Merry Christmas

Greetings from Domelandia,
Christmas Day we awoke to an empty house. This wasn't the first Christmas for just the two of us, so it would be OK (or so I thought) because the kids and the grandkids had all been here last weekend. But then the Viking started talking about Christmases Past, like when the Redhead and the Strawberry Blonde daughters would crawl into bed with us and beg us to get up and open presents.

I'd say, "Let me make some coffee first." This comment was met with groans because back then, I had to build a fire to make a cup of coffee.

However, on this Christmas morning, the empty nest bitch descended unexpectedly and created emotional havoc. The Viking looked at me as if I'd lost my mind as I cried. I have wonderful memories, but sometimes I wish things were the way they used to be, with a houseful of kids and the best part of my life in front of me, not behind me.

So, I calmed myself down by making breakfast for me and the Viking. We opened our presents-I got spoiled by the Viking as usual. Then I kept myself busy for the rest of the day, putting stuff into the new pantry.

I adore Christmas, and love to watch ''A Christmas Carol' and 'It's A Wonderful Life' while I'm baking cookies or decorating the tree. Their messages of hope and love and giving to others may seem corny, but they get me where I live. We started a family Christmas tradition years ago by watching the last three Star Wars movies on Christmas Day. I love those movies. I actually sat down to watch the last movie and realized that Yoda's message to Luke is just as meaningful as those in the conventional Christmas movies:

"The Force is all around us. Life breathes it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Remember, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware--anger, fear, aggression--the Dark Side are they. Once you start down the Dark Path, forever will it dominate your destiny."

Change is inevitable, but "that is the way of things, the way of the Force."

This morning my Mother came to me in a dream. I held her close to my heart, kissed her, told her I loved her.

I think she knew I needed a hug.

Happy Birthday to Me

Greetings from Domelandia,

A couple of weeks ago, my daughters threw me a party to celebrate my 60th birthday. Instead of having it out here in Domelandia, they held it at a restaurant/bar in town. I had nothing to do except review the guest list, choose some special songs, decide what to wear, and show up.

Sister came the week before and helped me put the garden to bed. One bright October afternoon, we drove to the farmland east of town and picked apples. We planted iris corms and put a greenhouse over the carrots so they wouldn't freeze. Those activities took my mind off the celebration, but I was nervous as I dressed for the party.

I had mixed emotions and second thoughts about celebrating my birthday. My daughter thought this was funny and said, "Mom, just relax and let this be all about YOU for a change." And it was good. There was an awesome slide show. I got to hold my new granddaughter and hug my grandson. My best friend since 6th grade was there, and our son-in-law's folks came all the way over the Continental Divide to come to my party. Upwards of 40 friends were there, and it was wonderful to see all those people I love.

The food was great, the DJ played my favorite songs, and I danced my legs off! Handmade spice cake for dessert - yummy. The Viking gave me diamonds and rubies. And a .22 Ruger pistol.
(He said it was because I was a woman of many talents). He is my 'slow and steady fire'.

As I watched family and friends talking, laughing, eating, and dancing, my heart overflowed with love. My daughters wanted to give me a memorable birthday celebration, and they were 100% successful. But maybe they didn't know it would turn out to be a way for me to do something I needed to do--to say THANK YOU to the Universe for my life. To dance my love and joy and gratefulness without holding back. Sometimes we need to simply rejoice.

It was perfect. I am a lucky woman.

Angels vs Devils

Greetings from Domelandia,

I'm from a long line of Good German Girls. We keep clean, organized homes, we're good cooks, we're hellcats in bed, and sweet as pie to grocery store clerks and waitresses (unless they piss us off--then all bets are off).

I've been spending a lot of time in the garden this summer. A couple of times I've looked up from whatever I was watering or weeding or building to discover that the Viking was driving up the road after a hard day's work with no supper even thought about, much less started!! I have been so engaged that I completely lose track of what time it is. Don't get me wrong, the payroll gets done, the checkbook gets balanced, the dishes and clothes get washed, but those things are squeezed in around working (playing) in the garden.

And is it gorgeous! We're being rewarded with pounds and pounds of picture-perfect green beans (three kinds), squash, sweet baby carrots, Swiss chard, etc, etc, all packed with vitamins and minerals and the satisfaction that comes with growing some of your own food.

I looked around my house a couple of weeks ago and thought, OMG! This place looks like hell!
Floors unswept, the Viking's library and our family photos dim with dust, windows in need of a wash. (HOW long has it been since I cleaned the bathroom)? And Sister is coming next week!!

