Greenstorm's Journal

We're far enough from the solstice now that light begins to come golden and sideways again. The aspens are gold. There is a feeling that sometime it may be dark. The darkness actually caught me last night; everyone was making noise out and I went to check on the pigs and the dogs and the birds. Turned out it was a whole bunch of people on ATVs coming along the road, maybe to or from Canada Day celebrations, but I stopped to pick grass for the rabbits and hang out with the dogs in the back field and it was late gloaming by the time I got back in.

The summer barely feels started. It is barely started, I suppose, and maybe 3 months left till snowfall.

Tucker is back in the city. It's been awhile since he's been away for the full week and it was hard to let go, but now that he's gone I find myself expanding into myself so completely that there's no room for anything else. I was going to build the quail aviary this weekend; a wasp stung my lip and I didn't get anything other than the wood stained for it. I buried bodies and planted berry shrubs and brushed Avallu for hours and sold helicopter goose and watered the garden and stacked 202 pieces of lumber and talked on the phone a little and mostly just... wandered, observed, and thought about things.

Should the aviary go in front to screen the nascent seating area from the road or in back by the chicken coop to consolidate the birds?
If in the back, should I do a woven screen around the seating area and if I did that would it motivate me to keep on top of the aspen suckers?
Should I mulch and exclude the seating area now or later?
Should I disrupt nests for the year and take out the old mulch? How many rotten eggs are in that mulch anyhow?
Should I spread the mulch on the haskap exclosure, the apples by the pig fence, or the front yard?
When should I change out the mulch under the front deck?
What colour stain do I want on the front deck, and which of my boards should I use to floor it?
Where are all those wasps living?
Are all the ducklings still here? Chicks?
Should the pigs go in the far field or the back pig paddock next? If the back field, how shall I run water?
How much do I want another greenhouse as compared to a storage shed?
If I put the aviary in back it won't match the single-pitch roof of the greenhouse back there, but if I put it in front I won't come closer to completing the compound; which is more important to me?
Should I solarize the smaller back paddock by the neighbours' house in prep to plant more apples next spring?
Which geese should I keep out of this year's crop, and what is my m/f breakdown?
Can I remember the email of that guy in town who wanted a boar from this litter of pigs?
What should I do with the leftovers from rendering tallow, it'll probably make the dogs sick and I don't want to freeze it for the chickens for winter. Should I bury it?
Am I sure I don't want to make a maggot/gut bucket for the chickens? It would make them so happy.
No, really, where are those wasps coming from and why did it sting me in the face?
Is that a wasp's nest in the duck nest and are those ducks eating the wasps?
When should I let the little chickens out to free range?
Can I even catch these geese?
Should I make slightly raised beds and if so should I make them in a fancy pattern so I can appreciate the pattern from my deck?
Should I move those roses from the holding bed to the front seating area?
Do I want to try and keep only feather-sexable quail?
Are all the ducklings ok?
Should I lock up the new baby chicks or is their mother going to do a good enough job taking care of them?
When should I cull my roosters, if I do it too soon will I loose aerial protection for the hens?
Should I do a run of meat birds and sell them at the farmer's market?
How long will this feed last, and when do I need to get more to avoid having to buy feed-store feed?
Are those aspen roots in my septic tank? The suckers look so green right there.
Which branches should I keep on this plum tree and which should I prune out?
Should I thin my apples this year? Those trees are ridiculously heavy with fruit.
What is that dog still barking at?

It's so lovely to wander around and have my attention caught by one thing after another, to observe and to mess with bits and pieces in my own good time. I'm starting to get a little lonely but I'll be back to work tomorrow and maybe assembling the aviary tomorrow evening (front or back?!). The internet hasn't been good to me lately; it feels othering and hostile. Well, except for the RED gardens project in Ireland, which makes me want to run away and join their intentional community for the entire two seconds it takes for me to realise it's full of, well, people. Neat to see someone who might be compatible to garden with, though

Community is certainly a theme lately. The world wants me to join it and roll around in people for awhile. Some part of me thinks that would be nice. The rest of me is busy enjoying being right here, with my skin stretched out to the fenceline and my entire world inside it. I'm just starting to catch glimpses of how the work I've done in the last two years is spilling into the future; I'm no longer standing outside the project looking forward at it but am now inside it.

I have manifested parts of this system with my hands. It's beginning to look like the inside of my mind, and will continue to do so more and more with every passing year.

