. Or you might go outside one day and find a hive of bees has decided your yard is the address where they want to make their home.

Which I think is kind of an honor, actually. Talk about creating a bee-friendly habitat -- that moment when 500 or so of them arrive and let you know you've done it right is a great feeling.

Point of entry.

Our bees arrived en masse a few days ago, and unfortunately, set up shop in what (of course) is a totally inconvenient and unsafe place for them to stay. Being that it's inside the base of the fountain, it's highly susceptible to an ant invasion, and of course is impossible to manage the honey production safely.

But the thing is, I love these bees.  I'm also allergic to their sting, to the point where I keep an epi-pen on hand when I'm in the garden, so most of my bee enjoyment tends to be in small doses, and from a safe distance. I will never be a beekeeper for this reason, and the hive cannot remain where it is for that reason as well. But I'm still happy the bees chose us.

But what to do with them was a conundrum.

It didn't take me long to come up with a solution. Because you know who else loves bees, to a point where he actually has a beekeeper's outfit and beekeping equipment? My boss at the winery, that's who. He had a hive until last year, when the queen died and the minions deserted the bee box, and he's been looking for a replacement hive ever since.  And now he has one. Mine. 

Better Homes for bees.

It turns out this hive is an offshoot -- excess product if you will -- from a much larger hive which exists someplace on this property (I don't know where, but it's certainly not in the way of anything and therefore no danger to me). So this new hive can be moved and we will still have plenty of bees here.

So next week, we have an apiarist coming to remove the hive from the fountain and put it into the winery bee box. Then we will move it away from here, down the road to the winery, where they can hopefully live out their days and make lots of honey.

Ready for occupancy!

It's not a done deal yet, and it may be trickier than we've all imagined (isn't it always?) but I'll keep you up to date as we go and let you know what happens to these awesome little guys. They are a mellow bunch, not even minding when I get close to take pics of them, so I think they'll make a great addition to the winery. And, you know, if they ever do get a little grumpy, there's plenty of Cabernet on hand to settle them down again. Hey, it works for people.

Over there, over here

I'm not quite sure how to deal with the violence of our time.

This month: Police, charged with protecting the public, seemingly shooting innocents rather than criminals. These incidents are immediately followed by a criminal individual shooting innocent police officers in Dallas. All this while the entire nation is still reeling over the Orlando nightclub shootings and the slaughter of all those innocents last month. And of course we still have the airport bombing in Turkey and the mass murders in Paris in the backs of our minds.

Then this week: A Bastille Day celebration in beautiful Nice turned into a bloodbath.

Then today: A possible military coup in Turkey, one of the only Middle Eastern countries considered a good, safe transportation hub to go through on your way to and from various points in Europe, Africa and Asia. As of this moment, the airport is closed to anyone wanting to leave and The Men With Guns are running the show. Seems like you could say that about a lot of different places.

And who knew? Who could have predicted any of these things?

I would imagine if, for example,  you're trying to get to or from somewhere in Europe or the Middle East today and ended up in Turkey, you probably are 1) scared for your life, and 2) having a horrible moment of clarity when you realize you've definitely ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It seems like a lot of people recently have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and have paid with their lives. It seems like too many people have had to experience the awful realization that they are in a terrible situation, real time, and there's nothing they can do about it.

How do we process things such as this? People lucky enough to live in relatively unpopulated areas, such as myself, sometimes feel as though they are watching an alien world, all from a distance, whether they are on a homestead in Central California, a farm in the Cotswolds, or a cattle ranch in Argentina. The horror of what's going on is on the evening news or the internet, but only as long as we look at the screen. 

It's not down the street or even on the other side of town. But that doesn't mean it's not still horrifying.

Living where I do, I don't have to worry (much) about terrorists or rogue police officers or military coups. And at times like this, it feels like a huge divide between "here" and "there." Even if you're in a city apartment there is probably "here" and "there." Here, your cozy flat with the tea kettle singing, the house plants growing and a cat or two at your feet. Out there, Armageddon.

