Greenstorm's Journal

So last night I posted on fb that it might be good to put a trampoline in my livingroom instead of a sofa. I have a sofa downstairs, and a trampoline is multi-use: you can nap on it but you can equally do body stuff on it.

This morning my co-worker, the one I work closely with, came up to me and said he'd thought of doing the same thing awhile back. I was describing how I'd prefer aerial silks but I wasn't sure structurally how my house worked, and he offered to come put up hooks for aerial silks. Not that I can't do both.

It's been a long time before someone came up to me in person and said "yeah, I'm like that too". Like, I'm tearing up a little. Mostly it's like "I never thought of that" accompanied by either "that's so cool" or "I could never do that".

The roads here feel as familiar as my own skin when I drive them. The seasons are each year different from the other, but they hold me in a familiar pattern now. They shape my activities with the same light steady pressure that I shape clay on the wheel.

And today I felt seen.

I think the green hair is working.

So a thing I've been worried about for awhile happened.

Whatever is going on with my mind for the last couple years, it's included some things like forgetfulness and more difficulty holding thoughts and daily tasks. One of my daily winter tasks involves the woodstove, and that's really a string of tasks: I open the air, open the catalyst, open the door, put wood in, put the de-sooting agent in, blow any shreds of bark or wood off the ledge and gasket seal of the stove, close the door, if the stove is hot enough I close the catalyst (it pretty much stays hot enough all winter), wait until the moisture is driven out of the wood and it's burning super hot (depending on the ash bed, dryness of wood, species of wood, and my timetable this hot-burning period lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour), then close the air down, sometimes in two steps.

I'm always pretty cautious about the hot burn phase. This is one of the two points the chimney will catch fire if it's going to, but also between the catalyst which intensifies the heat, the length of my chimney which creates a blowtorch effect, and the size of my woodbox the stove could overheat, or overheat the chimney, if I left it open to burn a full load of wood from beginning to end. If I'm in the room with the stove I will definitely notice: the fire roars and the room gets extremely hot. If I go upstairs or go outside during this time I am very careful about time, and go back and check every fifteen minutes or so.

Yesterday morning I forgot to close the catalyst. This is relatively minor, as these things go: I got home and saw smoke coming out the chimney, which the catalyst normally eats and spits out as more heat. The stove had burned through a 24-hour load of wood in roughly 12 hours and the house temp was a (welcome, it's been warm out) degree or two cooler than expected. I'd never done this before but it was fine, it just means the chimney soots up a little faster and I use up more wood for a day.

Then, during the hot burn phase last night, I stepped out to load grain into buckets for this morning and kind of shrugged off coming in to check on it for about half an hour. The birch is often slow to catch, but still, this is longer than I normally leave it. I came back in to a very, very hot stove (it hadn't been up that high since last winter I think, or maybe my first fire this fall), a very very hot room, and the chimney clanking and groaning with heat expansion and probably burning off whatever small fragments of creosote that were inside it. Luckily the chimney had just been cleaned a couple weeks ago so there was nothing to catch in it. I turned it down and monitored the chimney and it was fine, but then this morning I woke up and the house was still very warm- I hadn't turned it down enough for the forecasted temperature overnight. I've been adjusting the stove to the forecast automatically for years.

So. I get that doing tasks in what work calls "upset conditions"-- when one thing has gone wrong -- makes those tasks more likely to become an issue. So the one moment of forgetfulness, leaving the catalyst open, means that I'm putting in wood in the evening instead of the morning, so that throws the automatic parts off and makes it more likely that I'll do something like leave it in hot phase too long, and then enough is disrupted that my habit of turning down the stove before bed is thrown off. But. The stove is both very dangerous and is lifesaving here. It's the heartbeat of my home but it's also what keeps my pipes from bursting and my everything alive in the cold spells. I need to be able to use it, and I need to be able to use it in a safe way.

Last night, when I was checking the chimney after the second stove mishap in 24 hours, I asked Threshold if this was its way of telling me it's time to leave. I was talking to a chimney, there was no answer, and there was no major omen unless you count waking up into an extra warm house this morning.

I know I'm overloaded here right now. If I take some of the load off (fewer animals, finish up sewing, scale back on visitor scheduling uncertainties) it might help. But I am thinking about what happens if I don't develop a good community here in the middle term, and exploring options for that; not to lock in place, but to have available.

