• Category Archives The Move

  • Cutting Back

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

    Dug out a yew that created a beautiful blue-green pattern against our east facing boulder wall. 15 years ago. Since then, cruel winter sun bounced back from the yard as the sun rose 5002011 08 14_1015burned it, then burned it again and again. The blue-green became conifer death bronze mixed with blue-green. Might sound interesting on paper, but it’s not.

    The yew will not be the only long term planting here to get excised or significantly reshaped this year. Like not getting a haircut on the day of the job interview, preparing our front landscape is better done now, so some of it can grow out, look natural. We want to land that job. Yes we do.

    Continues to feel strange while I work in the garden beds, among the orchard’s trees and shrubs knowing that perhaps by this time next year, I will no longer be responsible for them. Wendell Berry had been my lodestar, taking over a family farm, staying on it, learning it, working it for the future, not the present only. Now it’s clear that I am what I really always was, a temporary custodian.

    We have done right by the land here. Soil amendments with organic matter like manure, compost, top soil mixed with the natural Great Anoka Sand Plain to create healthy, productive perennial beds, vegetable beds and orchard. We planted for the long term 5002012 05 01_4097when we bought the house in 1994, using a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and laying in river birch, amur maple, a bur oak, spruce and Norwegian pine. We put in several boulder walls and created a three-tiered perennial garden with a brick patio in its midst, just off glass doors leading into a bedroom sized space I used as a study for a long time.

    Over the next couple of years we amended the soil even more than Otten Brothers had done in all the flower beds. Jon and I cut down the black locust trees that dotted the area occupied now by the orchard and the vegetable garden. We chipped the trees and used them for mulch. Jon built raised beds and they’re still in use. The orchard came later, but began to bear fruit three years ago and had an excellent year last year.

    With the exception of the sheds and the fire pit we’ve largely left the woods alone, letting 7002011 09 04_1250them be habitat for wild critters and a place for our dogs to roam.

    We raised bees here as Artemis Honey. Our pantry downstairs has honey from our hives, canned vegetables from many years in clear jars. There is there, too, a wooden tray system for onions, garlic, apples and pears. It’s empty because those pantry residents go first as we eat through the year’s crops. Some of it is frozen, greens for example, ground cherry and raspberry pies, chicken-leek pies. We just had a chicken-leek pie yesterday for lunch.

    This will be the third year of the International Ag Labs program aimed at growing optimal crops of healthy food while improving the soil rather than depleting it. We also have permaculture touches like plant guilds, an herb spiral, a suntrap, flowers planted among beets chard 7 6 12R600the vegetables.

    All this might be overwhelming to a potential buyer, but I have plant lists, soil tests, names of suppliers and assistants. We will also have photographs of our property throughout the year since this kind of work goes on all during the growing season, typically from late March through the middle of October.

    It is my hope that whoever buys this property will love the land and its potential. They won’t do just what we did, but horticulture is a flexible art, open to the values and desires of many sorts of people.

     


    The Move Third Phase

  • I Love A Parade

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

    The Parade of Realtors is two thirds finished. The one today offered a much better number than our first one, while at the same time being more professional and believable. That’s a winning combination for me. She’s a friend of Kate’s and mother to a long time friend of Jon’s. We have one more Realtor to meet, then we’ll choose and begin to do what they think we need to do to sell our house next spring at the best possible price.

    Of course, between here and there is a path lined with a lot of cardboard and sweat equity, not to mention real estate perusal in Colorado. Next Monday we meet with our financial planner and will discuss with him how much if any capital it might make sense to withdraw to support our purchase. That and a number we anticipate from the sale of this house will define the parameters of our search.

    Since making the decision a little over a month ago, we’ve made concrete step after concrete step, each one headed west toward the Rockies. And each one makes a bit more excited. Living in the move, instead of Minnesota or Colorado, has let me go with the process as it flows, allowing my daily actions to flow with it, rather than struggling against difficulties. So far that seems to be working fine.


    Colorado The Move

  • A Morning

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

    Mulching a hosta bed, a bed of grasses, some newly planted begonias and a few perennials. The cooler air, 63 degrees, made the task pleasurable.

    When finished, to the Latin. Ay, carumba! Just as I patted myself on the back for having made strides almost long enough to work on my own, five verses came up that were almost as opaque as if they had been written on black paper. That was Friday. Today I hoped a layoff might have filtered them into easier chunks. It does sometimes happen that way for me. Nope.

    At that point I found some empty boxes and began filling them with books. I got a good ways along, filling up three boxes, hard cover fiction, paperpback fiction and a box I’ve started for Margaret Levin. She likes fantasy and science fiction.

