I’ve decided to get rid of the opening page and have my blog directly at notsothoreau.com. So here you are.

We went out to the boat again on Sunday. We’ve got new batteries for the engines. The starters are going to be rebuilt this week. One of the carburetors is shot, so we will need to replace that. If we can get one engine working, that will be enough to move it. We’ve been trying to sort out what work needs to be done immediately. I am hoping to move in by April. I am spending half the week in town and the other half out at the house in the woods. I need to get settled in somewhere. This just is too hard emotionally. The dogs seem to enjoy the time in town, and then spend the time in the woods catching up on their sleep. There is a fenced yard in town, so they get to spend a lot of time outside there.

As for how my life is going, well some days I just don’t know. I seem pretty happy in town, when I’m with the boyfriend. When I’m back out in the woods, it gets lonely. The amount of stuff to deal with is overwhelming. I am in a mess with the “friend” who was supposedly selling us the place in the woods. He is reluctant to put it up for sale, which means I have no chance to recover any of the money I put down on the place. He is trying to prevent me from removing the rest of my personal property, like the trailer. He can’t prevent me from doing that legally, but it does make things messy. I have tried to be conciliatory, but simply can’t afford to give him any more money on the place. And I’m angry about the whole mess. Jeffrey got sick taking him to the VA Hospital. I really don’t feel like I owe the man anything else.

The other issue of course are medical bills. I have a ton of them. I put in for the WA state medical insurance back when Jeffrey got sick. It took until January before they denied it at the first level. It’s now up at the disability office. I had to go in and give them a copy of the death certificate this morning. The woman that took it remembered working with Jeffrey back at the Nursery. Little things like that are always hard. I don’t know how that will turn out.

And then there are the usual issues in a new relationship. I have to remind myself how little time I’ve been in this relationship and how long I was married in the old one. It’s tough. We seem to connect well and get along well enough. But I am dealing with a different person and I have become someone different. Both of us have been dealing with grief and the loss of our spouse. It’s complex. I think that it will all get easier with time. We need to see what our relationship looks like. It’s still developing.

Okay, so pictures of the soon to be Grace O’Malley (named after a famous Irish woman pirate). She is currently on the Oregon side in a marina, as we try to get the engines running to bring her home. I think I am going to like living in this boat. There’s a major amount of work to be done yet. I may not be able to move in until April. After life in the trailer, this seems spacious. Fortunately, the head (bathroom) is one of the areas where we are going to need to redo the walls. That means we can build out a useable shower. I am truly tired of tiny bathrooms. The plan is to find and fix the leaks, repair the walls, and put something down on the floors. The wood work up front will also need work, but that can be done while we live in it. We also need to get the wiring sorted out and get the generator running. Lots of stuff to be done, I know. When I was out there on Sunday, it was an amazing thing to walk around in the boat, watch the fishermen come in and look at the other boats in the water. I can imagine sitting out front, under the cover at the table, and doing my morning journaling. I know how small spaces fill up fast, once you start moving in. And the dogs and cats will make it livelier yet. I can’t wait to start coming home to this.

My soon to be home

Looking out at the front of the boat

Seating area forward

Looking out at the galley

This is the bedroom area

The engine room

Side of the boat

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m planning to move to Vancouver come spring. The problem is that the boyfriend has his son, son’s girlfriend and 7 month old baby already at the house. He has property on the river, but the trailer there is occupied. So we have been looking for solutions. There are a couple of old houseboats on the place, in bad need of repair. They can’t be lived in as there are no arrangements for sewage.

