Busy Hands Homestead

There is dirt under my finger nails is the same color as the weeks old bruise under the nail of my thumb.   I took last week off of work. Adam took off the week before Christmas, and the upstairs flooring is 99% done: the bedrooms have wide maple planks, the great room upstairs is oak parquet, and a friend laid most of the tiles in the upstairs bathroom. The stair landings are done.    Risers placed. Treads still need to be cut and installed. It was my goal to tackle a giant pile of reclaimed flooring and get it ready to install. To install our heat system, our floors need to be sanded and finished.   I wanted to install heat the first week of January.   Those days have come and gone, and while the pile of flooring is now half the size that it was when I started, it still stands between heat and appliances. I sort boards by tongue and groove size. I scrape layers of dirt that peel away like thick apple skins from tongues and grooves.  ...

The two of us are face down in a giant pile of leaves. I'm laughing, and it hurt. I raked the maple leaves in our yard into a giant pile thinking that the kids would be excited, or at the least, would want to jump into them just once. Instead they watched me for a few minutes, shrugged their shoulders, and asked to walk down the street to a friends house. I let them go, think that this is just what 6 and 9 feels like, and continue to rake the leaves waist high. I am slowly, grudgingly coming to terms with the delay of our house remodel (again). The many moving parts that need to come together to start the process of tearing down and rebuilding our house, didn't come together in time to move out and start before the cold set in. For weeks, probably months, I've been avoiding a house, that no longer feels welcoming to me. I avoid my garden, my kitchen, my living room (there is no where to sit anyway), barely see my family. I've move through sadness, ange...