Days 4 & 5: Weeds & Wine, and From Hole to Pole

Wednesday, April 27

Dear Maine,

Sorry I missed you yesterday. It turns out that drinking half a bottle of wine and writing letters to you is kind of an "either/or" proposition. 

I'm not sure what to make of your weather. We woke up to frost yesterday, which quickly melted, in most places, at least. 

Then, frost makes way for sunshine, literally without a single, solitary cloud in the sky. But then there's the wind, without which it would be so warm, but alas, the wind seems ever-present here. 

I spent another day helping Rose with the perennials. It's funny how we humans think we are in control. I spent my entire day yesterday in service to the plants. They need to have their winter straw cover pulled away so they can be rediscovered, weeded, and tucked back into their beds, this time nestled comfortably with the straw tucked all around instead of on top of them. 

Tonight we had our first farm potluck. Dennis, Beth and Jane hosted us, and Jane provided the entertainment. Rose and her husband Jerry came, along with their son and Dennis' brother, Joe. Nate describes Jerry as a "salty old Marine". Joe seems quiet, the way I envision Mainers to be. And I am just in awe of Rose. I believe she is in her mid- to upper seventies, and she can run circles around just about everybody here. She has a wonderful sense of humor, an enviable work ethic, and a gentle, kind spirit. She is beautiful, inside and out, with her stylish silver pixie cut and dangly earrings. I hope to be like her one day. Rose is the person I've worked most closely with since I got here, so I've had the opportunity to get to know her a bit more than everyone else, but everyone here is warm, welcoming and approachable. I think it's going to be a good summer. 

We also got to meet Lauren, a returning apprentice who is currently finishing her last semester of college. She plans to make farming a way of life. 

We had lots of fun and good food at the potluck. Beth and Dennis delivered good news: since Thursdays are normally half days and they had plans, and we've already knocked a bunch of things off the to-do list, we could have the whole day off! Woo-hoo! That makes for an even better night's sleep! 

Thursday, April 28 - From Hole to Pole!

Dear Maine,

We "slept in" till about 7:00, then did the chores, made breakfast, and got started on our day. We had two things in our to-do list today, and we got them done, and more!

First, we went to Home Depot for a 6x6x8 & 160 pounds of concrete. It was so windy! And cloudy! And cold! I mean, I know it's Maine, but is spring ever going to come? 

Next, we went to our tiny post office. It's open from 8:30-10:30 & from 1:45-3:45. How's that? 

Is everyone from Maine just super friendly and awesome? I have yet to meet someone rude, or pushy, or unpleasant. In fact, the other day at Tractor Supply, the lady in line ahead of us apologized for taking so long, which she really wasn't. And people drive the speed limit here, yield to you, and even wave you on when it's not your turn. I think Mainers are really cool. I like the way they roll. 

Anyway, Paul at the post office was no exception. He got us all squared away with our post office box, and shared a little bit about his other work as a prison chaplain as well. There was no rush, and it was an entirely pleasant experience. I can't remember the last time I said that about an interaction with a government agency (or quasi-government...whatever the post office is these days). 

So that was our first task. Check. Then we moved on to the next: the hole and the pole (or "post", more accurately, but that doesn't rhyme).  Our 6x6x8 was destined to hold the gate we are putting at the end of the driveway. So we started digging. 

We took turns, though Nate did by far most of the work. 

And we made ourselves a pretty good hole. Fully three feet deep! 

And with pretty good soil, too. Mostly sand and silt, with only a few rocks, and very little clay, which we encountered about 2 1/2 feet down. We set the post and filled it in with gravel, rocks and concrete. We did good work. That is one sturdy pole...er, um, post. 

We discovered some frog eggs/tadpoles, too. 

Our land has some pretty cool stuff! We took a little walk, and it looks like the beavers have been busy (I hear they're like that). Their lodge is still intact, and it looks like they've been pushing things around since we were last there in January. I don't remember all that fresh cut timber in front. 

And this is one of my favorite spots. I dub this "Mermaid Rock".

On our way out we stopped in to the town offices to update our address and get some information. It's hard to believe, but we also had a good experience there! TWO good interactions with government agencies in the same day. I can hardly believe it myself. We talked with Tori again, and we also met Colleen, or possibly Carline; it's hard to say given the strange things Mainers do with the letter "r".

On our way back to the farm, we did laundry at the Corinth Laundromat, which will be our new laundry facility, at least until we figure things out. $2.50 to wash in a top loader (Aside: Isn't that a little steep? Or have things really changed that much since I last did laundry at a laundromat ... in college... in 1997). 28 minute cycle, and boom! Done! (No dryer for us; we've got lots of clothesline here.) They had a radio playing country music, a puzzle in progress on the table and a shelf of books for borrowing. This is a place I'm not going to mind going once a week. 

On the drive back Nate informed me that we were going to Four Points Barbecue in Winterport for dinner. Apparently it's going out of business because the owners are divorcing, so we had to get there before it closes. I am SO glad we did. Look at this: 

 

I mean, just LOOK at it! And every bit of that was the best barbecue I've quite literally ever had. We still have half of it in our makeshift cooler-fridge. I'm already looking forward to lunch tomorrow. They're open till May 29, so I hope to get back there again. 

