Monday, September 11, 2017

Monday Journals







September 4, 2017



Here’s to a busy 48 hours!  Analia and Rory will arrive in just a few minutes.  The twins are staying home with their daddy today who is off from work, so it will be a little slower here today.  Then, they will be back tomorrow afternoon.  In between, I need to try to start moving our personal items from upstairs so that Alissa and Gabino can start moving some of their things in as they get a chance.  It’s going to be quite a month but I am so excited that things are coming together for us to be able to make SW Virginia our primary residence this soon.  We really didn’t anticipate things coming together for us this quickly.  The contractor contacted us yesterday and the lumber for the barn will start being sawed on Tuesday and will be delivered by the end of the week!  Mike has started trimming trees around the barn and cleaning up brush around the outbuildings.  When we return to our Rural Retreat, he will begin taking the old metal off the barn and the shed so that the men can get the board and batting up as quickly as possible.  Exciting times and a lot of work coming up!

I woke up this morning to a nice, long email from our son in Thailand.  I just love getting emails from Mikey and hearing about their life.  He is having such an adventure and while we miss him so much, we are thankful for his happiness.  He and he fiancé,’ whose parents are from Thailand, have built a beautiful new home there.  They manage some resort properties for Marisa’s parents.  I am ashamed to say that when I was still on Facebook, I didn’t take the time to write and keep in touch with people on a more personal level like I do now.  I really enjoy the intimacy and the details shared with the few folks whom I keep in contact with by email and by writing letters.  I feel like my life is richer in so many ways since I left social media.  I do miss all the casual contacts and keeping up with everyone.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is how we as humans just see a portion of someone else’s life and make judgements.  We all do it.  Some of us struggle more than others with being critical.  Human nature wants to cut others down in an effort to build ourselves up.  It’s also easy to look at others and see all that they have and feel like life is perfect for them and not for us.  I think because I have had so much tragedy in my life and because my heart is tender toward the suffering of others, I have never struggled much with jealousy but our family has certainly been the object of it and the destruction it brings many times.  We have been targeted by others who are jealous of any success or happiness that we might have and who have worked overtly to bring us down.  I didn’t even realize it at the time but in retrospect, I can see where the jealousy revealed itself, festered, and then targeted our family until we made efforts to buffer ourselves with boundaries from those individuals.  The really sad thing is that in every case, a friendship was lost.  Oh, that doesn’t mean that we don’t or won’t still have a relationship with those individuals, but the relationship has been stunted because we have had to protect ourselves from the personal attacks.  Someone else’s life can look so good from the outside looking in but we never know what kind of things they deal with on a daily basis.  And it’s easy to be critical without knowing all the facts.  A critical nature on the other hand (something that is just as destructive as jealousy in my opinion) is something that is more of a struggle for me than jealousy but still it’s not one of the “sins” I struggle with the most.  However, I feel that all of us struggle with being critical to some extent.  We don’t like the way someone else lives, or the choices they make, or the way they wear their clothes, or the music they choose to listen to, or the way they are raising their children, or the church they attend, or their choice of candidates, and the list goes on and on.  We all struggle with this because we feel our way of life and our thinking is the right way.  I try to be conscious of having a critical nature and work hard to curb that in my own life.  Again, having been the object of intense criticism, has hurt me deeply.  I guess putting my life down in a journal and sharing it on my blog as well as having participated in social media for so many years and mostly sharing with others the positive things and even with the negative, having a positive attitude towards it and seeking the lessons and looking for the good causes some people to be jealous and critical or perhaps there are just those who are so filled with their own pain, that they in some twisted way are seeking someone to tear down.  While it hurts to be the object of someone’s judgements and criticisms and even worse, thinking on these things has brought me full circle to check my own heart and mind and to find out where I can do better to be less critical and destructive.  We can’t change anyone else and it’s not our responsibility to do so.  It is our responsibility to change ourselves.  That is how we change the world. 

