tagged with: quest

Ever mixed clay, sand, and straw into a building material that might outlast a country? I hadn’t either.

Time to learn to build my house. I’ve never built anything more complex than my immunity, so this will be quite a course.

Next spring, I’m going to build a house from scratch. Today, I made a box. It was kind of hard, but I don’t plan to make any more boxes for awhile, so who cares?

One of my more charming fantasies is that I’m the first, last, and only person ever to question how the world is run.

What I used to skip as a ten-minute detour now loads in ten seconds. Great. Now I can try to read the whole Internet

It will take me awhile to get used to paying disaster-area prices for plants I recently yanked out of the dirt.

Last week, I was hauling mammoth logs from a chill stream and heaving them into rickety ‘cabin’ piles so they could sprout shiitake mushrooms. Now, I’m staring at a screen, sitting in a chair that, while comfy, can’t quite take the edge off eight hours.

I write this amid my last harried ten minute whirlwind of packing, but that is as well because months and months would be far too little time to find the right words to thank all those we leave.

If the future held only pavement and parking tickets, yes, my soul would be careening towards permanent raisinhood. But the immediate future holds a cozy, mouse-free home, my wife’s friendly family, a hot bath (perhaps several), months of serious writing, and my own computer. I am dreadfully excited.

Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Sam Walton—the same old story over and over again. The world can’t seem to get itself properly conquered.

So when we passed a lovely stone house for the three hundredth time and my wife finally said, “Let’s see if anyone’s home,” my first thought was, “But they’re strangers.”

Today I sang while I yanked carrots.

My wife and I both went to the Franciscsan University of Steubenville, and as alumni we are entitled to a lifetime subscription to Franciscan Way. What a bargain!

I am convinced that the earliest crafters of video games made hay.

We went to Rochester last weekend for a wedding (not ours), and I saw my stuff again.

There’s a lot to it; in short, you will have to read more than this blog if you want to garden.

The other day, a friend of the farmers here brought his kids over to visit, and one of the kids noticed the cloth that’s hung over the TV when it’s not in use.

For two or three days, my knife would bang around in my pocket, reminding me as I sat at my desk that if ever a hurricane struck, the roof blew off, and I had to slit out the cubicle cloth to make a lean-to, I’d be ready. (Whatever a lean-to is.)

You take a bird that can’t fly and can barely peck, and you decide its life is over. That’s it. You are master of life and death. Sounds straightforward to many of us, but in real life you catch the animal and stick a knife in its throat.

I didn’t know bears ran from cows. That would comfort me, if I couldn’t picture myself running with them. Cows are big. They have horns. But that’s another blog.

Did I ever mention that chickens are cannibals?

It’s impossible to convey the phenomenon of a three-foot pony wreaking havoc among a herd of six-foot mares. It is entrenched firmly in the category of “boring-in-a-movie-but-thrilling-in-real-life.”

Farmers seem to have an unusual fondness for dropping casual remarks that freeze the would-be apprentice from the tip of his scalp to the soles of his new steel-toe boots.

I just killed a few chicks. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to let them grow big and fat and then kill them. This is doubly true when the chicks belong to the kind soul who let you loose on his farm in the first place.

The others show every sign of hurling their sun-soaked selves back into the fields with renewed vigor (if no blog). My re-entry will be more of a gentle toss.

They merely say we should get out more, join a club…in essence, go buy some friends. Sure, if you’re stuck somewhere, you should make friends, but I think there’s more. I

“Cathedral” is a peculiarly apt name, for the giant trees are as pillars holding the windows that glow above the spacious silence and color the sun.

For I am neither the first nor the last of a long caravan skipping from the shriveled hearts of the cities into the open meadows of God.

Also, the glass around the flame gets hotter than glass ought to get without turning another color or beeping or something. It didn’t come with a Surgeon General’s Pithy Tip printed all down the side, so I found out the hard way. A couple times.

Half the people I meet hear me say “farm” and instantly translate “drudgery”. (The other half translate “sylvan paradise” and are precisely the folks whom the first group spend their lives trying to save from disappointment and fitness.)

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Then that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril then the envious Court?

A week ago today, I, my wife Beth, and our nine-month-old daughter Cariysa moved into a cabin in the woods on a mountain in rural Maryland. It’s a short walk from a small organic farm with crops, cows, pigs, horses, and a wonderful family that’s going to teach us as much as our heads can hold during this growing season.

We’re both still alive and kicking, generally each other. Nature, I’ve discovered, doesn’t dig in and root out all your bad habits. It merely provides less distractions from them than the average contemporary home.

I just washed my hands at a normal sink; in two weeks, I’ll fetch water from the spring.

The car slipped down, snow spurted into the windshield, and it was done. The right front tire was absolutely buried in snow. Unless our nifty snow tires developed four wheel drive and sprouted spikes, we were here for an extended visit.

This was not your usual rustic homesteader cabin. At least, it wasn’t as far as I could tell, based on my limited acquaintance with the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Just the thought of watching Black Beauty made me sleepy and bored. I’d read about fictional heroines drawing horse pictures and wishing for a pony and I’d feel out of place, like I was spying on some bizarre cult that was obsessed with orange juice.

As I mentioned in my last blog, only three months ago, my wife Beth and I are interested in farming. That interest is sharpening into something approaching concrete action as we visit various actual real-life farms and plan to do an internship in the spring.

All my life I’ve eaten. Okay. Where does food come from? No, really. Why is it that every day a new food turns out to be lethal?

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