Am I the only one who feels a little guilty turning away from the news and just walking back into the comfortable routine of my normal life while others are suffering so horribly? I watch the sun set, I listen to the birds in the trees, and it seems somehow disrespectful to those who are still living in very real fear at the exact same moment. Yet there is also comfort in it. The sun will still rise tomorrow, for me anyway, and that becomes something to hold onto, something to look forward to, along with the beautiful routine of my day to day life, something I may not have appreciated as much before the sidewalk massacres started happening.

And if you think this is where I mention that time-honored cliche that we all have to get out there to public events, to airports and to foreign lands as we normally do or the terrorists and bullies of the world are winning, I do not believe that. There is no way I'd want to be in Europe right now, and I have family there. There is no way I'd want to be black in certain parts of this country. 

There's a primitive instinct that tells us to stay put when things seem to be getting chaotic "over there," (wherever "there" happens to be) and the primitive part of my brain is happy to be who I am, where I am right now. And I can't say I'm blessed, because then it implies that those less fortunate or of a different color or geographic locale are un-blessed, unwatched over somehow, and that's unacceptable. 

So I'll just say I'm lucky. Does that work?

But how do we negotiate our increasingly violent world? For me, the tendency is to pull inward.  To walk my property at sunset, watch dumb "Christmas in July" programs on television...anything that tells me there is goodness and routine still to be had within the boundaries of my blessed/lucky-so-far life.

And I guess I can be thankful for that and mournful at lives lost "over there" at the same time. But I still can't help but wonder where we all go from here; when "here" becomes a haven and a shelter from "there." One thing is for sure, and that is that we never really know the distance between the two. Because every place  is "here" until the bullets start flying and you realize you're now the one who has ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And then you find you're now "there" too. I hope you all stay safely within the bounds of "here" as we collectively attempt to figure this all out.

Hipster

So I am home from the hospital after having surgery on my hip. The surgery itself was pretty much a walk in the park, other than the usual crappy feelings when coming out of anesthesia (that uncomfortable place of wanting to wake up and being unable to do so completely, strangely the feeling I also have when watching this year's political debates).

I haven't documented much about my hip pain because it was tedious enough to be living through without having to write about it. My homesteading activities, garden and job were the places I went to avoid the pain. But suffice to say, it's been going on for two years with no less than six doctors attempting to find out what the issue is. And so while I haven't written about it, it's definitely been a constant companion, with me more than even my husband has been. Pain is there when you're in the shower, sleeping, driving and shopping. It really is the bad relative you can't get rid of, because it lives inside you.

Anyway, my first doctor (local orthopedist) took two x-rays, declared me arthritis-free and sent me to five months of physical therapy, which in hindsight was not only unnecessary, but probably made things worse.

My second doctor was heading the physical therapy department; she helped me a LOT with pain management, but unfortunately could do nothing about the original pain, which she termed "sacrolitic dysfunction." This term is what a more recent doctor (Orthopedist #2) angrily called a "magic box," where no real diagnostics happens and people just learn to live with pain they should be seeking the origin of.

So the next doctor was my primary care doc, who really did care, but could not diagnose the problem either (more x-rays though). His solution was a prescription NSAID which helped the pain somewhat, but did nothing to alleviate the origin of it.

And here's the funniest thing: One of the main symptoms ( which to me was the elephant in the room) was a large, moveable knot at the base of one of my "back dimples" that everyone insisted was "just inflammation." More on that next.

By this time a year had gone by, and I was unable to do many things I used to be able to do -- carry a case of wine to a customer's car, hike up any trail with hills (99 percent of trails around here have hills), sleep well, or do any serious gardening tasks, like shoveling. Oh, I'd do them, but I'd pay dearly in terms of pain for the next day (or six).

And so I finally got fed up and drove two and a half-hours to an orthopedist in Fresno I'd seen who had fixed a torn meniscus in my knee about 10 years ago. He took one look at the lump on my back dimple and said, "well this is most likely a benign growth that will need to come off." Not inflammation, not "sacrolitic dysfunction"...a physical growth. A tumor of some kind, pressing on the nerve that runs through your hip and down your leg. That was the ultimate origin of the hip pain.