I'm so happy here. So happy, I can't tell you. This was the thing I needed and I have it.

I'm home.

So a couple weeks ago Josh was over and broke the snowblower by driving it into the fence. Instead of just breaking a shear pin the whole thing got kinda fucked. It was my new snowblower and I super enjoyed using it.

Luckily Josh is an engineer and ordered the parts; he's coming today to put it back together.

In the meantime we've had a lot of snow.

I've mostly ignored the snow. The geese trample it down by the back door/their waterholes, I park outside the gate, and I wear tall boots back and forth. I worked from home yesterday and shovelled off the decks because it was supposed to warm up today (if it gets warm the snow gets heavy, and if it gets warm then cold the snow gets heavy and then refreezes with a sharp, icy crust).

Yesterday I learned I (or any normal person) can take landrace wheats out of Plant Gene Resources of Canada. They have maybe 300, a bunch seem to have been given from Russia. You get a couple seeds, and you can just... grow them, test them. There are also a bunch of heritage potatoes. But here's the thing. A landrace is the physical manifestation of culture plus an environment. It's the touch of anyone who's ever eaten in a culture, everyone who's touched the soil and everyone who takes food from that soil and prepares it in a certain way, of all the ways animals were kept and used and of what labour was considered reasonable and what was not. To be able to take one of those genesets and grow them and maybe pass them on to someone else to grow in the future-- I imagine it is like handing a bible with a blank extra page at the end to a christian and giving them a pen. I can't describe the feeling. But anyhow, wheat is a big rabbit hole and I love it. I will be test growing a bunch this year (necessary since they don't really sell the old varieties in large quantities so I'll need to save my own seed for the following year's big field).

Today I drove in to work and the power was out. This doesn't mean I get the day off, because I'm set up to work remotely, but it does mean I get to come home. And on the way home I parked on the street and shovelled the end of the driveway for half an hour or so, and filled up the duck pools, and I'm going to let the fire go out and check the chimney to see if it needs cleaning. It feels like spring out there, maybe 2C wih a nice thick clean blanket of snow that's definitely melting a little. Also, half an hour of sweating tank-top-in-January manual labour is really good for my spirits. Plus I got to come home to this:



It feels like sunreturn. Soon it will be light out at 5pm. Soon after that I'll be doing chores in the light. Then the rush of spring will come and everything will happen at once, planting trees and spreading hay in the potato/squash field and making garden beds and moving the greenhouse and season-start training at work.

I've spent the last couple weeks mostly solo here, not many visitors, not going out much. I feel grounded and engrossed in my life.

Today I'm thinking about how people end up in proximity to other people.

Work sorts folks according to aptitude, interest, class and luck. You end up with folks of somewhat similar backgrounds, most of the time, and a shared set of conditioning -- whether that's certain sets of university training, family tendencies, whatever. This isn't to say that people who work together are the same, but there tends to be similarity.

The internet sorts people according to interests: polyamory, Star Wars, women's football, local food.

School sorts people by age, pretty much.

In cities folks are often heavily sorted. At least in Vancouver, the way people deal with having so many people everywhere all the time is to ignore large portions of them, to exclude them from the probable-friends realm. Then we build other structures to make probable friends in a more orderly, sorted way: online dating websites, cooking classes, walking groups, photography clubs. And again we end up sorted by interest or hobbies.

So it was my expectation that, in a small town, there would be a lot less sorting and you'd need to get to know people who weren't in the kinds of categories that work and school and interest-groups sorted you into. With fewer people, you'd end up knowing more people by physical proximity.

It hadn't occurred to me that physical proximity often came about because of certain sets of interests, aptitudes... and personality traits.

So here I am in a small town, and I've met an upper class Mexican woman who's ultra social and friendly, and I connect with her really well despite the fact that we share few interests or age categories or whatever. I wouldn't have met her back home. One of her skills seems to be the ability to connect well to almost everyone, which I find pretty great. I'm curious about how she would make friends in the city, just because she knows *everyone* here (and also apparently everyone who has ever lived here).

And I've also met an eighty-something woman (who I will be living with) who is from one of the founding families of the town, who brews and quilts and gardens and sands and paints her deck and kayaks and just separated from her husband of many years because she felt he was getting too dependent on her. She has a greenhouse with tomatoes and cucumbers. She has apple trees and a raspberry patch. She is, honestly, like a little window into the life I always hope/expected to have at that age.