Well, last night I confirmed that the fan in my downstairs bathroom (the one I use to shower every day) isn't actually attached to anything. It's wired in, but the hole in the side of the fan box that's supposed to go to a vent that leads outdoors doesn't have anything connected to it; it just vents into the space between the bathroom ceiling and the kitchen/bathroom floor. So that's nice.

It explains why so much water was accumulating in my roof.

I guess when I get someone in to put the vent hood on my stove they can also vent the bathroom properly, but none of that will happen until I get the butcher in for the pigs (he's MIA for the last month) and then pay down this credit card bill for feeding them.

I grew up in a huge (albeit cold and unfinished) house, 4000 square feet and 5 acres for 6 people. There were always places both indoors and outdoors I could go to be alone, private, and safe. In the house if I didn't want to be in my room I could climb through the undrywalled bathroom, over the pile of contruction lumber and down the not-yet-or-ever-wired hallway, into the sauna-without-electricity which was basically an unheated unwindowed cedar room full of spiders, dust, and peace. It felt like the tombs of Atuan, known only by touch. Or I could go upstairs, through the library, into mom's office where she was never to be found during non-school hours since she was doing chores, making dinner, and taking care of my brothers and I could take a book off the shelf and hide under her desk (which faced away from the door). No one could find me and it was warmer in there.

When I graduated from highschool me, mom, and one brother moved into a 42" boat. The boat had three rooms plus a toilet room: mom's room with the shower in it, the front V berth, and then the galley-slash-salon with a couch in it on which I slept as long as I lived there. There was no privacy at all, visual or sound or anything, except when my brother was at school and mom was at work (and she didn't work in the office every day). The boat was (illegally, since we lived on it) moored in the city's downtown and I learned to live in public spaces at that time: the new library, the new plaza next to the transit station, the acres-big park with a bike path encircling it and swings, the big cheap clattering chinese restaurant with a million things on the menu which I could even occasionally afford.

I had no money at this time, I was working a very part time job for minimum wage and I was supposed to be going to school. I'd go to the university and use the computers there but I failed out of my classes pretty quickly; I was too afraid to talk to adults to ask them for help, and too poor to afford the textbooks. I tried to get a job following mom's advice ("just go in with a resume") but through some combination of the early 2000s recession, being too afraid of adults to talk to them, never having been raised around non-abusive adults and not knowing what to say, having no idea what working actually entailed since mom was a college professor and had hoed beans as a kid and dad hadn't worked, being deeply depressed, and being autistic I had a two year job search that failed to get me more than the occasional month or two at part-time minimum wage. At that point it was clear I wasn't doing well in university, and to motivate me mom kicked me out: she said I either needed to pass classes (which I needed to pay for myself) or pay rent on the boat. I wasn't able to do either.

Luckily my boyfriend had started working at a nice job at his mom's workplace at that point, and we could move in together to an actual apartment.

(This is so painful to write about)

For awhile we lived together in a couple of what were probably fine apartments, but that felt amazing to me: carpet! that was less than twenty years old! Smooth, drywalled, mudded, sanded, and painted walls! Molding at the base of the walls! Doors that fit their frames and frames that were finished! Showers with curtains! I felt rich. I was not rich. I was living with someone who we thought we would be together forever, but I was still only working the occasional stint in call-center jobs. He worked at a regional airport, so we lived deep on what were then the fringes of suburbs whose population mostly commuted to the city. He could drive, I could not. The busses to the city took a couple hours, and they did cost money. I grew tomatoes on a south-facing deck, walked to a yoga class and to the local nursery where I hung out, and spent a tremendous amount of time online.

It didn't feel unusual for me to be dependent on my partner, to not be able to leave. I'd never had the option of leaving while growing up, of living on my own. I'd never had enough money at one time to make up a full rent cheque even if I were to take every cent in my account and the change in my purse and spend it on just that one thing.

That was at least two apartments in the suburbs. Long story short we moved to a third apartment in the city to be closer to another couple we were dating. A year or two more went by, maybe more, I'm really uncertain of the timeline at this point. I was completely unable to get work in the city; I volunteered at the botanical garden for years, sold knives door to door for a bit but didn't have the network that business model relied on to sell to all my friends.