    In both the Latin and the packing I did encounter an obstacle and it’s one I encounter when the dogs dig under fences and dig up garden beds. A sort of weariness comes over me, a sense that I’ve done this work before and now I have to do it again. And then again. And then again. This feeling saps me of resolve and short circuits decision making so that translation and choosing books to discard become seemingly impossible tasks. This is not, I imagine, peculiar to me, but when it hits, it slows whatever I’m doing down. A lot.

    It will pass and the tasks will become easier and more tractable.


    Garden Latin The Move

  • End Times

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

    It must be a little like dying. When I touch something here and imagine the last time, the last time planting seeds in that raised bed, the last time coming down these stairs, the last time leaving our driveway, a hint of sadness gathers around my fingers. Not yet, I say. Not yet.

    It is not the same now. And will never be again. Not here. Last month I touched these things and imagined my stewardship of them, how today influenced not only tomorrow, but next year and ten years. Not now. Now I wonder how new hands will care for this soil, the carpet on the stairs.

    How will the house feel when it is not our feet that walk its floors? Will it miss our pressure and gait, after all that’s all it’s ever known? Inanimate objects, you might say, are inanimate, but I wonder.

    Right now Kate’s playing music on the parlor grand piano. The sound feels lonely, as if it wonders why it has to go. Why can’t it stay with these hands, feel the music played as she plays it? Perhaps it will be sad to go. Or, perhaps it will end up in the hands of a rock and roll, jazz and blues sort who will tickle it in ways it’s never known. Could be. And, it might like it.


    Colorado The Move

  • 400%

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                 Summer Moon

    New state, new realities. I’m reading the Denver Post online now and there was a story in today’s edition: THE FIRE LINE: WILDFIRE IN COLORADO. The 27 minute video is worth watching, especially if you contemplate purchasing a home in Colorado. Even if you’re not, you might find its underlying argument, made by fire researchers and fire fighters and natural resource professionals alike, intriguing. The oldest of them, John Maclean, draws an analogy between flood plains and fire habitat. If people move into a flood plain and experience a catastrophe, is it the Federal Governments responsibility to take care of them? Well, he goes on, fire habitat is the same.

    From 2000 to 2010 100,000 people moved into red zone areas. What are they? Areas with a high likelihood of unmanageable fire. Just like a floodplain. Here’s the big question: how much money and how many firefighters should we risk saving structures willingly built within high likelihood fire habitat? Not much, according to the tone of this video. And it makes sense to me.

    It’s an interesting case in the politics of the West where local control and individual choice are part of the political culture. It means state legislatures and even county boards hesitate to control developers and home buyers as they create neighborhoods, beautiful, yes, but also dangerous. Without getting engaged (yet) in these struggles it seems to me that it’s a false libertarianism which champions local control and individual choice on one end of a decision making chain, but then looks for the Federal Government and local firefighters to compensate for the risks on the other end.

    Out of all the climate change material I’ve read and learned over the last year one of the standout predictions is that fire incidence will increase by 400% in the West. That’s 400%. I look forward to working with the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club on issues like this one.

     


    Colorado Great Work Sierra Club The Move Weather +Climate

  • Underway

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                Summer Moon

    Meeting another move manager company rep today, SortTossPack. With the momentum gained from the garage effort, I can now see how to get through this work. The overwhelmed and torn between two places feeling came when the whole was abstract, pressing down all at once. Now that we have a plan for going through the house: upstairs June-July, downstairs August-September, and we have completed one segment we are in process, rather than OMG what’s next?

    We’ve still got many, many moving parts to this whole process however. Staging the home may turn out to be one of the more difficult ones with three dogs and the need to get some landscaping work done in the back. We have to fill Vega-Rigel holes and reseed grass where the dogs have caused it to go bare. Plus we’ll have to corral the dogs during showings. Which may not be easy. It might be that we’ll have to board them during open houses and important showings. But, that’s all next year.

    We have a realtor coming on June 9. We’ll get some idea of what our house and land might be worth. We have the meetings I’ve mentioned here before with our financial consultants, Ruth and R.J. this month, too. Kate will head out to Colorado in late June or early July to meet with a Colorado realtor and literally begin to get a lay of the land.

    In addition to all this reality show material I’ve been considering what sort of Stetson and cowboy boots I should buy.  My books on the West and Colorado have to get concentrated into one place. It will take a couple of years of reading to get my intellect settled into a new area. Trips of exploration and plenty of historical and geological and horticultural reading, too.


    Colorado The Move

  • Surprises

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                              New (Summer) Moon

    Marketing my manuscripts has always come hard.  I read today about a poet, Patricia 500P1030645Lockwood, whose husband sent out her work in what he called a blitz. The New Yorker published submission number 240 after Poetry had published submission number 179. I’m still in the low 20’s in my submissions. Of course, novels are not poems and blitzing poems is easier than novels, but the energy level required is, I imagine, the same.

