I got the VICFA newsletter, and shucks!  Y’all are so sweeeet!

The trip across country was really an adventure.  I decided to take the most southerly route (Interstate 40) to avoid mountains as much as possible for the sakes of my old truck trailer and our warmth.  According to AAA and Mapquest, it added a day of driving, but I think our trip was much easier.  I’d split the trip up into 510-650 mile stretches, which left us enough time to stop when we needed to and still reach camp by dusk, especially since we were driving into longer days and earlier hours.

After looking at livestock trailers and truck caps, I chose a $500.00 freestanding cage by Sydell that fit in the bed of the pickup.  The trailer would be too hard on the truck and use too much gas; the cap would not allow a way to pen the goats out of the truck if we were delayed anywhere.  I did not purchase Sydell’s very expensive tarp cover, which turned out to be a mistake.  I traded household items with a friend in return for an ugly but serviceable 4x8 cargo trailer to carry lightweight items like our tents and food.  Donnie, my boyfriend, wired it for lights to make it legal.  My brother Dan traded in a tiny Acura RX car for a bling red Toyota Tacoma pickup.  All the way up to the morning we left I was trading, giving away and packing stuff. 

I found homes for the old dog (Honey) and male cat (named Rocky Horror, because his legs have garter belt markings on them) at the last minute.  The cat had an appointment at the vet in Warrenton to be neutered first.  I heard him working at his cage door while I drove but did not take it seriously.  When I opened the office door, Rocky suddenly released a yowl – and his cage latch.  He ran into some thorn bushes behind the office and down an enormous ground hog hole the shopping center manager insisted didn’t exist.  Rocky wasted a LOT of my time; after the first two hours of calling him and visiting all the businesses in the shopping area to tell them what happened, I had to go home and made three trips back and forth to check on him.  I finally caught him in a Havahart trap with a sardine the following morning, got him fixed and delivered him to his new owner, a very prim young man who lives with his even more so momma.  They think Rocky is named after the boxer and we’ll let them continue to think so.

Monday night I sold my beloved angora buck (Karma) and gave away an angora doe (Stevie Nix) I had planned to take.  She was VERY pregnant and had been head butted rather severely; I was afraid she’d have a dead baby on the trip.  After checking the fitment of several cages in Dan’s truck we really didn’t have much choice since the only way I could have separated her was to have her cage mashed up front behind the cab where we couldn’t have gotten her out easily.  His truck turns out to have a smaller bed than mine; two cages side by side just didn’t fit to allow the goat and the Great Pyrenees (Lacuna) out at rest stops.  Zara, a new VICFA member, took both goats; she asked what she owed me for Stevie and I told her I just wanted Stevie’s baby to live.  “Oh, the pressure!” she answered.  I cried a long time over the goats while Zara’s little girls stared at me solemnly. 

We also took three young muscovy ducks and a cat I’m allergic to but she’s sweet and catches mice.  They also rode in the back of Dan’s truck, individually caged, of course.  All the cages were large and equipped with bedding, food and water.  The cat had a two-story motel with a litter box on the lower level.  The goat pen was supposed to hold six goats comfortably and I took only three (Aeroplane, Courtney Love and her unnamed buckling).  Even the dog could stand up, turn around and lie down.  Everyone had wind and rain protection but could also look out the window. I’d intended to take a hive full of bees, as well, but when I opened their hive the night before, I discovered their population had seriously slimmed down since I’d last looked in the fall.  Deciding such an under populated hive might not make the trip, I left them behind for the new home owner.   If any of you want a hive, let me know. 

I am now torn between feeling satisfied that my farm goods and animals have been disbursed to the far corners of Virginia (without a single registration performed, ha ha, VDACS!)  and feeling desperate to know how they all are doing.  Especially those of you who may have some four legged babies, please write!

Donnie and I couldn’t sleep, torn up over what will happen to US because of the move.  The best man I’ve ever known, I left behind.

Tuesday morning I was a drill sergeant, barking for Zofia to get up, to hurry up, checking and double checking everything.   A few important things I’d intended to take, like extra tarps, tarp clips you use when the grommets rip out, fasteners of various sorts, etc somehow got left on the tool table despite all the orders I dispensed. But overall we got it together in a reasonable amount of time.  Donnie checked and rechecked the trailer, which took a big weight off my shoulders.  If he said it was fine, it was fine.   I didn’t worry about it the whole trip.  We left at dawn, Zof and me leading and Dan following. 

Poor Donnie was left with plenty of vacuuming and mowing to do, despite the fact that he has his own home and yard to care for.