Finally one of my friends from the polyamory group had to go on maternity leave; she owned a cleaning business that she'd built and wanted to pass it on to someone. I started cleaning with her and I was completely terrible in the beginning, but she was patient and trained me up for months, introduced me to all the clients, and then eventually left it in my hands.

As soon as I had enough money to pay my own rent, my first partner said he needed some time living apart. I believed him. I suspect he believed him. The last time we ever had sex or an intimate date was in our shared bed, though, because once I moved out he made excuses about not getting together in private, got married to part of that other couple we were seeing, that person vetoed me with him and my other partner (the other part of that couple), and every time we got together for the next several years he'd express what seemed like real interest in meeting up but never actually follow through.

Anyhow, when I moved out I didn't know any of that. I found a room on craigslist in a house full of gay dudes. It was a beautiful old house, immaculately kept, with a big fishtank in the livingroom. At this point I'd developed some social skills but I still didn't spend much time in the shared areas, just up in the little attic room I had my own rights to. I kept my rats in there, my own fishtank for a little while, and my bed: that's all that fit. I wasn't home much: I spent a bunch of time at the home of the couple we were dating (I didn't really know I wasn't dating the one partner yet, and the other was still seeing me), and then my commute to work and back took a couple hours each way on the bus if I wanted to be on time. I learned the city's bus system intimately.

This is when I was first buying my own food. I remember buying a frozen brick of masago, the cheap orange kind full of msg ad sweetener, and eating about half of it on rice, then not eating any again for months. I couldn't leave anything in the kitchen, not even a dirty glass overnight, and friends didn't come to my place.

My home at this point was really the home of the couple I was dating, and my time was spent more there than at the room I rented. I'd swing home, hang out for a day, feed and play with the rats, and swing away again for a day or two or even three, depending on how much the rats were eating/drinking. In the other house I had no bedroom or anything like that, not even a drawer, so I lived with my bag full of housecleaning supplies including little vaccuum on one shoulder, and my big hockey bag full of clothes and books on the other. The other house meant stability though, it was people who loved me at the time, who cared for me and who I spent time with, and I (and partner) had been spending time there for the last several housing moves so it felt stable. It felt like home.

Then came the veto, and that house was no longer mine. I'd planted things there: a pawpaw tree, elephant garlic, raspberries, saskatoons. I'd built a greenhouse. I built a greenhouse in the backyard of the house I was renting a room from too, with the help of my other partner, and one of my roommate's friends offered me a job working with plants. I took it, and for the first time was, not full time employed or anything, but was actually employed by another person in a job where I could pay my rent.

A kaleidoscope of homes and partners follows: I moved on average once every six months for awhile, in with partners mostly but sometimes with roommates. This home had a hole in the floor that let in daylight and then the ceiling collapsed. That home we moved in as a group, lived there for six months while the landlord was always going to install floors, then got evicted when he finally did. This home was a studio space that one partner's brother let us live in for awhile, then kicked us out. That one I couldn't afford when the relationship ended. This one was really too much of my income. That one was a friend's place she rented me while she lived elsewhere, but I got the boot when she moved back in (that one was really lovely, and it's where I was the longest aside from here). There were sublets and sublets and sublets. I kept a PO Box in town, paid for, because it's the only way I could do all the legal documentation things you needed to receive mail for. When I needed to recover a password on the phone to do my taxes I ran through three or four possible postal codes when they asked what mine was.

I played ATM fishing every week, putting in two dollars so I could get at the extra 1.50 in my account and thus debit 3.50 at the store for groceries.

I remember moving my things in a wheely suitcase once in the summer, a gift that my aunt had got for me to pointedly suggest I should move out from living with mom before mom kicked me out herself. It was summer, and they're not made for that kind of use: the wheels melted right off.

If it was the right time of year I always planted things, if there was any outdoors at all. I tried to alway s be somewhere with outdoors. I could afford rent and mostly food, I always paid my rent, and sometimes I'd buy plants. I'd plant them where I was living. Years later I'd see them sometimes, flourishing if they hadn't been removed. I watched the saskatoons in front of that one house grow huge and full of berries.

I never stayed anywhere long enough to pick fruit. Tomatoes, a couple times. Mint, in very different types of locations, yes. I hauled pots of plants from home to home to home on the graces of friends who could drive and were willing to help me move.

