Now my late nights have become just before dawns. It’s quiet here in the early morning. When I went out to pick up the Denver Post, the full Settling Moon II hung above Black Mountain to the west. When the full moon rises, the snow reflects its light, making deep shadows.
I’m feeling nearly ready to get back to work. With the TV now upstairs and Jon coming out on Sunday, I may have the workout area functional by Monday.
With the Andover house on the market, the last of the major tasks for this move is underway. I feel oddly detached from it, knowing that its sale is critical for our well-being here, yet almost not caring. I’m more interested in getting the treadmill reassembled and plugged in, finding my snowshoes, returning to Caesar’s Gaul and my sessions with Greg.
Caring for that land, dreaming about it, was a joy and a blessing, a time of quite literal giving back. We left that property better than we found it, especially from a fecundity point of view. In a strange sense that makes it easier to part with. I have no regrets about what we did there, only positive feelings.
Now that same energy has shifted, focused on a montane eco-system in an arid regime with a greatly shortened growing season. All I know now is that I want to xeriscape, create an optimally fire mitigated property and grow a few vegetables. Each of these tasks requires knowledge I don’t have, yet draw on skills I do have.
When the house sells, a balloon of care will lift in our thin air, rising quickly above Shadow Mountain, then Black Mountain, then Mt. Evans, a somewhat close 14’er. But it will see me already at work here, considering the land and loading Perseus, hunting for Latin words.
The half settling moon is in the sky. We’re not half done, but the reading room, living room and the two bathrooms resemble their future counterparts. The kitchen though remains mostly with king cardboard, as does Kate’s sewing room, my loft, the garage, the dining room, the home office, the grandkids room and the guest room. We’re both excited about our progress, steady and considerable, especially given altitude acclimatization.
The body, our bodies, the dog’s bodies, are miracles. Here we are living where the available oxygen is, at first, inadequate for our needs. After several days with lack of adequate oxygen though, these mammal bodies say, huh. We need to do something here. We need to produce more red blood cells so we can take in more oxygen with each breath.
And so it is that we’re not quite as winded as we were this last week, our sleep is not quite as disturbed. Both of us can feel our bodies changing, adapting to this semi-alien environment. Amazing. All part of the adventure.
Last nocturne in Minnesota. We’re at the Best Western. The house is empty, the cargo van full. We pick up the dogs in the morning, then Kate heads south and I head into the western burbs to pick up co-driver, Tom Crane. After that Minnesota will swiftly pass away behind us, certainly not for the last time, but for the last time as residents.
Over the years we have experienced the death of many dogs. It’s odd, but the body of the dead dog holds no sentimental attachment for me. Of course, I’m grieving the loss of a friend, but the body no longer hold that friend. I feel the same way about our house. Empty of our presence, the life-giving force that made it home, it is of no interest to me, a lifeless building.
The grounds though, where our hands have shaped garden beds, sheds, a fire pit, an orchard, a vegetable garden, for that I have a continuing connection, one not lost by moving away from it. It will always be partly ours, partly an expression of our stewardship and care. That feels good. We left that property better than we found it, the only gift ownership really has to bestow.
I have never and still don’t feel any personal connection to Andover or this larger area we’ve inhabited. I’ll not miss it at all when we leave it behind tomorrow. Minnesota, much different. In Minnesota I became an adult. In Colorado I will become a third phase adult. And I’m looking forward to it.
Have to go to sleep now. A long day and night ahead of me.
Took my weather station apart today and cleaned it up. There’s another Davis weather station not very far from our new house and it posts on Weatherunderground as Black Mtn/Shadow Mtn. Once I get mine setup I’m going to go back to posting my weather, too. I moved the display panel away from my broadband hookup into a room where I only use wi-fi here and could no longer post.
The study is done for now. So is the garden study. It was the one with all the files. Tomorrow I’m going to head into the closet under the stairs and the built-in cabinets down here in the basement. That will represent the last of the packing until December 15th or so, moving week. Then, all the computer stuff, all the monitors, this tower, keyboards, mice, cables, power surge strips. Into boxes. Another box for desk supplies, Latin books, remaining stuff.
Next week I plan to go through all of the manuals we have and organize them. I’m also going to work on information about the house itself (where the gfi’s are, filters, that sort of thing) and put together a handbook for the various gardens and the orchard. The new folks will do whatever they want of course, that’s how transfer of property rights work, but I want them to know how and why we did what we did.
There will be a bit in there, too, about cohabitation with the pileated woodpeckers, great horned owl, the moles and the voles and the mice. Those land beavers and whistle pigs. The occasional snapping turtle, small green frogs, salamanders, newts and garter snakes. The odd opossum and raccoon, of course, as well. Chipmunks, squirrels, turkeys and deer. Crows and nuthatches. Chickadees. Hummingbirds. The whole blooming buzzing menagerie.