My friend Penny told me about a friend of hers who needs work. So I called Lisa, and she came over and helped me clean my house. As soon as we'd arranged her first visit, I got a bad case of the guilts. Good German Girls do it all, and look good doing it, and certainly do not hire outside help to clean their homes! The very idea.

I had a clear picture of my dilemma using the memory of an old-school cartoon.

On one shoulder, a devil whispering in my ear: You're lazy. You're selfish. You're wasting The Viking's hard-earned money.

On the other shoulder, an angel: It's OK to spend time doing what you love to do. You're providing quality food for your family. You'll be helping someone earn money. Your house will be clean.

I listened to the angel. The house feels wonderful, and I haven't felt guilty at all since I figured out that it wasn't the devil who was talking shit to me, it was my mother-in-law.

Letting Go

Greetings from Domelandia,

My grandson was at the doctor's office recently. When the doctor walked into the exam room, he yelled, "I DON"T WANT TO DIE!!!" (He's 4).

I can relate to that. And by the way, I don't want anyone or anything I love to die, either.
The past few years I've been faced with a series of losses. Some are big, some aren't, but they all point to one of the lessons I'm supposed to learn: Letting go.

About a month ago I noticed the apple tree we'd planted in 1991 looked ill. My friend Penny B looked in one of her books and described the symptoms of fire blight. She read the description and my heart sank. Turns out that this particularly nasty affliction is caused by hail, late frosts, and drought. So, I think, we're three for three. This tree holds a lot of good memories for us, and we even got several bushels of apples from it over the years. One remedy for fire blight is to spray the tree with copper sulfate while it's in bloom. This method kills bees; I won't do that. Another suggestion was to trim off all the blighted parts, which I attempted to do last week. There's just a skeleton left of our poor tree with a few leaves left to keep it alive. Maybe.

We lose our parents and our friends. Someone I knew died last spring and the shock and unfairness knocked the wind out of me. It's so painful for me to witness the grief of bereaved families that my stomach hurts for days after a funeral.

Pets get old and feeble, or go carousing and don't come home again. One of our old horses, the Palomino, broke her hip in a snowstorm a few years ago. The Viking had to put her down, and because the snow was so deep, we couldn't bury her. I vowed that our other horse, Glory, would not be food for carnivores--not that I don't appreciate circle of life stuff--but I couldn't handle it. Glory is the horse we bought at the sale barn for $35 and the horse that taught our daughters to ride. She has one messed up ear and has arthritis in her front legs. She was looking so poorly a couple of years ago, we thought she wouldn't make it through another winter, so our friend brought his backhoe and dug her grave. It's over in the meadow, a beautiful spot. She made it through that winter (and the next two), and more than one visitor finds the hole macabre. She's been with us 31 years and I'm resigned to losing her, but I know I'll cry when the time comes.

My friend lost her baby sister, then her Mom, and then her brother all within the space of a few years. She said, "Up to now, we've just whistled through life." She helped me recognize the signs when my Mom began her final journey. She provided resource books and endless support, which made the experience more bearable but not much easier. My siblings and I wondered why Mom's passing was such an awful ordeal. I keep telling myself that it was her death, not ours. That she had lots of things to work out before she could let go. That her passing was exactly as it was supposed to be.

I think people hang on beyond all reason because life is wonderful and they don't want to go.
Or they finally decide to go because too much sadness has accumulated and it's too much to bear.


My doctor convinced me that I should take statins to combat my high cholesterol. They made me feel tired and achy. I almost became reconciled to feeling tired and old all of the time, but one day I decided, "To hell with this." It took two months but now I feel like my old (ha, ha) self again. I'm certain that something will eventually kill me, but until then I refuse to feel like I'm dead before I really am.

In 2008 the Viking had triple bypass heart surgery, Mom got pneumonia, and I broke my ankle. (Bam! Bam! Bam!). Things were starting to settle down and then we heard that the loveliest of human beings, my sister-in-law, had breast cancer. BAM!!! She dealt with it head-on. Instead of asking "Why Me?" she asked, "Well, why NOT me?" She had the breast removed and scheduled a reconstruction. She got a tattoo where her nipple used to be, and moved on with her life.

I am grateful that I didn't lose the Viking. I'm SO not ready to let that part of my life go, but someday I'll have to. I'll keep doing the things I love to do while I still have time and energy. I'll get new pets to love, and keep good memories of the old ones. I'll remember the grace of my sister-in-law.

I'll get another apple tree, a blight-resistant one, and let go of it while I'm planting it.

