Spring means manual labor

Hi! 

     Have a seat.  Want some ice water?  I know, you probably think I’m crazy.  With a large part of the country under winter storm advisories, what am I talking about “spring”?  Actually, we have about one more week (at the time I sit writing this) of winter.  Celestially speaking, that is.  Our Gregorian calendar tells seasonal lies.  Summer doesn’t start on the solstice any more than spring starts at the equinox.  We are rapidly approaching the quickening.  I don’t think we’re going to get a garden in this year, though.  And while last year we had raspberries, my husband burned down the canes.  I asked him not to, but he said he didn’t like where they were. 

I can’t argue about that.  They were in an odd place.  The previous owners had put a little bit of plastic netting like stuff around a small rectangle in the yard, stuck some trellis in the ground, and planted the raspberries right there in the middle of the yard.  There wasn’t enough room to mow around the little fenced in area, because it was too close to the pasture fence and too close to the railroad ties that sort of separate the driveway from the side yard.  Not very well thought out.  And the wood that was marking the bed boundaries inside the little fence was rotten.  The gate was rotting, rusty nails poking out all over the place.  It needed to come down. 

     But I still wish he hadn’t burned my raspberries.  Little Bell loved them last spring/early summer.  He called them “rose berries” and would ask me to go picking almost every day.  We didn’t get many berries, maybe a handful each afternoon, sometimes less sometimes more.  But we didn’t wind up wasting any either.  Little Bell ate every last one. 

     I didn’t get any pictures of it before it came down, but there was an adorable little A-frame greenhouse on the north side of our house.  It sat inside a better fenced off area.  The greenhouse was an older structure put up by the previous-previous owners, also Bells.  We still get their mail.  Anyway, I wanted to use the greenhouse, eventually, and since it had raised beds right next to it, I thought it might be a great spot to start our first little garden.  I have been doing diagrams and planning out companion planting strategies all dang winter.

     When we first moved in, the place was really overgrown.  I have pictures of the jungle that those raised beds had become, but I can’t seem to find them now that I want them.  I decided it would be best to wait for winter and everything to die back some before I tried to weed them out and clean them up.  Trying to keep the jungle from creeping back in during prime growing time was just impossible to keep up with while unpacking, organizing, and trying to get settled in. 

     So here lately spring has been snuffling around the door.  We’ve had some sunny days that are pleasantly warm with a cool breeze now and again to keep things nice and refreshing.  Perfect time to go see to that greenhouse and those beds!  So I tromp out there, shovel in hand, gloves on, ready to go.  I go in the greenhouse first to tackle some weird vines that have taken over in there.  As I am  hacking away at these crazy thick vines that have just thrived in there all winter, I notice that some of the beams of the frame don’t seem to meet up with the ground.  As I yank some of the vines free, huge chunks of the vertical supports just crumble away to dust, eaten clean through.  Termites.  Alas.  The plastic was also so brittle it was breaking off in bits and pieces whenever I bonked my head on it.  It was a little bitty A-frame, after all.  So it had to come down.  I was sad, but it’s a great level spot just under a pecan tree, and as luck would have it, it’s the perfect size for a swing set.  The location is also great, because there are two large windows that face that direction, so we can keep an eye on Little Bell without having to necessarily be out there hovering.  Win, sort of.  Silver lining?  Yeah, I’ll go with that. 

     So then I have to tackle those raised beds.  Maybe they could become sandy spots under the swings, or a proper sand box.  With these daydreams in my head, I start yanking out the dead vegetation only to see sharp edges of cut tin.  What the ever loving....?  I am actually really lucky I hadn’t sliced my leg on one of the corners while I was tromping through there this past summer looking at plants.  The stakes that had been used for corner braces had rotted away to nothing, leaving Vs of sharp metal edges just sort of lolling out into the hint of a path between.  The folks who lived here right before us apparently had visions in their heads about those cute raised bed gardens folks make out of galvanized water tubs.  I love them, too, but their solution was to use sheets of roofing tin buried in the ground with untreated garden stakes to hold the corners together.  I am sure when it was first done it looked great, country cute and all that. 