I had an MRI, then another one, and then was referred to a cohort of my ortho-guy (who, due to his kick-ass expertise and can-do attitude I now look at the way some young girls look at Justin Beiber -- sheer, unadulterated idol worship) to rule out the tumor itself being caused by a spine issue. The spinal surgeon recommended a general surgeon. And so on the appointments went. By this time I was coming up on two years of pain, but at least 1) they knew what it was and 2) there was a plan in the works to fix it.

So my general surgeon operated on me this morning. Already I can tell there is a huge difference. He removed two benign growths (one hiding and not visible to either man or machine), each one the size of a golf ball. For two years, those two tumors had been altering my gait, my mobility, my joy in life, you name it.

I'm home and resting now, two "golf balls"  lighter and feeling 100 percent better. It's been a long road in getting here, and I'm incredibly thankful to have finally arrived at a healing point. 

But the moral of the story is this: Never be afraid to get a second, or third, or forth opinion if you feel you're possibly being marginalized, your symptoms dismissed, or patronized to based on your age, your sex, or anything else. I will say this without any doubt: Doctor #1 treated me like an old person who has to "learn to live" with a certain amount of pain. Doctor #2 did care, but I sometimes got the impression that he felt some woman-sensitivity might be the cause of my pain, and was therefore not aggressive so much about finding its source, instead attempting to just alleviate the symptoms. Physical Therapy Doc was lovely, but, same problem -- manage the pain, don't worry about the cause. 

All three of those doctors are good people who, ultimately might have crippled me by not treating what was actually wrong.

If you live in a small city, find a doctor in a big city who 1) sees more unusual cases, and 2) has medicine as the center of their life. Many of our doctors here on the coast do NOT move here to practice medicine -- they move here to paddle board, sail, wine taste and live the easy life. These are not the doctors you want. You want the ambitious, driven, curious and caring doctors who publish papers, want to establish good practices, and gain respect and importance in their respective medical communities. Occasionally they can be brusque, arrogant and opinionated. But they have a passion for medicine and problem solving, and will not give up until they find what is wrong with you and fix it, whether you are 18 to 88.

From a healing place, I hope you're well. I'm happy to say I am!

The salvation of country life

I recently re-activated my subscription to Ancestry.com and have once again been spending time with those who came before me. This time around I'm focusing on my U.K. ancestors, since I am a first generation American on that side and have a lot of family over there, past and present.

I came across a heartbreaking story of my third maternal great-grandmother, a lady named Elizabeth Aylward. Her whole branch of the family originally lived their lives in the rural hamlet of Suffolk, England, as well as Essex County. (I've actually been to Suffolk a few times and it's beautiful.) But when the Industrial Revolution began to gain traction, like thousands of others, Elizabeth made her way to London to live in the city and find work.

Over the years, through census documents, I saw her working as a boot-mender, a silk weaver, and as she grew older and presumably less dexterous, a laundress.

Her life went on in what must have been a dreary and difficult way, earning barely enough to survive and, along with her husband, supporting a family. But it was what happened after her children were gone and her husband died that really got me. 

Elizabeth's "Poor Law" removal and resettlement document.

1881 Census for her section of Bethnel Green Work House. The age of most women there was between 50 - 70.

Elizabeth Aylward ended up at age 70 in one of London's most notorious workhouses -- Bethnal Green -- where she lived out her days doing menial labor until she died.

As I read the sad story of her life, I couldn't help wondering if she ever regretted leaving the clean air and green fields of Suffolk. I can't help but feel that somehow, if she could just have stayed in the country, her life would have been far different. There would have been a community to care for her in her old age (no workhouses were needed in the farm communities, it was a city phenomenon) and life might not have been such a struggle.

But I could be wrong. It could be that she left Suffolk for London partly because she needed to find work that would support her.  In the end I will never know, of course, what choices could have changed her life. But I know when I lived in Los Angeles, I was very familiar with the sensation of how it felt to spend everything you have on rent to a point where you're broke at the end of each and every month with no emergency fund and no savings. And while there are no more work houses, there is certainly economic uncertainty for people who live their lives in cities and spend all of what they earn, month after month, year after year. The cities of the world are, in some spots, glamorous and cosmopolitan, but they extract a high price from those who want to live in them.

