Crossing

I’ve crossed over.    

Last Monday, after a final heart-wrenching garden tour, we locked the back door, click! and left the old house for the last time.  Black clouds thundered as we exchanged hugs and best wishes with Mark and Kari, the young buyers.  We also exchanged a house and a check. 

While Linda tried out her new “work-digs” (a couple upstairs rooms with our dear friends Doug and Monica in NE Minneapolis), I moved into our two (temporary) homes:  cabin and shed.  The one room 20’x20’ cabin rests between the landlord’s (Kim, Troy and their 3 daughters) house and a cornfield. 

Here we eat and sleep with Kirby cat---whose learning not to spend all his time under our bed---and when we can, Kim and Troy’s Savannah the Wonder Dog, now likely in her final weeks if not days. 

The shed---a ¾ mile gravel drive or a ½ mile prairie-pasture-woodland walk---stores most of our old house.  Fortunately we’d donated, sold or trashed much of it. 

I thrilled to the task of building a scrap lumber readily accessible shed-kitchen (crock pot, Fiesta ware, canned tomatoes…).  I reluctantly rebuilt the “mouse-proof” storage (furniture, winter wear, blankets) after spying mouse droppings littered over all like black pepper.  The urine-reeking tarp covers squealed as I dumped their scurrying contents onto the driveway, now their final resting place.  Mouse-proof now?  Perhaps.  But upstairs in the hayloft, quiet and order calm me as do the well-stacked boxes, wicker chair seating and of course the amazing sawdust toilet, odor free as ever. 

And Friday it began:  the new house.  Stakes and string and a lot of imagination. 

Tom the builder says Steve will start excavating this Wednesday with concrete poured the following week.  Perhaps.

I’m engaging new life.  Making space for stacks of heating wood (fallen boxelder, willow, elm, oak, apple). Buckthorn met its end through chain saw and the blue dabs of Roundup death.  My sweat-soaked shirt tore down the back as I peeled it off, giving the biting flies quite an opportunity as I muled the spiny buckthorn to a combination brush pile / snow fence.  No more buckthorn on the homesite’s 300’ hedgerow.  I look forward to removing this invasive from the remaining mile and a half of Land hedgerow, unleashing the long-suffocated woodland wildflowers.  

And oh the wildflowers, our prairie, I can’t tell you how I delight in its emergence.  We identified and welcomed three new flowering forbs to our prairie family: rosin weed, downy sunflower and starry campion.  Four years since we planted their birthing seeds, they awe me with their patience.

And here I am, maintaining what matters.  Blog.  E-mail.  Text.  Phone.  Digitally shrunk distance.

The bridge of crossing is long.  Yet, right now, as I gaze over the bed out the window where the corn is but the floor of the sky, I can’t imagine feeling more blessed.  Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. 

Rah-dur!