  

     In the picture, you can see the bit of metal visible through the overgrowth versus the actual width of the entire buried strip I’ve dug out. 

     There is less than a foot of space between each bed, and the longest of the beds was only scant inches away from the edge of the spot where the greenhouse was, which was done right proper with concrete pavers and buried hardware cloth to keep stuff from digging in.   So trying to dig these strips of metal out is proving to be challenging.  Standing up in the bed alongside, carefully trying to step on the shovel and sink it down to dig out the metal, while trying to avoid running my leg down either the sheet of metal in front of me or behind me is slow work. 

     Little Bell likes to come out with his big dump truck and a sandbox shovel and “help” by getting me to fill his dump truck with my shovels full of dirt and rocks so he can dump it somewhere.  We still haven’t decided where we’re going to try to put our raised beds.  Maybe I’ll put them over on the north side of the house, still, but just over the fence from where the swing set will be.  Then Little Bell can play on his swings and slide while I’m out there puttering around, and we can both keep an eye on each other.  The only other good spot would be on the south side of the house out in the side yard.  We’ll figure it out. 

     In the meantime, I guess I better get back to digging.  These things aren’t going to haul themselves out or the ground.  Exercise, right?  I have been saying I needed to do more of that.  See y’all later! 

         

Getting it together - DIYs

Hello again! 

     Welcome back to the farm.  Part of the fun of moving is getting to try to make your new space nice.  Part of the fun of having a place of your own is getting to do it any which way you want to.  I actually really love the paint colors in our place.  I told my husband that it’s like a chicken egg pallet.  He’s started calling me the crazy chicken lady, because I cluck at him every now and then and ask him where my chicken coop is, since he has deemed the barn uninhabitable and unsalvageable, other than maybe 1/3 of the wood and some of the metal.  I know, I know, quit pouting.  

     Anyway, I was going to tell you about some of the crafts I’ve been doing to make our little house more “ours.”  I had decided that I wanted to use some kind of gauzy white something-or-other for some pretty overlapping curtains in our dining area.  But at the same time, I really hate working with sheer material, because it slides so dang bad I wind up with some really crooked hems.  Then there’s the fraying.  And I know, you can overcast the edges to fix the fraying, but every time I’ve tried to overcast edges, I wind up with a big snarl of thread and one really ticked off sewing machine. 

     So then I thought about cheese cloth.  Have you ever tried to find large yardage of cheesecloth?  I did find some on bolts, but it’s still just one yard wide, so I would have had to sew it together in strips to get panels wide enough for the window.  And it wasn’t nearly as cheap as I was hoping.  So I gave up on curtains for a little bit longer and decided to go through another box.  It’s a good thing, too.  I stumbled across an IKEA Ofelia bedspread I had bought on sale a few years back thinking to make a skirt out of it, but it just always made me look like the marshmallow man, no matter how I draped it, so I stuffed it in a bin of fabric and figured it might be useful later. 

     Please excuse Little Bell’s second breakfast. 

     Since there are knobs or filials on the wall instead of a rod, all I had to do was cut the bedspread in half.  The fabric is basically cheesecloth gathered gently at fairly regular intervals.  That meant I didn’t even have to cut or sew holes to hang it, just poked a ribbon through the loose weave of the cloth and tied it to the knobs.  I think it worked out perfectly.  I’m not quite done.  I want to change the narrow ribbon tie-backs for some burlap, but otherwise, I really like the way it turned out. 

     Next, I needed to be able to protect my pretty table.  We sealed it with a matte -- or do they call that satin? -- poly coat, which looks just wonderful, but doesn’t clean up as easy as a glossy smooth finish does.  Live and learn, right?  So I needed some place mats.  I knew what I wanted.  I’d seen them online.  Cute burlap mats with manners on the bottom edge, right justified, in this old-time typewriter font.  I loved it!  But I wasn’t going to spend $50 for the dang things.