I got so good at moving. I only ever had one dresser of clothes. I kept things in steamer trunks and books lived in boxes. The plants were awkward, of course, but there it is. I had a moving company I liked and that I eventually paid for; luckily I had a strong visual style so people would give me clothing they thought I'd like and I didn't have to pay for clothing; I could afford to move. Moving was my poverty hobby and my most expensive hobby.

Eventually my stuff went into storage. I don't remember when, or what spurred it; I think it was the breakup of a relationship where we were living together just the two of us, or maybe it was my decision to go back to school. Everything I loved was in a 10x10 box in an inaccessible part of the city (that is to say, busses didn't really go there) and I was in another box with a moldy futon on the floor, a rabbit, and a dresser in a house that was probably a negative 500k value on the multi-million-dollar lot.

Years later it came out of storage. I'd been at threshold a couple months by then, my own house, this house that I own. I'd been rattling around in it with a set of dishes I got on a facebook sales group, a week's worth of work clothes, a bed they'd left behind, and two of those tall barstools that are impossible to sit on. When all my stuff arrived on the truck it was like Christmas is supposed to be (did you grow up with nice Christmas presents?), all the things I wanted curated by someone who loved me and knew me well: my pottery wheel. My sewing machine. The mirror I liked. My lounging couch. My marshmallow mattress and the bed I can hang clothes on the frame of. Dishes I'd made. Festival clothes, fluttery silk and good for nothing but pleasure. Steamer trunks full of costumes and sweaters and kink gear and unfinished skirts. Boxes of books, and shelves for the books to go on. Old spiral bound notebooks. Booze I'd made and bottled in the hope of someday being able to sit somewhere and drink it.

People who place little value on stuff inevitably have enough money to get what they need, or a corner of their parents' basement where they still have stuff. People who say "it's just stuff?", I have no time for those folks.

Five and a half years ago I moved here, to Threshold, and my stuff came, and it was a completion. Three pieces clicked together: the land, me, and my nest of things. The next year we were evacuated for fires and I had one of the bigger trauma responses I'd ever had in my life: I was displaced, temporarily in someone else's home and unable to spend much time at my own home where I had put in a garden. My other partner was ghosting me and gaslighting me about the ghosting. I spent the weeks of evacuation in a dark dissociated haze where I could barely hear sounds; even with someone who loved me there, even with my animals close to me.

After that it slowly got better. When I came home the greenhouse had grown so much I couldn't get into it; Josh had set up automatic watering while I was gone and things had flourished. Winter, summer, winter, summer again: the seasons continued to come. The apple trees, here before me, bloomed every spring. Every spring! Ice locked the house and slid down off the roof and sheltered it in a cradle of white peace, while inside the woodstove breathed its heartbeat of full to empty, blazing to smouldering, over and over and over and over.

Last summer I was given a couch and put it in the basement, in the woodstove room. The room has a rack of squashes I grew for seed (I mean, also to eat) and is stacked with dairy crates of corn drying for seed. The dog door opens into this room and three cats and two dogs wander in and out freely. I spend so much time here now, sitting on the couch with my feet up on a suitcase (hard-sided, so I can set a drink on it if I need and my back to the firewood rack holding the next few days' heartbeat of heat. The wood stove creaks occasionally beside me, topped with the hum of a little heat-driven fan, and when it's windy I can hear the chimney singing. Outside is the winter's worth of firewood, right outside, the future sitting there in solid form and every week I split it and carry it indoors. Sometimes I go upstairs and get a jar of applesauce from the pantry, from the apple trees that where here before me, and I eat it.

This home makes demands of me and every demand is: stay, interact with me, I'm here, stay, you can't ignore me, stay. These demands feel like love.

I haven't opened every box from the moving years but I'm getting closer. Last night I took a rubbermaid of various things, noticed it was mostly winter gear, and I hung two dairy crates near the door. Shelves are beyond my budget, but dairy crates? I have a source. I labelled one "hats" and one "scarves" (considered, and discarded, "scarfs") and put the combination of work toques and unicorn toques in the one and the scarves from the box in the other. I took some other scarves off my coathooks and put them in too, which let the coats stretch out a little more.

The rubbermaid isn't empty but I'm one step closer to being unpacked. I have years of "important papers" to go through, mostly no doubt taxes and government correspondence about permanent residency and citizenship and paystubs that were so desperately valuable and so desperately hard to manage with all the moving, but can go on the fire now. There's another box labelled "ancestry" sent by my cousin on my unknown dad's side, and I think some sort of catholic baptism thing? My US birth certificate may even be in there somewhere.