46 degrees. I’m going outside to take down the silt fence we used to keep the dogs out of the fire pit and the area near the house where they dug in the garden. Amazing warmth. But if I understand it right this will be the sort of winter that will be normal in Colorado only without the extreme cold for contrast. (though they did have some a week and a half ago)
Having work to do outside, though it became something of a burden in the last few years, does get me out of the house. I’m hoping in Colorado I use the lack of house related outdoor work to focus on hiking, foraging for wild food, getting familiar with mountains. That’s what I want to do.
Next weekend I will deploy a bagster, a large heavy duty tarplike container that can be filled with construction waste, throwaway junk from the house. In it will go the silt fence, the extra siding that Rigel tore up getting at the bunnies, old bird feeders, a certain amount of excess bee woodenware and anything else we don’t want to move to Colorado, but can’t give away or sell.
Key’s is a breakfast joint on University. There are several around the cities. The original is on Raymond Avenue also just off University, but all the way into St. Paul where St. Paul abuts Minneapolis near KSTP. In my working days many plots were hatched over breakfast at the Raymond Avenue Keys.
Now Kate and I have our business meetings there, focused these days on our impending move. A month from today the packers come to finish up the work of getting ready to load. They’ll do the kitchen, the garage and anything else not already boxed.
The list of things to do, once long and overwhelming, has shrunk. There are still plenty of tasks, but they no longer seem overwhelming.
Over dinner Wednesday Tom asked what’s the most daunting thing now in the move. It is, without question, selling this house. Until that’s done our reserve cash is stuck here in Andover, illiquid. We’re relying on Margaret to get the job done.
A primary text in my rethinking, reimagining my faith is Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute. It’s not the content of the book-though it has useful material about new ways of agriculture-but the gerund phrase it has as its title.
Becoming native. What an idea. The very notion of native is that you can’t be native unless you’re born to it. So what can this mean, becoming native? In my understanding it’s about a process, a careful listening and seeing. Casey Reams, a soil scientist, was notable for saying, “See what you’re looking at.” So often we don’t.
We will never be native to a place where we were not born, but we might enter a state of grace with the land, a “becoming native” state, an ongoing increased intimacy and sense of co-creation. When Kate and I landed here in Andover 20 years ago, I was far from what I understood then as my native turf, the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But, as I wrote here a few days ago, I’ve actually spent most of my life in small and medium sized towns of the midwest, 47 of 67 years. So, I became native, or entered into a state of becoming native to the city.
Becoming native is not achievable from the couch or from books or from yearning. It begins when, as the New Testament says of Jesus’ disciples, you shake the dust off your sandals and finally leave the other place behind. Whatever it is. Becoming native begins when you commit, often unconsciously, to the new place.
After 19 years in Indiana, where I was raised; I lived in Wisconsin for a year, Appleton, and never felt like I landed. By the time 20 years of residency in Minneapolis/St. Paul came and went, its streets were my streets, its future my future. Becoming native happened gradually and unconsciously.
Here in Andover, where I initially felt out of place (a cliche I use deliberately here), becoming native followed a somewhat more conscious path. We decided to put landscaping work into the mortgage and added terrain features such as boulder walls, a tiered perennial garden and several plantings of trees and perennial flowers and shrubs. Initially, the gardening work was bulbs and annuals, almost exclusively in the tiered bulbs above our brick patio.
There were though, several black locust trees in a grove about 40 feet off our back deck. That area, sort of a backyard, had weeds and these trees. Black locust is a dense wood and one often used for fence posts in the 19th and early 20th century. They also have thick, wicked thorns. It was the work of a couple of years, with chain-saw and step-son, before those trees were gone and the stumps had been ground away.
After the bulbs and the annuals, the felling of the black locust grove, attended by sweat and days of heavy labor, including sessions with a rented industrial quality wood-chipper, began to reel me into this place. The soil and manual labor, outdoors work, gave me an intimacy with the grounds I’d never had anyplace else.
Add in the dogs of those years, the planting of this garden and that, the eventual creation of the raised beds, the orchard, the fire-pit and we began to become one with the land here. The bees provided a collegial work force from the insect world.
The house hosted birthday parties, holiday meals, meetings with the Woolly Mammoths, the Sierra Club and parties for Paul Wellstone’s first campaign. Over time this land became home.
Then, becoming native to this place could truly begin. I would mark the moment of crossing the threshold late one fall night, perhaps in November when I heard a scratching outside the study window. Turning off the light in the room I moved closer to the window and looked out at a bird feeder then set up nearby. There, scratching among the fallen seeds was an adult opossum. This was the first opossum I had ever seen live outside of a zoo. He came back several nights, then disappeared, perhaps eaten, perhaps gone into hibernation.
