Three Months gone by...

So their first three months had been and gone. Her attempt at finding a new Girl Scout troop was a flop. Her hopes to switch over to KY jr roller derby for my derby girl fell short as well. In fact, when she looked back at it, it was hard to find something that hadn't gone wrong... the tracter dug into the ground and sliced the satellite cable. The cement truck had collapsed the pipes that lead from the trailer to the septic. They had to dig them out and replace them all. The first company who was paid to do the concrete work took off with their money and made an awful mess in their barn. It would take years before they could afford to fix that concrete disaster. Her car had broken down twice. His once. The grass didn't grow, and they had to till the ground a little at a time with the Garden Weasel and replant. Her son had called her from Cincinnati to let her know what a crappy parent she had been and remind her of all the times she had fallen short. Then ended the conversation with how he didn't need her in his life anymore. The list goes on. It had definitely been a hard trek so far.



But it was the most wonderful time she had ever had. It was the happiest she had ever been. She started a garden. She grew veggies from seed, and bought what she couldn't seed. She had pludged through the woods looking for old felled trees that had been rotted long enough to turn the ground into mulch, and she hauled it by the 5 gallon bucket up to the house. Her girls had helped. Hundreds of gallons so she could help put some nutrients into the garden soil. She turned over the "KY clay" as she called it, and weeded the land at the same time, all with a shovel. Then she planted, watered and hoped and prayed that she could grow something. ANYTHING! She planted so many things hoping that some of it would take. Grapevines, beans, strawberries, potatoes, herbs, melons of all kinds, pumpkins for the fall, squash, tomatoes by the dozens, peppers of several varieties, sweet potatoes, lettuce and chard, radishes, eggplant (a favorite). Working in the dirt was such happiness. It felt good to be sweaty and dirty at the end of the day.



With her husband working from home, the girls refused to eat lunch or dinner without him. Since they didn't have a table in their trailer that would fit all of them, they would eat together at the couch and chair. Every day they would do this. He would get off the computer when it was time, and they would sit around eating whatever they made on their griddle or on the fire, since that was all they had to cook with. Sometimes she would make up some of that amazing deer tenderloin wrapped in bacon. It was everyone's favorite, even the girls who were not too fond of deer meat. In the evenings (which was sometimes as late as 9pm when they were all done with their work), they would eat dinner while watching old episodes of Family Feud. They would try to get all the answers before the contestants and be proud when their answers came on the board. "I called that one." little Bret would say. "Thank You!" would be Brenda's reply. They had hardly even eaten meals together in Ohio. Bret used to be so tired and beat down from work that he would often come home and sit in his bed for dinner, yelling at the girls to be quiet and stay out. But here, even THAT work felt better, because this was their dream.

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Now that my husband works from home, sometimes I leave the house, go to the window by his desk and make weird noises and faces at him. It breaks up his day, which I think is a good thing.

We washed our laundry by hand. She and the girls learned how to use the washboard. And they agitated the laundry with this plunger-like tool. Then into the rinse to be plunged again. All this took about an hour. Afterward the laundry was squeezed and hung to dry. It might take the better part of the morning.


It took 3 months to get the hot water working. And just that long for a stove to arrive as promised by the trailer company who sold them the trailer. After a lot of painfully heated days, even air conditioning showed up and was installed. In Ohio, they could keep cool their house down in the morning and rest assured it wouldn't get too bad unless the outside temperatures went into the 90's. Trailers are so thin that they heat up quick.

For the first three months, until the hot water was fixed they would microwave a gallon of water when they wanted to shower and take it into the bath with them.

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I told my girls that they have their sleepover on Saturday so to make sure they bathe. One of them said, without missing a step, "I will use TWO gallons of water this time." Such troopers, living out here with me: limited water, none of it hot, almost no TV or internet, washing laundry by hand, no stove. And still as sweet as can be.

They had to limit their internet time, which freed up all kinds of time to do other things, like clear trails, take hikes, play in the fields, make forts. Trips to the library were a treat, as were trips anywhere. They learned that reading was not a pain to be forced upon them, but rather a window into another world. She was thrilled when the first girl told her that she had realized how reading is like watching a movie. "The words start to play a movie in her head."  They were also learning all about the land outside. They got a cat to keep out the enormous amount of mice that seemed to find their way in to their home. The nibbled on sassafras branches, drank the rain off of leaves, sat by the pond watching the tadpoles.

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Marley: do you want to taste some honeysuckle, Mom? I'll show you how to do it. Here, hold my frog.

Everyone calls it the simpler times... when they didn't have all the modern day tools of today. But she could attest that things took much longer this way. She hadn't knitted much since she had moved. Who had time with all the fire making and cooking and laundrying and hauling up this or that and clearing trails and gardening. She began to read the "Little House" series to the family during the day. They would sit to hear the next chapter. It was like history. And it felt a little like the present to them too.

Those three months flew. And with all the things that had seemed to go wrong, still everything felt so right. She wished this life for her boys who had grown up and moved away year ago. "If only we had been able to do this YEARS ago,"she would find herself thinking. "How different their lives might have been too..."