WHAT A MESS.
I dream of our finished home. I dream of clean, white walls...wooden floors, rows of organized shelves, books and mason jars and trinkets artfully arranged. Everything minimal, simple, and neat.But that dream seems distant sometimes. Especially yesterday, as I looked around our tiny cabin and saw: bags and bags of left over insulation and the plastic it was packaged in, stacks of newly-built bee frames, random scraps of drywall, boxes of tile and grout and adhesive, Jesse's latest fermentation project, plywood boards and flooring pieces, stovepipe and bags of chicken feed....not to mention the literal MOUND of garbage still lying in the yard full of trash from the early days of construction and strange metal pieces we have unearthed from around the property.
Jesse and I produce very little trash, in reality. All of our food scraps go to the compost or to the chickens or to Wendell, and all of our paper or cardboard is burned. We reuse anything that we can. We try not to buy or consume products made or packaged with plastic. But, in the process of building our house, we find ourselves stuck with a ridiculous amount of plastic wrapping and other such junk. It leaves us in a sort of dilemma - living in Bugtussle, where there is no such thing as trash or recycling pickup. And so the garbage piles up, until we decide to drive it to the faraway dump, where we then have to pay for them to bury it in a landfill. There is always the solution that many of our neighbors use, to simply burn it all, plastic and everything, filling the sky with a dark, chemical cloud. Which is worse?Clearly, we don't like either of these choices. So....there is sits. Not decomposing. Making a mess.While I am still working on a solution for our garbage pile, I can find an answer to the clutter. While in my mind our life is simple and organized and white and clean, I have come to realize that it is mostly, actually, messy. Our life is messy - it is overflowing with canning jars and bushel baskets and skeins of yarn and dirty chore boots and books and old wine bottles and all of the little things that fill our days. It is not the cover of a magazine. It will always be a little bit cluttered, a little bit dirty, a little bit real. And when I can embrace this, I know I will be happier. We are farmers, and our life is full of practical, utilitarian things - it will never be truly "minimal" or "streamlined." I think of the Shaker saying - Beauty rests on utility - and in that, I can look at our unorganized cabin floor, and smile.- Hannah.
CABIN PROGRESS.
Busy week! We began installing drywall...
...and we got the stove pipe up through the roof - a rather precarious task that involved balancing a ladder in the bucket of Eric's tractor. It is so hard to be patient when all we want to do is move in....we are so close!
SWARM NUMBER TWO....AND THREE....
On Sunday, I went with Cher and the Bugtussle kids to see a high school production of Peter Pan in Lafayette. While we were away, Eric and Jesse worked on installing the stove pipe in our cabin. While they were taking a break, observing the bees as Jesse retold our story of the swarm, Eric suddenly exclaimed, "It's happening again!" And it was - ANOTHER SWARM. They scrambled together an assortment of old hive parts and pieces of bark and plywood to make a hive. Although the bees didn't seem thrilled about their somewhat bedraggled-looking new home, they haven't left yet! We are planning to move them to a more hospitable location on a cold morning. I truly cannot believe that once again we happened to be walking by the bees as they decided to swarm!We are getting a bit worried, however, about the original hive that keeps swarming....especially because we came upon yet another small swarm of bees late last night (which we did not capture). That is three total swarms, quite early in the season. I am planning on checking in each of the hives tomorrow to make sure all is well. Any beekeepers out there have ideas about this sort of behavior? I know that swarming in general is a sign of health - a sign that the bees are productive and expanding. But THREE seems a bit excessive!- Hannah.