Scarves and hats, two steps closer. In the summer I can reverse the crates and put pocket-vests and sunhats in them so I have somewhere to put eggs when I find them. Closer and closer.

The pottery wheel is out.

I've unboxed my sewing machine and ordered the part that got broken at Josh's place in 2016. I've made a spreadsheet of fabrics and put my patterns in one place, together, in one rubbermaid. I've assigned fabrics to patterns, pending toile making (I can't actually sew until the part arrives and I can fix the machine). I've cut out the base patterns, and much to my cat's delight have rolled out the big roll of paper to copy the patterns onto for useable templates.

I carry water every day for the animals.

I split and carry wood once a week for the house.

I move through my kitchen, through my livingroom and its current sewing space but sometimes its butchery space, its soapmaking space, its seed-saving space, for myself.

The wood shifts in the fireplace. The dog exhales and shifts in her sleep, head and limbs akimbo. Outside the geese honk quietly.

Last night there was something that could help me living in my house and I just did it, powerdrill was there to hand, screws were there to hand, I knew what the next months would be like and where I would need something, I put that thing there without it being a wasted effort or a ding on my damage deposit. That's the story. As you see I can tell you stories all day. The stories are just the setup, though, the context and feeling of chaos and kaleidoscope and helplessness and slow inching towards healing.

The noun to all these verbs is me, the person to this home, sitting next to the fire and beside the dog and typing thoughtfully on my laptop. Me, in the same home where last night I hung two dairy crates from an unpacked box, where four years ago I came back to find my garden overgrown and remnants of wildfire smoke still in the air, where five and a half years ago I rattled around on the floor in this basement with a puppy.

Somehow I'm still here.

Somehow life is still allowing me to unpack my boxes.

And you better believe I'm still planting things.

You gather together. You become a family, a close and ritual-sharing but not necessarily completely-agreeing group, and knock around a shared space for a bit. There is food, and food rituals, and spending time in the kitchen. The house is full of food and people go home with leftovers. You catch each other up on your lives. You feel abundance.

I only had a couple people up for thanksgiving. It was the right number of people, on for the upstairs bedroom, one for the downstairs bedroom, and I took the new couch down by the fireplace. The cats got snuggled well. The first day was a bit of a mess because I haven't hosted here in so long, I haven't hosted people with unknown food stuff in so long (one was celiac and no garlic/onions and also a couple other things I didn't know details of in advance, the other was lower carbs), and I haven't hosted on this food system (lots of home grown stuff and not much place to buy stuff) ever except for close, known friends.

It was nice. The unknown person was more talkative than I expected, and I think a little too forceful for the other person to be completely comfortable, though I could rise to match it. She had overlapping conversational style, which was very nice. We got to playing in the kitchen and made cauliflower fritters and a squash pie (which in turn required making clotted cream and a gluten free pie crust) and I seared a goose breast. There was a garlic-free caesar salad that was actually quite good and a frittata made with pork cracklins and maple smores and a chicken soup. We processed a bunch of lard and dried some peppers.

Before they came I had a big cleaning push and got the house in better shape than it's been in awhile, moving some things out to the storage and stuff like that. So now that they're gone the house is nice and clean and useable. I need to set up my sewing soon, really.

It was good to get up early and talk to Kelsey, who is a morning person, and then stay up late talking to Kris, who seemed to be more of an evening person, but I definitely have some sleep to recover.

It's amazing to have Kelsey close. She's one of the friends (maybe the friend) I've had the most conversations about meaningful topics with (usually interpersonal and social structures) and now she's two hours' drive away instead of two incredibly expensive flights away. She's in a masters thing right now so hopefully she can find more time to come visit sometimes.

It was also fun to do shampoo and conditioner bars with Kris. She's done a bunch of recipe formulating and has done lab work previously, so she brought a bunch of fancy chemicals up and we made the things together after Kelsey went home. Also lots of talking, since we've been in each other's orbits for twenty-odd years but have rarely been physically in the same space.

It felt like a housewarming. My house feels warmed, like a welcoming space for me to hang out in and do my projects. Whether that's catching up on the social stuff, catching up on my cleaning, or laying down some good memories and/or novel and not completely self-controlled experiences within these walls I am not sure. I'm happy for it though.