Enter craigslist, where he found an ad for a 1969 Chris-craft Aqua Home. This is a 46′ houseboat, designed to be lived in on water. It has two 327 engines and can cruise if you want. This one needs work, so the price was right. We had to wait a bit, as there was an offer ahead of us. That guy bailed out and we are now the owners of the boat (or will be when we finish paying it off over the next few years). The first problem is to move it down to the moorage that Lon owns. He knows someone with a tug who can move it. (The engines work but it hasn’t been started for awhile. Seems safer to have someone move it across river from the Oregon to Washington side.) Once we have it in place, we’ll start interior repairs. It had water leak into the walls, so there is panelling to be replaced. As soon as we can make it liveable, I start moving in. I am already spending weekends in town and commuting the long drive to Hood River on days I need to work. I take the dogs with me. It will be easier when I get the cats moved over and all my stuff. I have so much to do that it is dizzying. I’m still happy over it. I won’t pretend that there haven’t been a few bumps along the way, in this new relationship. It’s hard to start over. Still, he makes me happy and I think I am going to like river life. I am going to try and get some pictures in the next couple of days to post, so stay tuned.

The weather has finally moderated a bit. The roads up to home were icy, but hopefully will be a bit better tonight. I was stunned to pull into the drive and discover that they pushed back the berm, leaving a parking place next to the road. Why, I have no idea. It sure makes it easier to back into my spot. Of course, with the ice, I am back to throwing chains under the tires to drive that foot up to the road.

I am starting to spend my weekends in town. I take the dogs with me, leaving the cats home with food. I hope this phase doesn’t last all that long. It feels a bit crazy. I am hoping for more snow melt this week, enough to get my little car back on the road and start moving stuff out of my place. I need to get the trailer out somehow. I also need to clear out the sheds. If I can get it all moved over, then I’ll be done with that place. It’s going to be hard to do, but necessary. I can’t live there alone and I can’t afford to make payments on it. It’s a dream that ended when Jeffrey died.

I henna’ed my hair last week. I enjoyed the grey, but decided that I needed a newer, younger look. It may be from having a boyfriend, I don’t know. Lots of changes coming up in the near future. I guess that’s the way it goes. I hope I can find time to do some visiting soon too.

As you know, Jeffrey died in October. That first night I was in the ICU, I was sitting in the waiting room talking to Ginger as the nurses did some things to him. A man stopped by to chat. His wife was down the hall in the ICU, fighting lung cancer and pnuemonia. We talked about goats and parrots, medical proceedures. Over the time Jeffrey was in the ICU, I would bump into this man and we would talk. It was a strange thing. It felt like a bubble of normalcy would surround us. We were going through the same hell, with the same doctors. He’d been married for 21 years, so it was just as difficult for him as it was for me. On the 12th, I talked to him in the ICU, on his way for a family meeting to take his wife off the ventilator. She died that night. I had to make the same decision for Jeffrey the next day.

We kept in touch by email and phone, with long phone calls talking about the things that had happened to us. There were no defenses between us, as neither of us had the energy to lie. We talked about our spouses and tried to make sense of the terrible thing that had happened. The memorial services were a day apart. He wanted to come out to talk to me, but it didn’t happen. He went silent for a couple of weeks. I continued to send emails. He finally let me know that he was attracted to me, but felt that I would not be ready for advances like that. We continued to talk and went to the Art Museum together. There were sparks there, for sure. Things began to heat up between us.

We’ve gone through a couple of bad spots in our relationship and every time, it deepens. It’s blossomed into love, for both of us. It’s still terribly early after the death of our spouses and that may be why we have this fast and faster relationship. When you’ve had a loved one die suddenly, it gives your life an urgency. And that is what seems to be happening now. I don’t want to take things slowly. And so, come spring, I will be leaving the mountains and moving back to the flatlands, by the big river. I have a lot of loose ends to wrap up. I’ll miss the place, in many ways. I miss Jeffrey each day and always will. I can’t make much sense out of this all. I just know that even in sorrow, I have this new relationship that brings me so much joy.

The snow continues to melt, although it has slowed a bit. There are patches of bare ground in the driveway. It looks like I might be able to move the 323 up the drive maybe sometime in February. We are making progress. I haven’t been able to get back home since the snow hit. I’d like to go over and check things out but it will have to wait for now. I’m doing 9 days straight, before the next day off.

