Rural Dreams

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Just remember that my mother reads this.

I spent some time just

I spent some time just driving around yesterday and I came across some handmade signs that said land for sale with someone's name and number. I saw them in a couple of different places - on really lovely dirt roads. Steve had an appointment with the guy today and went and looked at land while I took a quilting class in Hudson. How luxurious to be able to have scissors, pins and a hot iron out without having to worry about a two year old! The class only consisted of myself and an older woman - I'll say her name was Doris. It was so nice to sit around sewing with other women. We spent an awful lot of time admiring the quilts of the woman who owned the store, grilling her about how she did things and also just chatting. I mentioned that we were looking for land and they had all kinds of advice about getting tax exemptions for agriculture. Doris' husband is a farmer - they rent all of the land that he farms. When Steve came to pick me up he was very excited and said that we could definitely get some great property from this guy and that he would finance it (at 12%! ouch). Doris asked who the guy was and when Steve told her his name Doris twitched. She said "I'm just going to tell you this - keep your knees together". We were laughing so hard - imagine your grandmother saying that. Some of the land that Doris and her husband rent is owned by this guy and I guess they've had some problems.

Steve took this

Steve took this

The 129 acres that I

The 129 acres that I mentioned in a previous post is also sold.
I got a listing e-mailed to me today from a realtor.
It has power lines running through it so I wasn't even that interested.
Turns out it's sold.

The land is sold. I

The land is sold.
I can't believe how hard this is.

We had dinner with Jess

We had dinner with Jess and Leland last night and talked some about buying land together. We talked about splitting the land vs. buying it and building on it cooperatively and we all agreed that the idea of doing it cooperatively was more appealing to all us. I am very excited about this. Jess is interested in florist kinds of things and we discussed using composting toilets and a greywater system with the greywater system watering a flower garden. We also talked about building our homes in a U shape so that there is a shared courtyard in the center. I am very very excited about all of this. Lee had catalogs for woodstoves, sawmills and a solarpowered kiln for drying lumber. Here is the land that I am most interested in now. It's on a beautiful dirt road. I just have to get the realtor to return my call. Realtors are incredible.

In other news, Columbia County now has the highest Lyme disease rates in the country.

The house is under contract

The house is under contract already.
How frustrating.

Our house plans change every

Our house plans change every few days. Today we looked at four parcels of land and a house. Actually, three of the parcels didn't have realtor signs so we weren't sure EXACTLY where they were. Sometimes I wonder about realtors. We liked the general areas of two of them very much though. Last we looked at this house. We were only able to drive by it, but it looked really interesting and the price is right - we would split it with our friends Jess and Leland (Steve is apprenticing with Leland) and all of us live there. It's a little bit of wacky idea, but it might work. We'd renovate it and then sell it. Steve and Lee are going to go and look at it this week. It comes with a huge barn but not much land. The lots in Mass tend to be smaller than in NY. It's really close to Pittsfield, which is the only real city in Berkshire County, but it is far enough out of town to feel like the country. Right at this moment it is feeling like the most likely prospect, but tomorrow everything could be completely different.

Here's Wes in his glory,

Here's Wes in his glory, gnawing on a skull (deer I assume, but I don't really know). There is an incredible assortment of bones scattered in a circle behind the barn. I can recognize jaws and teeth and a hoof and vertebrae and lots and lots of what I guess are leg bones.

And here's our cat (whose name may be Roxy or Rita or Manuella or Delphine) drinking out of the bathtub. She is completely enamoured with dripping or running water. If I take a bath and have the water running, she walks around the edge of the tub.

Cute (?) Things They Do

Cute (?) Things They Do
Before I tell this story you have to understand that there are NO walls in this barn we are renting and so you can't have any real privacy, except by sheer distance. Well, today Aidan pulled out a box of tampons from the drawer where I keep them. He proceeded to rip open the box and pull out tampons. He likes to dismember them, a practice that I have witnessed before. I gave him one as a sacrifice. He ran off with it and I put the rest away. He happened to be naked. Then, I was doing some other thing and wasn't really paying attention to him. When I looked at him again he had gotten the mousie out of the cardboard and was earnestly trying to put it into his butt. I was dumbfounded. I really didn't even know what to say to him so I just sat on the bed and watched him for a minute, amazed. So he came over to me and handed me the tampon and turned around so I could put it in his butt for him. I started to explain to him that tampons are for girls and then stopped myself, imagining him trying to get some poor little girl to use one. I just didn't know what to say to him. He doesn't have much language yet - I didn't know what he would understand.