For me, my salvation came not from a journey into the city, but a journey out of it. And somehow, I feel that if Elizabeth could just have found her way back to the small town she started in, her life might have ended in a rocking chair by a window under a thatched roof somewhere instead of a brick factory work house, being fed crumbs and living in filth while working until the day she finally dropped dead. 

Elizabeth's greatest challenge, in my opinion, was something that was not her fault at all -- she was born into the era that valued the man-made and technological, the brick and the concrete, over a simple country life, considered by most to be antique and passé in the face of the Machine Era.  And it led her away from that country life to a hardscrabble existence in East London, where at the end of that life she had nothing to show for it -- no savings, no home, and no close-knit community to depend on.

I don't know where the soul of Elizabeth Aylward resides today but I only hope that there are a lot of green trees, fragrant flowers, soft breezes and most importantly, eternal and blissful rest. 

God knows she earned it.

The dollhouse

My friend's dollhouse looks a lot like this one.

This Christmas a friend's little daughter got a dollhouse. It's actually a pretty cool DIY invention, made from a bookcase with holes cut into the shelves for stairs, running from one story to another. So maybe a five-story dollhouse is not realistic, but she absolutely adores it.

I also had a dollhouse as a child, the style of which was not quite realistic for little me, but which I also absolutely adored. It was a one-story, ranch style 1960's house with a big kitchen, fireplace, and large bedrooms. It was totally beyond my 5-year old realm of comprehension because I grew up in a city-style, compact apartment building in the heart of Los Angeles.

The dollhouse of my dreams...and eventual home of my reality.

The dollhouse had beautiful wood credenzas and sideboards and hutches (furniture designed to evoke permanence -- not very moveable, as most apartment furniture must be). There was a large sofa floated in the middle of the living room facing the fireplace, plus a breakfast nook table in addition to the formal dining room. Since we lived in a such a small, shared space we had none of these things, but it spoke of a home I badly wanted. 

Even at a young age sometimes you are conscious of the things you don't have and feel like you were supposed to get, as part of some pre-birth deal with The Creator. But often the contract with said Creator is, in fact correct. You will get the thing(s) you feel like you should have received...but you may have to work to get it for it yourself, much later in life than you'd ever imagined.

I'm not knocking my childhood, indeed I have many happy memories from that neighborhood, which was mostly comprised of houses with stable, long-term families residing in them, unlike our apartments, which had a constantly rotating group of tenants. 

It's interesting to note that my parents could actually well have afforded a house in that same neighborhood, but chose not to live in one, because they thought it was just too much work -- a roof that would eventually need replacing, the carpet and paint they'd have to pay for themselves, a back garden and front yard to mow and tend to, etc. And of course they somehow managed to bring home from the hospital that one kid who felt these things were essential for a happy life. Moí.

My dream come true, in its early form.

That's because if there's ever a kid who belonged in a house rather than an apartment, and indeed in the country rather than the city, it was me. I've known it from the time I was born, which is probably why I glommed onto that ranch dollhouse the way I did. Isn't it funny how sometimes we have to spend the first 30 years of our lives finding our way home? 

Perhaps the dollhouse was a premonition of the future, or maybe just a deep longing brought to life in miniature, but I spent many, many hours creating garden space outside the little doll/ranch house, moving furniture around inside, and dreaming I was actually living within its brick and wood-siding walls.

And so, seeing the little Christmas dollhouse my friend got her daughter made me realize many times you're born knowing where you belong, and you might find it first visualized in a gift, or an afternoon or vacation spent someplace memorable, or even just a picture in a magazine that calls to you and says, "someday."

Check out the rooster on the chimney! 

Who knows, maybe there's a high-rise, multi-story house in my friend's daughter's future. Only time will tell what she gravitates towards and what she sees in her early life that speaks to her. But when those things do speak, both children and parents need to listen and let the little ones walk the path towards their destiny, whether it's a profession, a hobby...or just a nice house with a garden and a sofa by the fireplace.

Keeping it simple, keeping it up.