My life is changing wildly and there are parts of that I will wait to blog about. I’m starting to be public about these changes, at least among friends and co-workers, but I’m not quite ready to be THAT public just yet. Sorry to be mysterious. At some point, all things will become clear.

I went for a consultation at an accupuncturist today. I am going to try a few treatments. I’d like to do more this spring and summer, so am working to lose a bit more weight and gain flexibility. Just the standard stuff. I feel more like myself since I passed December. I still miss Jeffrey, of course, but I seem to have accepted his death. It’s not what I wanted to happen, but there it is. Me and the dogs and cats are doing okay at the house. I’m just ready for spring. I’ve got a lot of decisions to make. I still am waiting to hear from the state about whether they will pick up any of the bills. I will likely have to file bankruptcy this year. There’s no way I can pay medical bills on what I make. I couldn’t afford to pick up insurance for him after all. And so life goes on, waiting for the snow to melt and for spring to come.

One of the drawbacks to living in this house is the trees. They’ve grown up around the place and I knew it could be dangerous. I’ve made it through this storm okay, but here is what I’m talking about.

Tree on the garage

This is the garage and the tree against it. Now, let’s look at the car port:

Tree on the carport

There was a small tree across the drive, now cut up, thanks to Heath’s help:

Tree across the drive

And finally, a view of the ruts, left after Heath got stuck doing his good deed:

Loretta and the ruts

But happily, gloriously, the weather has warmed and the snow continues to melt. The ruts did make it easier for me to walk. I needed a break from the snow. There is a lot of winter left. I’d like for the driveway to clear and I miss my walks in the woods. Life at 1700 ft in winter does not always let you do the things you would like. I’m thankful that the trees caused minimal damage. I hope I don’t have any more of these pictures to post.

Well, it has been an awful year and truly the most awful Christmas eve imaginable. I won’t go into details. At any rate, it’s Christmas day and I am ready to move forward past the holidays into a new year. We have snow, lots of snow. There is a tree down against the carport roof, one against the garage and a small one that came down in front of my other car. I don’t know how many will come down today. But the house has stood for a long time and belonged to a good Christian. So I am hoping that he’s left enough of himself around to keep the house standing through this. I haven’t felt like celebrating and still don’t, so this is as festive as it gets. Hope you are having a happier holiday than I. Be careful dealing with the snow, if you have some.

It was 10 degrees F this morning in the car port. The house was down to 55 degrees last night. I had all six cats on the bed. We had to make room for Loretta too. We are all managing. I try to keep the fire going at night, but I get home so late that there’s barely enough time to take the chill off. It is supposed to moderate later and dump a bunch of snow. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that either. I always find that this extreme cold just saps my energy. I was supposed to go to the Christmas party, but changed my mind. Somehow, it’s as though Jeffrey is still out at the trailer, fighting to warm it up for me when I come home. I know it’s not so and I’m glad he doesn’t have to deal with this, even though I miss him so. My mind is just working that way tonight and I won’t be any fun at any party. The dogs, as always, will be thrilled to see me.

I manage to drive back home occasionally. Sometimes, it’s very painful. Some days, like today, it seems wonderful. There was a flock of small birds in the tree next to the trailer. There was a flock of chickens, out where our chickens used to cruise. Jeffrey always thought they were from one of our black hens, that crossed with the neighbor’s turken rooster. They mostly have naked necks and there seem to be about three roosters in the bunch. They grew up in the trees behind Mike’s place. I loved seeing them out there today.

I went up to the garden to check on it. I still have lots of fall crops. I love the wild kales and picked some to have for dinner. It is supposed to start snowing on Friday night. I am planning to go out tomorrow and try to cover things up a bit. I am taking the 11th off, as it would have been my 38th wedding anniversary. I think I will be okay but did not want to push it at work. I am so grateful that I was able to get the garden in this year. I’ve even got some cabbage up. If I can shelter it from the arctic air this weekend, there’s a chance for some real growth there come spring. I do not know yet whether I will keep the place, or move back home. I miss it, some days. I miss Jeffrey every day.

