Meals on Wheels

I could (and often do) tout the benefits and importance of food storage but if there is ONE major downfall to the storage of food, I met it head on recently:

MOVING it.

Trust me. SO not fun. It is heavy. It is cumbersome. It can be fragile and it is a HUGE nuisance.

Especially my home-canned goods.

It made me sick to think of how many times my hands have touched that food from planting, weeding, harvesting, canning, loading into the canning cupboard, UNloading the canning cupboard and REloading the canning cupboard.

See what I mean?

Sick.

We better REALLY enjoy eating it..............

Airing my dirty laundry and other snapshots

~ she found a small, very old book in the basement entitled Think Before You Act and calls it her treasure. That moment, I saw the sun glistening her strands and pages illuminating her mind and called her mine.

~ I felt very proud of myself for doing a load of laundry that day. UNTIL I realized that a vent hole had yet to be cut into the wall, leaving the dryer unusable and no clothesline has been put up.


What?!? You don't think little undies and socks make good valances?!?!?
I say: "Tres chic!"

~ pumpkins and sunshine. The lighting is just so that you can not see the piles of metal scrap awaiting removal, the bags and bags of garbage on the porch, the exposed and trampled dirt left over from an emergency drainpipe/leach-field dig-up and fix-up, or the haybales that are trying desperately (and in vain) to help insulate a foundation that needs to be fixed next spring. Lovely lighting, no?

~ We wanted to get all moved before the snow flew but Jack Frost had other plans. It snowed the most beautiful covering of white~ the kind that sticks to trees and makes marvelous snowmen...... and makes moving a tremendous pain. But the children had a lovely diversion with the snow, though I fear Corynn may be allergic.

~ The first time we slept over, we all woke up at about the same time, came downstairs and stopped in our tracks. Andrew said "Woah! Look!" Corynn said " Mama look at the window!" and I just stared. The finest gold, and with a glimpse~ we are kings.


~ My first task was to get the counters in the kitchen cleared and the table in the dining room cleared so that we could at least fix REAL food and have a place to eat it. After a job well done, I fixed our first meal in the new house. Everywhere else was a D.I.S.A.S.T.E.R but the meatloaf, boiled potatoes and roasted vegetables never tasted so good. We even had some sparkling grape juice I had found in the cupboard when we were cleaning out Grams things.

~ miss him? Oh, that face.

Too busy to have been taking many photos these past few weeks, but I could muster these few.

One for each week I have been gone.

Figured I owed ya.

Once there was a girl named Rebecca who had a blog...

...and ACTUALLY blogged there.

Well here I am, on the flip side of a major move, feeling like quite the stranger to my own blog~ it feels almost foreign to me to be looking into a computer screen and making odd little click, clicking sounds with my fingers.

I fully intended to blog more often through this ordeal, and would have welcomed a diversion allowing me to sit down at least three weeks ago, had certain difficulties not arisen...like say, waiting a week and a half for the internet guy to be able to come and 'hook us up'. Then of course, another few days to re-glue the legs on our computer desk which we had to saw off in order to get it up the stairs. Then a few more days at the realization that an ungrounded plug in the room would not be sufficient for the computer wiring without an adapter (and hence, a trip to the store when I was too busy to go) and THEN, tack on a few MORE days upon realizing that our wireless USB went AWOL during the move. All this to say---TOTALLY not my fault.

But I am here now, and wondering with this long absence~
Where to begin? or if I even should....

We successfully turned the pages of a month and, with a lick and a flip ended a new chapter of this Story of ours. It had its moments of intrigue and moments of bliss, a few fairly profound jolts but mostly it was just colorless redundancy: pack, haul, pack, haul, pack, haul.

I worked from morning until night with just a short mouth-shoving break for meals. I survived the long nights, intense and energy-draining days by draining Coke by I.V. and my poor family ate more chips and pizza than we have ever eaten before (to the point of being grossed out by it.) I can now boast being 10 pounds more squeezable, if only that were boastable. It has been nice having home cooked meals (and the cooking has become FUN again!) and VEGETABLES and eggs and potatoes. And I have given up Coke.

There were a few moments of Matt holding me in the kitchen while I stood blubbering "We can't do it!", "I can't do this!", "I......can't..........sniff DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wail..........this!!!!...........slobber, slobber" with Matt assuring me that we can. There were a few other meltdowns on Matt's part, but we won't talk about those. ;-)

We eventually came through, however, and now the packing and making trip after trip in our van and a pickup is just a story past and the beginning of this new chapter is upon us. Still, many a box surrounding us and much work left undone, we have begun our new life in a new home and had our fair share of new excitements to make our fondness for the place kindle and flame.