     I had some muslin cloths that I had used for flat-fold diapers when Little Bell was really little.  That didn’t work out too well for us, because no matter what type of cover and extra liner, padding, and filler I tried, bought, sewed, or contrived, the dang things leaked and bad.  So we switched to disposables, because I just couldn’t have my baby waking up screaming in a puddle of pee every half hour to an hour.  Anyway, so these muslin flats were stuffed in a kitchen drawer and used for light clean up instead of always grabbing for the paper towels.  Most of them are still unstained.  How that happened beats me. 

     I printed out the manners I wanted in the font and size I needed.  I used the “show ruler” tool for Word so I didn’t have to guess.  I cut out my burlap, then cut out my muslin just a bit smaller. 

     Using my lightbox (also known as a south-facing sliding glass door) I printed out the manners and traced them with sharpie onto my muslin rectangles.

     Then I sewed the muslin to the burlap.  It looks great, but it isn’t water set.  So I can’t wash them.  Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? 

     I had read online (so it’s got to be true) that you could make sharpie colorfast by heat treating it, using salt, and a variety of other things.  It’s crap, because a few of my place mats have spots where the black has bled, particularly where sweat from glasses has dribbled.  Fortunately, it was a really easy project, and one I liked the results of well enough to try again.  I think next time, I’m going to splurge for some washable fabric pain pens.  At least I can reuse the burlap, and the muslin didn’t cost anything extra, since I already had it.  And the bits I take off the place mats will still be just fine for cleaning rags, which is all they were before they were turned into place mats.

     Our latest decorating project -- okay, I say “our”.  I really mean Pa’s, because he did all the work.  All I did was supply indignant inspiration.  I went to Hobby Lobby for the burlap for the place mats, and while I was there, I saw all kinds of things that I just *needed* to hang here and there in our house.  There were cute signs for the bath, the kitchen, the laundry, the kid’s room, our room.  Then I’d look at the price tag.  For a piece of half inch plywood painted cute, they might want 40 bucks, or more! 

     

I also found this cutie and took him home.  *giggle*

     So I took pictures of things I wanted.  The cuteness will come to my walls, provided that once I have the time and resources I still want them hanging on my walls, but the cuteness will NOT cost that darned much, I can promise you that.

 

     For example, I found this coat rack/key hook thing made with what looked like 1/4 inch thick strips of trim around the tiniest chicken wire I’d ever seen.  Every single one of the ones on the shelf were broken in some way, because they were that dang flimsy.  It is hard to tell in the pictures, but it’s not very big.  I don’t think it was even a foot and a half wide at its widest.  Sticker shock slapped me in the face when I saw they wanted $60 for the thing.  But gosh, it was cute.  So I took a picture, trotted home and said, in my best Veruca Salt impression, “Daddy, I want it.”

     This was made with scraps of crap that my husband scrounged out of the scrap/trash pile next to his shop.  The thing is sturdy enough that our three-year-old could probably swing off of it, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it held.  I’m still debating whether or not to paint it.  The more I look at it, the more it grows on me as it is. 

     If you read our Christmas post, you’ve seen that Bells sign before.  Pa’s dad made it, and it used to hang on a gate post type thing over their driveway.  We weren’t really sure what to do with it, because we don’t have a gatepost to hang it off of.  Our mailbox has to be mounted on a particular type of break-away post do to ordinances so nowhere to hang it there, and we don’t have a front porch door or entryway to hang it on, so Pa put it on here, and it just fits, I think.

     Baby steps of progress are being made, and each little one makes our house more ours and more home.  There is so much that needs doing, and some of it isn’t going to be cheap.  It’s kind of overwhelming, honestly.  But these small projects that we can complete in between give us a sense of progress and accomplishment, and that keeps us motivated. 

