THE PATH AHEAD...AND BEHIND

I love this place that we live in. Every single day it changes. It continually surprises me, even on the days when the weather is 110 F or -20F. I dress for the weather and get the job done and love all of it. I am challenged, exhausted a good part of the time and laugh every day. And some days I cry too. 

I get frustrated, whiney because I  have to figure out how to get my job done without anyone to ask for help. We chose to live here. Mine to do as best I can. 

John keeps me centered when I'm on the verge of a meltdown but it's still mine to solve, ponder, learn from and make hay while the sun shines, get along when it doesn't.

One of my horses and three of my dogs are buried on this land. We've trimmed the trees, hiked out and brought back junk left by previous owners while we try to keep the forrest and fields clear. My grandparents and their grandparents lived like this. I try to remember that they worked much harder than I do. That history is always in the back of my mind.

The past nine months we've been waiting to see whether we will continue to be allowed to live here. I've lost sleep, lost weight, panicked, cried, had a melt down or two with poor John holding me because sometimes it isn't something that can be balanced. 

I've looked and looked for another place we can afford, some place where we can keep our small herd, grow our organic produce and live out our time together with no more than the usual worries about how to pay the bills. 

I know that home is where the heart is, that it's the people you love, the animals who depend on me who are important. And that is where part of the pain comes from, the anger while we wait and wait and wait. I've been telling myself this is a door opening, a new direction to go. But if I can not keep my horses and donkey, I just don't want to go there. I made a promise to them. It's my job to keep it unless my time ends and it really is out of my hands. 

This is the way that I feel about this place. I dance and sing and sweat and cry and sometimes I stand in awe of how beautiful it is. I've had deer walk in to the front yard and stand ten feet away while standing on the front porch. 

An immature Golden Eagle took up residence one Spring until it was ready to move on. It would sit in the top of our Broken Oak or one of the giant trees at the end of the East pasture and watch everything that we did. And the morning it left, it flew on the thermals right over the paddock and called to me. 

A Bard Owl sat on the railing of the deck more than once one year, watching us through the doors. It was huge, intimidating and beautiful. It was an owl that shook me out of the depression I was in when moved here fourteen years ago, after loosing our business and home, bankrupting, the year of 911. 

I walked out every day with Spirit, my first horse, and my dogs. I was trying to get my bearings, trying to convince myself that I wasn't a failure. I did my best. It just wasn't good enough to save a business that went down with buildings that fell and brought us all to a slamming, screaming halt. 

I sat on a rock while the dogs took naps and Spirit grazed next to me and watched the sky, doing my "What's it all about Alphie?" thing, crying nd moaning about the unfairness of things.  And a tree branch turned and looked at me. I was so startled I fell off the rock backwards and ended up on the ground looking up at a surprised Spirit. " Hey, what are you doing down there? I thought it was my job to put you there?" And I started laughing again. It was as simple as that. the branch was an owl and I was still alive, still breathing. Anything was possible!

I laughed because there's always something funny going on, something to make me smile. 

You know that guy who wrote about small stuff? He's right, it's all small stuff. And there's always a reason to tilt my head back and laugh until my sides ache.

Tomorrow we meet with representatives from the new owners of the land to discuss a rental agreement. Do I like leasing? No, not really. We owned for years, had rental property, homes, the full monty. I liked the freedom of being able to paint murals on all of the walls and floors, setting up a business out of our home, planting anything we wanted to plant anywhere, any time. I liked painting the outside of my home, putting on a new roof, setting up paths for neighborhood kids to walk on when they took a short cut home from school through our yard.

But here I love the wildness, the raccoon we've named Rocky who comes up on to the deck and looks in the doors at us, wondering why there isn't more cat food out there for his dining pleasure. 

I love the big sky, the tall prairie grasses and our small bit of the last of the old growth trees that were, somehow, over looked when the developing in this region went on. I'm pretty sure that if I looked, there might even be an Endt with a few Unicorns living under it's branches. Heck, we might even be where some of the Endt Wives are hiding.

Heaven help me I'm even so smitten with the place that I don't even mind the ticks, chiggers, snakes or mosquitoes. We've made our peace over the years and now we all just sort of fit together like raggedtey puzzle pieces. 

We tried to buy this place or, at least, buy in to it. We wanted to be part of it. That wasn't an option so we let that one go. 

I've looked at places over the years, even found two I would have moved to but every time the market would go up then down, like some kind of out of control roller coaster ride. There was a real danger that we would end up with one of those upside down mortgages. I did not want us to go through yet another bankruptcy just so we could say we were owners again. Too much anguish involved. Too much stress, anger and fear. So we stayed.

How could we not like it here? It's like this every day, every single day there's a spectacular sunrise, a breathtaking sunset. There are trees with giant thorns, ancient oaks with hollow spaces at the base of their trunks where birds build nests.

We've heard a cougar scream in the hollow out back of our house (a converted barn with crookedty floors and doors that don't quite work, windows that look like something from Alice Through The Looking Glass) and watched a deer give birth in the side yard. There's the opossum that stops by the studio door to look in at me, on his way to the cedar bushes in the front to eat the berries and the Great Blue Heron who has visited every year, or his children. It stands over five feet tall and soars in over the house like a glider coming in for a landing, always absolutely silent, huge, majestic.

Our fourteen years here have been magical. I've felt more at home here than any other place we've been. My roots are almost as deep as some of the trees now. 

Tomorrow we meet to find out what the proposal is. Our contract rolled over in July so we are safe for that amount of time at least. It will give us one more year to search and prepare if leaving is what we have to do. 

I am taking my horses with us. I made a promise. I never go back on my promises. Even when we lost the gallery I managed to place almost every artist we represented, in a new gallery. 

This will work out the way it's supposed to. But just between you and me, I hope the path is longer here for us. If we do leave part of my heart will be left behind, here in the land . 

I'm not as afraid of tomorrow as I was, but I will cry if the parting is sooner rather than later. 

And I'm curious too. Wonder what happens next? Anything is possible, anything at all. 

I am, ever yours, Nancy, smiling and scratching my head in wonder