I now live in a house with a white picket fence. A yellow house, with a white picket fence in bad need of a wire brush massage and a fresh coat of white paint. All in due time. The house sits on a third of an acre in a neighborhood of large lot homes. The view out the dining room window is snow capped Mount Blanca, look the other direction and the mountains are lower on the horizon, you're pointed in the general direction of the immortalized-in-song Wolf Creek pass. The mountains dominate the skyline in any direction you look.
There are now fifty some bales of straw in the back yard, arranged in rows and sucking down water as the first step in converting them into a vegetable garden. Soon enough they'll get dosed with fertilizers and covered with a layer of dirt, the dirt home to a bought-from-the-store jug of bacterials and buggies that turn dead straw and deader dirt back into workable garden soil.
Strange, but it's how the locals go about it. I'd never had reason, until now, to differentiate between dirt and soil. Synonyms in my head, but not here. Here what they call dirt is an overwhelming majority, what will actually grow something is called soil and it's a slow to build and highly prized minority of the landscape. Long and short of it? It's not my garden, this is one of Omega's long held dreams coming to reality. I'm just providing a bit of muscle, playing in the dirt to the intent of creating soil.
Needless to say, the garbage disposal in the sink is fond of this state of affairs, it isn't seeing a third the work it used to.
Here in the next few days a slingshot run down the mountain to the old place is on the agenda, waiting at the bottom is Omega's little Chevy truck, one of the toughest trucks I've ever met in a lifetime of working with such machines, currently resting in the competent care of my brother who took on the work of restoring it after two years of heavy, heavy service with essentially no maintenance at all. Duncan (the truck, named after the true hero of the Dune series of novels, Duncan Idaho) will be coming back up the mountain with a light load of things useful in the current setting... I have very much missed my chop-saw and table-saw, and the roto-tiller will be invaluable come fall when the harvest is over and the straw garden gets tilled in with the compost pile so the buggies can continue their work of turning dirt into soil for next year's garden.
The garden isn't the only thing being built. Omega, totally fed up with the local school's line of hooey, has pulled Beam out to home-school him. Even though it means having to establish a sanity ration of time away from the house I'm in support of the decision. The only thing the kid was learning from the public offering was that all he had to do to get the grown-ups to jump out their ass complying with his demands was do something stupid. Spoiled rotten, in point of fact, and the vast majority of it complements of the public schools. He'll have plenty of resources, both grandmothers are certified teachers, one a veteran of the specials who is filling out the paperwork to be Colorado certified as teacher of record (funny, how the most kick ass warriors in the land and the teachers who work with the most challenged running out to hopeless of the kids share that word... special).
I've been drafted to teach a unit on sailing ships... spinning off into geography and world trade and the mechanics/physics of how the ships work in the first place. Out of the assembled crew I'm the most competent in the technologies and the trades, the matters of fire and steel where the humanities have little traction. Beam's education will be unit based which means teach anything and everything that can be rationally associated with whatever it was caught the young one's interest. So yea, the Cutty Sark is a work of maritime art, but what was going on back in her day that got her built in the first place? How what why was this British Maritime Empire thing? That sort of education.
It is funny, in a fatalistic sort of way... I've fallen into my favorite quote from Albert: "For my total contempt of all forms of authority the fates have punished me by causing me to become one." Oh, well.
Like I said a bit earlier, with Beam home 24/7 sanity time away from the house will be mandatory. So... I'm back in search of a congenial coffee shop where I can go back to being the character-in-residence regular to do the majority of my writing. No biggy, I always was more productive when my writing was the counterbalance for something else.
I think, I think I can be happy in this place... and that is a new idea for me. For me happy has always been somewhere over one horizon or the other, it's been as scarce in my life as soil is in this barren desert valley. For me happy has always been something I've promised myself is waiting at the end of the ride (think Frankie Lane, that classic country song Rawhide immortalizing the trail herd cowboys) . It's almost, hell, almost? It's scary to think that ride may be over.
<3 Happy is something well deserved by one who has helped others search for theirs.
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