Gingerbread Cookies and Icing

Gingerbread Cookies & Icing

For Cookies:

·        2/3 c Butter - you can use shortening, if you prefer.

·        1/2 c Sugar

·        1/2 c Molasses or 1/3 c firmly packed brown sugar

·        1 Egg

·        3 c Flour - spooned and leveled, not scooped and leveled

·        1 tsp Baking Soda

·        1 tsp Cinnamon

·        1 tsp Ginger

·        1 tsp Cloves

·        1/2 tsp Nutmeg

·        1/2 tsp Salt

**Before you start, the dough has to chill a couple hours before you roll it and cut it, if you want to use cookie cutters and have it keep a good shape when it bakes. 

Cream butter and sugar, then add molasses and egg and mix well.  If you’re subbing brown sugar for molasses, just cream it with the butter. 

Sift the dry ingredients together, or if you’re lazy like me, just sort of whisk it around with a fork really well, so it’s all mixed together good, then add that gradually to the sugary goo. 

**This next bit can be skipped, if you just want to do drop cookies**

Divide this into sections.  Some folks say half, but I think half is too large, unless you’re fast or have no distractions.  I have found that dividing the dough in half it still warms up too much and sticks to my cookie cutters, the pastry mat, me... So I divide mine into quarters, roll it in balls, wrap it with plastic wrap, and chill for 2 hours. 

Once the dough has chilled and you’re getting ready to roll it out, preheat your oven to 350.  Roll out to about 1/8th of an inch thick.  Eyeballing isn’t my strong suit, but my woodworking husband told me that a lot of measuring tools are 1/8th of an inch thick standard so carpenters and woodworkers can know how much to alter their plans for cuts.  Pretty cool!  So I borrow his plastic square and lay it next to my dough as a guide for thickness.  Not that it really makes a huge difference one way or the other if they’re a little thicker or a little thinner.  They’ll still taste good, just might be a bit softer or crunchier depending on whether you went thicker or thinner. 

Anyways, back on track. 

Ok, so you roll it out, cut it with your cookie cutters, or if you skipped the chilling part, just do your drop cookies, whatever floats your boat.  You can grease or flour your cookie cutters, if you feel the need.  If the dough is still cold, I didn’t have problems with sticking.  Once it warmed up, it didn’t seem anything helped, so I leave that to your best judgement.

Bake on a greased cookie sheet for 9-11 minutes, just till the edges firm.

The cookies have to cool completely before you ice them, if you want the icing to be neat.  If you like warm melty icing on warm soft cookies, trust me, I won’t judge. 

If you want to let the icing harden, just leave them out on the cookie sheet, don’t cover them.  Once the icing has set, you can put them in zippy bags, a cookie tin, or whatever, and they keep for quite a long time.  I think Little Bell ate the last one almost two weeks after I baked them, and they were still pretty soft, just starting to get a little more crumbly.

For Icing:

·       
1 & 1/2 c Powdered Sugar

·        1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

·        1 tsp Corn Syrup

·        2 - 2 & 1/2  Tbs Warm Water

Whisk this all together until it ribbons.  Ribboning is when you can drizzle some on top, and it sits there for a bit, keeping its form a few seconds before it sinks back into the rest.  I wish I had taken a picture, but taking one-handed pictures with a cell phone is also not my strong suit.  One of these days I intend to get a real camera.

You may need more sugar or more water, depending on your humidity at the time.  Just add one or the other in 1 Tbs increments until you get it thick or thin as you want it.

If you are going for a neatly decorated cookie, this icing takes about 24 hours to set up and become hard, again, depending on your humidity.  You *can* pipe it with a piping bag.  If you manage it without squishing it all over yourself, drizzling it all over the counter, and generally making a big ole mess, my hat is off to you.  I made a mess.  A big mess.  It oozed out of the top of my piping bag, all over my hands, and dripped down all over the counter, the floor, the cookie sheet... Next time, I am going to use some squeezy bottles, and I am glad our dog answers to "dammit."

