Northern Flicker and Snow Days

I just love the variety of birds we find in the vineyard, most of which I've never seen before. This Northern Flicker has been hanging around, and today I was lucky enough to get close enough to him to get a shot.

We've also had plenty of snow, so you know what that means....sledding through the Pinot Noir vines,and building snowmen on the front doorstep! Not bad for a couple of former Californians. But even in Oregon, snow days mean play days since they don't happen very often!

No expectations

One of the best things about starting over in a new place is the freedom from having a lot of preconceived notions about things. Right now, for instance, daytime temperatures have been hovering in the mid to upper 30s in the central Willamette Valley. And every night when I watch the news from Portland there is much grousing and commiseration among the anchors and commentators that it is supposed to be about 54 degrees at this time of year, and why in the hell is it not warming up, already? The poor weather guy really has to take a lot of flak about it. People are quite offended the weather is so "abnormal" right now.

But for us, with this being our first year here, we have no expectations. Which I'm glad about, considering I made something of a cottage industry of complaining about summers in California when we lived there. So if we wake up and it's 27 degrees that seems just fine, thank you very much. It's still February, and we knew February means chilly temps anyplace north of the 40th parallel. So we're open to whatever form winter is going to take, including ice and snow. We're never disappointed because we have no expectations...or years past to compare anything to. What freedom there is in that!

54 degrees?

No expectations.

Expectations are really a curse in long-term commitments, when you think about it. We expect friends, the weather, spouses, towns and restaurants to all be a certain way, and it really fries us if they start to change and we don't like the direction things are moving. And the longer we've been enjoying something, the more we take offense when the ground beneath our feet starts to shift. That's why, occasionally, our elders can seem like such massive pains in our behinds. Often you'll find that, for them, the way things were has hardened in stone and is now the way things should always be. With pretty sharply defined edges. There is sometimes anger in nostalgia; paradise lost and all that. What a way to curse a perfectly good present.

I'm not afraid to say that I'm not exactly sure how it's all going to work as we move to our new place, and in fact am kind of excited by that fact. Homesteading is, by its nature, fairly monotonous, and so re-learning it all in a new place is certainly one way to keep it fresh, if one can just resist the temptation to try and bring the past routines along and cram them into new spaces. That probably would not work anyway, and I've seen people broken by the act of trying to make that happen. 

It's hard to keep those expectations at bay, but trying to stay in the zen of the present is a good exercise for staying open to any new ideas up ahead. 

It's official

We are homeowners again! Escrow has closed and we now legally own our own sweet little farm-ette. We won't be moving right away as the family/former owners asked for a few weeks to rent back to us, but we'll begin doing some repairs right after they vacate and will begin moving a couple of weeks after that.

I am already looking to purchase a couple of livestock animals to help us keep the grasses down, so stay tuned for that! And my hens will once again have their own chicken house, which will make life a lot easier for me, as it will need a little less cleaning and they'll have more room to roam around inside when it rains. 

So with this move will come a return to a simple, less carbon-intensive lifestyle, which I can't wait for. The old adage of "you don't know what you got 'till it's gone," is true when it comes to homesteading. There is not only common sense and environmental responsibility, but also pleasure and comfort to be found in things like re-using instead of buying new, composting, growing your own food and hanging your wash. (Since I've brought it up about ten times, can you tell how much I really miss drying my wash outdoors? Every day here it doesn't rain I think to myself, "If I had a clothesline I could do a load of wash and hang it out right now." 

So the order of moving will be from least important to most important items, with professional movers coming on the final day to take all the furniture we can't lift ourselves. I miss the college/LA days of having rattan Pier One furniture, masonry brick-and-wood stacked shelving, and art posters in plastic frames, all of which I could move by myself if necessary! 

Those were the days. Milk crates and DIY shelves.

And in a great Murphy's Law Conundrum, two of my three kids will be here visiting the week we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Which probably means lots of take-out food, driving around showing them things, and of course having them move some stuff for us. Just so they feel useful and needed, of course. Ya, that's it. 

So maybe the simple, eco-friendly life will have to wait another week or so after we move. But it'll come. I know that now. And just in time for spring! There will be flowers and veggies to plant, animals to bring home, and the art of turning a house into a home. I cannot wait to show you around the new place and get to work making it our own.

Snow Day

For my entire life, I've lived in places that have seen snow....once or twice....always in historic data. 1959, 1926...you get it. Even places like Los Angeles have seen snow in times past, but it is always a once-in-a-lifetime thing when it happens. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I always held out hope that I'd be around for the next historic snowfall but it never happened -- ever -- in any place we lived in CA. It got tantalizingly close a few times in Paso Robles, but no real snow, ever, on our property. 