    Marketing our house, however, seems like it will be easier. I hope. When I think of our house from an outsider’s perspective, I think of it as full of pleasant surprises. They start when the cristata and the star crocus bloom and proceed through the daffodils, the tulips, the iris, the lilies, the clematis, the monkshood, the bug bane and liguria. Early, too, is the magnolia, a white pillar of fire for a week or two. In their own time the fruit trees blossom, the lilacs and the peonies. Later on the 500P1030693daylilies will come in. If vegetables are planted, they provide interest over the growing season, too.

    Then we have the firepit area and the magical shed for grandchildren, two tool sheds and a contained 1.5 acres with woods, a wonderland for dogs and kids. Downstairs we have a steambath, upstairs a grill in the counter. We have a professional Viking stove and a fully insulated garage with gas already plumbed in for a heater.

    Within the last five years we’ve replaced the air conditioner, furnace and well pressure tank. Within the last eight we renovated the living room and kitchen, installing new flooring, counters and removing a wall between the kitchen and the living area. We’ve also 500P1030676installed new lighting fixtures. In the same time frame we put on a new roof and new siding.

    (photograph in our woods this week)

    But here’s the clincher surprise, if it were me. Yep, we have a morel patch in our woods. We just had a steak and morel meal on Sunday. Finding them was a highlight of the first year we lived here.

    Oh, did I mention that our land was a hemp farm during WWII? Look up hemp if you don’t understand why that’s interesting. We’re no Colorado on this point. Yet.


    Colorado Our Land and Home The Move

  • Deconstruction

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                            New (Emergence) Moon

    Deconstructing a life. The circus tent metaphor with its stakes, ropes and main canvas 1000P1030696describes the physical and emotional act of moving well. But it doesn’t speak much to the time before moving. As I worked on the dog stalls, taking them apart screw by screw and with pry bar and small sledge when necessary, another metaphor came to me. Deconstruction.

    To move permanently to a new place hundreds (or thousands) of miles from the old one requires several acts of deconstruction much like the dog stalls in our third garage bay. The obvious physical ones require utilities to be stopped, a home to be vacated and perhaps sold, a neighborhood left behind, friendships must be changed to accommodate a new situation, memories stored on city streets, in restaurants and parks must be given up or purposely recalled through writing or story or photograph.

    What’s really going is that the life carefully built, or, perhaps not so carefully, now has to 1000P1030719be dismantled, packed up and moved. At least all that is movable. To go back to the dog crates, the wood no longer has their shape. It has already lost the memory of what it once was. But I have photographs and Kate and I have many stories about the dogs who fed there and the young man who built them.

    There will be no more Minnesota life when we finally follow the moving van west. Its pieces and parts will stacked up and stored. The integral experience of living in a place will have shifted locations, this time to Colorado.

    This transition will be much more intentional than my flight from Indiana. That time Judy and I packed our stuff in a trailer,1000P1030725 pulled away from Connersville and never looked back. That was annihilation rather than deconstruction.

    Several years of analysis, a good marriage and a circle of excellent friends has convinced me that leave taking, deconstruction in this case, is important for all parties. We plan to do it as well as possible.

    (man with tool)


    Colorado The Move

  • Old Dogs

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                   New (Summer) Moon

    With the work in the garage I’ve tipped myself a bit more toward out door work, a struggle I get into at this time of year anyhow. My best working hours are in the morning, so I tend to use them for the work that seems most pressing. When the fallow season has dominance, coming down stairs to my computer and my books draws me. Once the growing season begins, and even more so with the International Ag Labs program which finds me up and spraying well before 8 am, I find a tug and pull begins to happen.

    Life always comes first for me and when the plants need my attention, they get it. That allows avoidance patterns, like the ones around submitting my work, for instance, to flourish. Time to spray the plants. Time to thin the vegetables, plant new bulbs, amend the soil. That sort of thing. In fact, I have plenty of time in my day to get all this work done.

    Over the last couple of years I’ve developed better patterns (old dogs can learn…), so I don’t expect this growing season to be quite so disruptive. As I’m writing this, another voice tickles me, in the move and just after it will be a good time to develop new habits. Yes, an advantage of leaving an old milieux.


    Colorado Dogs The Move

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                        New (Summer) Moon

    We’ve located a realtor and have a second move manager, SortTossPack, coming out next Monday to show us their services. The goal this month is to get the garage done. In June we’ll do the financial consultations to see what our overall budget will be for the move. We’ll also move on to one room in the house and finish the sheds. Meanwhile, the garden.

    Tackling the garage has kept me in the here and now. Nothing like a drill, sledge hammer and crowbar to focus the mind. I can see the benefit in working with tools. They demand your attention.

     

     


    Colorado The Move Format Aside