I think it was around 1AM when I woke up this morning. I had to run down to the usual place I like to go that time of day. Only a couple of minutes later, after putting a couple of logs into the stove to counter the cold outside, below 20 degrees, and turning the taps on in the kitchen to prevent them from blocking up with ice, I was back in bed, snuggled up warm, and head cozy on my pillow. I thought I could dive back into sleep, but soon realized I was on that train of thought that resembles the one we used to ride from Birmingham to Worcester some evening after visiting the big city, only two cars long, and hoards of people leaving for the day, trying to pack into the tiny spaces between the filled cars, where they connected together, and the articulations of rounding the bends on the rails made us a little unsteady.
I decided to go ahead with the usual routine of watching a few YouTube videos and trying to fall back to sleep. Joe Pera came to mind. His soothing voice, and calming images should be perfect to fall back to sleep on. By 4AM, I had followed his train of thoughts out of the city of my mind, and into a meadow, away from even the country lanes he takes his viewers on, and when there, I realized that the tangential topics he leads one along had not called me to sleep, but to change.
I have now got my laundry running, I am dressed, hair combed, and sat with coffee beside me, my warm chair blanket around me, and the keyboard beneath my fingers, still trying to relax. And it is not that I am not relaxed. I am. I am also stressed a bit.
Earlier in the year we put the field up for sale across the street, in hopes that we could sell it, use the money to fix what needed fixing on the house, then take what was left to put down elsewhere, and move, then sell the house to finish buying into the new place. But life changes, and not always in the direction one tries to go into. Now we are looking at removing the listing, though I am not sure how we will cover the costs of repairs on the house. We need the field to feed the animals we want to raise and we need the repairs on the house. Paying for them is something we will have to consider.
That is part of my stress. The means by which we live will likely change soon, and I don’t know when. I have some debts to pay down first. Then we will have to learn to put one foot in front of the other another way.
I also need to get down to the dump and get some more firewood. I am worried that I have not yet really collected enough to get us through the winter. I keep wavering back and forth between that, and thinking there is probably enough. But even if there is, getting ahead for next year is a fine thing to do. I could do with doing that.
I would like to get up to the mountains next year and get maple trees and dry them out and start spinning those on my lathe, and making small furnishings out of them. I guess it is not much of a business plan. But it is what I want to do, and I have found that the things we want to do are the things we should do, as long as those things are born in a healthy mind and are good also for those around us.
The old house just stands and stands. It wants a little help where it has one bad ankle. But it remains well into its second century. I feel lucky to be a part of its history. It does not suffer from the modern fashions that the young houses do. It makes me wonder how well I will stand in my future, and how I will stay propped up when my ankle, or my leg, gives a little under me. The old house looks after me. I want to look after it. I want to give it to the generations to come, and vanish into the list of the names on the deed that had a chance with it over the years, and who have raised families here. I want to do all this. I should just do it.
It’s nearly 5AM now.
There is a computer upstairs in my den that is dedicated to a near singular task, which is to record data from my weather station and see to it that it goes online so others in the area can see the weather data and use it to plan their days, and decide their local conditions are better or worse than other places where they know people who live around the country. It is my small contribution to the world around me. We don’t always say ‘hello’ to the people in our neighborhood, but I like to keep them appraised of the weather close to where they live, and make my contribution in that small way. At the moment though, the computer’s hard drive is reported as failing, and I am trying to replace it. It is not going quite as well as I had hoped it would, so the weather station is reporting online as down at the moment. If I were a little more tech savvy or maybe if I were better at following directions, I would have it back up and running right now. I will approach it again today, probably after a nap. With good luck, I will have it properly cloned and up and running before the girls pick out their 3 o’clock snacks. Even with my nap.
Sometimes a light catches my eye through the window. It is a car driving by on our little country road that is often used as a cut from the highway, or from State Street to Weston. I wonder if the people in the car are doing what they want to do? Or are they trapped in the social cage that they have been programmed for from school right through the traps of debts and career? Even for a homesteader, it is nearly impossible to be truly self reliant in this country. I don’t know of many who don’t support their lifestyle on the back of some work outside the home. Someone has to punch a clock, while someone feeds the goats. How can we both live the idyllic country life? I have got that stressing my mind too.
It’s time to refill my coffee cup.
One thing I have been pondering for many years now has been the value of the news media. This goes deeper than worrying about their biases, to the level of the noise they bellow out at us; the general public. Many years ago, while conversing about the importance of being informed with another fellow whose name I cannot remember any more than his face, he told me, ‘why worry about it? What goes on – out there – had not direct effect on your life. Why let it in; why let it stress you out?’ It always seemed to me to be a statement like, ‘as long as you keep the duct tape around the doors and windows, the nuclear fallout won’t trouble you.’ Knowing what is going on has helped me to understand things, like why the planes fell silent in the skies for a short while in late 2001, and… In the last twenty years, that has been the most significant thing of all. The rest has been a lot of who shot who, and how the weather is. Honestly I don’t need to be appraised of who shot who to know that it was not right for them to do that. There’s not many ‘whys’ that ever justify it. People can be really ugly, and that is the overwhelming sense I have gotten from the news. I don’t like that feeling. But it contributes to the feeling of fear that keeps us as sheep, and keeps us controllable.
I have been leery of social norms since childhood. As a kid, the school saw to it that I would be in constant contact with a psychologist, to see why I found schoolwork dubious and why I could not get along with the other bots, I mean boys, that liked to bully me. Not following a crowd is my norm. There’s nothing interesting going where everyone else is. Raising chickens has only confirmed to me how low we are on the evolutionary ladder. A chicken sees another chicken picking at the ground, and goes to see what it is, and join in. A chicken becomes injured, and the others see the weakness and go peck at it till the bird dies. I live in a country that is follows fads as they develop and uses ‘social media’ to expedite the trends, and hashtags to speed them along. It cannot agree that healthcare is a basic right of its citizens. It all seems chicken to me. I don’t know why we cannot agree to not shoot each other, and that everyone deserves to have a doctor available in the inevitable time they become sick or injured. It’s something we all do. So let’s look after that together! Or is it because some aspects of healthcare may be dispensed in ways that we cannot all agree on? That’d be like shutting the schools down because we don’t all understand evolution.
Pardon my rambling thoughts here. It has been a long time since I have been able to do this. The past few years my thoughts have been sucked up by the political disposition of the New Media. It’s been a bad time here in America. There is a lot of bickering over what we stand for as a nation. I do think to some extent the media has amplified it beyond reality. At the same time, I see things that indicate to me that it is as bad as they say, usually printed on a flag bearing a name, and language that was once considered too uncouth to put in the sight of children. Yet, here we are. Well, my brain needs a rest from all that, so this is all I am going to say about it at the moment. I would rather be all consumed by the junk mail in my inbox, than… no wait. That is just about as bad.
Across the room from me is a picture frame with an image of a house in it after the style of Pennsylvania Dutch art. The house is a country home, flanked by two trees, and under it is the word “Peace.” I have always thought of this as a call for peace, as in ‘world peace.’ This morning it strikes me as country peace. Peace, as in little noises from a nearby road. Peace, as in no shouting, or hollering. Peace, as instead being able to almost make out the words of a conversation being held more than a quarter of a mile distant. Peace, as in the pace of time being marked by sunrises and sunsets, rather than hours and minutes. Peace, as in enough rain, but not too much, so the corn grows, and the tomatoes too. Peace, as in watching the chickens, and not growing more cynical about humanity for doing it. Peace, like listening to Joe Pera, without his soothing voice or his relaxing topic train derailing my brain in the realization that I am still without peace.