September 7, 2017

Really, I can’t keep up.  I only had Alissa’s two on Monday (the twins stayed home with their dad who was off work) and then again for about four and a half hours on Tuesday evening.  However, they just exhaust me anymore.  The baby is such a happy girl, until she realizes that momma is not there to nurse her.  She really doesn’t want to take the bottle and once the hunger pains have set in and she refuses the bottle, then the fussies start.  She also doesn’t sleep well at all at my house.  She will only take a thirty-minute nap in the morning and then if I’m lucky, another thirty-minute nap in the afternoon.  (At home, she takes a morning and afternoon nap for an hour and a half or more.  When Rory is sleeping, I try to do something with Analia, Hudson, and Ella like play a game, work a puzzle or read a book.  And I also try to get meals together for them while the baby is asleep.  It makes for a non-stop day with no breaks for me.  I’ve taken care of children all my life it seems.  I helped a lot with taking care of my baby brother and sister as I was 14 and 16 when they were born.  Then, when I moved to Alaska, I babysit children around the clock, sometimes even having a baby spend the night at my house.  Then I raised my own two while often working with preschoolers at church.  All of those years I was high energy and it didn’t matter how many I had to watch, I was on top of things.  Now I feel like all I can do is manage and barely at that.  I guess that’s a sign that I really am getting old. 

There’s not a whole lot of time it seems between when I watch the kids Monday and when they come back Tuesday afternoon.  I rush to get things done around the house, at the antique mall, and run errands.  This week seemed especially rushed.  There’s a push now to get the house to a point where Alissa and Gabino can start moving their things in.  In fact, I have already made a spot in the basement where they can store some of the items they don’t need right away.  I pushed some of our things out of the way so they can pile their things there.  Then, I started cleaning out the closet and everything stored in the spare bedroom that I use for a sewing room.  It will become Analia’s room.  I made headway but didn’t get quite finished.  When I can get some strong guys to help me, all of the furniture in that room will be moved downstairs to set up the bedroom for Mike and I to use while we are in Staunton each week.  All of the fabric and sewing supplies we loaded in the truck to bring with us to our second home which is soon to become our primary residence. 

This whole process is going to be difficult but good for us.  We are “downsizing” through all of this and moving into a home that is about half the size of the one we are leaving.  We have to decide what is important to take and what we can leave for the kids and what we need to just cull out of our lives.  The disorganization of the house drives me crazy but I am trying to practice just letting it go and focusing on the fact that this is all for the best for everyone.  This is going to create an amazing environment for Analia and Rory as Mike and I live there in Staunton with them and are able to help care for them while Alissa goes to school and works.  I think the girls will be more settled with time as it will “their” home and we will just be there to help out.  Their routines won’t have to be interrupted, at least on the days we are there to keep them.  The good news is after it is all said and done, I will have to spend far less time cleaning house!  Our house in the Valley is 4000 square feet and our house in the mountains is less than 2000 square feet.  That means right now I am maintaining 6000 square feet of living space and once we are completely moved and settled here in about a year, I will just have the smaller house to concern myself with.  The reality is, the upstairs of our Mountain home is mostly guest and storage area, so that leaves me with less than 1000 square feet to keep up with on a daily basis.  Our large Valley home has been a blessing and continues to be a blessing and I am thankful for it.  It was home for many years to Mike’s two children, and then it became the only stable home my two children ever knew.  We have welcomed adult children back to it when they needed a place to get their feet back under them and we have filled it with grandchildren.  We have had plenty of space for everyone and for guests on occasion.  We have been truly blessed and leaving it is definitely bittersweet but leaving it in the hands of Alissa and Gabino means that we are not really leaving it but just giving it up for someone we love to continue to fill it with memories. 