It isn't hard falling in love with a place when you see it as Gods place for you and it isn't difficult to see the extraordinary in your Story when it is God's fingers flipping the pages.

The extraordinary abound even amidst the cardboard and clutter~ and I am determined to take note.
Renaissances' long lost blogger,

Rebecca

Moments

Just some moments last week~

Matt and his Dad repaired part of the roof last week. The children took turns 'helping'. I love Corynn's expression.

~ Hopestead feels a bit like it sits on top of the world, a very good place to see Autumn colors emerge.

That, and watching tractors weave to and fro, children run and play and random things being thrown out windows are the only things that keep being locked up in a pack and play for HOURS bearable. This child is the most amazing kid (maa-a-aaa!) and just what I need, when there is a home with nitro pills, carpet tacks and all sorts of hazardous things to consume that needs cleaning out. I feel bad about the portapack, but very very very thankful too. I will make it up to him someday.

~ zucchini mozzerella bites~

~ Grams motto must have been "LAYER IT!" because there is not a place in the house that doesn't have at least four layers of flooring, wallpaper or contact paper on it. Tar paper. Laminate floor. Foam. Newspaper. Carpet. Carpet on top of carpet.

Made finding the real floor a sort of treasure hunt.

It is easy for one to get distracted from his work.

Especially when there are $1.50 tires on sale. We could use that sale right about now!

~ Matt putting up the library bookshelves to be used as homeschool bookshelves. I should be getting a whole new set of nice, real wood shelves made for me as soon as Matt is able....MEANING: I can get rid of those nasty, warped particle board bookcases from Walmart I loathe.

~ When one has girls that look just like each other and boys that look just like each other, all with the same distance between them, it is easy to feel as though you are being time warped at times. I remember this exact same moment a few years ago, with a Corynn and Andrew doing just that very thing and looking just that way.

~ I post this picture for the sole reason of admiring those adorable squinty eyes. A one-year-old with laugh wrinkles is too much for this mother to bear, especially if it is hers.

just call me Taz

When it comes to cleaning rooms of their junk, I am like a Tazmanian Devil~ throwing things here, rushing back, tossing more things and so it goes. I would make piles by the stairs so that when I went downstairs I could take handfuls at a time.

I was working so quickly, I didn't even realize that I had boxed a poor little Adele' in until I heard the wails.

The Name of the Place

Growing up, I was in a nomadic family. I believe my parents have moved 22 times since they have been married. (Right, Mom?) And in my life, in particular, the moves were often to different STATES and often far, far away from friends and family. I took my neighbor with me for Grandparents Day at school. As a child, it was mostly fun, adventurous, exciting (well, maybe not for Mom!). But when I met Matt, I got to see a different side of things.

He lived in the same house he was born in all of his non-married life. Both sets of grandparents lived down the road and he would be babysat or spend the night at their homes regularly. We still pass a stone wall that he built as a teenager~out of stones that another Newman built long ago. His family is all buried in the local cemetery. Our children sleep in his old room for rest time when we visit.

It was all so different from my upbringing. So constant, so secure. So.....stagnant. Though I wouldn't trade how I was raised, this lifestyle~so vastly different from my own~appealed to me greatly.

When I got married, I decided I should like to live in one beautiful, amazing home the rest of my days; that my children would grow up and their children would sleep in the same room and reminisce, that we could write the heights of our children on the doorposts and see them, small again, decades later. I thought it would be lovely to watch my children climb and play on the apple trees their parents played on and that we could all picnic under a great maple that we planted. A place where we would never have to abandon our memories. Wouldn't my life be grand?!

And then real life happened. And while 'real life' didn't turn out at all like I had envisioned, it was beautiful to us....like my childhood. We moved, almost like clockwork, every two years. Each place we made our home happy and sweet, and named her thus.

