You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'My Home' category.
This is the view I grew up with. Minus Dan, of course. This is the valley that my parents bought when I was fifteen. All eighty-two acres are just as lovely.
When we moved there, the valley was filled with scrubby trees. We cleaned it out, dug a whole out of the hill, and put in our house. For the better part of a year, we lived in the shell of that house while we continued to work on it. We didn’t have running water or electricity at first.
We read books aloud to each other by lamplight in the winter evenings. We watched the fireflies as they filled the valley in the summer nights.
We hauled water up from a spring on the property and heated it on a wood burning stove. Dishes were washed by candelight. Showers were taken outside in a little solar heated shower, often at night, for privacy – not from neighbors because there aren’t any.
For a while, there were no windows on the main part of the house, but my siblings and I insisted on sleeping out there anyway. In the winter we heated stones on the wood stove, wrapped them in towels, and put them at the bottoms of our beds to keep our toes warm. In the summer, bats often joined us in our “bedroom” at night. We drifted off to sleep watching the fireflies glowing softly below us.
We loved ever minute of it! It was my parent’s dream come true… a piece of land, and a fairly self-sufficient home. We poured our sweat and blood into that land, and we love it. Those of us kids who have left home, look back on it with a fondness that we may never feel for any other piece of property. The siblings still at home may not feel that attachment, but that’s because they were still essentially babies while we were taming that bit of land.
Mom used every bit of daylight to plant her cottage garden in the front of the house, and for years she has nursed it along, and now it rivals many botanical gardens in it’s variety and beauty.
Dan and I sat on that very bench in my mom’s garden, under neath the fragrant blossoms of the crabapple tree and the sparkling canopy of stars, nearly every evening during the spring of our courtship. We watched the otherworldly dances of the fireflies that filled the valley below us. Many times since, we’ve commented that that valley must have the most amazing firefly display in the world. It’s incredible.
Things around here have been phenomenally crazy for the last few weeks. I can’t believe that it’s been nearly two whole weeks since I last posted.
We have so far:
Visited with my brother (Caleb) and his girlfriend, Alison who came home for a week.
Visited with my brother (Jared) who came home from college two times during the last couple of weeks.
Visited with my sister (Anna) and her family, who came home to participate in all the visiting (see above) and celebrate our mom’s and Bessie’s (my niece, Anna’s daughter) birthdays – (see below).
Started raising cockatiels with my brother (Zion).
Met my uncle from Chicago at a local(ish) campground.
Camped.
Hiked.
Fished. (Okay, only a little, but as my uncle says… “Fishing requires patience, but fishing with children requires the patience of an angel).
Uploaded and edited roughly 1400 photographs.
Celebrated my mom’s 49th birthday.
Celebrated my sister-in-law’s 46th birthday.
Celebrated my niece’s 3rd birthday.
Celebrated Easter Sunday.
Changed 224 diapers.
Had/have a bad cold and a case of hives (mine!).
Attended a play.
Prepared roughly 42 meals.
Washed around 746 loads of laundry.
Washed 300 loads of dishes in the dishwasher.
Had a picnic.
Did major grocery shopping twice.
Took a mass family picture involving 20 individual and wiggly people.
Played at the park.
Juggled three fussy babies.
Figured taxes. Repeatedly.
Bought two cars.
Cleaned up approximately 29 spills.
Visited the Science Center.
Put out four oven fires.
Had two tires repaired.
Potty trained a two year old.
Mopped the floor. Once.
Learned of two separate and potentially serious car accidents involving my parents and my brother.
Photographed most of the above.
A small bonfire, marshmallows from the surplus grocery store, and my camera…
As you can tell, I could easily have been entertained all evening!
Yes, I know, every one knows what a fork looks like, and that a post entitled “a fork” sounds rather boring…
Having lots of people around (using my camera) always makes for a few surprises when I download the pictures to my computer. Then I have to find out who took the photos in question in order to give the proper credit, you know.
So, the credit for this photo (which I find very fascinating and would enlarge and put on my dining room wall, had I another inch of space) goes to Nathan.
My very real-life green….
And it’s slightly more attractive relative…
{green ~ our bathroom fern}
For some reason, I love color weeks. I haven’t participated in one in a long time, but now seems like a good time, since we’ve hunkered down to recover from Truxton’s arrival.
Emily, of shining egg is hosting a green week, in (hopeful) celebration of the end of winter, and the coming of spring.
Since I am still camping on the couch for the most part, my photos will be relegated to things around the inside of my house, but I will be browsing the list of participants to get a hint of the spring which I hope is starting to show up outside. Kinsley and Sophie have already been enjoying this activity with Trux and Mama. Who knows, maybe Sophie could learn her colors through color weeks?