Driving back and forth between the two houses each week gives Mike and I a lot of travel time together.  The trip takes close to three hours, sometimes more if the traffic is bad or if we stop more than once.  It’s hard for me to stay awake in the car.  I am one of those people who stays on the move for 18 hours a day most days, but when I do sit down, I go to sleep.  It doesn’t matter where I am.  I have even found myself drifting off to sleep in church or at an auction.  To keep Mike’s mind active and to keep him from getting tired, I have started reading out loud while we travel.  I can’t read on the back roads because I get car sick and have to watch the roads.  Once we get onto the interstate, I have about two hours to read.  Mike is not a reader.  In his entire life, he can only remember reading through one book.  I have tried to get him interested in books before with no success.  I have even tried reading out loud to him before and he just laughed at me, made jokes, and wouldn’t pay attention.  Recently I picked up the book THE MAN WHO MOVED A MOUNTAIN that was published in 1970.  It tells the story of a man who grew up right in the very area where we bought our second home and describes life in these parts back in the 1920-s and later when this part of the Blue Ridge was mostly cut off from the rest of the world.  The stories mirror those of the old west with senseless shootings, killings, and a general lawlessness fed by bootlegging and alcohol.  The book is filled with history of the area and is most interesting to us as we settle here.  The surnames in the books match names of descendants on the mailboxes along the route to our home.  All in all, a very interesting read for us as we travel.  While filled with wonderful local history, the true story’s underlying message is one of love and how love conquered even the most difficult situations.  It’s refreshing to read stories like this.  Sometimes it feels like love never wins with all the evil in the world.  Sometimes we need to be reminded that reading the story and viewing history in retrospect, often helps us to see things we don’t see when we are living through it. 

It's chilly here in the mountains this morning and I am thinking more and more about winter and the reality of taking care of my Jersey girls in the unpredictable weather that goes along with this country.  In no way will it ever compare to the winter adventures of my time spent in Alaska but with enough time spent in these mountains with livestock, I know there will be difficult situations to overcome.  I am anxious to get the barn done.  I had thought about removing the shed on the back of the barn so as to give it more of an aesthetic appeal, but upon considering the possibility of some nasty winter storms coming down this mountain hollow, I decided to leave it.  If things get bad enough, I can lock the girls in the large lean-to area and they will be sheltered from the weather and easy to feed.  The history of the smaller Jerseys that I keep is that are descendants of mountain stock, so we shall see if they remember their roots and make a go of it here.   We bought a generator for our Mountain home.  We have one at the house in Staunton and there have been years we have used it a good bit.  I have a feeling we may be using the generator a lot here. 

September 8, 2017

Yesterday was one of my favorite kinds of days.  I call it a “nesting” day.  Imagine the little momma hen fluffing her feathers, turning this way a little, that way a little, scratching around in her nest with a watchful eye, finally setting herself down with an air of importance and looking pleased and comfortable with her surroundings.  That pretty much describes me when I am all alone in my house for the day.  With a watchful eye I make my way through “my nest” cleaning, straightening, and arranging and then when I am all finished I “set myself down” and enjoy the view.  And I got to spend unhurried time in the kitchen.  Still I try to cook from scratch and not buy processed food even though we do so much traveling.  We do stop for a meal more than we use to but I try to feed us before we leave or when we get to one home from the other.  However, often our meals are small quick meals or larger meals that are made quickly and I don’t like to be rushed in the kitchen.  Yesterday I was able to slow down and enjoy my kitchen and that always makes me happy.  There were a million and one things I could have been doing outside and the weather was gorgeous, but I needed a day to just putt around the house.  It’s good therapy for me.  I made a cherry pie with a lard crust.  I had rendered the yard several months back using our outdoor fire pit.  When I make pies with lard crust, I no longer trim off the extra dough.  I simply take it all and turn it under at the edges making a thick edge of crust.  The lard makes it taste better than a donut and we both enjoy it so much, it seems a shame to waste it.  I’m aware that award winning pies have a relatively thin crust and I wouldn’t win any ribbons with my thick edges on my pies, but we would almost fight each other for that thick piece of lard crust.  When I make pies to share, I always trim back the crust so it’s not so thick.   The cherries were some I had put up in the freezer.  I used half sour cherries and half yellow cherries.  I think sour cherries make the best pies and the yellow need to be used up but don’t have the flavor of the sours.  Mixing together in a pie is the perfect combination.  I had put a lot of bell peppers in the freezer to use later, but had four left out that I needed to use, so I made stuffed peppers and a small meatloaf to take back to Staunton with me for the kids to have for lunch on Monday.  I made mashed potatoes and used the cream off our raw, Jersey milk.  We had some beets in the cellar and I peeled them, sliced them thin, seasoned with butter and salt, covered with aluminum foil and baked them in the oven.  They taste so much better cooked this way as one doesn’t lose any of the juice or flavors like you do when boiling them.  I took some green beans out of the freezer and seasoned them with bacon grease.  The meal was delicious and I enjoyed having the time to not only relax making it, but also to sit down and enjoy it without feeling rushed. 