In thinking about the possibility of hibernation I began to see this property in a new way. According to the Minnesota Extension Service and the DNR, there were likely thousands of animals: chipmunks, voles, opossums among them hibernating here in our woods. An image, a vision really, of our land with many, many lives lying below ground or in tree hollows came to me.
It was that vision that awoke me to the fact that we shared this property with so many others. It was not our property anymore than it was theirs. We were cohabitants. And not only with animals. The jack-in-pulpit, the columbine, the wild grape and wild cucumber, virginia creeper, the lilies and the iris, the tulips and the daffodils, the garlic and the asparagus, they all rested here over the winter waiting springs touch to come out into the sun.
An anthropocentric notion of ownership, amplified by deeds and by the very process we go through now, selling this property, creates an illusion of our habitation here as the only significant one. Many people would, without much thought, identify humans as the only inhabitant of the land. And it is not so.
Here there are whistle pigs, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, the occasional wandering muskrat and rat, salamanders great and small, newts, garter snakes, toads and frogs, snapping turtles at certain seasons, pileated woodpeckers, great horned owls, crows and geese. There are millions, probably billions, of microscopic flora and fauna that keep our soil vital and nourishing for the larger plants that live within it.
This is a hectare of land, 2.5 acres. It has oak, ash, poplar, ironwood, elm, cedar, buckthorn (grrr), snowberry, river birch, maple, pine and spruce. There are many native and many domesticated plants and six domesticated animals, four dogs and two humans.
Once this umwelt settled into my conscious and unconscious awareness I knew I was becoming native to this place. I will never be as native to it as the generations of rabbits that have lived and died here. Nor will I be as native as any of the other animals or the native flora. Perhaps I have become as native here as the daffodils in our gardens and the lilies, both flowers that thrive on this land just as Kate and I have.
And now we are selling. What does that mean? Really? A certain sum of money, often transferred from one mortgage bank to another, changes hands. Legal documents get signed. Keys handed over. On some day we see our goods loaded onto a truck, we get in our Rav4 and pull out of the driveway never to return. But our cohabitants will remain, snugged into their tree cavity, their underground burrow, their nests beneath the shed. The major natural character of this place will remain largely intact. Sales are about humans, mostly, unless new “owners” abuse their trust.
We will, I think, go through a process of denativizing in which we gradually let go of the sensibilities shaped by these woods, these plants, these animals, these cohabitants. Even if we visit someday, just to see how the old place is getting on, we will return not as natives but as travelers, historical tourists.
We will, I hope, be becoming native to a new place, one with hard rock and high peaks, faraway vistas and remarkable spring snows. But it will not be easy. We will have to earn our place there, just as we have here. Frankly, it’s the part of this journey that most excites me. Yes, the grandchildren. Of course. Yes, Jon and Jen and Barb. Of course. But as to my life and its daily turn, becoming native to the Rocky Mountains is the big joy ahead of me.
And the sound of chain saws was heard on the land. The landscaping work has begun. A bobcat, pulled by a truck filled with mulch sits just ahead of a white pick-up with an enclosed trailer. The dogs announce, over and over again, that there are strangers here. Strangers here. Strangers here.
The steady rate of work toward Colorado goes on. We’ve been at this now since late April. It can feel like we’ve always been moving. Always will be moving. But an end exists and it’s much closer now than it was when we first decided to give the whole process two years. As we grabbed hold of this project, various aspects of it have conspired to make moving early next year the best plan.
Though not eager to leave Minnesota, we are eager to start establishing a new life in the mountains. We’ve lived here over well over 40 years, both of us, and our Western life will take time to flourish, just as this one did.
We will have the grandkids, Jon and Jen, and Barb (Tennessee grandma) to help us ease in. Kate says there’s a top 10 quilt shop (in the U.S.) within 40 miles of Idaho Springs so that will give her a place to make new friends. The Sierra Club and other environmental advocacy groups are strong in Colorado, as are certain brands of progressive politics, so I’ll have some places to meet new people, too.
But none of this until after the landscaping is done.
Now all but the leeks and egg plants and peppers are done. The egg plants and peppers are trying to get one egg plant (in the case of the egg plant) and a few peppers (in the instance of the peppers) finished before the killing frost. They might make it, maybe not. The leeks I decided to leave in until the day of the chicken leek pie baking, probably Thursday.
Anne and Kate worked hard all day, trimming up the perennial beds and finally weeding the vegetable beds. I can throw down the broadcast tomorrow.
In the mid-40’s all day the weather was perfect. My gardens would look wonderful if vegetables grew well in the 40’s and 50’s. Working outside in those temperatures energizes me. Even though I’m tired now, I feel good about the day. If I’d worked the same length of time in even the mid-70’s with high humidity, I’d not gotten half as much done. I’m a northern guy.
Kate and I look forward to telling our new Colorado neighbors that we came to the Rockies for the milder winters.