And since then, it's just been a relaxing evening. I can get used to those. I'm getting pretty good at building fires in the wood stove. I enjoy coming in and being cozy after a day of struggling to stay warm. It's an adjustment. But maybe spring will finally arrive one day. I'd be happy with 60!

One final treat: after showering (boy, does that feel good!) and before dinner, we were going to do chores, but Dennis and Jane beat us to it, so instead, I got all the critters to pose for some photos. 

These are the laying hens, a.k.a. the cluck clucks:

And these are the mini-clucks in their crafty little enclosure:

And finally, this is Pearl, the goat, with her Icelandic sheep, which are getting sheared soon:

Pearl makes me happy. She's so serene. Makes me feel super relaxed and very sleepy...

Day Three

Dear Maine, 

Apparently no one told you it's spring. It snowed today! 

It's nice not to need the alarm clock to wake up, and we are settling into a routine. We get up, make breakfast (today we filled our tiny cabin with smoke making bacon. Whoops.), and get ready to start our day with absolutely no rush at all. I love the commute - I step out the door, and I'm there. 

My day usually starts with a trip to the outhouse. It's about a 1 1/2 minute walk, so it's important not to wait till things become too...urgent. 

Stay tuned for an interior view. 

After breakfast come chores, which involve feeding and watering the mature hens (the cluck clucks), feeding, watering and moving the young chickens (the mini cluck clucks) to a new patch of grass, and watering the sheep and the goat, Pearl. Then we open the hoop houses and move on to whatever needs to be accomplished during the day. 

Today we took all the tiny lettuces, spinaches and scallions that were living in trays and transferred them to the field that will be their home for the next 4-5 weeks until they are harvested. I learned about spacing, planting and watering. 

That's Nate watering the row on the left. Afterward, we had to cover them, what with how it's still snowing. I learned how to make a trench with a wheel hoe (that's an ingenious little device!), and I learned a good technique for burying the edges of the row cover so the wind doesn't carry it off. There was still time before lunch, so we "fished" the garlic. You probably don't want to know, but that means putting this stinky organic fertilizer emulsion, which is made of fish parts (lots of nitrogen!), on them by mixing with water and applying via watering can. Let me tell you, that shit stinks, and it's pretty much impossible not to get it on you in some way or another. The only way I could get the smell of my hands was to touch a lot of raw onions! Yeesh!

Then it was time for lunch (Aaron, if you're reading, please skip this paragraph), and we headed back into town to the pizza place (The Winterport House of Pizza). The sandwich and burger we had there yesterday were pretty good, so we decided to check out their gluten free pizza today. It was also very tasty, and they've got some pretty rockin' chocolate chip cookies, too. See, we haven't settled into a routine yet in which we will make our meals ahead of time so we can get back to our normal, healthy way of eating (yes, Aaron, I am on track with my supplements!). It's going to be super awesome, because once things start to ripen, we can pretty much have our fill of farm fresh vegetables, and then it's going to be a whole new world! I can't wait!

It started snowing while we were at lunch, and the temperature dropped significantly. Apparently the high today was a whopping 40. So after lunch we got to do some work in the greenhouse, where it was a balmy 60 degrees. I loved this!!

First, I got to make mud (and who doesn't love making mud?). Then, I got to use this fun tool to make the mud into 2-inch blocks into which Nate set tiny seedlings that had been grown in tiny blocks of soil, maybe half an inch square. They're so tiny because greenhouse space is prime real estate, and not everything germinates, so it's just not efficient to start seeds in the larger blocks. Making the soil blocks and putting them in the trays was kind of like building a sand castle, and I'm super happy when I have my hands in soil, so it was like playtime for me. 

I could do that all day!

Then I planted 288 pepper seeds of four different varieties. (I know this because the tray has 12x24 slots.) I really like planting and transplanting things. 

We finished up, closed up the hoop houses, pet the goat, stared at the sheep, fed the cluck clucks and the mini cluck clucks, and collected these beauties: 

I do love these fresh, never refrigerated eggs that I collect with my own hands (a first for me). And yep, I sure did put them

all in one basket! They have the yellowest yolks, and they are so tasty!

We collected some more firewood from the woodshed, got the wood stove going, made dinner (I'm so glad we brought the grill with us) and some treats, and did some relaxing. 

It's other muscles that I forgot I had that are making their presence known today, but it's okay. After a little protesting, they settle in to their new activities, and it is as if they are merely waking up from a long nap. My body knows how to do these things; it has just forgotten after years of domesticity. Each day, as I get a little more dirt under my fingernails, I grow just a little more feral...and a little more free. 

Day Two

Dear Maine,

I'm not sure I'm going to have the energy to keep up with daily letters to you, even though I still have the enthusiasm. What I have right now is a sore body! I'm sure I will be fine, but a full day of using my body in ways I'm not used to is taking a very slight toll, but nothing a little arnica and Young Living Pan-away oil won't fix!