We have some neighborhood dogs that show up when I am cooking.  I never feed them, although they look a might bit skinny.  I believe they are hunting dogs and their owner must not restrain them.  We don’t have that issue in the Valley.  All dogs are restrained, fenced, or walked on a leash.  One almost never sees a roaming dog in our area.  I don’t have a fence nor do I chain my dogs in Staunton, but we live back from the main road and I have trained the dogs to only go so far on our property.  It concerns me that these dogs run loose because I don’t want them here when I bring my own dogs eventually.  I’m never mean to the visiting dogs.  In fact, I don’t even raise my voice when I tell them to go home.  I speak to them in a conversational tone but never do I feed or pet them, although I would love to, because I know they would be here all the time.  Another time we had a larger, German Shepherd looking dog that arrived.  He had a collar and I thought we were going to have to go find his owners.  I didn’t make over him because I didn’t want him to stay.  (People make this mistakes with stray dogs so often.  Once a dog gets attention or food, then they will keep coming back.)  I watched him all day and wanted to love on him so badly.  He came up on the covered, wrap around porch and would watch me through the screen door.  He really wanted to come inside.  I would ignore him but smile to myself.  Finally, he got up on the wicker lounge and sat there looking out.  Eventually, he grew tired and lay down and took a nap.  We had somewhere to go that evening and still there he was, parked on our porch.  I told Mike that if he was still there when we got home, we would have to try to find his owners.  When we returned, he was gone and we have never seen him again. 

Last night after supper I took a walk.  I usually like to take my walks in the morning but it was nice to get out and see what is becoming familiar in the fading light of the evening sun instead of the early morning light with which I usually view it.  Mike walked with me and we both wore a jacket to ward off the mountain chill of a pre-autumn evening.  The hills on the back forty are steep and one gets a good workout.  In the mornings, I usually startle a flock of turkey but on our evening walk, the only birds I saw were some variety of yellow finch.  There were about a dozen of them feeding on the thistle, chirping and calling to one another.  They were bright and cheerful and were always a step ahead of us it seemed.  My favorite thing to do from the top of our property is to take in the views of the Buffalo Mountain.  It has become to me not “Buffalo Mountain” but “The Buffalo Mountain”.  I’ve always been one to seek out the highest points and rest my gaze there.  Somehow those higher elevations symbolize hope to me.  Always, wherever I have been, I seek out the mountains.  I guess that’s why the flatlands have always made me feel like I was suffocating.  I remember in Alaska I would go to a favorite spot behind the Baptist church where my grandfather was pastor and just sit and gaze at the beautiful Alaskan Range on the other side of the Delta River.  Time and time again at various points in my life, those mountains would give me the strength to keep on going.  When I was in Northern Montana, it was the beautiful Canadian Rockies that gave me hope at a point when I was all alone and trying to find myself out of an abusive relationship.  In Colorado, it was the solitary hikes I took daily in the Rockies that kept me from going insane.  When I lived in Bedford and Forest, Virginia, it was the drives to the Blue Ridge and my visits to the Peaks of Otter that settled my soul.  Living in Staunton, in the Shenandoah Valley, the expansive views of the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains have filled my heart with peace time and time again.  In the last few years, Mike and I have made fall trips to this area of South West Virginia and soaked in the atmosphere of the beloved mountains and when I climb our little piece of mountain property, stretching my limbs, breathing a little heavy, and making it to the top, my eyes seek out The Buffalo.  Now the dreams of youth are gone and I have grown up, adult dreams that are a little more realistic but the mountain still symbolizes to me Hope and Faith and that feeling inside of me that no matter how ugly the world may get, there is still beauty to be sought out and higher elevations to attain. 

September 9, 2017

It was another beautiful day yesterday.  I awoke before dawn and the sky was so clear and bright when I looked out the window.  Later, when I took a morning walk, the sky was a beautiful shade of blue and clear.  I startled some deer on my walk and they bounded off from the edge of the pasture into the tall pines that line our property. 