Let's face it, blogs often end up going into dormancy because of the repetitive nature of people's lives. I can't tell you how many blogs I've discovered at the last post, where the author says, "well I've pretty much said all I can say about this, so I'm signing off." it's always frustrating, because just when I start to get interested in the story -- when I've scrolled back, reading it from its inspired beginning -- it slows down and then one day, it ends. Abruptly, as its author moves on to something else.

Routine "comes with the dinner," so to speak, in life, but especially in the homesteading one. It's the side dish to the main one of living from scratch. It's pretty much a given, for instance, that in summer you're going to grow tomatoes and can them. Once or twice a year you'll make soap. Pruning happens in fall. It's all novelty for the first year, and then you get to have the first year a second time, usually with minor curve balls thrown in...the early frost, the cracked mason jar, insect invasion, etc. Repeat and rinse.

And it's called The Simple Life because of that predictability.

Now maybe you've come up with a way to write in such a way that your readers are continually drawn into said life. Or likewise, perhaps you are such an awesome photographer that the reader wants to be in the room with you while you're completing your work (if you feel that way please come on over and bring your apron). Martha Stewart has always been good at this. Come for her 118th iteration of a pumpkin pie recipe, stay because you'd like to take up residence in her gorgeous kitchen, sit by her fireplace and dine while admiring her tablescapes.

Thanksgiving checklist item: Spray paint all chairs to match my blouse.

People like reading about the simple, homemade life because it's a state most of us are trying to achieve in one way or another, and we like seeing others on the same quest. We're a club of people trying to keep it old fashioned, or just longing for the perfect bucolic life, and trying to keep balance in a busy, busy world.

Today I canned the last of the tomatoes -- 10 quarts of delicious spaghetti sauce -- and made enough laundry detergent to last through winter. There are three loads of wash on the line as I write this, and I even have enough tomato sauce left over to make a great spaghetti dinner tonight.

This is my measure of a good day.

I prefer this kind of work to working outside the home (even though I do both), but have found I cannot live like a hermit all my days, or my social skills get rusty. I've seen the same in others too. Like any good story, I need new characters and situations to make my life more interesting, even though at the end of the day, I choose a warm fire, a hot meal and a big comfortable chair over many other things. 

And I realized the other day that if balance is a number between one and a hundred, there are about 99 numbers you can hit that will just be wrong, with about 10 of those being "close but not quite." The perfect balance is like the perfect temperature -- fleeting and difficult to maintain in a dynamic, changing environment. You'll hit it once in awhile, but most days you'll be adjusting up or down, depending.

Maybe it's not so much about the simple life these days as much as its about the "simpler" one. Not perfect, not exact, just a theoretical number we shoot for every day, with some days getting closer than others. 

After all, how many days is it a "perfect 75 degrees?" Not nearly enough, my friends. Not nearly enough. So I just try to get in range, most days, and keep writing about it. I hope you do the same.

Reunion

I am 4th from the left, last row back.

So this last weekend I went down to Los Angeles for a reunion of the cast of "American Bandstand," which was a television show I was a regular dancer on from about 1977 - 1979, when I was a teen/young adult. For me, those were the height of my "city" years. We clubbed until dawn, grabbed expresso at all-night coffeehouses, taped the show, and somehow dragged ourselves off to work and college when we weren't doing that....crawling through traffic, living in crappy apartments, eating and drinking in dive bistros and chic eateries and, generally, living life in the fast lane (within which there was usually a traffic jam, so not so fast, really). 

It's familiar...

So how does someone born and raised in the city, well-versed in city life and activities, end up working a homestead in a rural part of the state? That answer was simple: I became who I was supposed to be. Anyone who lives a fundamentally different lifestyle than the one they grew up with knows exactly what I'm talking about. 

Sometimes you just get mailed to the wrong address at birth. It happens.

Yet for those who are raised in those "foreign" environments, we can often learn to be a pretty good mimic where the outside world is concerned. Just like any place you live long enough, you learn the lingo and adopt activities that allow you to fit in. In short, you become the guy in Rome who did as the Romans did. He blended in, in order to survive.