My whole life, a thing I've always wanted from where I lived was the ability to have a bunch of folks over and do (mostly food) things. I'd traded that for safety and self-building for a couple years here, now maybe time to relearn it?

I do seem to be planning to take summer solstice for the pagan community's get-together schedule.

I'm also entering week 3 of the birth control and I seem happy. No way of knowing if that's environmental (Josh was here, then people were here, so I'm not lonely) or some other random thing or related to the pills, but I expect to go a second month on them and see. It makes sense that if my cycle has made me so strongly unhappy so regularly, that there's some magic mix of hormones that would not have that effect. Is it possible I found it on the first try? That would be AMAZING. Next up would be addressing cognitive issues and shading into stuff around executive function vs demand avoidance.

Went to the fall fair in the next town over last weekend to hang out with Ron. I got to wander around for awhile before he got there. Some thoughts:

The smell of horses. I'd forgotten it in my body; I grew up with a couple horses, and it's such a sweet calming smell. It was lovely.

I maybe haven't been at something so intensely all-ages since I was that age? Not just kids-too-young-to-babysit-themselves and parents, or city folks and a very few of their only-child kids, but the whole spectrum of ages. Lots of teenagers and preteens in all the 4H barns, many kids concentrated in the kids play area full of transparent balls that floated on water and bull rides, but also just lots of folks around. I probably looked like that wandering around hand-in-hand with my first boyfriend. Because it was spread out over the fairground I could go closer or further from clumps of people, which was nice. I often prefer further.

I watched the heavy horse pull event for awhile. I'd never seen something like that before: draft horses are always lovely, but in this case they were in teams of 2 taking turns pulling a big metal device that got increasingly more weight stacked atop it. Each pair had to pull it a certain distance, I think ten feet, but could pull it further if they chose. Everyone was steered by reins on the ground. As each team went, they announced the "above team weight" so that must have factored in; there was one tiny but draft-shaped team that tapped out early but were so much smaller than everyone else that they were quite high above their team weight early on. I'm not completely sure how they decided who won; folks dropped out as they couldn't complete the pull or as they thought it was too much for their horses, and a winner was announced at the end.

There was tremendous variability in the nervousness of the horses, in their synchronization, and in how well they complied with their commands. It was really common for them to start forward before they were fully hitched to the weight, and several times teams had to circle around again to be hitched up after they took off too soon. Then again, a couple of them were super bullet-proof.

While chatting with Ron a couple things came up: possible work stuff, and he floated the idea of maybe a co-property-ownership housing type situation with him, me, and two other people (one of whom I know a little and like a fair bit). I guess I'm folks' go-to person for that sort of thing now? A different job would be a requirement for something like that for me. And perhaps obviously, the only reasonable first move in doing a land thing with someone is sitting down for dinner with them and actually meeting them all. So I don't expect that to go anywhere, but who knows, and it was fun.

The small animal barn was enticing. There were some duckles that were the same breed as I did this year: cayuga x pekin. They were lovely.

There were also a lot of baby rabbits for sale that made me very much miss my bunnies, I took pictures of all the rabbits for sale and the numbers but did not come home with any. That's probably for the best, since there's not a good rabbit vet around here and I'm not set up for having all my cords chewed. Still. I like rabbits and I miss them. They have real personality.

There were also some poor geese there, a mom with one gosling who was nervous and calling out a lot, and a pair who seemed a little less nervous but were probably why the first one was calling so much. Well, that and being down low around so many humans. None of them had water to submerge their faces in. None were for sale; if they had been I'd have just brought them home to get them out of there. All the other quite small animals were on raised platforms of some kind, so they were less loomed over, I guess geese are just too big for that? Either way, I like geese and if I ever take any to the fair I'll make sure to take a group of at least 3 or 4.

I did hang out with an alpaca for a bit. They are smaller and cuter than I remember.

On the way home a couple things happened: I listened to a super useful ADHD podcast that I'll get into later, and I stopped to pick up a ton of hog feed. While the feed guy was loading an ant (looked like an ant) flew into the neck of my shirt and started biting between my boobs. I brushed it off and it ended up under my shirt, biting my nipple. I could not get it out, and I felt really weird trying to deal with that in public. I think I've become a lot more body-conscious up here, trying to handle the weird local Christian whatever culture, and I'm pretty sure I don't like it.