Summer is My Favorite Season

Greetings From Domelandia,
This time of year, I practically live outside. Gardening (and all that that implies) is one of my passions. The Viking and I decided that one of this year's goals is to see if we can grow some food for real. So I have bitten off WAY more than I can chew and sometimes feel overwhelmed when I wake up.

Here's what I've been doing: I moved flagstones from an old patio area and used some of them to build a little sidewalk around our new dining room add-on. I had to use ropes, levers, and 2' lengths of fenceposts to move them. I dug out a bushel of old iris--now I need to decide where their new home will be. They are a deep purple color and smell like Grape Koolade. The yellow Dutch iris are in full bloom right now, are 2+ feet tall. They are velvet perfume.

The Viking (obviously, he GETS me) built me a state-of-the-art gopher-proof garden (cross your fingers!) Tilling as I go, I have thus far planted 3 kinds of onions, zuccini and yellow crookneck squash, pumpkin, Italian flat pole beans, baby limas, and Blue Lake green beans.
I planted 3 raspberry plants. For pretty, an assortment of sunflowers and hollyhocks, planted to face the morning sun. Columbines, lilies, delphiniums, and hosta in a shady spot. I've kept them all watered, and applied compost and mulch. I'm expecting to water them through June, our driest summer month. I feed the birds daily and remember to bring in the feeders at night so we won't have bear problems. I take the dogs for their daily walk and keep up with office duties for our business. I cook supper (not culinary triumphs--I just can't get into cooking right now), wash dishes, do laundry.

I make neverending lists for the next day: (Need to Plant: Cukes, carrots, corn, chard, cabbage (?), Anaheim pepper and tomato sets.)

This is the time of year we look forward to. The heat! The green! The wildflowers! The songs of birds from dawn 'til night. The beauty of our little valley.

Those little bags of seeds crammed full of possibility and hope.

Psychedelic Parrots and Confessions of a Nature Freak

Greetings from Domelandia,

The Viking and I were sitting in the airport recently reading a NY Times article about how many people, especially city dwellers, have no connection to the natural world. They don't really know (or care) where their food comes from, for example, or what gets sprayed on it while it's growing or right before they sink their teeth into it.

The extent of this disconnection amazes me. Strawberry Blonde daughter has a big garden and chickens. She is a generous woman and shares produce and eggs with people she knows. Her chickens lay green, blue, and tan-colored eggs. They eat table scraps and bugs and scratch around in the dirt. They live the way chickens were meant to live. The shells of the eggs are hard to crack, and the yolks are a deep yellow-orange with a rich, delicious flavor. She was dismayed to learn that one friend had thrown the eggs away because they weren't white and because they were hard to crack.

Besides trying to grow some clean food, I think the main reason we're here is because we need to feel connected to the wild world. I feel odd and out of sorts if I can't spend some time outside every day. Being outside makes me feel peaceful and centered. Maybe because the sky is huge. Trees, not buildings, crowd the landscape. The noises we hear come mostly from birds in the daytime and coyotes at night. There are millions of small lives being lived in each moment of every day. We're surrounded by Beauty. We are tuned in to the music of the spheres.

Before we came to the land, the Viking and I were frustrated city kids. Both of us had fathers whose lives had taken them far away from their farms. They talked to us about how wonderful life is in the country, how satisfying it is to provide food for one's family, how peaceful life can be away from the city. We dreamed of this life separately as children and then the stars aligned themselves so we could dream our life together. This was good, because neither of us would have been satisfied with suburbia. I think God has his quota of normal people, and then there's us.

We've learned how to live in relative harmony with Nature. I quit being afraid of bugs and spiders. It doesn't scare me when hummingbirds fly right up to my face to get a closer look at me. I enjoy getting to see them up close. From the beginning, we decided not to kill beneficial snakes (they eat rats and mice), though one bullsnake did a thoroughly believable imitation of a rattlesnake, and the Viking bought the act and killed it. (We had little kids, for gosh sakes)! We were both chagrined to find that we'd killed a 'good' snake. I sat down and cried. A few years back, the Viking decided that even rattlesnakes deserve to live. They get relocated far away from the house, because now we have grandkids, for gosh sakes.

Best of all, sometimes we get to catch glimpses of the Mystery. There is a pond on our place that holds runoff water, but for many months there is no water in it. Before the monsoons start in summer, the pond is baked dry. After the first pounding thunderstorm, the water seeps down into the dirt and the Spadefoot toads wake up. They start singing and swimming around in the muddy water and begin the happy job of making tadpoles. As the pond shrinks away in Autumn, the toads bury themselves and wait until it's time to start it all over again.

