Busy Hands Homestead

Tired is lodged between my shoulder blades.   I pick a shovel and one scoop   at a time close up the trench connecting the power from the shop to the shell of our house. Seven hours later I shower and drive Adam to the airport.  He is mostly out of town for two weeks and I have no option but to keep moving.  Every day starts and ends with an impossibly long to do list.    I am woken up Tuesday morning a semi load of insulation being dropped off at my curb.  After work an (unbelievably kind) neighbor and I lug each giant bag of rock wool into the house and pile some in every room - down stairs and up the stairs – until my arms no longer can hug the bags to my chest.   Wednesday night we do the same, but when I try to bear hug the first bag insulation to me I find I can’t carry a single one on my own.   As we round up the corner of the stairs the first time a flutter catches my eye.   An owl is trapped against ...

There is something that I love about being solidly in the winter months. Past is the anxiety about the coming cold, the lists of unfinished work, all the things we could have done but did not do. It is a new year full of dreams, and potential, and things yet to come. It is dark enough at 6:30 in the morning to see the earth's shadow cover the moon. Ivory glaces upward, takes in the moment, and crawls back into bed. Sylvan looks up and keeps looking. The cold creeps between bathrobes, and coats, and boots on bare feet as we stand looking at the sky. The early morning darkness gradually becomes lighter, the afternoons noticeably longer. Winter is an excuse to hunker down, to bend our heads close, sip warmth and gradually put the pieces together. Puddles form and ice sheets get smashed while waiting for the school bus. The surface of the road slowly appears and disappears on my walk to work. It snows, and it seems that ev...

Sylvan's blue and orange glove keeps slipping out of my knitted mitten. He and I wave to Ivory on the school bus, go down the street, and up and over the bridge. There is a skiff of snow on the ground, a hint of sunlight through the clouds, and the sound of birds chirping. Flocks of black birds morph across the sky, the morning light flashing off of their wing flaps, and for an instant they are foating glitter. Our hands slip and we switch sides. I can't remember what we talk about, but the kid walking next to me is happy and bubbly and is rattling on barely audible over the drone of trucks. It is hard to imagine that just half an hour earlier, he was screaming about breakfast and shoes and going to school in general. The snow and cold surprised me. I wasn't ready. Sylvan is bundled up in snow pants and bright orange sneakers. His sister's hand me down bogs I saved from last winter are still too big, and I haven...

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...

I haven't ventured outside or changed clothes since I got up Saturday morning. Yesterday I went through the annual ritual of cleaning and rearranging the house to accommodate all of the house plants moving back into our living space. By the time I looked at the clock is was 5:30 and I figure I might as well spend the rest of the day in pajamas. The whole point of these posts and participating in the #SNAPchallenge is to raise money for Double SNAP Dollars, which doubles the purchasing power of SNAP benefits spent on fresh fruits and vegetables.  So please, if you have the resources and value expanding access to fresh fruits and vegetables, take a moment to DONATE HERE!   My family has lots of practice cooking on a limited budget, because SNAP used to be our food budget.  These posts might make it seem too easy, but it wasn't.  I am calculating the Double SNAP Program into my daily expenditures, which helps a lot! I also have the benefit of being raised in a fa...

I gave myself permission to delay posting about day 2. Day 2 was the day of the Northside vs. Westside Softball Challenge with I helped organize. There are still a few banners in the car that need to delivered back to the game's sponsors, but other than that, it is over.  It is a fundraising event for the North-Missoula Community Development Corporation , and I still need to tally up the final expenditures and earnings, but overall it was a success. The Westside won 18 – 9. Back to the #SNAPcallenge and food related issues. Breakfast was oatmeal. Oatmeal is a perfect breakfast choice for my family of picky breakfast eaters because it is easily customizable. Adam and I eat it as a savory dish topped with onion, cheese, eggs and greens, while the children opt for brown sugar and cinnamon. Oatmeal (4 x .043 = $0.172) Cheese (0.16 x 2 = $0.32) Eggs (0.21x 3 = $0.75) Swiss Chard (CSA) Brown Sugar (4 tablespoons = $0.096) Coffee (cost of my coffee ...

So, we bought a school bus. I'm hoping its not the worst decision we have ever made. Adam has slowly, much too slowly been morphing it into, what hopefully will be a living space.   And I have been trying to pack up our house, sew a million curtains, and keep life normal.  We have successfully (what is success anymore??) been navigation the line somewhere between a mess and a disaster. Some days I drop both of the kids off at the bus stop, other days I drop off one at the bus stop while the other would rather hold my hand the whole way, since I walk past the school on my way to work anyway. We always arrive just at the front just as the buses pull up to the back. I spend more than I ever imagined staring at a computer screen, navigating an entirely new and foreign world of a federally funded affordable housing project. Damn, that shit is complicated. Late August, I received an email about participating in the Community Food and Agricu...

Strong, cold wind blows down the beach, the water is so cold my toes tingled and the kids still get soaked from head to toe, splashing in the space between solid land and sea. The kids shriek and run.  They gather up rocks, poke at pieces of jelly fish, and these moments alone would have been worth the drive.  The moments with friends and the most decadent camping food, in the history of camping, would have been worth the drive. But, the excuse for this trip, is a moment 1 minute and 55 seconds in length. Intellectually, I had been prepared for this moment. We had listened to podcasts, heard other people's stories, shushed the children on the eleven hour drive split between two days: "Shhh!!! Listen, to this story.  They are talking about what we are about to see." "Don't look at the sun without your glasses.  It's dangerous." The sun was bright, the temperature dropped, our shadows become duplicate, the spaces between the leaves turne...

For an entire week our mornings and evenings were filled with the chink, chink, chink of cherry pits. Two cherry pies, cherry danishes , and quart bags of pitted cherries are in the freezer.   Jars of apple cherry jam are on the shelf. Once a year we drive up to Finley Point to pick cherries in the summer sun and then jump into the clear  cold water of Flathead lake.   The silver fruit picking ladder gets warm  in the sun and is almost to hot  to touch against my skin as we move from one tree to the next. The sticky, sweet, dark red juice runs down my fingers as I fill the same basket over and over, carrying it up and down the ladder, and we fill the cardboard boxes we brought along. The kids pick cherries for a while, and then get distracted and sprawl on blankets, eating lunch and running through a sprinkler the owner’s of the orchard left on. Between my feet and the ground, between where I stand on the ladder and where the ...

“You know what's great about plants.” “I don't know. What?” “That they are plants!!!” Sylvan looks at me incredulously. “Don't you get it?” Ivory shrugs, and eats a raspberry. The sky is peach and glowing. We are sneaking a few raspberries at dusk. The kids are up, way to late, once again. The three of us walked down the street to water our garden plot. Adam is washing the dishes. The house is finally starting to cool down. These fifteen minutes of my day are the only ones that seem to echo the rhythm of past summers. I am trying to breathe – just breathe. The sky fades to dark. On the way home, I cradle a hand full of raspberries to share. Soon after, we fall into our beds, on top of sheets and blankets. I feel like I am treading water – cold icy water – that makes it hard to breathe. I could dip under any moment. My days and weeks are filled up. I run back and forth, back and forth, drop off ki...