Ticks
It's tick time again. It seems that two days in a row of warm weather = ticks. I put Frontline on the dog and the cat a few days ago and was feeling really bad about putting poison on my innocent pets. Well, today I was glad I did it - I pulled another dozen ticks off of Wes. He's the perfect color - they are really easy to see on him. I still don't have any alcohol to drop them into - so - how to kill ticks? Well, I made tick soup. I just put a pot of water on to boil and dropped the ticks in there when I found them. Please, please don't tell me that half an hour of boiling water doesn't kill ticks. That would be more than I could bear.

I went and looked at

I went and looked at the land on Rt 22 and the Green River with Jes today. We took our dogs. Her enthusiasm about the property was starting to rub off on me and the dogs were in heaven playing together in the river. Then a man from a neighboring property came over and complained that the dogs had been on his property and he had chickens. He said that a dog could get shot that way.

I told Jes when we got back to her house that that was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for that property. I think she agreed.

Cute Things They Do Today

Cute Things They Do
Today Aidan was trying to brush the cat's teeth - with my toothbrush. The cat was an example of tolerance. She's a cool cat.

Aidan has, it seems

Aidan has, it seems very suddenly, turned into a little boy. He's taller and thinner and talking a lot - repeating words that we say regularly. I noticed a picture of him that was taken in November and he looks completely different. He's really a joy and such an easy kid. His cousins were over the other day and Sophia and him were running around with plastic buckets on their heads with Sophia announcing "we're bucket heads". So Aidan is still putting the bucket on his head and running around gleefully. He changed a lot after his most recent sickness and I have noticed this before - him seeming to grow up suddenly after an illness. A friend mentioned noticing the same thing with her daughter.

In other news - we think our cat is really cool now. There was a day soon after we got her where Steve and I agreed that she was a really mediocre cat. Then there was a day recently that we agreed that she was an exceptionally cool cat. Now we just need a name for her. Our most recent conversation about it resulted in the name Delphine for the DJ Delphine Blue who used to have the radio show Shocking Blue on WBAI. We'll see if it sticks.

We are still looking for land - we have some friends who we have been thinking about going in on some land with whose need to move just became more urgent. We tried to look at a parcel today that they have been considering with a friend of theirs - it's 18 acres that would be divided into three 6-acre lots. I wish I could say that I am excited by it - it is right on the Green River and has a partially constructed bridge. We couldn't really get over the river and onto the property with Aidan. What's bugging me about it is that it is right on Route 22 - a very busy road . They say that if you build toward the back you can't hear the road, and the river runs between the road and the property, but its not a river like the Hudson - its a river that you could walk across in most places. I really wish that I was excited by the prospect of it. I'm ready to move on... or maybe I'm not.

I just walked over a

I just walked over a piece of property with Will: 128 acres for $129,000. It was on the side of a mountain and it was beautiful - there was a space for a home on the road at the bottom of the hill with a stream meandering through. Now I'm scheming - who can we share it with...? I haven't seen anything as cheap as $1000/ acre.

The washing machine repair people

The washing machine repair people still haven't called me. I told our landlord about it and he said he got the washer for free and to just chuck it. Now I'm just waiting for the repair people to call so I can tell them what assholes they are. Or maybe I'll just make an appointment with them and then not be here. The landlord also revealed to me that there is no electric set up for a dryer. I really thought that I had left laundromats behind on Long Island.

We had a musical weekend.

We had a musical weekend. On Saturday night Aidan and I went to see a "family concert" featuring David Grover, a children's musician who happens to be our friend Jess' dad. He is also a folk musician who played with Arlo Gutherie. It was in a small space at the Spencertown Academy and was a benefit for the Mountain Road School, an alternative private school that seems a little Waldorfy and is located on the grounds of a Sufi community. It was nice, but a little lonely as I went by myself and didn't know anyone there. People were actually quite friendly, but I am shy. Aidan had a great time. He was doing laps around the place to the music with other kids. What had me jazzed about the show the most was a performance of "This Land is Your Land". Apparently there have been countless verses written by people to the song and they sang one that Woody Gutherie wrote. His son Arlo had taught it to David. I wish I could remember the words but I'll just say that it was irreverent and radical. I felt really priveliged to get that sort of direct transmission from Woody Gutherie.

Oh I think I just found it here.