So that's two strong awesome women I've met in the first week. I do not have to struggle or work hard to make friends. I do not have to force myself to meet people where they're at in order to broaden my mind, nor do I have to limit myself to make people comfortable (although the poly cat isn't out of the bag yet).

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I had a similar experience when I went to volunteer at the botanical garden looking for a redheaded gardener boy to date and received a bunch of amazing surrogate grandmothers instead. I guess I'm surprised to meet awesome women outside my age bracket. I guess I'm surprised awesome, fully realized humans exist where I had previously set a tidy stereotype box.

I guess I enjoy people, and respond well to people, in ways outside the sorting boxes I'm used to using to find friends.

Oh, and I guess I like people again? It's been months, at mimimum, since I could say anything like that.

This summer is a good choice for me.

Impossible to capture the perfect day, but they do happen. Each has a different face.

Waking to snuggles and the inimitable touch and interaction of a loved one and sunrise at the foot of the bed. Breakfast: s'mores and scrambled eggs and bacon, cooked for me, but in my very own cherished home. Lazing and every kind of touch until my body is near brimming with it, then bottling my first successful batch of lovely-tasting graff. Magicking together a full-on thanksgiving meal with turkey, roast veggies, miso-maple squash, orange-cashew quinoa, mashed potatoes, perfect gravy, and my whole dear family in 2.5 hours then relaxing while someone else does the dishes. A house full of love, the perfect playlist on my computer. Turkey stock with frozen hoarded celery leaves already boiling as the door shuts for the last time, leaving me so tired and a little lonely with clothes to fold off my bed but--

I am so lucky. My life is so full of love. I'd never hoped for any of this. I had never known how good it could be, when I was waiting to see which brother would kill himself, with mom depressed and stressed and busy, trying to figure out what was important in my own life and struggling to know what I wanted. My week has been a parade of people I care about and am close to and enjoy and who in turn care about me. My weekend has been a closer, deeper nesting into people I am learning to be vulnerable to. Next week will be more folks I love, more folks who love me, all so bewilderingly and fascinatingly and dazzlingly different each from each until the tapestry of my life might as well be woven from the sun itself, too bright to encompass with these senses I am given.

The loneliness is itself part of the perfection of tonight, this reaching outwards from the base of my sternum and the way my ribcage cranks open as if it could fir the world in there.

Now, bedtime and another day.

I am blessed indeed.

I am splitting my time between being in love, not being in love, and schoolwork.

My routine's altered a titch, and will continue to be a little different for the next little while what with the six-day schoolweeks.

Right now everything is humming along with my chosen people. I seem to be at the point where the people who I make an effort to include in my life are making efforts back, there's stuff to say and do between us, and everything is flourishing. It helps that depression seems to be taking its ugly fingers off my friends this month.

I've been skipping the occasional big social event in favour of downtime: either sleep or time to myself or homework. This has been a fantastic choice on my part. I've been ramping up the exercise, which, when combined with my incipient period, means I'm tired all the time but this will pass. My body feels good. My weight is up and muscles are starting to show up. I have a fitness goal for firefighting and a physical ability goal for yoga: 5-minute balances, yo.

Sewing's gone underground in favour of sleep and homework, for now. I have some pants I really should get done, though: I want the products of that sewing, I really do.

My baby rats are stupid-crazy adorable, and my BEWs are still white-- this is a breeding goal I've been pursuing since the beginning, and only just achieved-- and one of the boys is an excellent shoulder rat already. I want to be able to take my rats to school in the evenings, I mean one or two on my shoulder, but nuts to me. I don't think it'd go over well.

My freezer is super well-stocked, which means that the money shortage at the end of the month doesn't stress me out as much as it might.

I need to do something about my branding, about my taxes (which involves sending off a written, signed document), and study for my citizenship test.

It's only seven thirty and it's getting dark. Fall's here, and with it our lovely amazing indian summer full of clear blue skies and crisp air. Walking around outside makes me feel like I'm drugged-- I suppose if I wanted to be literary about it I'd call it intoxicating. The air is clear, less of an obstacle to vision when there's light out, and things are sparklier. This weekend held the equinox.

I'm sitting in a place that feels like home, but it isn't my house. I'm over at the House of Boys- Angus, Dan, Tyler, and Nick's place. We did the cooking for Mabon, Patti's big dinner party, here, and I just finished doing some dishes. It was a big party weekend-- first Piotr's birthday, then Ty and Brit's anniversary/Ty's birthday/this place's second housewarming, then Mabon on Sunday night. They were three very different experiences but interestingly there was a core of people that showed up at all of them; Tim, Navi, Anthony, myself, Patti and Tyler that I can remember off the top of my head.