If you want to color the icing, I’d use the powdered coloring you can get for cake decorating, because that won’t thin it out.  The liquid food coloring works just fine, but the added liquid will thin your icing, and you may have to add more sugar, which will lighten the color, so it's kind of a vicious cycle.  

It looks like a lot, but they’re actually really easy.  This is the first cut-out cookie I’ve ever had any luck with.  I usually wind up with misshapen blobs that only slightly resemble whatever the heck they were supposed to be when I cut them out.  The flavor is intensely ginger-spicy.  I may have to tinker with them to get them a little more to get the flavor just right for us.  Pa didn't much care for them.  Little Bell *loved* them.  I was on the fence, but was happy they turned out.  

Time for me to get back to work.  I'll see y'all next time!

Our Christmas

Time rushed right on past this first year. 

     Once we got home from our visit with family, Christmas rushed up on us like the Polar Express.  That’s Little Bell’s new favorite thing in the all the world:  trains, particularly the Polar Express.  His uncle gave him some GeoTrax that his kids had outgrown.  Some... Some is a big fat lie.  That man gave Little Bell a box 2 foot by 2 foot by 4 foot slam full of track pieces, train cars, engines, remote controls, stations, buildings, and associated paraphernalia.  I don’t know who has more fun with them, Little Bell or Pa Bell. 

      They get in there in Little Bell’s room and play with the tracks for hours, assembling, disassembling, and running the trains round the circuits they’ve made.  Little Bell yells, “CHOO-CHOOOOOOO!!!  Daddy fik it the tracks, Mama!” 

     A couple weeks before Christmas, right after Little Bell’s birthday, Santa came for a brief visit, and he brought a few books and a letter.  I’m sure it’s hard to read in the picture, but it says:

“Dear Little Bell,

     I know you have been trying very hard to be a good boy, and I know waiting for Christmas gets very hard when it’s so close.  So I am bringing you these books to help pass the time.  I know, if you ask nicely, Mama or Daddy would love to read them to you.  But these are special books, only for the Christmas season.  Leave them out for me on Christmas Eve, and I’ll take them back to the North Pole with me when I bring your presents.  I’ll bring them back every year and maybe even add a few new ones, too!” 

     The post script says, “Some of the books and toys I bring have been loved by other children before.  If you want to share some of your love this Christmas, leave what you would like to share in a box under the tree on Christmas Eve.  I’ll pass it along as I make my rounds, and you can help make someone else’s Christmas brighter.”

     

     If any of you have ever had a toddler (and I know some of you have), you know they get a hold of a particular book or movie or whatever, and they get fixated on it.  You have to read it over and over and over and over, or watch it over and over and over and over.  It’s enough to drive a saint nuts.  So this way, he has to give back the Christmas books.  Also, I love the idea of opening up a bundle of books each year to read up to Christmas, but how do you do that without reusing old books each year?  There’s no way folks buy new Christmas books every year to give their kids, right?  And it seems kind of weird to take books off the shelf in the kid’s room and stick them under the tree on some random night in December.  Where’s the magic?  It’s Christmas, after all.  So this is my solution.  Also, I am hoping to encourage Little Bell to voluntarily donate his old things that he no longer plays with each year, and while watching Polar Express, and hearing the Conductor talk about the “rebicycling” I got the idea to incorporate that into our Christmas traditions.  We’ll see how it works.

     His other most favorite gift was a tool set from Gramma Terri and Grampa John.  I don’t have a whole lot of pictures, because the tools are mostly out in the shop where Pa Bell and Little Bell work on things together.  Usually while they do that, I’m taking advantage and getting stuff done in the kitchen or cleaning, organizing pictures, knitting, maybe even writing a blog post.

   

It was a quiet Christmas, and I think those are the best kind.  We made gingerbread cookies to leave for Santa. 

(I’ll share the recipe in the next post.)