So you can imagine my Christmas morning-level glee when we woke up this morning to this. It looked like a Breughel painting across the countryside. 

I put on my snow shoes, walked around outside and snapped a few pics, just to be out in it. Snow is not at all unusual here, but since it doesn't usually stick around long and doesn't fall more than a few inches at a time, people mostly love it. Big Ag scraped his windows off and went to work, since he has 4WD and a short commute.

What surprised me was how bright everything was. Here in Oregon, we have a fair amount of gray skies and green trees, grass, etc. With the snow, it was like someone turned up the brightness level on the computer by a level of about 100. The ground was bright. The sky was bright. Everything from horizon to horizon reflected the daylight. I had no idea.

One of the things I vowed to myself is that sometime during my lifetime, I'd live in a place with 1) four full seasons, and 2)where I would wake up to snow on the ground. I can cross those item off my bucket list. But even though the box has been checked on snow, I still hope we see some more of the white stuff before the season is over, usually at the end of February.

Packing up (again) is hard to do. Not.

Hello, new farm!

Farewell, Mouse Turd Manor.

If I wasn't so happy to have found a home, I might be bummed that we have to pack up and move again so soon -- for the second time in one year, for those keeping track. But I'm quite grateful to be doing so. In many ways it will be great to get out of this rental -- a run-down, manufactured home I aptly named "Mouse Turd Manor," when we moved in (although we've since eliminated the rodent issue, at least inside the house). But the property is way too close to a dairy and the accompanying stinky dairy lagoon, and too far away from other neighbors to have made any connections there.  It's not exactly close to town, either. Great views though. I'll miss those.

The views from the front door of Mouse Turd Manor are mystical and magical. The dairy smell, not so much.

And since this time it's 1) a cross-town move, and 2) a move that will be done over about a month's time, it will be a lot less painful than moving to a new state, like last time. In the 20+ moves I've made as an adult, a local move, done over two or three weeks, is the least painful and most easily-organized way to move, by far. Take a carload or two a day over to the new place, UNPACK IT, empty the boxes, return and refill the boxes for the next run. Have the furniture movers show up on the last day and move everything you can't lift and load yourself.

Not having a ton of boxes to unpack reduces the number of items you'll have to go box-diving for in your first few weeks at your new place significantly. In other words, you'll know where your spatulas are when you need them. I always try and put unpacked items in the same places they are now, at least for the first few months I'm there. This means, if your picnic basket and carpet cleaner reside in the closet of the bedroom where the blue quilt is on the bed, they should go into that exact place in your new home, if possible. You'll feel a lot less cognitive dissonance that way and you can always move them later on to different places, once you're more settled in.

But the things I'm looking forward to the most are the things that were just too inconvenient or impossible to do here. Stuff like growing significant amounts of food, canning, preserving, hanging wash out to dry, using the solar oven, having a dedicated space for my chickens, and having garbage and recycling pick-up. Those are all things I'm looking forward to having available again. Move to a new place and you'll find out quickly the things your soul needs, and mine needs that stuff. I've felt like a boat without an anchor without being tied to the seasons and the land in those very meaningful ways. And I really miss homegrown food. 

I'm even looking forward to having some farm neighbors again.  Boy, I never thought I'd feel this way, especially after we lived next to that one guy next door who blasted "Radar Love" by Golden Earring on his patio every single Saturday morning when he was out working on his property. While I love the quiet, neighbors (patio speakers notwithstanding) can really help you feel part of a community. Even if you don't like their music, at least you know they are over there. 

And so March will be Moving Month. We'll also be putting in a new well pump, doing some minor septic repairs, painting, cleaning, and refinishing some hardwood floors. It will be great to post pics and write about what's going on, because it's going to be a lot!

Boldly Forward

"The Old Farmhouse" by Reb Frost

I am happy to announce that...tentatively....we've found our house!

We made an offer on a newer farmhouse about 30 minutes north of here last week and found out over the weekend that our offer was accepted! We'd been watching this house for several months, waiting to see if the price would drop, and once it did, we moved in with an offer.

So now there will be the usual round of inspections, which is why we're still tentative at this point. (We may discover that a swarm of Asian stink bugs, or Amelia Earhart and DB Cooper have been inhabiting the attic for years. I doubt it, but one never knows.) But we're extremely optimistic that this is The One.

It's been a long road to get here, and as much as finding the right place took a long time, what also took a long time was finding out how we wanted to be in this "new world" we moved to 10 months ago. Did we want to be suburb-ians with chickens or true country bumpkins? Flatlanders or mountain folk? What cities did we want close proximity to?

There was also an insane sellers' market this last summer, and we decided early on that we were not going to lose our heads in bidding wars or in having to make immediate offers on places we weren't sure about. I am glad we didn't succumb to any of that madness, even if it did make our wait longer.

