Ironically, the date of that post is the same day that the sale of our old house should be finalized. Amazing. When I think that just over a year ago we had planned to stay at the old place "forever" and now...here we are.
Some things have stayed the same: we can still walk to the bus stop, we still drive about the same (or slightly less) than we used to. We still knit, and bake, and make our own meals from food we grew ourselves.
Some things have changed. Most notably, I woke up this morning to find that the mother of all our beef meals this year (#6) gave birth to another calf, her 10th in a long career as a range cow. Dale stood in the barn with his binoculars to make sure the afterbirth came out ok and that the calf took its first suck "on the tit", as he says. The cow stood and mooed while the calf stumbled about, just barely two hours old.
It's raining today, and the calf and cow refuse to go in the loafing shed, despite Dale's best efforts to make it accommodating. He says "That cow would sooner fly to the moon then get into that shed". Sounds familiar...
I asked Dale if there was anything I could do to help. He says "Naw. Mostly when we try to help these things out, we just end up causing more trouble." Also sounds familiar.
So, we let her be, stood at a distance, and watched. She knows what to do.
I realize looking back on these posts, and those from S, that I haven't logged what has been going on this first fall and winter on the farm. I am sure I'll regret that later. But we received an offer on the house this week, a good one, and suddenly this block in my head, the piece of me that has been both here and there, just let go. And I realized that this last year has been very hard, and, in a way, I've been grieving for what we left behind. We put so much work into our first house in Utah. Painting and renovating the house until it was just the way we liked it, planting trees that had just started to really grow, harvesting our first few years of gardens, raising our first chickens. We did all of that, the two of us, all by ourselves. And it was a lot of work! To just let that go, no matter what we get in return, is just hard.
But now that it is going, we have our farm. Something both of us have always wanted. In the rain this morning, filling the troughs, watching the horses, seeing Dale's new addition to the herd, seeing all of the very hard work we've already got into this place (in real terms, lots more in one short year than we ever did in eight years at the old place) I realized something very important. I am never moving again. Everything we plant here, every improvement to the land, every time we amend the soil or fix a fence, we'll be doing it so that this place will be a better place in five years, ten years, and twenty years down the line. This is our farm and our home.
And I don't have it in me to leave all that hard work behind again.
So, here we are.
It rained today, in mid february. The temperature is in the 40's. The horses are outside with their blankets on, muddy and happy. The dogs are wet, filthy, and also happy. Because of the rain, I can wait another day to move the manure heap, and I am happy. And I'm finally home.
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