September 10, 2008 – The perfect life had its ups and downs today – broken fence, leaky water valve, sick ewe, software screw-up. I can’t (gasp) put up photos for the moment and am trying to get the image program working.
So it’s just me and words, like the beginning of the Blog and the Farm Journal. I always like to believe that everything is an opportunity, and those photos I took of the dogs and the leaves today will just have to wait a bit.
I am, after all, a writer, and that’s how I make my living, and there isn’t a job description I could ever be prouder of. If this trouble lasts a few days, that will be fine. It will be good for me.
The experience made me think of my first year on the farm, in 2003. Just me and Rose, and Orson and Clementine, a yellow Lab now living in Vermont. Orson is buried at the top of the pasture.
I remember the snow and cold of that winter, and the frostbite that still brings sharp pain in cold weather in some of my fingers.
Life is so different now, in so many ways. A lot has happened, more than I can think to recall. I think I know a lot more about myself, I have dealt with a lot of fear. I think of the spinal troubles, when I couldn’t walk, and lambing in that awful winter, and frostbite, and the loss of Carol, my first donkey.
I’ve met so many people and learned so much. I have written four books here, started taking photos, and, with Annie’s help, am running a fairly efficient farm. I have healthy animals, good hay, a functioning water system, and have patched up some of the farmhouse, and almost all of the collapsing barns.
I couldn’t have imagined Elvis when I first came, or Winston still hobbling around. There was no Izzy, no Lenore. No goats.
I couldn’t have imagined killing Orson, who inspired my move here in some ways. I didn’t know what hospice was. I never thought of teaching writing to high school kids.
I didn’t know any of the wonderful friends I now have. And some of the friends I knew are gone, out of my life, moved away, busy. I never thought of myself as an artist, am shocked to think of myself as one. I didn’t think of myself as ever being depressed, or fearful, or having any kind of mental illnes. I never thought for a second that I would be in therapy, or group therapy. I didn’t know I had diabetes. I had never taken a photograph, not really.
This blog was different, some daily textual musings, and I could easily read all of the e-mail every day myself. Not now.
I have to be honest, it’s been tough, in many ways. I confronted a lot of things up there, and learned a lot about myself, little of it good. I am still hard at work on a spiritual life, still trying to figure out what love is.
I have lived a lot of life here, and I haven’t absorbed all of it, perhaps never will. I’m still not really sure where I am going, or how I will get there.
But I am grateful for this blog, and for the many good and kind wishes it has brought me. This blog is a record of my life, in words and photos, and it is a mirror of my life that will far outlast me. Like the farm, it has come to define me, and reflect my odd life.
And it’s good to be a plain old writer again, even for a short time.