Day: May 5, 2013

It seems sometimes as if I have been building a new life from the minute I was given this one. The last 15 years have been about continues change, some growth, some learning and healing and risk-taking. I started on the mountain, moved the farm, moved again to our new home. We have been in this home for about seven months and this has been yet another period of relentless change, hard work, and many other adjustments. This farm is very different than Bedlam Farm, our lives are very different. We have become much more involved in our new community that we were before.

I am teaching a writing workshop, we are close to the Battenkill Bookstore, Maria is volunteering at food co-op, riding horses on trails, we are making new friends. I can hardly believe the amount of work Ben did on this house, and the amount of work we have done from removing the wallpaper to painting to building four gardens. This morning, for the first time either of us can remember, we slept till 9:30 and only visited the hardware store twice. This is not a complaint. Real farmers get up at 4 and work well into the night. There is so much to do, but the house is more and more feeling like ours. We are ordering wood for our two wood stoves, we will be stacking it all summer. We need hay for the late Fall and winter. We have not yet sold Bedlam Farm and need to take good care of it until someone buys it.

We are rotational grazing, as the Spring is very dry and we need to preserve our grass. We wanted to build a new life together – not my life on my farm but our life in our home. Bedlam Farm was my place, I bought it, fixed it up, furnished it before Maria came. This place is different, we have made every decision together. I think we are beginning to live our new life. In addition to caring for the sheep and donkeys and dogs (and cats and chickens) we have four gardens to water and weed. And books and e-books to write and quilts and potholders and scarves to sew, blogs to write and photos to take. It is a full life and a good life.

My creative life has changed, and so has Maria’s. She can speak for herself. My love for photography has deepened, the blog has become more important, I am plotting my first podcast  and I am working to sort out the new life of the writer, more diverse, complex and interactive. I believe I will get there.

While I did not imagine that Bedlam Farm would still be on the market, I did hope for us to pass the first great test of our marriage – could we do all of this work on the house, make all of these decisions, work side by side day after day without getting tired of each other, or worse. This has not happened. We listen to one another, we disagree on very little. If anything, this year of engagement and change has brought us even closer together.  We love making decisions together about the farm, although I can be quite annoying. Maria said I was very impatient to get the garden going, I wanted the flowers to bloom immediately. I want everything to be done immediately. I told my sister about this today, we talked on the phone.  We hadn’t talked in a few months, we had a lot to catch up on. You are lucky, she said, speaking of me and Maria. I am. We are. This past year has reminded me – no, taught me – what is important in life. All of my life in fear I feared the wrong things. I never feared living a loveless life.

All of my life, I wanted somebody to stand with me as I moved through life. Our new life together has shown me – I trust this completely now – that one should never give up on love or connection. It is always out there,  it is everywhere, it is the point, why we endure. Every day, we are discovering and revisiting things about this town that we love – plays at Hubbard Hall, the Round House, our new cafe, Battenkill Books, the hardware store, my Dahlia garden, the Food Co-Op and soon, a beautiful new path to walk, a summer watering hole by the Battenkill River, where I will sit in a lawn chair with Red, come up with excuses not to go into the cold water, and plow through books to review. Step by step, day by day, building a new life.

I want to write a poem about this world,

not the world you see on cable, or hear

about on Facebook, or see in Washington.

I want to write a poem about the other world,

you do not need a passport or visa, you have one,

you do not have to take your shoes off,

or empty your pockets, or leave your pen behind.

In the world, the spider makes some art every night,

it is not for sale, he has no agent,

she signs no contract,

she needs no marketing plan,

the donkey brays to the morning sun,

the dog stretches and wants nothing more

than to be near you,

the proud little pansy quivers in the wind,

the chickens find the shade of the Lilac,

the barn cats worship the sun, and follow it all day,

the magnolia buds are sweet, if you smell them,

this world lives in the song of angels, the distant calling of the birds,

the radiant smile of my love, the chorus of angels,

singing to you, if you listen for them,

and then this sweet, sweet, sound of silence, the finest wine.

This world comes to all of us, small sounds, flashes of color and light,

faint smells, if we are not to distracted and hurried and worried to hear it.

This world is my world.

Is it yours?

On the path, I fell behind, trying to take some photos of the deep woods. I didn’t have my wide angle lens, so that will have to wait, but I had this impulsion, this revelation as I looked ahead, I saw almost everything that I love, my life walking ahead of me. I had this stab of feeling – I thought having lived so long without love, would it be bearable to ever lose it, to have to live without it again? I don’t know. I always tell Maria she will have another chapter, at least one, after I am gone. That is my wish for her, that is what love is about. And she said, well what about you? What if I go first? Will you have another chapter? I don’t know, I said, I am older. I will try. And then I caught up with them.

Frieda is a hunter, she ran wild in the Adirondacks for some years and we rarely take her off leash, especially out in the woods. She can vanish in a flash, be gone for hours. She always makes her way back, always comes home, but as dog lovers know, it is an awful thing to have your dog running wild somewhere in the woods. And Frieda usually comes back with blood all over her teeth and jaws. Once in awhile, I do it, I have trained her to pose for me, and she loves doing it. So,  not surprisingly, does Red. I was happy with this portrait I took of the two of them. Album On Facebook.

We have found the most beautiful path in the woods. Our friend Jack Macmillian is a woodsman, the real thing, his family has owned land nearby for 200 years and he has created the most beautiful path in some of the loveliest and deepest woods. He has generously offered us this land for walking, and I believe it is the most beautiful path I have ever seen, including the path we loved at the original Bedlam Farm. We have been walking there every day on the well-tended path. The dogs have really taken to it and Lenore has found several ponds to her liking, when she is warm she just wades right in and lies down. Got to get a new hose attachment to hose her down when we get back.

This is life with a Lab, I wouldn’t have it any other way, although Lenore is especially fond of the muddiest, smelliest water available. I love these woods and I’ll put  up a photo album of the walk shortly.