Anyhow, good afternoon at the fair. I would have stayed longer but Ron got a text saying that a person he'd hung out with the day before had covid, so he left, and I figured I could get to the feed store before they closed. As I left I saw something intriguing which, in later research, turned out to be the farmhand challenge with folks hauling logs and things. In hindsight I'm sorry I missed that. Maybe next year.

Next big social event will be the music festival in the park next weekend. With this stuff it feels like it never rains but it pours; last weekend were so many potential things to go see and do, likewise next weekend, then it will drop off for awhile again.

The roofers finished yesterday, which means they didn't come today. That in turn means no banging on the walls/roof, and I worked from home. I slept a long full night.

The shipping container arrived for me to put things in for the move.

I've had a day of relative quiet. I was working, but I did spend a little time outside. I worked on a post a little about my PDA counseling appointment but I'm not in the mood. I threw some ribs that Josh and I smoked when we were butchering into a pot with a cup of beans and a cup of rice. After a couple hours I added a third of a head of cabbage and a quarter of a jar of my 2019 marinaded hot peppers. It cooked into a soft stewy thing that is really tasty; I'm drinking a glass of Summerhill wine with it, the first wine I liked back when I went to work at the vinyard there, and the sun is coming in the windows sideways.

Some of the baby tomato plants went out for twenty minutes this afternoon and I ate some ripe micro tomatoes from my windowsill.

Baby piglet, the one who I think was pretty premature and was doing poorly, was running around today. The Hooligan crowd of piglets was also running around.

I have a show-watching date with Tucker tomorrow and an in-person date with him next weekend. Tomorrow I'm going to see the old work crew.

I'm exploring things that will pay me enough to make the job itself worth my time. There's apparently a mushroom operation in Sayward that sells mushroom spawn etc; they pay a very low wage but it would be easy to get to and work that didn't require my mind. For work that did require my mind and paid decently? That's harder. My mind is not available to be required.

Meanwhile I mean to post about PDA and people; manipulation, socially acceptable manipulation, and what I do; supports vs obligations; financial boundaries; and long term alignment. Just, I won't post about them right now.

The as-yet-unnamed property. Viriditas? Maybe, maybe not. Hole in the wood? No. Greenheart? Maybe, maybe not. Its heart is the meter-in-diameter trees that guide a very flashy creek across it. Big. Old-ish. Mossy. Trickles of water over rock in summer, a roar at certain times of winter. That's the heart.

Before you come to the heart you are on a logging road that mysteriously starts being paved. There are plantations all around: second or third growth (probably second) all well-spaced straight uniform conifer trunks with jagged stumps of shaded, partially-jettisoned lower limbs, all dripping with green moss and undergrown with sword fern (polystichum munitum, stick'em like you do with a sword, munitions like weapons: sword fern). The road is pretty straight for a bit. Then the trees are less uniform, there's a spot that wasn't replanted by a forestry company, and a driveway goes in both directions: east and west.

Follow the driveway up west and, after a narrow band of bigleaf maple and spruce and improbably large alder there's a thicket of salmonberry (rich moist indicator) with some young bigleaf maples and spruce and alder coming up through it. This is where the fields will be. The soil is sandy brown under dead winter leaves. The end of this space is marked by a little lean-to-camper-shelter building that someone was living in so we couldn't poke around; that's the edge of the rich sandy soil full of salmonberries, the demarcation between that and the heart.

The heart is cautious. I'm not sure if it's beyond words or if it's waiting to see what I'll do before giving them to me or if I was just busy, my whole body an antenna picking up every scrap of information from the land while a human was trying to talk to me at the same time. It's a place that, if given my full attention, could fully occupy it. The big potato-chip bark spruce trees, the braided stream through mostly-soil-sometimes-rock, the start of skunk cabbage: the heart. It's not to be disturbed by the likes of me and my farming machinations.

