wish you were here, postcards from the farm

This is Beach. Around her all hell is breaking loose. Her uncle and her brother and even her mother are trying to trouble shot an electrical problem in the mudroom. 

Turns out I didn't just blow a fuse, mine or the house's. 

The house around her has an end of the world vibe as the boys pull fuses and shut down power to sections of the house. Electronics powered down and candles lit.

She is completely unaffected by it all.

The total disaster with the eye doctor most of which went down in front of her via the phone. The end result was a set of mismatched not completely correct contacts costing twice what we were told, a 2nd unprocessed refund hopelessly pending, lots of finger pointing between the front office, one f bomb, one phone call asking my parents for a short term loan, and a transfer of all Beach's records back to the expensive clinic.

The washer with frozen pipe at day 4. Where I got desperate, or more accurately got pressure from a 15 yr kid who had just spent a week in Moab and would like clean clothes sooner rather than later. So then I broke something overloading an outlet or a circuit or just an old house in my attempt to speed up the defrosting of the washer.

The one thing I haven't mentioned is I know from past experiences that when the washer freezes sometimes, roughly about half the time, things break somewhere inside. That makes it hard to hold out much hope for an easy solution. 

So it's winter in this old farm house. The mudroom is hardly beautiful and not exactly an inside or outside space; it is a room you always wear shoes in. And there are always complications with spaces such as these.  

Around here you put on big boots and a farm coat and walk over the crusty snow to the coop get eggs. You carry clean water from here to there in metal buckets and feed the chickens from old coffee cans both of which stick to your skin in the cold. You break up ice chunks and secure bedding. 

There is a rabbit and dogs and a few cats. Its all the same. 

The greenhouse has its own requirements, heaters and fans that need switching on and off. But late at night you can slip on the same big boots and cross the yard to the glow of the string of lights hanging inside the thin billowy frame. That is where the hot tub waits.

I don't have a way to make all this tie neatly back in. Yesterday just wasn't neat. There are other storms brewing. Meet season hanging heavy on the horizon (and the pocket book). Even the bench at gym was lacking luster. 

The day and the night sort ran like slow moving lava. Those of us able to make it to higher ground did pretty damn well and those of us who didn't quite get there just keep passing the phone off to those who did because the last thing BC needed to hear me say was what I was thinking and feeling about the whole thing. Instead he got to hear about who said what at gym and about India and about India's dog...

And this is Beach. She is an island. She doesn't care that the only vegetable left in the house is one lonely napa cabbage.