Okay, so I’ve talked about grief and death, cheery topics all. Time to talk about laughter. I think everyone’s heard of Norm Cousins’ experience with laughter healing his illness. Now, can you think of anyone that you know, who has a serious illness and has tried it? Nope, me neither. What I know so far, from my experience, is that laughter eases the burden of grief. It doesn’t make the grief disappear. It just makes the physical burden of grief lift for a bit. If you have been dragging that weight around, that is enough.

Yet, when I’ve talked about this on lists for widows/widowers, you would think I had insulted them. One woman told me that it was her grief and she would deal with it in her own way. That’s fine. It truly is a very personal grief and no one should be told how to handle it. My point was that laughter is a tool to help you deal with it. You can chose to use it or not. My situation is that I have to function. I don’t have the luxury of dwelling in that grief. I have to be able to go to work and do all the things that need to be done at home. I just can’t let myself get so weighted down that I can’t do these things. So I will take my laughter any way that I can.

Christmas will still suck. It will be hard to get through our anniversary on the 11th. Some mornings, I get up and I just want to stay home and ride the grief out. Somehow, Loretta or one of the cats will bring me out of it, maybe even just an email. It’s enough. Grief can recede in the background, just like any other mood. It can be managed, just a bit. Some days, that’s enough.

I’m going to try and write some thoughts up about death. I don’t want this to become the grief and death blog, but there’s not a lot of homesteading going on right now.

So basically, when you lose your spouse, there is that life you had together. Then there is the death and there is now. The death is like a barrier between you and that life. The thickness of that barrier depends on how long you fought death. If your spouse went quickly, as in an accident, the barrier is like a plate of glass. If it was a long fight, the barrier is thicker, like glass bricks. There are true warriors out in the world, that fought death for months, trying to win the battle. If death wins, they are terribly wounded by the battle. You can’t imagine some of the stories I’ve read on the grief lists.

There’s a book by Ianthe Brautigan, about her father’s suicide. It’s called “You Can’t Catch Death”. It was something her mother told her, meaning that death is not contagious. But it feels like it is. You didn’t die, but everything about your life did. The relationship is dead. The future is dead. You are in a strange limbo, weighted down with grief. If you are trying to comfort someone that has lost a spouse, this is why they may seem strange to you. Until it happens to you, you simply can’t imagine how awful the reality is. You get frozen in time, trapped down by grief. You can prepare a bit for certain days that you know will be bad. But it is the little routine things that stab you.

So here you are, with no life ahead of you and nothing but memories behind you. Between you and the memories is the death. You’ve fought with death and lost. You’ve been wounded. You can’t live in the past. It’s pleasant and you would certainly rather spend time with those memories than with the nothing that is your current life. It’s your grief and you will have to find your own way through it. Sometimes, you just run away from it. What you need is distance from the death. Time will do that, as will new memories. To move forward, you have to build that new life. That too takes time. You can throw new memories at it and put a little distance between yourself and the death. But it’s the best that you can do. I don’t have any answers for you here. It’s just the way life is right now.

I’m off to a friend’s place for the meal. I don’t know if there’s much of anyone that reads this blog, since it was down so long. But if you do, I hope you have a good day too.

I’m going to change the site a bit. I’ll be moving the blog to the main spot on notsothoreau.com. I’ll put up a redirect, in case anyone has just the blog bookmarked. My focus will be changing too. There probably won’t be any homesteading posts any more, although I think I will try to keep the place. I’d like to build on it, but I think my goat days are over. I just can’t do it alone. I’m doing a little better these days. I will be glad to have the holidays over. I’m working Christmas and the day after and will be working tomorrow. It’s easier to maintain if I do.