      Little Bell loved the Christmas tree.  He would ask us to light it every night around dinner time.  “Turn on the Christmas tree, Mama Daddy?”  Once it was on, he would stay near it until bedtime, gently touching the branches, exclaiming about the lights, or rearranging the ornaments. 

     I think Pa did a great job setting up the tree, and Little Bell helped decorate.  He did a great job, too.  He has his own Polar Express ornament that he would move to various locations on the tree as the month progressed toward Christmas.

     Christmas morning, he woke us up at 4:00 a.m. but seemed rather underwhelmed that Santa had come in the night and brought presents to put under the tree and goodies to stick in the stockings.  I supposed the excitement for Christmas will grow as he gets a bit older.  But it was fun, and he spent the entire day playing with each of his new things in turn.  Not all of his new toys have actually survived to the New Year, sadly.  His “delivery truck,” in actuality a long-haul 18-wheeler, was played plumb to death.  It hauled dirt, rocks, toys, the dog’s bone, and all manner of other things before it was decommissioned.  It just couldn’t handle the rough-and-tumble demands of a three-year-old boy. 

     There is something to be said for a big family Christmas, and I caught myself missing certain people this holiday season.  It’s a bit lonely out here sometimes with just the three of us, but there was also a distinct absence of the present guilt, the stress of trying to see absolutely everybody, and the anxiety that goes along with having to play nice with folks you generally avoid for the other 364 days of the year.  You know y’all all have one or two of those in your families, too.  Everybody does.  And you make nice for a little while just so the holiday is peaceful, and then, as soon as you can, you get away to sanctuary. 

     The thing is, that isn’t a peaceful holiday to me.  I don’t like having to feel like I’m walking on eggshells.  It puts knots in my belly and goes counter to the loud-mouthed, say-what-I-mean type of person that I am.  By the end of the holidays, I need a holiday from the holiday so I don’t feel like I need medication to maintain an even keel. 

     This was a peaceful holiday, though.  We didn’t have to go anywhere, do anything, play nice with folks we don’t even like, or feel guilty about the presents we couldn’t afford to get.  We just enjoyed each other, our home, and the joy our little boy found in a few new toys and a couple of cookies.  I hope your holidays were as wonderful as ours!

 

The journey so far

     So... what happened?  When we closed on our farm, April Fool’s Day 2015, I just knew I was going to be blogging about all our adventures getting the place set up, settled, situated, and such.  Where did all my good intentions go?  We still don’t have Internet set up.  It seems like there is always something that needs doing.  And once the hubbub of just moving in got sorted, there is the ongoing stuff that just keeps cropping up. 

     Like the tree, which was threatening to crush out little farmhouse, and wound up costing $1500 to take down.  Just to give you an idea, that man is over 6 feet tall.  Just as an aside, and no they’re not paying me to say this, if you are in East Texas, in the north part of the 903 area code, and you need a tree cut, call Cut-R-Down Tree Service.  They have a website and Facebook, too.  Brandon and Kim were lifesavers. 

     There have also been two floods in our area, although all around us people were getting flooded all summer.  Fortunately, our house was above the high-water line.  Our lower pasture was flooded, the fence came down, a few big branches, too.  If it had still been standing, that big tree would have come through our roof.  But there is a silver lining there, too. 

     Our beautiful old barn, that I fell in love with before the house even, has apparently got quite a number of leaks.  We went down to check it out after the second flood, and some of the boards were soaked black.  There were rivulets cut into the dirt floor where water had poured in through the roof in places.  Also, the high-water mark was a foot deep on the downhill side of the barn, which means if we had had livestock in it, they would have been soaked. 

     Upon further inspection, my husband has decided that only about 1/3 of the wood is salvageable and a good part of the siding metal can be saved.  But the barn is largely rotting and won’t be safe much longer.  The top floor is already unsafe and will probably collapse very soon. 