Home #1 was the home where Matt and I moved into married life, blushing and flirtatious. Where we learned to live with one another and had our first (and second and third) fight, something I was SURE would never, ever happen. It was where I learned that Matt had a horrible temper and where he learned that I couldn't cook a lick. It was a teeny little house that you could see every square foot of when you walked in the front door. Reminiscent of Laura Ingalls house (minus the loft), it was the most lovely place on earth in my mind. It was where Matt and I slept in a twin bed together until we could afford a queen size bed, but when the bed was delivered~ the delivery men weren't sure it would fit into the room. (It did, though when you walked into the doorway you were practically on it and I had to climb over Matt to get to my side.) There were open shelves between the 'living room' and the 'dining room' where I put all my lovely shiny crystal wedding presents and the most lovely rainbows would dance through the house every morning as the sun came up-right through the window onto the crystal. It sat on the farm where Matt worked and right next to a large house where a dozen Mexicans lived. This was the home I would walk to the farm and have picnic lunches with Matt and where Matt learned to speak fluent Spanish, even though he took French in school. This is where Corynn was born. But we moved about a month later. We called her The Little House. We pass her on the way to church.

Home #2 was an apartment down the road. Still small, though more spacious than the first house, it had an upstairs(!) that had TWO rooms and it even had two bathrooms (though the downstairs bathroom, your knees rubbed the washing machine when you sat down.) It was in a nice grand house, the large side being where the owner (our landlady) lived. I really disliked this house~ it is bizarre to play outside in a yard where your landlady is watching you. Or hanging clothes on a line where another persons clothes were hanging. Or watching her dig up the rose bush you just planted because, well, she didn't want it in HER lawn. This was the home where I hung lights from trees and we danced and celebrated our anniversary (the same night our single landlady had all her single girlfriends over for cards and they all swooned at the romance of it all). This is the home I taught myself how to can and where Matt went to his parents' house every weekend to "DO something outside!". This is the home where Andrew was born. We called her The Duplex. But we moved a week later.

Home #3 was where we became a family. A real family. It was three and a half hours away, in a place where we knew no one. A beautiful, big, BRICK home with columns in front~ it, too, came with the farm where Matt was working~ though this time, it wasn't ON the farm but down the road a bit. It had a huge yard, where I began teaching myself how to garden and a huge garage where Matt would work. It had a huge basement where the children would play and a huge CEILING in the living room that I would sometimes just stare up at in awe. Everything about it was huge in my mind, coming from two *small* houses before that.

This was the home where we met a wonderful church family, and established wonderful lifelong friendships with some dear families. It is where I met with one of my dearest friends every few weeks and we would get together at someones' house after the children were in bed, and we would crochet and gab, sometimes cry and ALWAYS laugh the nights away. This is the home where the shelves that held my beautiful crystal wedding presents broke, dashing them all to pieces and leaving me with just three special things...none of them rainbow-throwing crystals. Since we lived so far from parents', we were able to establish our own family traditions and celebrate our own family holidays....at our own home! For this reason alone, I will forever love this place. Matt moved down there in order to take over the farm and buy it out from the farmer, which was never a part of the plan in the farmers' mind, turns out.... so Matt, with no love-loss and maybe just a bit of resentment, called this house (despite its' grandiose charm and the memories we built as a family) simply The Brick House. We packed up and moved when I was pregnant with Adele'.

Home #4 is this, our current dream home. Since our dream house was really just a shell when we moved, we had to live with Matt's parents for a month or so. So I was pregnant when we packed up the Brick House and very VERY pregnant when we finally unpacked it into the new house. I lifted things WAY too heavy for a woman great with child and remember feeling guilty the whole time. But. It had to be done.

This house is much more grandiose than the brick house ever was and has barns to boot. It has high ceilings and large rooms and everything I ever wanted in a home (except a mortgage.) This is the home where we finally started to live as we always wanted to live: with wood heat, with animals, with a huge garden and chickens. This is where we had Halloween parties in the woods, and circus parties and book parties and Christmas parties. It is where I began to teach myself about food storage and preparedness. It is where Matt taught himself how to butcher a cow himself. With his bare hands he tore the cow from limb to limb. It is where we began having somewhat regular dates (once every several months) since the grandparents lived close by for babysitting. This is the house where Adele' and Judah joined our family. We call this home The Mansion.

Home #5 is the one we are working hard for, the one that is pulling us and our attentions from the moment we wake up to the moment we collapse into bed, and then pervades our dreams. When we first began looking at it, I called it the Hobbit Hole. With its dark paneling for walls, short ceilings, lack of light fixtures and just general claustrophobic feel, that name seemed to suit it. But of course, it won't be long before I throw buckets of white paint in every direction to brighten up the place. So, no....it won't be called the Hobbit Hole. Instead, a much better, more fitting name we have decided on is....

