Winter                                                        New (Settling In) Moon

With Kate letting her body adjust to altitude a mile high it’s just the four dogs and me. I woke up this morning to Kep, the Akita, and Gertie, the German Shorthair, playing outside my closed door. Hmmm. I shut them in Kate’s sewing-area to-be along with the big girls, Vega and Rigel.

Dogs test their containment and if it has flaws, they will find them. In this case the latch is semi-circle of metal that snugs into like shape depression. It allows the door to close, but open again with slight pressure from the kitchen side or a pull from the sewing area. Apparently repeated pushing against the door can pop it loose, too. So, some modification will be called for. Too early for me to figure it out.

After I pick up Kate at 9 this morning, I’m going to finish the shoveling and unload the cargo van. At this altitude and with my current level of acclimation it might take all day.

Managing the dogs makes this place feel homelike very quickly. These familiar, mundane chores are part of where we live. Doing them here offers clear feedback about where home is now.

Mike the Fence guy comes over for his final inspection and payment at 11:00. More integrating.

Samain                                                                          Moving Moon

Our last visit with Mary and Margaret, the Realtor team, before we move. Going through final matters, things we’ve set in motion after we leave, how we’ll communicate once we move. Margaret put a lock box on the front door, a visible sign, a ritual moment when the widdershins movements we have made around the property come to life. This house is now in transition, too, officially.

(Looking north from the far side of the garage, toward the back and the shed)

Got a text of seven pictures today, too, the fence. The fence, our first imprint on the new property, got finished this morning. When Tom and I make it to Black Mountain Drive, the dogs can bound out of the truck into their new home.

A first task in the new house will be to run the fence line with the little yellow wire of the invisible fence. This will double up the protective capacity of the fence, discouraging leaping over and, I hope, digging under. As to the digging,  I’m prepared to nail 2×4’s all around the perimeter, wooden fence post to wooden fence post, at the base of the fence line.

(Kate’s space is through the door to the left, the entrance to the first garage bay to the right.)

Samain                                                                         Closing Moon

Mike the Fence Guy (as he identifies himself on his card) has had his travails this week. While enroute to our property, his truck’s fuel pump failed. This meant he not only had to get the truck fixed; he had to shift all of our fencing supplies to another truck.

When he got to Black Mountain drive, his assistant did not show up and had left his phone turned off.

Too, he had asked me yesterday for the code to the garage door opener key pad. Hmmm, I thought. Didn’t get one. So, I called the realtor who called the second realtor who discovered that the key pad had never been activated.

Kate suggested I figure out how to set it up and perhaps Mike could set it himself. Would work except you have to be inside the garage, with the lift motor, to engage the switch that allows you to enter a new code. A good safety feature and one I was glad to discover, but not helpful to Mike.

He did solve the storage problem. There is a shed on the property which had combination locks but also exposed screws. He simply backed them out with a drill, opened the door and stored the concrete. Good deal for him. And for me. But it does mean that lock hasp will either have to be reinstalled or not used for locking the shed. There’s nothing in there except window screens anyhow.

(This is roughly the sort of fence Mike’s installing.)

When I talked to him this afternoon though, he said six holes were dug and posts set. The ground is only a little frozen in some places, mostly not. And, the temperatures will not plunge as they did last week.

Samain                                                                          Closing Moon

This day a month from now we’ll be getting ready to collect the dogs from Armstrong Kennels, Kate in the rented cargo van and me in the Rav4. I’ll pick up Vega, Rigel and Kepler while Kate will take Gertie. We’ll drive together to Shorewood where I’ll pick up my co-driver, Tom Crane. Then it will be good-bye to Minnesota.

That thank you for visiting Minnesota sign at the border with Iowa will have a different signification for Kate and me. We’ve lived in the Twin Cities a similar amount of time, Kate coming in 1968 and me in 1971. So, ok, it was a long visit.

Don’t know why I’m writing about this except that the sense of abbreviation to our time here has begun to increase. It has become palpable, as if the future is pressing back against the present, calling us forward. As I wrote a day or so ago, the closest analogy seems to be the anticipation of Christmas for young children. Not so much in the sense of eagerness, though there is that element, but in the way a particular future day and its events can dominate a present moment.

Now even the small world between my desk and my bookcase, punctuated at one end with the computer and at the other by the gas heater, feels impermanent. I can see it stripped down, bare, then gone. That’s new.

More moving business today. Buy a new stove for the kitchen since we’ve decided to take our Viking with us. Take hazardous waste to a dump site. Perhaps deploy the bagster to clear some space in the garage.