     Another development is, the antique table that was my Gramma’s, then my dad’s, now mine, got broken by the movers.  They claimed to have fixed it, but it broke at the beginning of December.  I was not happy.  At all.  We saved the pieces, and Pa Bell hopes to refurbish it for me into maybe two half-circle tables for the living room, like end tables.  But that’s down the road.  He wants to be certain before he does it, because he knows it’s very special to me. 

     

     In the meantime, I got a lovely farmhouse table and bench that he made for me from pictures I’d saved on Pinterest.  I LOVE IT!  He’s so amazing.

He finished both the table and matching bench just in time for Christmas Eve muffins! 

     We went back to Georgia for a week to visit family and friends quickly over the Thanksgiving holiday.  We had thought to stay longer, but Pa Bell’s back just couldn’t take the bed.  He needed to come home.  Kind of like me.  I need to get home.  I am up at the local coffee shop hijacking the Internet briefly.  One of my resolutions this year is to actually contribute to the blog on a semi-regular basis until we get Internet set up, and after we get Internet set up, I want to set aside a blog day at least once a week.  Until then, I’ll pop in at odd times when I come to town to download work. 

See y’all later!

A little backstory

Hello! 

     Welcome to the farm!  Thanks for deciding to stop by.  Come on in!  Excuse the mess, please.  We’ve been here almost a year, and we’re still not unpacked.  Don’t know if we ever will be, come to that.  Making a home is always a work in progress, isn’t it?  Sometimes I look around myself and I wonder what the heck I’ve been doing.  To be fair, it’s been one heck of a ride these past few years, and the last one in particular, but I’ll get to that in a minute.  Sit a spell, and I’ll tell you a little bit about us. 

     I’m Ma Bell.  Ha!  Ma Bell?  Get it?  I reckon some remember.  Anyway, it does kind of suit.  I can talk a blue streak if someone ever cares to get me started, which is one of the reasons why I thought I might try blogging.  I don’t actually have a whole lot of folks to talk to around here.  It’s just me, Pa Bell, Little Bell, and the dog for the time being.  We’ve got plans.  Grand dreams!  Some folks laugh at us, but I reckon that’s okay.  We might not make all of them come true, but we’re going to do our best.

     Five years ago, I was a deputy sheriff in a county in Georgia, winding up a master’s in forensic psychology, eye on the prize, aiming for a career, retirement, 401(k), and all that jazz.  I was still married to my mistake.  Everyone has a mistake or two in their past.  Some of us marry them, some of us wise up before we go that far.  Anyway, it was on the outs.  I had moved back with my folks, and once I finished school and (hopefully) got a better paying job, I was going to build a little house out on my Daddy’s acreage, maybe have a garden and some chickens if I had time. 

     My now husband, life-long friend, had joined the Army the previous year.  He called me to tell me that they were sending him to Fort Hood and he was going to be deploying for Afghanistan soon.  What?!  I couldn’t just let him go to war without actually seeing him in person again.  I hadn’t seen him since before he enlisted.  We’d been friends over half our lives.  So that weekend I drove the nearly 1,000 miles to hang out, have a few drinks, reminisce, and wish him well. 

     While we were catching up, I told him I had finally left my mistake.  He said it was about time and that he’d been waiting for 15 years to ask me out, but I just wasn’t single.  Apparently everyone knew but me.  I can be thick on occasion.  Anyway, he said he didn’t want to start anything with deployment imminent, but asked me to wait till he came home before I got into any more stupid relationships.  I told him I would.  About 15 days into his deployment, he asked me if I’d marry him when he got home.  No, we didn’t date.  We didn’t much need to.  We’d been friends forever, seen each other at our very worst and our very best.  Told each other all our relationship woes, asked for advice, gave unsolicited advice.  There were no secrets or surprises lurking in either of our closets. 