One of my favorite things is bird watching. I recognize most of the birds that come to our feeders, and look in the bird book to identify the ones I don't. I can identify some birds by their songs alone. I missed seeing the Evening Grosbeaks for a couple of years until my friend and fellow nature freak reminded me that some birds prefer to eat from perches and some like to eat their seeds on a flat spot. These Grosbeaks are one of my favorites and I nicknamed them The Psychedelic Parrots because they have large, fluorescent yellow-green bodies. You wouldn't believe a bird could look like that unless you could see it for yourself.

In true nature freak fashion, when they came back, it made my day.

Neighbors

Greetings from Domelandia,

I live in a little valley in Southern Colorado down by the New Mexico border. We've been here 30-odd years, with the exception of a year spent back east while my husband and I worked to pay off the hospital bill for the birth of our first child. We also took a sabbatical in 2000 to see if we could find a better place to live, but ended up back here. When we finally got home from that trip, I was so happy to be home I fell to my knees and kissed the ground.

Sometimes I tell people how long we've been here and they say, "Oh, do you like it?" It cracks me up every time.

We raised two amazing daughters up here in the foothills. At first we had no running water, no electricity, no telephone. It was hard sometimes, but the payback was being able to live in the middle of nowhere. Who needed TV when the wild world hummed with the music of LIFE, right outside our door?

My husband the Viking planted us smack dab in the middle of this little mile-long canyon. The first part of our 'driveway' down at the county road crossed a stream and this crossing was steep, narrow, and dangerously slippery when wet. The Viking said, "Keeps out the riff-raff." Only our most determined friends would dare that crossing, even in fine weather. It wasn't a problem for us, at least in the beginning, because we didn't have a vehicle. We caught rides to town with one of the pioneers who live further up the road. It worked for us.

We didn't have neighbors until some time ago when the land that borders the county road was sold and the first people moved in. They were determined to tell all of us The Right Way to Live. They had opinions about everything and expressed them louder than anyone else. After a few winters, they moved on. We'd gotten used to the reality of having neighbors down there, and so we welcomed the new ones that followed. The Viking even helped them with some building projects.

We had the whole valley to ourselves, acres and acres of unfenced wilderness. Our children rode their horses all over the canyon, following the paths of elk and deer. Every place had a name--Raven Rock, the Meadow of Morning, Serendipity Trail. I can still see our girls, red and golden hair loose and streaming behind them, pounding up to the barn after a morning in the hills. They rode bareback and were patently fearless.

An elderly couple bought the 80 acres behind us. We were a little surprised, but not upset. They drove a small travel trailer back to the end of the canyon and visited only in the summertime. They were friendly and considerate. They brought us little gifts, including some iris corms that I planted alongside the path to the well. The neighbors made little hitching posts near their trailer so our girls could tie up their ponies when they visited. One day they asked us if we would mind if there was a gas well on their property. And would we mind having a nice new road with big trucks going back and forth in front of our house all day? We were horrified. "We don't see our place as an investment," we said. "This is our home." And for some reason, maybe because they were people who understood that money isn't everything, they declined the offer from the gas exploration company. I am forever grateful to those two sweet souls. When the iris bloom each May, I think of them and send prayers to Heaven, where they most assuredly reside.

As the years went by, we got running water, solar electricity, a good road, a satellite dish, a couple of cars. We even bought a little parcel of land to keep it safe from development.

A few years ago the land at the end of the canyon was sold, and sold again. We had an opportunity to buy it, but by then we were saving money for college tuition. (Plus if you buy all the land that touches yours, it just never ends). The most recent owners are from the Big City. They bought the land as an investment and as a possible place to live when they retire. We hardly saw them until a couple of years ago when they started spending time on the property in the summertime. They told us that their intention was to allow the gas exploration company to put a well on their place. This time there was nothing we could do to prevent it. Thank goodness the road to the well won't go through our place, and that makes it way more tolerable, but we struggled with these changes anyway.

I don't recall the Viking and me formally discussing it, but at some point we became reconciled to the fact that we'll be getting full-time neighbors. We even said when they move down here for good, we want to have a good relationship with the new folks. I'm glad we had some time to get used to the idea, because the other evening, our new neighbor stopped by for a visit. He wanted to talk. He said, "Where I live is tame, boring. Down here is wild." He asked surprising questions: "What have you given to the land? What has the land given you?" He wanted to know how he could be a good neighbor. There was more to him than I thought.

He and his wife will do just fine down here in the wild world, with the help of some good neighbors.