But at some point, your deeper nature will surface, as it did with me at about age 28. I say deeper nature because deep down, I have always belonged in nature or out in the country much more than on on some nightclub floor or 4 a.m. coffeehouse. As a really small child I vividly remember driving out of Los Angeles, over the Grapevine (Interstate 5) into the rolling farmlands of the Central Valley to visit relatives, and feeling like I was coming home. Which, it turns out, was exactly what I was doing -- just 20 years too early. 

but this is Home.

Yet, thankfully, there is no time limit on coming home and no reason why the first place you live should be "home" for you if you don't really feel at home there. Home is where your soul comes to rest. You might find it at birth or age 70, but the later age does not invalidate the fact that its true. Every soul has a compass that points true north (or south, east or west in reality), and until you heed the pull and go to where it's telling you, you will always feel a little out of place, deep down inside you. You may look like the rest of them, but you're not really one of them, and you know it.

And yet, by being born in a land foreign to your soul, you do learn to be a citizen of two worlds. So when I went down to Los Angeles for my reunion weekend, on the outside I fit right in. I like that, and hope I can always do that. To be a citizen of two places surely cannot be anything but a privilege.  But to know which one is home is the true gift. And for me, to head back, out of the city and to a place where I can see the Milky Way at night and there's no hum of the freeway off in the distance is both a tremendous comfort and something that makes me realize how lucky I was to seek -- and to finally find -- Home. 

Just country livin'

One of the best things about living in the country is being able to use the phrase, "well, that's country livin." It's kind of an all-encompassing excuse for when things don't look:

 1) clean, 
2) tidy,
and even 
3) sanitary


Example: The floor is dirty?  Just country livin'. There's chicken poop on the back patio? Just country livin'. Starting to get the hang of it?

When your clean glasses have strange residue in their bottoms , it's the hard well water. Country livin'. When there are small sticks or pieces of grass between the sheets, it's because hay really does get everywhere once you break the bale. Definitely country livin'. If there's an odd smell in the house that indicates country livin', most folks will immediately check bottom of their shoes for animal feces and then their sweaty farming clothes stuffed in the clothes hamper.  And after awhile they learn...when others don't like the smells, sights or sounds around their place, they offer the reason: It's just country livin'.

And of course once you've become fluent at offering this as the reason anything happens, you then can move onto more far-fetched, yet still in the realm of possibility scenarios that can also be blamed on country life:

Dead animal on your property
Dead person on your property
Unidentifiable body part on your property
Sunburn
Welding burn
Indian burn
Bits of canning vegetables stuck to the kitchen wall
Bits of canning vegetables stuck to the kitchen ceiling
Bits of canning vegetables that somehow made it into the dining room
gardening by moonlight
zip lining by moonlight
fixing fence by moonlight
getting old
feeling young
sunburn
windburn
mortgage burn
muscle aches
muscle building
euphoria
defeat
plantar fasciitis
back pain (always)
freckles
tan arms
white belly
general insanity
specific happiness

All of the above.....Just country livin'.

(If you live in the city, never fear. In your case, just feel free to make your own list and add the excuse, "well that's life in the big city." This rationale works well for all those city-oriented things you know and love, like meat-hurling street performers, homeless encampments under your parking garage and 2 a.m. restaurant runs to the Thai place 'round the corner. I lived that life,too. Not better, not worse, just different.)

Goin' Into Town

Most days I write about the simplistic and very romantic perfection that wine country life can be. But there is a price to be paid for all this open space and bucolic pleasure, and that is that in order to have it, you can't live too close to town. 

We actually live 20 miles away from the nearest small town, 60 miles away from the nearest medium-sized one, and 120 miles away from a metropolis large enough to have things like big furniture stores or a Macy's.

The actual reality of the weekly trip into the small town and the twice-yearly trip to the metropolis is one of the things I wish someone had told me about before I moved to the country; while it would not have changed my mind, I certainly would have been less romantic about it. 

For some reason, I saw my in-town days as vignettes, with me strolling the streets of the boutique-y parts of our lovely downtown, stopping at gourmet food stores while maybe sipping a latte and enjoying all the pretty things in the store windows. 