We spent another glorious day at home where I could do more nesting.  I was able to get the upstairs thoroughly cleaned, even the large closets that I need to start packing with items from Staunton.  I dusted them and mopped the floors.  It felt good to get some details done in the house.  We had an early supper of filet mignon, macaroni and cheese and the leftover green beans.  Afterwards, because I still had plenty of daylight, I took another walk up to the highpoints of our property where the views are just amazing.  Mike had a contractor come in and this man seems promising.  We shall see.  We have some work that we need to do on the gutters on the house, some detail work on the inside of the barn, the roof of the barn to patch and paint, and perhaps eventually a bathroom added to our guest cabin above the garage.  The other contractor is supposed to do the board and batting on the outside of the barn.  The lumber was supposed to be delivered this week, but it was not.  So, we shall see how that goes.  We are learning that it’s almost impossible to get anything done here.  No one seems really serious about working. 

It's been cool enough this week that the furnace has come on during the night.  We have it szet back to 60 degrees but it has been getting down in the 40’s here at night.  It really feels like fall is just around the corner.  While the 16th of September is such a hard time for me, marking the anniversary of Josh’s death, I try to get through it be celebrating the coming of fall, the season that he loved so much.  I will be bringing my fall decorations to our Mountain Home and decorating here this year instead of in Staunton. 

Mike spent the afternoon working on the barn.  He tore down some metal, removed trash from the milking area, and started getting the old, nasty hay out of the barn.  He had a huge bon fire in the evening burning up some brush, trash and some of the hay he had removed from the hay loft.  There is a ton of work to do to get the barn cleaned up and repaired. 

Today we did go out to two different auctions.  We went to our favorite auction house which is about 45 minutes from our home.  It is the one where the owners are so honest and fair.  I can truly appreciate their integrity after attending various auctions.  It seems that being deceitful goes with the territory with most auction houses.  We didn’t buy much but got a few bargains that we can price and resell.  I wasn’t happy tonight at all when we went to the Entertaining Auction house that is about 20 minutes from our home.  I have learned to really enjoy a lot of the people there but the racism is driving me insane.  Mike just keeps telling me to be calm because we are living here and he doesn’t want me to tick everyone off.  However, I am only being outwardly calm until I have the opportune moment to say what I need to say.  I will never pretend to go along with such evil.  I can’t.  I don’t want to.  And I won’t.  Tonight, there was an old record sold reportedly entitled KKK by Johnny Reb.  The auctioneer said, “The record has “Rebel” written all over it and for those of you who are upset about the statues being taken down, this record is for you.”  Oh! How I could hardly contain myself! And folks want to pretend like racism is just fringe group that marches in Charlottesville! These are “good, honest, everyday, God loving, people next door” types.  The kind of people you want to be your neighbors (if you are white) and the kind of people who would do anything for you (if you are white).  Racism is alive and well and maybe more outspoken than at any other time in history in certain places.  I wanted to buy the record and break it in two right in front of everyone.  Instead I sat and watched as the little 45 record sold for ten dollars and had multiple bidders.  One of the things I have learned reading the book A MAN WHO MOVVED A MOUNTAIN is that Buffalo Mountain was once owned by the Lee family of Robert E. Lee fame.  So, I do understand that the folks who are native of this area are proud southerners.  What I can’t understand, is how people can’t see that racism is wrong no matter what.  I think what slows me down in my response is not that I am afraid of responding to the racism but I really do understand where these people are coming from and how that the way they have grown up and lived and where they have been raised and their lack of exposure to people who are different from them and their unwillingness to see that people are all the same no matter what color the skin might be or where they might be from fuels their racism.  In this instance, fighting fire with fire will not work.  Carefully spoken words dropped at the right time to make people think and lots of love are the only way to possibly shake someone up enough to make a difference. 

Tomorrow, we are getting up super early to get things wrapped up here in the Mountains so we can head back to Staunton.  I promised Analia we would go to church with her there tomorrow.  Then, we have a birthday party to attend for Mike’s brother, Kenny.