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.