• Category Archives The Move

  • Boards Darkened With Soil and Sand and Oil

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                             New (Summer) Moon

    Continued the deconstruction of the dog feeding stalls. Jon’s design was elegant and well executed. He put love into it for those dogs. That was in the time of the Irish Wolfhounds Morgana, Tira, Tully and for a brief while Scot (who died too young of hemangiosarcoma). It was also while the whippets Iris and Buck were still alive. (I think, my memory of the exact co-residence of our dogs is a bit fuzzy.)

    As I removed the bones of the stalls and the doors into them, I stood inside the wooden structures, each about two and a half feet wide. It was then that memories began to surf my mood. The wood inside these crates has darkened, oil and sand and soil rubbed off on them while an eager animal ate their breakfast or their supper. There were, too, tooth marks on some of them, probably a dog frustrated with waiting for food or to be released back into the yard.

    Their big furry heads would stick out of the sliding feeding doors, looking up with that quizzical where’s my food look that dogs have perfected through long years of living with humans. Those days the panting of the Wolfhounds filled the air with a sweet odor and the sound of them eating gladdened my heart. That time is long past, but the boards in the stalls look like stalls in barns, places where animals have been, pressing up against them and leaving the permanent record of their existence.


    Colorado Dogs Memories The Move

  • Water, Water, Not Everywhere A Drop To Drink

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                             New (Summer) Moon

    Some rain. Glad to see it. Our irrigation system gets started today, my attempt to do it proved futile. Irrigation smooths out the rain here in Minnesota, covers the droughty patches in midsummer. Thankfully we have our own well in an aquifer that gets recharged quickly by groundwater thanks to the sandy soil here on the Great Anoka Sand Plain.

    Water has a very different profile in Colorado and the western states. Learning water ways will require attention and persistence, one of the more difficult transitions. Out there it’s not only rainfall, but snowpack that determines water availability and the law that determines how it can be used.

    Now, back to deconstructing the dog feeding stall.


    Colorado Garden Our Land and Home The Move

  • Deconstruction

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                             Emergence Moon

    More sorting, moving, discarding. Kate cleans and organizes, I move things, applying what muscle I have to the work. Today I began dismantling the five-stall dog feeding station that we used when our pack was at its largest, ten years or so ago. The dogs would come out, go in their individual stalls, I would lock them in and then pour out their food into bowls. The stalls kept feeding dish aggression to a minimum. We haven’t used it for a long time, but when we had the most dogs we needed it.

    Jon built it and he did a careful, thorough job, as a Johnson (Kate’s side of his family) would. Since he used mostly screws, the taking apart is less destruction and more deconstruction. Very literary.

    We’re at it, pushing the tasks ahead at a reasonable pace, gaining momentum as we go, each task accomplished making the next one that much easier. And, our load is lighter. The stuff has thinned already and we haven’t even moved inside yet.

    We have our differences, mostly about the sequence in which things need to get done, but we negotiate those. These tasks are keeping me in the now. I’m present to and inhabiting the move.


    Colorado The Move Third Phase

  • Inhabiting the Move

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                        Emergence Moon

    Planning on an hour or so a day, maybe two some days. Today the garage. Clustering yet another batch of toxic chemicals for a run to the hazardous waste depot. Old motor oil, gasoline preservative, brake fluid, paint. I put in that pile the ambitious collection of items I got when I decided to tackle small engine repair.

    In my usual avidity I dove into it, buying manuals, tools and imagining the things I could fix: snowblower, lawn tractor, weed whacker, chainsaw. Why? I can’t recall now, but, like the irrigation system I reasoned, it can’t be that hard. Oh. Yes. It could. Wrenches and screwdrivers danced out of my hands. Things weren’t where they were supposed to be, or at least where I figured they should be. Turning screws, cranking off recalcitrant nuts, slipping belts off and on and connecting metal latches all had unanticipated problems for me. I’m sure they were the kind of thing a kid learns with a father or brother who enjoys these things, but I skipped that part of my education.

    Finally I admitted what could have been obvious to me in the beginning. This required more patience than I had and more skill than I was willing to learn. I felt a bit defeated, somewhat ashamed of myself as a man, not being able to get simple mechanical tasks done.

    This sequence of imagining myself into some new skill began with lock smith ads in the Popular Mechanics and True magazines I read as a child. Boy, if I knew how to pick locks, make keys, install safes, I’d have a real, useful craft. Over time this theme of having a real, useful craft would, oddly, lead me to attend seminary and learn how to be a minister. Ministry was not, however, equivalent to being a locksmith. It was both more and less complicated, more and less useful.


    Colorado The Move