Back to bush time

What did you find there? Did you stand a while and stare? Well, lemme tell you. I stayed. I saw. I saw some more and looked around. A lot. Because home on the range has gotten a little strange, in the unusual sense. At least in the daylight hours. Which is to say I've had to go down to the lowlands, down to the town, and take me a job. A strange and innovative way to top up the coffers to the level still required as this project, which is to say, this fine life we are livin' gets under way. So I thought I might as well get a good one and do shit that I love to do. Which has all been a little engrossing for the past couple months, involving those oft cited evenings and weekends and the required willingness we often see attached to them. But it's all coolin' off now and this weekend I got to get back out on the spring mud and participate in home a little bit.  Tick a few things off that list that rides to town in my head every morning and updates every evening as I pull up the driveway. A bit of an adjustment though, it turns out, to go from going places and doing other things while thinking about the list to being here and actually damn well doing something. Where to start? With the first step, as my old friend Ken Chapman used to say. Which first step? Which project? Which of so many things I've been dying to do. So I stared some more. Looked around. Finally took Tammy's advice and quit worrying about it. Went with the stand around and the stare. Sure enough, focus followed. Elsewhere fell away. The late snow quit, the sun warmed the good spring mud and some shit started getting done.                    
                                                                                                                                                       -D

He's my Whiskey Alexander                                                                                                                               Tammy Stranack

Put the load right on Tammy

Almost hiking season. I'm gonna be ready, not whiny. My plan? To throw the dog food or flour bag and some weights into my pack. Forty-five pounds or so. And shoulder it while doing my chores. My outside chores. Firewood, water and laundry. For a two-hour stretch. Yikes. Yeah, I was nervous. Wasn't sure if I was tough enough. Splitting wood with a pack on. Carrying five-gallon pails of water, or just squatting down to pick up the split wood, assuming I could swing the heavy splitting maul above my head. But if I am tough enough to do that for a while? I'll be able to groove out like nobody's business when I get hikin'. Pack? What pack? Too easy.
So what bothered me the most at the end of my brutal two hours wasn't my wobble knees or the unstable snowy trails. With an extra 106 pounds (water bucket included) sinking unexpectedly is a little bit dicey. Makes one breathe out in a loud grunt. Nope it wasn't my racing heart or my dead arms trying desperately not to drop the rounds of wood as I walked them several hundred metres down the road or through the trails. It wasn't even my whiny, hungry cat, who followed behind or even underfoot. In fact we were both hungry. And, no, even that didn't bug me the most. Maybe it should have been when I had my first fight with a knotty piece of spruce, draining energy, near puking with hunger. And it wasn't even when I fell over backwards while filling my water bucket. Yes, it would be very easy to make that up. But I fell over backwards. Just about had to take off my pack for that one.
And it wasn't the second fight with the spruce. When it won. I landed my feeble blow right in the middle of the block. Damn. It stuck, and when my drenched, drippy, hungry, sore, bruised, sobbing self finally pulled it out, only the handle came free. Good, I thought, I was done anyway. Oh, Baby, if you're reading this, we need a new splitting mall.
So what the hell would piss me off more than any of those things?
My baby toe. If I hadn't been able to focus on a baled up piece of sock wearing a painful blister in my toe, I think I might've grown a brain  and thrown that heavy bag down the outhouse hole or something. Instead I can live to do it all again. Thanks to my fucked up little toe. Yay.

Castro's Cuba

Again. We have an excuse this time. But yet again, we have run out of firewood a wee bit early. We landed our asses back out here in October and did our best to store away a winters supply. And we came close thanks to the much reduced space we needed to heat. But ahh... Hmm.

Well there are still a few rounds out there, I pack in what I need for the night. But I guess I'll have to buck up some more. Except it's too bad I can't start the chainsaw. I'll just pack this one a little closer to the house. Maybe get busy, real busy with the axe, hatchet, saw or whatever else might work.

-Tammy

Good-bye snow angel

There are a few days every spring when you can dance on top of the snow. After the melt starts. And in the morning, after a night below freezing. It is a  funtastic time.

You can wonder randomly in and out of the trees. Anywhere really. Go ahead, jump up and down. You won't come crashing down through three feet of snow. But do get out early 'cause every day now, it turns into a mucky mess by noon.

I wasn't aware that the time had come until one morning seeing  my goofy husband flapping and jumping wildly, grinning toothedly, it dawned on me what his excited game of charades was trying to spell out.

It is time to run and skip or lay on top of the snow.

He had to leave for work but made me promise to get out and walk this snow. Magic melting freezing snow.

Bathing hole

A bath, a big bath. I can't wait. Our favorite place to scrub up on the way home. Just use fish friendly soap.

-Tammy