Keep going up the driveway; it's definitely got a slight slope up now. The heart flows under the driveway through four culverts, three side-by-side and one additional. The forest opens out onto a wet lawn, brown and slippery with winter rain and dog poop. Here the soil is clay; ramshackle plastic fencing encloses an expanse of woodchips in which small trees and perennials are planted; beyond them woodchips surround some long thin unraised but undoubtedly heavily amended garden beds cradled in the curve of the question mark shape the driveway now assumes. On the other side of the grass from the garden is a small cobb structure with goats, surprisingly enclosed in equally ramshackle fencing and with little disturbance to the grass despite their couple-years-long tenure. That's for the best; a hole here betrays slick grey clay with no texture when rubbed between the fingers.

At the head of the lawn and garden is the house, but behind the house a steep sandy hill looms. It's covered in alder, leaning a little bit out for the light that is one of the major limiting factors here in the cloudy grey, and goes up about eighty feet: sunset will come quickly with that hill to the west like that. Anything that needs to have very dry roots will need to live on that hill: chestnuts, grapes.

The house itself is a rectangle studded with uniformly-sized windows. Irrigation for windowboxes hangs off it. The roof is flat. If it had angled wings instead of a straight rectangle, or if was stone, it would feel like a grand manor house. As is it's a big building waiting to see what happens next.

To the south, past the goats, less-even but still dense trees press up against the property line. In the milky-overcast noon sky they don't cast shade onto the middle of the lawn; when the sun is low in winter at least the deciduous components jettison their leaves and allow a little sun through. Hill to the west. Pass a waterfall, then a scatter of alder through grass and brush and a chainlink fence not far north: there's a neighbour past there that likes their privacy. Maybe a willow fence will end up there? And completing the circle, to the east, the driveway plunges into the deep shadowed green of the heart. Up here the property is about 200 feet wide, widening from the heart through down to the road to 400 feet. The house can feel the presence of her neighbours, of that plantation and of the privacy-loving neighbour of open fields screened by light brush and trees.

There's more, of course: the house has an inside, turning east from the forestry road leads to another several acres. I'm not there yet, though, I can feel the information and possibilities swirling and forming and re-forming into patterns and possibilities. Several things at a time, not every thing at a time.

I've renewed my mortgage here. In Canada you have to renew your mortgage every 5 years at whatever the interest rate at the time is, even if it's supposed to be a 20 year mortgage or whatever. I'm not sure why they do that, but they do.

Benefit of living out here where I do: very low cost of land. Issue with living where I do: not much equity, so while housing value everywhere else is doubling and giving people places to put their house-fixing and property-improving debt, I do not have such an option. So I still have this debt, it is still a stress, but I have tenure in my home for another 5 years at the same interest rate as when I got it.

I guess that's part of feeling like I might settle in here. It's part of thinking of making shelving that fits the weird walls and part of considering where my art will go and part of settling plant lights into more sustainable locations (gosh it's hard to put up wall shelves that will hold the weight of plants). It's a feeling of safety-in-myself.

It's also a part of unsafety-with-people. I was listening to my relationship podcast the other day and they interviewed Brian Mahan, a somatic experiencing therapist. They were talking about how the pandemic made everyone unsafe: people on the street, our loved ones who went out to get groceries to care for us, every person has been a threat for a long time, and in turn we are a threat to our loved ones. Community and feeling like we can be ourselves in community is so important to heal shame and be ok with ourselves, to not hide ourselves, and now our communities are dismembered and we have no way of gaining the social safety and validation we need, they said. This aligns with my experience pretty well: I tended to have pockets where parts of myself were ok and the rest of me wasn't, but because I had enough of those pockets for most of me I was ok.

Now I have nowhere to be ok except at home with myself and I have to rebuild community. This is a hard place for me to rebuild community. The covix/vax issue adds another layer on unsafety to people who might potentially not fit. I used to be really optimistic that anywhere I went I could find folks to get along with. Up here there are lots of interesting folks but most people are tied into family systems: busy with kids and singular spouse after work and socializing as that unit if at all, and then either working or free during the time I'm working. Those normative structures really trip me up. Looking for folks who do relationships outside the norm, who have strong interests they get geeky about, who don't conform to gender stuff: that's easy. Folks whose life structure fits with mine enough to be friends? Not so much. And then folks who aren't moving to a small town to get away from covid mandates? Also not so much, though I'd imagine there were folks who want to move to protect themselves from covid too.

But anyhow, I guess finding and building community is what I'm committing to by staying here. And I guess I can't expect someone else to build the community I want, nice as it might be: I need to do it myself.

Having people around the house is extremely different from not having people around the house.