Busy Hands Homestead

There are moments when anxiety squeezes my lungs, I blink to push away tears, and I focus on what is around me right now.  Life at this moment is scary with so many things unknown, but at the same time I deeply grateful to be where I am, at this moment, with my family, and hyper-aware of just how much privilege this moment holds. At the beginning of March 2019 we turned on the heat in our house that we had been working on for almost a year. After living in the bus for seven months, followed by house sitting and couch surfing for the coldest of the winter, we made the decision to move out of our 30 foot school bus and into our house.  We had no kitchen and unfinished bathrooms. It was rustic at best, but warm. We camped out in a construction mess and for months as we finished bathrooms, built cabinets, added doors. In March of 2020, I am hyper-aware that warm water and hand-washing is a luxury, that having space (or money) to store essentials and minimize grocery runs isn't u...

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...

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 ...

Sylvan stands on top of a rock on top of “a mountain” proudly announcing that this was the first mountain he had reached the top of while being six. This event  being categorized as his first summit as a six year old was true, but the definition of mountain was being applied liberally.  The landscape feature we are standing on top of is the same as the view out of our dining room window, or rather the view we used to have before all we could see are walls of shiny metal on the new townhouses, and that feature is aptly called Waterworks Hill.  “Let’s walk to the top of the Mountain”,  sounds so much more exciting, as does: “We made it to the top of the Mountain”.   He holds my hand the whole way up and then the whole way down as he plans our first whole family expedition to Mount Everest. “That is half way around the world in Nepal,” I tell him, “and cold, with ice fields, steep slopes and a lack of oxygen.  We need to train.” He contemplates all th...

My best guess is that we have covered upwards of 2595 miles.  We drove from Missoula, through Billings, across Wyoming, cut across a corner of Colorado and covered almost all of Kansas before we ended up at our destination:  Middle America.  We have been crisscrossing the cross timbers for the past three weeks. NO - we do not have a DVD player in the car. I remember childhood car trips fondly: stopping at rest areas, state parks, singing, playing the road kill alphabet game (A is for Armadillo Soup,  B is for Broiled Beaver, C is for Crispy Coyote...  etc.), stopping at old graveyards to make rubbings of cool head stones, tents, campfires, fireflies...  I want that for my kids. I want them to know that a road trip is just as much about the journey as the destination.  YES - I packed some books, markers, paper, a giant stack of CDs and a cooler full of food. We purchased a luggage carrier and gave the kids room for their legs.  ...

I turned the pages of every knitting book I own. I looked through half a dozen knitting books from the library. I scrolled through pages of free patterns on the internet. I wasted time. Ivory had picked out purple grey yarn weeks before at the store.  I was planning to knit her socks. "Mama can you knit me legwarmers?"  She asked one evening. Of course.  Legwarmers made perfect sense. They would span the distance between the ends of all those size four leggings that fit her waist but come nowhere close to her ankles. No pattern for legwarmers. No more wasting time. I just started knitting: guessing here and there and finally coming up with a pattern that features a scallop on the top edge, super stretchy ribbing on the leg and a super stretch (new to me) bind off. I didn't get them done for Christmas, but I did get them done for the first day back to school. Materials: 1 Skein Premier Yarns, Serenity Sock Weight, 50% Superwash Merino  wool, 25...

I am face down on the floor in child's pose, inches away from the furnace warm air blowing over my body, tears pooling on the floor. Adam took Ivory to the bus stop.   Sylvan is playing.  I am crying.   I have been crying and crying and crying.  I got the day wrong on which I was to deliver the salad to the staff lounge at Ivory's school and it was the last tiny little snow flake to land on a mountain of snow and set off an avalanche.  It is rushing down and nothing will stop the force of gravity until it reaches the valley floor.  I will be the first to admit this is one part hormones mixed in with a million other things:  The feeling of failure that has been building for months.  The feeling that I am okay at many things but not great at anything and not being able to figure out at which skill I am supposed to excel.  The years of sleepless nights.  My constant battle against the natural state of the universe -...

"Mama! Painted trees!" I glance back at Sylvan in my rear view mirror and then back out of the windshield to try and decipher what he is telling me.  The car smells of apples. "Painted Trees! He repeats his phrase until my eyes rest on a line of small red Norway maples that line the road leading into a yet undeveloped development. Oh.  Painted trees. Yes, they are beautiful. This is the first autumn that Sylvan is really taking in.  He wades through the dunes of yellow maple leaves to pick up they few red ones and hand them to me. "Painted Leaves." Ivory begs daily, reminds me constantly: "Mama you promised that we could make Halloween decorations."   "Today. Yesterday. Tomorrow.  Before dinner. After dinner. After School. Now!!!!!!!!" I know I promised. I sigh. I feel guilty. I say things like: "We have to make food for your dad first." or "It is too late." or "later." or simply "oh, Ivor...

Our house looks pretty much like it always has. A drab white exterior, peeling paint on the windows and trim. Over a year of home ownership has passed and we are the only ones that know that things are changing ever so slowly. It is a constant balance of doing those things that need to be done and doing projects that are temporary but increase the immediate functionality of our house . While Adam had in his possession a borrowed sawzall, which he was using to cut through the old steal sewer plumbing under the house, I casually suggested that this might be the perfect time to cut away the wall of our closet. The opening into our bedroom closet was less than twenty inches and those clothes that hung in a neat row in it's confines simply stayed hanging.  It was too much of a pain to retrieve anything. The ceiling panel was a mysterious few inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and I had long decided it all had to go. The wall went, the ceiling panel went, the old layer of f...