Hopestead

Right now, the only homestead we have is built of hope and mortared with plans. The place we envision, the place we hope for is something we have to work to attain, something we ARE working for. So... Hopestead it is. And each time a piece of laminate flooring or wallpaper is peeled back, that hope grows.

We have been working tirelessly at Hopestead this past week. From dawn to dusk. we wake up, eat breakfast, I make lunch and snack and we go and are gone until dinner (and often later)

I feel homeless right now. Our Mansion is as of yet not packed (except books) and still feels like home but the only time we are here is to sleep. We spend every moment we can at Hopestead but it feels nothing at all like a home, only like work. We basically do our 'living' in the car between the two homes. And that is DEFINITELY the only time I sit down too. Pretty sad.

But! Not without its benefits. Here is some of what we have done:

You've seen this before:

Now it looks like this:

This is how the someday school room was looking last week:

Now it looks like this:

This is one of two medium sized bedrooms with lighting and small closets in the upstairs. The other two small rooms were part of the original house and have only a single (not grounded) outlet each to boast and barn boards for floors.

And here it is now~ so empty it echoes.

This is the BEFORE picture of the girls' room:

And, while it isn't DONE...here it is presently:

The hallway then:

And now:

The stairway then:

And now:

The master bedroom~the easiest of the upstairs rooms.

After I tackled it:

While I was tackling the rooms~ Matt was on the tractor taking load by load of stuff to the fire, tearing down shelves, building shelves, helping haul furniture, and completely cleaning out the granary. I never got a before picture of that-but it was amazing what he did all himself.

Once the last of the STUFF is gotten rid of, we can begin to squeeze as many cosmetic changes as we can muster into one week. Then, ready or not, it is time to move.

And finally..... a little something I find solace in:

IMAGINATION
by Edgar Albert Guest

The dreamer sees the finished thing
before the start is made;
She sees the roses pink and red
beyond the rusty spade,
And all that bleak and barren spot
which is so bare to see
Is but a place where very soon
the marigolds will be.

Imagination carries her
across the dusty years,
And what is dull and commonplace
in radiant charm appears.
The little home that she will build
where willows bend and bow
Is but the dreamer's paper sketch,
but she can see it now.

She sees the little winding walk
that slowly finds her door,
The chimney in its ivy dress,
the children on the floor;
The staircase where they'll race and romp,
the windows where will gleam
The light of peace and happiness -
the house that's still a dream.

You see the weeds and rubbish there,
and ugliness and grime,
But she can show you where there'll be
a swing in summertime.
And she can show you where there'll be
a fireplace rich with cheer,
Although you stand and shake your head
and think the dreamer queer.

Imagination! This it is
the dreamer has today;
She sees the beauty that shall be
when time has cleared the way.
She reads the blueprint of her years,
and she can plainly see
Beyond life's care and ugliness -
the joy that is to be.

Sore Shoulders

I am afraid you all may be sick to death of my blog posts before too long as currently my life is consumed with the ugly, dirty, cluttered and neglected. It stands to reason, then, that it is the ugly, dirty, cluttered and neglected that I record here. 'Tis this new season of my life. That said, I still want record these moments for posterity, for that one day in the distance where we can look back on all it took to make this place OURS. Frankly, I wouldn't come along for the ride if it weren't actually MY life, so I won't expect anyone else to. Unless you are gluttons for punishment. Or Insane.Either way, I fully expect you all to drop off like flies before the month is out.

We ( read: *I*) was very, very, very disappointed (and that doesn't even describe it) to find out the other day that the auction house that was supposed to take almost everything from Grams house instead took almost NOTHING. And so~while these two weeks were supposed to be spent ripping out wallpaper and carpeting and repainting...instead it is clear that the responsibility to clean out the house and rid it of its contents is resting squarely on MY shoulders.

Rooms that look like this, mind you:

(and yes, ALL the rooms are this way.)

*GROAN*

I am going in.....

If I am not back in a week~ call for help!

All in a Good Days Work

It is satisfying to roll up your sleeves, work hard and then see the end results.

As we await the auction people coming to clear out the house of all of Grams things, Matt and I figure we ought to start working where we CAN. So we began work on the outside of the property.

I dug up all my perennials, over 20 of them and was sore the rest of the day. The children barely fit in the car the next morning as we took them over to the new house to dig holes...AGAIN....for them to be planted.


I placed the flowers between the existing rose bush and lilacs, forming a huge circle that will one day have an entrance of climbing clematis. (The clematis I have, the thing on which the clematis climbs I do not. Yet.) In my head is a sort of floral retreat maybe housing a bench or picnic table in the center (but for now, picnic blankets will do just fine) surrounded by lavish flowers and intermingled with herbs.