For those of you in the Portland, OR area, I’d urge you to go see the exhibit of historical pictures of the Columbia River Gorge at the Portland Art Museum. It’s going until January 11th, I believe. I went last weekend and the pictures are wonderful. The biggest thrill for me was the picture of John W Stevenson’s home and orchard. We lived on the Stevenson place for a few happy years. The homesite is covered with rock and I’d heard about it. Had no idea there were pictures of it. The exhibit brought back a lot of happy memories for me.

Like I have two different people living inside of me. One seems to be about four years old and prone to hysteria. The other is a very pulled together 16 year old. That’s the one that can handle anything. I had someone write me from the ARDS site, where I’d written when Jeffrey was in the ICU. The woman’s mother had this and she wanted to know how Jeffrey was doing. I had to write and tell her he’d died. One of the women on a grief list said something similar had happened to her too. The reason we go to those sites, she said, is because we want them to tell us everything will be okay. Unfortunately, a lot of times, things aren’t okay. It made me slightly hysterical, thinking somehow that Jeffrey was alive and still stuck in the ICU. I don’t think I could have stood that. In many ways, it’s easier to deal with his death than to think of having to deal with that.

So I had that 4 year old near hysteria over that and managed to finally talk myself back down. It was really just a matter of telling myself that Jeffrey was okay and wasn’t in the ICU any more. I tell people that there are worse things than death. Watching someone you love with tubes in their throat, kept alive by a machine, is the most awful thing you can imagine. It becomes even worse when you hit that spot where no hope is left and you have to let them go. At least, the suffering for them is over and they are at peace. I work towards letting myself be at peace with the loss of my love.

I bought a new old car this week, an ’87 Mazda 323. I need a backup car, something cheap with less mileage on it. Still trying to get it home, but might manage that tomorrow. I think it will be fun to drive. I haven’t owned a stick shift in awhile. I feel good about making that decision, although I still don’t know if it was a wise one or not.

I think Sundays are really hard for me. We did so much together at the church. It’s hard when I attend and hard when I work, like I am today. The people at church miss Jeffrey too. But, I guess we will all adjust sometime. I’m not sure what is going to happen. Jeffrey was president of the Executive Board and the Building and Grounds person. He cleaned the church every Saturday. I don’t know if they are going to elect someone new to those positions or not. I’d like to do it, but I don’t know if they will consider me. I guess I’ll find out in the next month, when we elect new officers.

Now, I’m dealing with kiddies hacking into my site. Not what I want to deal with right now. If it continues, then I may have to rework the site, maybe go back to blogger.

For now, I want to talk about grief. I wrote in a letter today that losing a spouse is so awful that it’s a wonder anyone survives it. The least thing sets off a round of grief. I took Loretta in to be spayed today. We’d planned to let her have a pup by Wallace, to keep and raise. But I can’t do that now. By myself, I don’t have the time to raise a puppy and she was already bred. So there’s grief from that. I went to our doctor yesterday for a physical and spent most of the time talking about Jeffrey and crying. (He was Jeffrey’s doctor too.) I went for a walk today. I felt the wind brush my neck in a way that felt exactly like Jeffrey’s touch. I was in tears over that too.

Grief doesn’t go away, but you learn to live with it. I am trying to sort out the brave new life I want come spring. And I think, just maybe, it still involves that yurt. I also think it involves keeping the place and going back home. I’m just not sure exactly how that works out just yet. But somehow, someway, I have to forge ahead with my life and see what I can accomplish in the time to come.

I’m sorry the blog has been down for so long. I’ve been through hell, to put it mildly. Jeffrey was badly sick at the end of September. Bad enough I took him to the emergency room on October first. He spent two weeks in the ICU and died of pnuemonia on October 13th. We were married for 37 years and had a wonderful life together.