Believe it or not, this is the culprit: 

All that straw along the edges was covering these perennial flowers, and now it's not, and it didn't teleport there. To be fair, the majority of it had been done before I came along, but Rose and I did at least half of the larger field this  morning. The afternoon was spent combatting a bunch of ornamental onions that decided to infest the irises in the foreground in the second picture.  I think we got that second field pretty close to fully weeded, though. Nate did some stuff with some greenhouses and some power tools, and according to four-year-old Jane, he learned how to use a hoe. I'm told that tomorrow we will be transplanting some baby lettuces into one of the greenhouses. I'm just hoping there's no weeding involved!

As for our cabin, it looks like this:

It's a sweet setup! And I got a good panoramic of the interior:

I'm really most interested in the bed right now. And I'm starting to question my abilities. I'm soooo exhausted right now. Am I strong enough for this? Am I too old? Can I really do this? How are we going to have the energy to build on our days off when, after just one day of not-really-hard labor, we are both so incredibly beat? 

I imagine these questions are probably pretty normal. It's like, "Holy shit. What have I gotten myself into?"  I can tell you this, though: it's a good kind of exhausted, and I like the way I spent today more than the way I've spent most days at most jobs. I also know that this just feels right, and it's what I want. No one promised it would be easy, but I've been told many times that it'll be worth it. 

Anything worth having is worth working for. And this is a life worth having. 

Day One

Dear Maine,

So this is what it looks like to wake up to freedom. 

Sunshine streaming, birds chirping, total peace and calm. It's wonderful. I'm glad we practiced by not using the heat during our last few weeks in the house. It's 35 or so out, 50 or so in, but it's perfectly comfortable. It's hard to explain this feeling of absolute serenity. Or maybe it isn't, because it needn't be explained, only experienced. 

I can't wait to see what this day brings. 

...

We are unpacked and settled in. Rose, Beth, Dennis and Jane have made us feel incredibly welcome here. I will see if I can take a good panoramic photo of our cabin tomorrow when there's daylight. It's 12x15, and we (I) have filled it with way too much stuff, but it's cozy. The solar panel provides enough power to use a lamp and to charge our phones. We have a propane cook stove, gravity fed water to the sink (not hot!), a Gatorade cooler full of drinking water, and a wood stove, which we have running now. It's so cozy! There are dried herbs and flowers hanging from the rafters from past apprentices. I'm glad that the house we will be building is three times the size of this one, but for right now, it's perfect. It's seriously so warm and cozy, and I love all the wood. And last night, for the first night in a long, long time, I slept well. 

We made a little progress on our land today. We dropped off the compost we'd been making in our back yard in Johnson City since last summer. We aren't sure exactly where the final location for the compost pile will be. We need to figure out where to build first. We do, however, have a structure on the property now: 

Tada! It's a carport frame with a metal roof that Nate constructed last summer, and, of course, painted camouflage. We brought it up with us in January, and I'm glad we didn't set it up then. It was a little bit of a pain (a ladder would have helped), but overall not too bad, especially with our new (to us) Dewalt drill (thanks, LPJ3). We will probably get canvas for the sides, and we may build a platform to serve as a floor, just to keep things dry if we need to once we see how that area acts when it rains. We might put the tent under it for our weekend camping/building forays. (We plans to use our time off from the farm to build.) Ultimately it might become a woodshed. For right now, it's keeping our upended wheelbarrow safe from surveillance satellites. Just kidding. We just stuck it under there because, why not?

I love that it's 20:45 and I'm in bed. We start our farm work tomorrow with chores at 7:30. I can't wait!

Thank you for being super sunny today, Maine, although I'm looking forward to temperatures in the 60s and a little less wind (please). I hope this night's sleep is as good as last night's. 

Sweet dreams!

L'aventure commence

Dear Maine,

Today is the day! This is it! I can't wait to get back to you!!!

Ok, so maybe I haven't been the best correspondent...but it takes time and energy to work a couple jobs, to get a house sold and to downsize a three-bedroom house (with a full basement and garage) into a horse stall all at the same time. It's not easy to extricate oneself from all the trappings of a life made out of "shoulds" and "ought tos". But we did it, and now it's a whole new world. New priorities. New duties. New challenges. I still can't really wrap my head around it all, but I feel like I can share my thoughts and experiences with you more regularly now. After all, you and I are beginning a potentially lifelong adventure together. And even if it's not lifelong, it will be life-changing. 

I'm still pretty exhausted from the chaos of the last few days - ending both jobs on Wednesday, closing on the house on Thursday and taking just one day to tie up last minute things before leaving. We left around 10 this morning and arrived at Fisher Farm (See? You knew I would tell you eventually!) around 8 this evening. Willow gave me a meow serenade for the first hour and 45 minutes of the drive before finally accepting her fate. This sweet little cabin already feels like home. There are no sirens and no highway noise; just peepers. And the only light comes from the moon. As Annie once said, I think I'm gonna like it here.