Only that's not really how it is. Going into town for the day really consists of driving to many different large stores on the other end of town, pulling in and out of parking spaces, facing traffic stress and lugging bags of stuff into the car. And it pretty much takes an entire day, if I want to save gas and make it a weekly trip.

And that's the dirty little the secret about rural life:  When you live out of town, your days in town are spent dashing from one place to the next, in order to make the most of your time and gas money. No leisurely strolling here, folks. It's a Supply Replenishment run.

Not my home, but you get the point.  Country here, city way over there.

All this driving does make me appreciate the efforts many urban planners are putting forth to create pedestrian and bike-friendly cities, where residents can actually get the things they need without having to own a car.  But to live in an urban environment as it is now, you have to be willing to give up the biggest pleasures of being out of town: seeing the Milky Way at night, having a property large enough to keep livestock, grow food and have an orchard, and last but not least, being able to be outdoors without the constant drone of lawn mowers, police helicopters, traffic and noisy neighbors.  

That's a huge sacrifice, and not one I'm willing to make right now.

And so, at least at this point, we will continue living out here in the country and just hitch up that old wagon (aka the car) and do a 10-stop Errand Day once a week or so. 

And on those days when I need to head into town, I leave early yet still seem to always get back home later than I'd like.  A much better writer than I am, Robert Frost, once wrote about kind of journey, saying in part:

 "I have errands to run and promises to keep.  And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep."

Sometimes, on the days when I'd rather be here on my quiet hilltop than fighting for parking spaces in town, I would definitely agree with those sentiments.

Sounds

When I lived in the city, I awoke to the hum of the freeway most mornings.  If the city is like a body, the freeway is its circulatory system.  As it rises and and gets moving, the freeway-body responds with increased circulation, which is a kind of whooshing sound that grows louder and more urgent closer it gets to rush hour.  

If I was up really early (or came home very late), I'd see the newspaper delivery truck making its way down the street, throwing the LA Times into the lobbies of all the apartment buildings, just as dawn was breaking behind the skyscrapers to the east. Sometimes the mostly-nocturnal garbage trucks would still be finishing up their rounds and could be heard rattling their way home along the boulevard, fighting for space with the produce delivery trucks, which were outside the restaurants, blinkers on, delivering fresh goods for the day.  There would even be the occasional jangling of a dog leash as some early-riser took their Fido down the sidewalk to a postage stamp-sized patch of dirt near the corner, to do his or her business.

These were sounds that called you to alert, to action, as you dressed, gulped down some coffee and became part of the teeming masses headed into offices in order to Make Things Run, as the sun rose higher and the air warmed.  It was exciting to feel like a part of the machine, but for all the pavement I pounded in my business suit and Reeboks trainers, another life called to me, and after a time I left the city I had grown up in and headed into the suburbs.

The suburbs are different. The noise of the freeway, so much a pulse of the morning in the city, is a dim hum out there.  But at dawn and just after it, there are cars starting all up and down the street and the sounds of children clambering into them and being hauled off to day care or school, with cereal bars or sippy cups clutched in their moist hands. And there are the sounds of morning radio, blaring from the front seat of the same cars, where their parents clutch their own beverage cups and check their briefcases before heading out on their morning missions -- drop off the kids, head into work. 

If you wait another hour or so after that, the suburbs then begin to fill with the sound of the old gardening trucks and their clanky trailers, driven by the Mexican gardeners from  the "other part of town," who will arrive faithfully in the morning and finish their work before the day's heat gets too brutal.  With them come the sounds of lawns being mowed, bushes being clipped, and the ever-present whine of motorized leaf blowers cleaning off the sidewalks when they are done.  Sometimes there are mothers with infants, taking morning walks and pushing strollers along the sidewalks while talking into their cell phones. Sometimes there is birdsong. But most of the time the streets -- and the houses that sit on them -- are empty.

Now I live in the country, and here the sounds are completely predictable, and exactly the same on any morning of the week, whether it's Sunday morning or a Wednesday or a Saturday.  If you are up early enough, you will get to hear the last of the yip-yip-yip coyote songs, as the packs wind down their nights and retreat back into their dens. But more often the day here usually begins with the song of the brown thrasher, who nests in the bushes outside our bedroom window.  He also starts his song well before sunup, beginning just about the time the coyotes are winding down.  

