I can’t extract myself from the current of story and sit outside it for long. This has been the year of a long awaited spring, and then the creek thawed, the snow melted, and green erupted in hazy greys and violent neon everywhere. It is like when jazz hit the world, you could see Dizzy Gillespie and Bill Evans. Everything is jazz and it is all glorious.
And that isn’t having small children discovering the world. And being in an entirely new one, by a creek and nestled below the woods. In one hour we slaughtered a chicken, discovered it had lice, nearly cut off all my son’s hair, discovered it was fine, and then found an old machete under the porch. It is that kind of world. I was making pancakes too, if memory serves, and drinking a fine blackberry sage cider.
There are too many stories. Every day is a new adventure. Right now my five year old (who navigated the high jungle on his way down the trail) is nearly knocking himself over to push the two year old on the swing she climbed up on by herself.
So here we are
On November 14, 2022, I lived in Moscow, Idaho across the block from an optometrist, a dentist, and an undertaker. We lived in an old parsonage reworked for a duplex. A quadruple murder in town had my mother and sister telling stories and sending news articles from California. But we were busy living. Downtown was quiet save for the odd leaves or downturned person skittering across the street.
My husband and I were excited. It was all tangled. The housing market is rough here - High prices, skyrocketing rates, and steep competition. But against all the odds we found a quiet spot in a neighboring community. It was a ramshackle place that needed plenty of work, but it had 5 apple trees, three stoves, and a lot of light. It was right for us. So we were going to sign papers and deliver a down payment while everyone else seemed to be in a fog of worry.
In those two months we dug into our lives here, so much so that even though we lived in that town, I know more about Dostoyevsky’s murders than my own Moscows.
In part that is because our internet is barebones, but also because life requires much of us these days. My husband came home with the news of an arrest and my mail lady told me a car exploded in the news. I live a very small life with only the duties in front of me, the daily bread, and the breath in my lungs as the poet said. It is very good.
I always thought I wanted to be an ascetic, but I don’t think anyone actually wants to be one. It is a lot of work. What a scholar really wants is a warm fire, a good book, and no one to bother you. This is not that, but there are many good books.
We moved the week before Thanksgiving. The first night on mattresses wedged together, I could feel the cold pressing in from the wall.
We lit a fire in one stove and found the other two unusable for random reasons like exposed gas lines over heat vents.
We moved in without a washer and dryer, but in God’s kindness there was one down the street. The previous dryer vented through a hole in the subfloor, building a mound of highly flammable dryer lint under the house. Eric bored a hole through the wall in between rounds of chopping wood.
We found a near cord of wood in December (a small miracle).
Then the gas began leaking through the house. It started with a slight smell in the laundry room and became so bad my eyes watered. I hauled all five children out of the house in thigh deep snow and drove around until Eric could go home and check it. There was nothing wrong to speak of. The next time it happened I shut off the gas, leaving us without hot water. I began thanking God for cold water.
Eric began working on the water heater in earnest. She was leaking and the boards were wet, so drying out the laundry room where she sat was a priority. No one wants a rotten subfloor. He started this just after moving in, so the tinkering just went up a bit. Our water heater needed a diaper. Once the water was dried up the pilot light stayed on.
This happened at the same time as a near historic freeze. The town marquee registered -18 and even with heat tape our pipes froze. Moving us from cold water to no water.
I boiled snow to keep the toilet moving and waited as the dishes piled up and the laundry mounted. Christmas was on Sunday.
So was Easter. There are million moments between them, and all were unfathomable.
But they are gone.
Here we are in the abounding present.
I'm going hunting for a blue lagoon.
Really
Further Up and Further In.
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