But I think the biggest mistake we made (in looking at the 20+ houses we saw...20+!) was in thinking we should adapt -- either to a house that wasn't really "us" and needed extensive remodeling,or to an area that made sense geographically but didn't necessarily feel like home. You figure if you move 800 miles, you are going to have to adjust to almost everything, including your home preferences. But if you do go in that direction, you will feel a keen sense of loss over what part of your personal dream (the things you already believe about what "home" should be) you are giving up. It might be enough closet space, that extra half-bathroom, or the view out your window. 

But if I could give any advice, I'd say honor those things, however irrational they seem to others. Or you will not be happy.

What we ended up with was something astonishingly familiar to both of us. It is a 1990's build (we have never owned a home older than that) that has a lot of flat, usable land, about 2 acres, with plenty of room for chickens, clotheslines, livestock, fruit trees and vegetable growing. It has a shop for Big Ag. It has air conditioning. But it's also reasonably close to city amenities. 

Oh sure, we spent time dreaming and trying on the idea of living in Victorian fixer-uppers, mid-century ranchers, and quirky old farmhouses with various additions tacked on over the years. But it turned out, what we really needed was a relatively plain-vanilla, modern home with no quirks and no surprises. Sure, we don't get any hidden closets, old wood-burning fireplaces, solid wood interior doors or built-in bookcases. But we did get something that felt like home. To us, anyway.

In short, our mistake was in trying to be too flexible, and force the square pegs that we are into round holes. Do that and it will never fit. All you'll end up with is bruised edges and disappointment. Especially at our age, when we've had a lifetime of living in, frankly, a certain kind of home. It's adjustment enough to move to a new state and settle in. Unless you're young enough to experiment with living in different kinds of houses, you might want to stay with something that feels familiar.

And so it's with a huge amount of excitement that we (hopefully) move on to this next phase of the journey, which is getting ready to move again, but to a place we can't wait to get to. 

One thing that occurred to me is that it will be great to get back to blogging about all things homesteading, that's for sure, as well as writing from a place that feels like home. And home is clearly where we want to be. 

Plus, plenty of time to plant some vegetables in spring! Hallelujah to that!

Darkness upon us

The real test over how well you weather the winter season is not November - December, when there are lots of holiday lights, parties, gatherings and shopping to keep you busy, happy and over-scheduled. No, it's what happens after that, in the dark and cold of mid-winter, with its short days, long nights and lack of holiday songs and lights,  that separates the hardy from the tender. It's been known to drive some folks mad...but for those willing to lean into those days -- to clarity.

I've noticed most people here in the PNW still have all their Christmas lights up. Maybe they'll take them down this weekend, or later this month, meaning we're truly heading into the darkest time of the year, both mentally and in the light our physical eyes perceive (because although we are actually adding roughly an extra 30 seconds of light each day now that we're past solstice, it doesn't add up to much just yet).  

I have never minded this kind of darkness. When I lived in the San Joaquin Valley, one of my favorite times of year was when the Tule fog rolled in thick and stuck around. Many days it never even cleared -- it was pea soup in the morning, more the thickness of a clear broth at lunch time, and then back to pea soup by about 4 pm again. It was a great time to stay indoors, light a fire, crochet, and listen to music or read. 

It was also a great time of year when I worked at the winery. We'd get stormy days, early on, when we'd have maybe two or four customers visit us over the entire 6 hour period we were open. I loved those slow, catch-up days because they could mean doing tasks I'd never have time for on busier days, or better yet, spending time getting to really know my coworkers as we chatted to pass the time. 

The slow, dark days of mid-winter are a time of hibernation, of incubation, when dreams began to take shape and you feel the new year beginning to take form in terms of goals, ideas and dreams. It is a time for patience and a time for thought and prayer. But without it, you risk just sort of launching into spring without any idea of what needs to stay in your life and what needs to go. It's no coincidence winter is a time when many of us clean out our closets. We're sorting through what works and what doesn't work anymore, both in what we've accumulated in terms of material goods as well as, on the emotional side, what we've accumulated in the form of relationships, habits, ideologies and desires. 

I like to think that when spring finally bursts forth into flower and sun, that I'll have a pretty good idea of what I want out of 2019, what I expect of myself, and what I'm ready to let go of. But without pausing to reflect on those things by using the dark days of mid-winter to sift, reassess and plan, it's all one long, endless road with no turn-outs or rest stops.

Not my kind of journey at all. I think the seasonal darkness has it's own set of special set of gifts it offers, if we're willing to accept them on their own terms. The greatest of which is that when darkness is prevalent, we have the ability to see our own light within much better.