The neighbor has been coming to mow the lawn and so I ribbon-ed it off so my transplants would stay safe~(while it is very generous of him to keep the yard cared for as the house stands empty, he has been known to mow down peonies).

Adele' was a real help and did all the ribboning off. Her chubby little two year old fingers in the ribbon spool and her careful walking backwards were too cute for words.


I still have to transplant my strawberry patch and find a lovely little out of the way place where my mint can stretch out its little arms and bask in the sunshine, where it can grow and grow to its little hearts content.

While I did this~ Matt worked on fixing a barn roof and clearing the stubble from those left-to-themselves, bachelors of barns.

The end result of two very busy days....

Before:

After:
It really was a shame to see it go, I loved that part of the barn~ it had character. But it just had to go...it was just waiting for the right opportunity to fall on innocent bystanders.

Before:


After:

~ Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. ~

~Thomas Edison

October Garden and Alterior motives

Thank you to all who left bright, shining bits of encouragement for me on our big news. It meant a lot to hear such positive comments; there was not a 'WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?!" in the bunch. But then again~ I haven't shown you the inside....

The truth is, the outside is the NICEST part of the deal (even though it isn't the least bit Victorian and lacks my much-coveted wrap around porch). It is the inside that gets me all squirmy. Frankly, I just don't know if I am brave enough to share the 'before' pictures with you, to expose her nakedness to the world? That might be cruel. AND it will undoubtedly illicit some of those comments I was just referring to.

But I digress.

(and the packing begins....)

In answer to the few questions I received about it: Yes, it is nearby...only 20 minutes away. No, it should not affect Matts work in any way or our church going or our extended families. In fact, it is very, very, VERY near to Matts family, giving us only about 5 minutes breathing room-er---commute. ;-)

And to the question how will I do it all?

Ummmm.....

I have no idea.

OR better yet, I WON'T.

These two pictures capture it rather well:

Lovely, homemade laundry soap. So clean, so bright, SO cheerful! (cue Evita, there is no SOAP, no soap like that!)

...and then of course, reality.

(and no, that is not all the laundry. Are you kidding me?! It is MONDAY, people!)

I already feel myself treading water, something that happens to me when I get so overwhelmed I slide down into this pit of mental exhaustion that then becomes physical exhaustion, though I haven't done a lick of work.

I have 2 bushels of pears to can up, beets to pickle and 65 pounds of grapes coming on Saturday. I have homeschooling to do (consistently but bare minimumly-if only that were a word). And that isn't even including the two weeks we have to repair and empty out the new house and the following two weeks of emptying the old house into the new house.

But it has to all get done, so it will. My prayer is that it gets done in a way that is PLEASING TO THE LORD. I don't want to turn into a bear and I am SURE my children don't want me to either.

The one consolation is that up until this point whenever we have moved (and we have moved many times) I have either been great with child or newly postpartum and have either been lugging furniture along with a tabletop belly or unpacking while nursing a suckling babe. Seeing how this is not my dilemma presently, this time it should be a piece of cake. Right?! Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Okay. This blog post is me, treading water.

How about a stroll through the blessedly dead October garden? Yes? yes. splash, splash.





~ I wanted to grow enough pumpkins to sell some along with our eggs on the side of the road. Since the flood however, and all the bridges being washed away~ we are left on a dead end road and no passersby. We will have plenty of pumpkins this year for ourselves!



~ Delicata squash. LOVE. Nothing better than Delicata roasted with seasalt and pepper. Of course, some of these were left entirely too long and are not quite so delicata anymore. ;-)


~ pears. I did not grow these. I do not have the luxury of owning my own pear tree. Or the partridge, for that matter. I ordered them. This years' price: $16.00 a bushel.

~ Since my last big harvest of tomatoes, I have thought we were out of luck with tomatoes. Late Blight, you know. But when I went down to harvest all the beets and winter squash, I discovered a few unscathed volunteer vines in a different part of the garden and voila! A season, extended! Makes for a lovely table centerpiece too.



~ Evie. She is my favorite of the three little kittens that we, for some reason that I can not fathom, still HAVE.

She is fearsome.

A bouquet or two left, for sanity's sake. They won't be for the table. They will be for my bedside. I always feel very much like a princess when I wake up to flowers by my bed.

And now...I need to go dry off and get to work.