It felt wonderful to hang out with people I love again. It feels wonderful, because really I'm still here. The boys are gaming in the other room, I'm making soup with the leftovers and trying to think of how to write here.

I recently finished a book called _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_ that was full of the most moving writing. I had forgotten how much a turn of phrase could stir me. I had not read anything in a long time that made me want so badly to call someone and just read it to them. It was a bit difficult to get into the book, the characters took a little bit before I cared about them so much that their salvation or lack thereof really mattered to me. It was a beautiful book, that said.

I feel like I'm home right now. I mean, I'm in what feels like familiar territory. If there wasn't all this food left from Mabon I'd make muffins for the gamers. You know that role, right? When Kynnin had people over to play D&D it's the same role I chose to take.

Ramble, ramble. I always approach my points sidewise, support then thesis. Sometimes it's anecdote then thesis, but it's all the same style. I'm working up to saying that Mabon was wonderful, everyone I love in the same room, and that it was a lot a lot of work. I'm working up to saying that Angus is my boyfriend again in an official sort of way. We're both smiling a lot. It's lighter than it was. It feels really good.

It's funny, you know, I was so tired of poly. It had been sort of like a cheesegrater, not always but enough that some important bits of me were abraded away. These were the bits of me that automatically expected emotional gentleness and also the bits of me that automatically gave it. I always have had the tendency to fall into hardassery.

Kynnin and I just made some mistakes from which we never recovered, and I was never out of a relationship for long enough to stop and reset-- things kept carrying over and carrying on, different iterations of the same carelessness coming up over and over. I didn't expect to get what I wanted, and that hurt me so much that I was afraid to even know what I wanted, and then I couldn't communicate it, and then of course I couldn't get it. You see the circle. Further, I was always afraid of being left, of the Kynnin thing repeating, and so I brought in a new boy for backup and distanced from the old one in preperation for the inevitable ending, often causing it.

I'm not saying this is the only way of looking at my relationships, or the only thing that happened in them; it's not the only reason they ended or began, it's not even close to the whole of my experience of them. I'm just saying, I was caught and it had gone on long enough that I was beat down.

Let's try an explanatory chronology.

A couple weeks ago I had a party at my house, and Ty's roommate Dan came to it. We ended up talking there, and have hung out since. I made him sushi one night; he made me a steak and shiitake salad another. We had a lot of fun sleeping next to each other. He initiated the STD talk before I did, the first and only person to do so. He's twenty years old. I really like him-- for all my second guessing (do I like him because he reminds me of Marvin? Is it this or that other thing?) that statement is both true and the only one I can make about it at this point. He's the first person since Angus I've both been attracted to and liked freely, like water flowing from somewhere in my chest. That's why so much second-guessing, and also why I'm so tentative. It's been a long time, and relief is always coupled with pessimist's caution for me.

I'm not sure whether it's that which drove me into this weekend. Perhaps it's also Sickle, which is something that requires Angus' presence in Seattle every Sunday, and he works Friday and Saturday nights from 8pm-3am; it's a hard schedule to spend time with him in, and now I'm starting my Master Gardener program imminently and I'm busy Saturdays and generally Tuesdays and Thursdays till late starting the week after this one- this doesn't leave us a lot of time together. In any case, I tried to break up with Angus this weekend despite the fact that we weren't dating. What ended up happening was that we had a long, long talk and we're dating now officially, and we're tentatively poly.

I had never had any of the poly talks with Angus. I had never needed to; people told me he was hardcore monogamous, and when he expressed discomfort with me being with other people I let them slide off me like water off a candle. They just slipped away. See? New boy/old boy, but it was different this time because there was no one else.

When we broke up we were by default poly because we weren't in a negotiated structure that excluded other people. When you're not in a structure, though, you spend minimal time defining that structure. We still hadn't talked. Now we have.

We're not sure what shape this is going to take but it's more intentional than last time. He's been doing amazingly at figuring out what he wants and acting to make that happen, something he couldn't even conceive of back then. I've been independent some, not leaning on a second boy but just doing my own thing. Those are both pretty important things to have done.

So. I'm happy. I don't know what's happening next. That's all.

Oh, bleeding like crazy.