     So I married my soldier when he got home for R&R, and when he came home from war, I quit my job, moved to Texas, and became a rather reluctant housewife.  I have always worked.  I got my first job shoveling horse stalls when I was 13, and from there I held a job all the way up until I was 31.  I still work as a scopist, but it’s spotty, catch-as-catch-can.  Pa Bell and I talked it over and crunched the numbers, and I was actually saving us more money than I would make us by staying home.  And he liked the added bonus of having dinner waiting, laundry always done, and never having to do housework.  (Of course he did LOL)  Some of that’s changed, but, I’m getting there.  Can’t put the cart before the horse, you know.

     Pa Bell had to have bi-lateral knee surgeries in rather rapid succession.  Then our son was born just before our second anniversary.  Shortly after that, Pa Bell had a pretty severe back injury that rendered him unfit for duty.  In a whirlwind faster than anything I’ve ever seen in a government-run agency, my husband was medically retired with a disability rating of 100%.  The process was supposed to take nearly a year and a half, and it took 4 months for us.  We lost our home, because you can’t live in post housing if you’re not in the military, obviously, and wound up living in temporary living facilities for a brief time until we could close on our farm. 

     It had to be a farm, and it had to be in Texas.  We both were adamant that we did not want to live in suburbia or want our son to grow up in suburbia.  Why not go back to Georgia?  Both of our families were back in Georgia.  We had a support network, places to stay temporarily until we could find our feet again.  Texas is one of those take it or leave it places.  We love it.  Some people hate it.  I personally don’t care for the weather, but I believe in Texas:  the ideals, the feel, the way folks here still remember what it means to be American, proud of it, and to believe in earning your way and paying for what you keep.  It rings with the ideals I was raised with. 

     Speaking of ideals, I am not PC.  I don’t hold with “words hurt” or “everyone gets a trophy.”  That’s not how life works.  I believe in an armed populace, law is law and illegal aliens are breaking it, and I think everyone needs to earn their way.  Just a fair warning. 

     Anyways, we found it:  Our little white farmhouse on a few acres of land in East Texas.  Far enough north to still remember what winter might feel like, far enough east to have streams, lakes, and a good chance of growing things living through the hellacious summers, and close enough to some decent-sized towns where if we really need it, we can find it. 

     In idle pillow-talk -- you know how married folks do when they’re winding down after a day, just chatting before going to sleep.  Maybe they talk about their day, or their plans for tomorrow, but I think this is the time when most people talk about their dreams.  It’s dark, so you don’t have to worry about seeing any of those “looks” on your spouse’s face, and you can just talk about whatever your heart wants right that moment.  When we talked like that, it was always a farm, a little garden, some chickens, maybe some goats, rabbits possibly.  Maybe we’d have a roadside produce stand, or sell fresh eggs.  Maybe I’d finally start selling the lotions, soaps, scrubs, and such that I’ve been making for us for the past few years.  Maybe Pa Bell would start turning bowls again on his daddy’s lathe, or start making woodcrafts to sell. 

     Dreams...

     When Pa Bell’s back got hurt, we really thought our dreams were done.  I had no retirement, and his Army career had been shot down.  We were fortunate in the severity of it, in one way, because he was able to retire with full pay and benefits.  So now, he can work around the farm when he’s able, I can work from home as work is available, and we can still make ends meet.  We’re not living high on the hog, that’s for dang sure, but we have a roof over our heads, food on the table, air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter.  I can take care of Pa Bell when he needs it, because with my part-time income, we make do, and I don’t have to find full-time work outside the home.  I can take care of our little boy, too, who just had his third birthday in our new house this past winter.  Pa Bell isn’t supposed to lift him, but that doesn’t always work out.  Little boys who love their daddies inevitably want to be picked up. 

     And we’re still working on those dreams.  Pa Bell got his daddy’s lathe over the holidays.  He turned a bowl for me for my fifth anniversary present.  It’s made from a section of branch from the huge red oak that we had to have cut down.  I’ve been reading and learning and planning.  We’re going to get there.  Our dream of a homestead will happen, and if you’d like, you can come along with us. 

     I reckon I’ve about talked your ear off by now.  And it’s time I got dinner started, too!  Come again sometime, and I’ll have more to tell.