Last night Steve and I went to see The Blind Boys Of Alabama at a small theatre in Great Barrington. I was a little apprehensive, I thought it was going to be blues, gospel, r&b. Actually there was a band that played a very long opening set that I wasn't real thrilled about, but the Blind Boys were AMAZING. They are going to be performing on the Grammys so everyone can check them out. They were straight up gospel and they are blind and the "boys" look like they are in their 70's or 80's. They were incredible singers and performers.

You might be wondering where Aidan was. Well, he was with his very first babysitter. We went to the concert with friends and brought Aidan over to their house to share their babysitter. As we were leaving I wasn't sure if we should sneak out or if I should say goodbye. I decided to quickly say goodbye and kissed him on the cheek. He just looked at me and said real casually, "bye".

In front of the house

In front of the house we are renting:

Do you know that thing

Do you know that thing that happens to your brain sometimes when you're sick, where it wraps around some thought and then skips like a scratched record while horror music plays in the background? I had it happen to me once before this recent sickness, it was also a stomach virus that attacked in the night.

The first time it happened I still owned Instant Karma. I had gone to a trade show that day and purchased fountains from a company whose original line had sold extremely well for me. They had a new, more expensive model made out of nicer materials that I had decided to try. Well all night long my sick sick brain was rehashing the whole buying scenario and second guessing its wisdom and imagining all sorts of horrible outcomes. Somehow, buying that fountain was going to cause all sorts of disasters. That one item wouldn't sell and then I wouldn't be able to pay ANY of my bills and my life would be one hellish utility disconnect after another.

In fact, I didn't sell the fountain, but it became a very nice gift for my step-mom and the whole thing really wasn't a problem at all.

So would you like to know the thought that was torturing me this time around?

What to write in my blog.

I got sick last night.

I got sick last night. I felt a little nauseous when I went to sleep. I woke up to Aidan making the biggest puke ever - then I threw up too. Steve was out of town until last night. I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't been there. Aidan was fine after that but I was throwing up til morn. I'm just starting to feel human again. Aidan was a kind and gentle kid today, thank goodness.

Our washing machine is still not fixed.

I've just finished reading The

I've just finished reading The Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. This is from the introduction, it is amazing to me how this could have been written today in the wake of 9/11:

During the deepest part of the Great Depression, in 1932, we moved from New York City to a farm in the Green Mountains... When we moved to Vermont we left a society gripped by depression and unemployment, falling prey to facism, and on the verge of another world wide military free-for-all; and entered a pre-industrial, rural community. The society from which we moved had rejected in practice and priciple our pacifism, our vegetarianism and our collectivism. So thorough was this rejection that, holding such views, we could not teach in the schools, write in the press or speak over the radio, and were thus denied our part in public education. Under these circumstances, where could outcasts from a dying social order live frugally and decently, and at the same time have sufficient liesure and energy to assist in the speedy liquidation of the disintegrating society and to help replace it with a more workable social system?

The Nearings were inspiring radicals - they became homesteaders, growing almost all of their own food, building their own buildings, and mostly trading for other things that they needed. They did this until Scott's death at 100 and then Helen kept right on going alone. She died recently, in her 80s I think. The thing is that they didn't have kids, and reading their book, I kept wondering how things would have been different for them with little ones.

We are looking for land

We are looking for land to buy and build a house on. It is very hard - we'd like 10+ acres (I'd REALLY like 50) but the prices here aren't cheap and every time we find something that might be good, it turns out to be on a main road or you can hear I-90 from it (Mass Tpke). We have to be out of this fabulous barn by July 1st - so we wanted to find something right away so that we can start building in the spring and maybe have a place to live by 7/1. Yes, its crazy. I'd be up for sharing a big piece of land with some like minded people. At least there is no snow so far so it is easy to look at land - actually, the conditions are ideal because you can really see the way land lays in the winter when the leaves are off of the trees.

Steve is out of town

Steve is out of town for two days - doing some construction at 55 Burtis Ave. and playing drums for some dance classes at CW Post. At the same time, my car is in the shop. It has been there for almost a full week. I hate to say it, but on Long Island it would have been done in a day or two. I also called to have someone come out and look at our washing machine last week - on Wednesday. No one has come yet. They don't give you a date, they just say that they'll call you the morning that they can fit you in. We are a little stir crazy here without a car and no papa, but better here than Elmont. At least we can go outside here. Aidan keeps bringing me the car keys, putting his shoes on, dragging my jacket over to me. He says "AR" (translation: car). I keep saying, "we don't have a car, honey" but this kid wants to go out and party, he keeps on trying.