But since he's so early, it's actually possible to roll over and catch another hour of sleep before the rest of the dawn chorus starts up, singing as they begin making their way down from the trees to start their day.  The roosters on all the other farms around us crow to greet the day, and all manner of animals can be heard calling out as their owners push wheelbarrows full with their morning rations towards their pastures and stalls - cow, sheep, goat and horse.

It's not a rush hour as much as a routine; everyone makes their own noises, everyone eats, and then everyone goes about their day. 

After about 9 a.m., the only sounds are birdsong, and the occasional call of the hawk or eagle floating high overhead.  But mostly, it's silent. Silence.  Such a strange concept after all those years of cities and suburbs.

I have lived through many mornings, in many places and in many parts the world.  Sure, I have my preferences, but I can also see the beauty and unique hope held within the mornings of all these places where I've called home and where I've stumbled out of bed and to the coffee pot.  

Every one of these places has its own symphony, and you need only be mindful to see the beauty in all of them.

Country Clean

Monday nights can sometimes be a little bit rough around here, because Monday morning is the time I clean each week.  I  sweep the floor, then go over it with a microfiber cloth stuck on a Swiffer.  Then I mop. I vacuum the rest of the house and clean the bathrooms most of the time, too. So by the end of the day, the house looks pretty darn good.

Then at approximately 6 pm, the men come home. And it's on, baby.

Fist, they try and walk in with their shoes on. Ain't gonna happen.

The they decide to have something like watermelon with dinner, so now the kitchen counter, the floor beside the counter, and the coffee table in the living room has sticky pink watermelon juice on it (just a few hours after I CLEANED ALL OF IT). There was a reason our parents made us eat watermelon outside when we were kids, and I get that now.

So basically, by about 8 p.m. I end up somewhere between pitching a fit and having a meltdown. And once I've dried my tears and put down the shotgun or cast iron skillet I've been waving around in a threatening manner (joking, but it's close sometimes), I always hear the same comment:  "But we live in the country!  What do you expect?"

So what do you think?  Is living in the country a decent excuse for having a dirtier than average home?  

I'm pretty mellow on the weekend, when most of our "country" things are happening -- when fences are being strung, trees pruned, and compost turned.  That's when dust, mud, hay, and other things too gross to mention get tracked in -- no surprise there.  

The weekend is also when Big Ag and Groceries will make snacks throughout the day, which means my granite counters feel exactly like the food prep area of the greasy spoon diner in town by about mid-afternoon on Sunday.  

The weekends are also when even the dog seems to bring in the majority of the pieces of bark, fruit mummies, and bits of straw attached to himself, and then plunk himself down on the sofa without a second thought.  Kind of sad that he's in on the whole thing too. But that's OK. I get it. It's the weekend and everyone's outdoors a lot. And some of the outside gets in when that's going on.

That's why Monday is Cleaning Day.

I've had girlfriends around here tell me their farmer husbands use the "but we live in the country" gambit whenever they request their mates kindly remove their shoes before tracking horse manure on the carpets, or throwing a straw-covered jacket down on a clean comforter on the bed. 

But I don't know, is it country living?  Is the standard of cleanliness and hygiene different if you live on acreage?  Or is it just an excuse for some folks to act like slobs or have a dirty home?

For me personally, I'm all for dirtiness outside, but I want the inside of my house to be clean(ish).  I don't want to stumble on mystery clods of brown material (hmmm, is that dirt or poop?  And how can I determine which one without reaching down to touch or smell it...).  I don't see why a kitchen counter that's been messed up with strawberry jam that's just been canned or dirty onion tops  shouldn't be cleaned well afterwards.

Is it just me?  Are my standards too high, or are my men trying to get away with being slobs with no accountability? 

I ask myself these questions almost every Tuesday. Because on Mondays I clean, and on Monday nights, my beloved family attempts to undo everything I've been working on all day long.

Because we live in the country, dontcha know.