Everything has been turned upside down. I was lucky enough to have someone take all the goats. Another friend took the geese, chickens and rabbits. My neighbor let my dogs out while I spent every other night away from home. I have been blessed by friends I didn’t really know I had. The people at church have been true family. Pastor and my neighbor were there when I had to make the decision to take Jeffrey off life support. (And I couldn’t go in to make that decision. As long as I heard the machines making him breathe, I could not have had him taken off life support.) Even the company I work for supported me. They paid for the time I took off and will cover with additional sick leave if I need it. I pity people who have to go through this without the kind of loving support I have had.

I’ve had to move off the place for the winter. I’m staying at a house the church owns. It has electricity and I’ve put in a phone. It will be “easier”, I guess. The dogs and cats have more room and seem to be adjusting a bit. I went back to work, after taking off the week he died and I seem to be holding up. So life goes on. I don’t know yet if I will be able to move back to our place or not. It is my plan to do so this spring. I can’t think of how hard Jeffrey worked to dig that garden and just let it all go. I will need to have something besides the trailer to live in and that is the sticking point. I may still build that yurt. Right now, I’m just trying to sort out what life without Jeffrey will look like.

Well, I’ve been moving through summer like most of you. We have yet another set of kids. We are up to 13 goats, but that number will change as we start to butcher some of the wethers. We have more rabbits. I bought a nice buck and two does. They are still fairly young so I am not planning to breed just yet. Jeffrey has been feeling better since he discovered he has a milk allergy. (He can drink goat’s milk and cow’s milk that has been cultured.) Our friend Mike is fighting lung cancer, so Jeffrey has had to help out there. We are also trying to get the winter firewood cut. Not a lot of progress on anything, but certainly enough work to keep us busy.

I have plans to update this site more regularly, and the next thing I know, a month has passed by. Sometime, I’ll have to write up my tech rant about the “cold pizza of doom”. Anyway, a quick update in the meantime. Something, likely a rabbit, got in and wiped out all the cole crops I had planted in the garden. It’s getting too late to replant cabbage, so I am going to replant with a bunch of old seed and see if anything comes up. I can still replant collards and kale. We have a live trap out to see if it comes back.

We are still working on the yurt but I suspect it is going to have to go on hold until next year. I’m going to try and felt some of this stuff up anyway, just to clear up some space. We really need to hook up the wood stove and start getting ready for winter. Likely, Jeffrey will build yet another extension onto the trailer for now. We need to move some cats in and find a place for my bird.

Speaking of cats, Jack had urinary blockage, something I haven’t dealt with in a long, long time. But I recognized it right off. Managed to find credit enough to get him unblocked. He’s been back home for a week and seems okay so far. He now gets to eat expensive food for the rest of his life, but I’m glad he’s back home.

We are planning to start butchering out wethers when the weather cools, including Ragnar (the goat in the lawn chair picture.) Hay is pretty expensive, $250 a ton for grass. Many folks are getting rid of their livestock as a result. Not a good time for me to do that. I’ll try to pull the rest of them through the winter and will wait until November or so to breed. We might manage it.

Loretta is still a handfull. She’s more like a dog now than a puppy. I wish she minded better, but she just doesn’t hear you sometimes. She’s such a good dog otherwise. She is a bird dog, so I guess it’s not surprising that she likes to flush chickens from the brush.

So, I guess that’s it for now. Maybe I can pull together that tech rant.

and we’re at about halfway towards building the yurt. Jeffrey has been cutting poles for the walls, mostly maple and hazelwood. We are going to take a walk around and look for poles for the roof this weekend. Meanwhile, I am fluffing wool, to get enough to start my first large felted piece. I’m shooting for next weekend. I worked on it all last weekend, spending a bit of the time tearing apart a grey fleece that was already trying to felt. So, I guess the stuff really WILL felt!

As for the garden, I finished planting it last weekend. The first potatoes are up and looking good. The volunteer potatoes are starting to flower. I have cabbage and collards starting to come up. We had a little rain today, which should help too. I’ll be glad when I can really see things come up. It is a lot of work to go out and water the plants every morning. Still, it’s nice to finally have a garden at long last. Everything seems to be coming right along.