After I saw how handy Dick and Becky’s radios were for them, I hinted to Dan that he might want to get us some – and he did.  They were often an enormous help, easier to use while driving than cell phones and always available, even when the phones did not have a signal.  Dan radioed us when bungee cords flew off the tarped trailer (which happened several times until we upgraded to rubber and metal cords) and we radioed him whenever we intended to stop for a break or saw something interesting. 

We took 29 South to 64 West to 81 South to 40 West, spending the first night in tents at Shady Acres Campground in Lebanon Tennessee.  The ground was cold and hard and we were too close to the highway and barking dogs.  I didn’t sleep (again!) But the camp had hot showers and sweet old ladies who didn’t care if we had animals, despite the fact that EVERY place else we called in Tennessee did care very much. 

I packed a lot of healthy food that didn’t need refrigeration for the trip; juice and water, chocolate rice milk, high-end nut butters, rice crackers, dried blueberries and strawberries, fresh apples and veggies, fresh and dried bananas, canned hummus, pitas, little tins of fish, etc.  The first night in Tennessee it was fun to open these packages at our picnic table. I was the only one still eating this stuff towards the end, though.  Zofia was crying for ice cream and meat by the second day.  (A child after Joel’s heart!)

I also packed three bales of hay from Wayne Arrington’s farm and a big plastic bag stuffed full of blackberry leaves (an anti-diarrheal suggestion from Sheri Mackey), grass and maple leaves from my own place for the goats.  I served home food to the goats at rest stops to make them more at ease.  The first three hours they all seemed a little nervous.  Aeroplane, the eldest Pygora, who was still pregnant but was as tough as a Mack truck (daughter of Ashi, a 7 year old pygmy/Mack truck cross that could out run and out fight any yearling) quickly settled in.  She spent most of the trip swaying like a seasoned boat hand, staring out the cage at the scenery.  To ensure the goats had plenty of food, I also picked greenery in every state for them, whenever I could find some away from the highway and therefore reasonably clean.   I had bought an expensive “heavy duty waterproof canvas tarp” from Home Depot to cover the pen and it turned out to be oil cloth, which smelled terrible even though I aired it out for several days before hand, stained the truck badly and started ripping by the end of the first day.   We stopped three days in a row to replace torn tarps on the goat pen and trailer.

I also packed generic Dramamine and a bunch of homeopathic motion sickness and diarrhea medications.  I gave Lacuna the Dramamine at the vet’s suggestion the first two days and then discontinued it because he looked great.  We walked him twice a day and tied him to a tree between our tents at night.

 In Tennessee we encountered three horrific traffic jams.  It was the only state where without a single traffic light in view, our speed varied from zero to seventy miles an hour.  Zofia enjoyed some awesome architecture, including a mysterious silver pyramid next to a golden domed mosque. 

Then we crossed into Arkansas, where the roads immediately worsened to a severe washboard for hundreds of miles and I felt bad for the animals.  We saw a lot of mud, brown water, X-rated stores, a sign advertising Toad Suck Park (yum!), dead armadillos, and a sign saying “speed limit heavily enforced” when there was no sign saying what exactly the speed limit was.  The cities smelled bad.  So did the feed lots.  We decided we weren’t ever coming back.

In Oklahoma we saw a sign saying “Lotawatah” right before a bridge over a river. We also saw an albino cow guardian angel, and sign announcing the town of Checotawas the home of Carrie Underwood, American Idol, 2005.  The National Shrine for the Infant Jesus advertisement depicted Jesus dressed up like a bishop in Mary’s traditional arms- spread slightly from the side pose.  The sign said, “The more you bless me, the more I bless you.”  There were also lots and lots of competing Indian casino signs and a hotel that advertised a FREE ELK! with every room.  Wind towers for energy production where everywhere, dreamily rotating by the hundreds, like ballroom dancers in a fairytale castle.  We spent the night in Marval Family Camping Resort, a lovely place with bright green grass, big trees, adorable log cabins, drive-throughs for RVs and camp sites by a lazy river.  We wanted to stay another night; it seemed completely unfair we had to set up in the rain and leave in the morning early. The ground was softer and a gentle rain sound instead of trucks on the road made it easier to sleep in between dogs barking.  Somehow our long cable for tying Lacuna to a tree disappeared here.  It was to be his last night with comparable freedom; after that he was tied to whatever his leash would go around, usually fence posts, or put back in his cage.

On Thursday we crossed into Texas.  Since the middle of Tennessee we had been seeing billboards for “Free 72 oz steak” but couldn’t read the fine print.  In Texas, with the signs coming more frequently, we saw the catch: you had to eat it all by yourself in one hour.  Zofia’s notes of Texas were:  “Gnarled dead trees, dry creeks, dead stuff.”  I guess she didn’t find it any more interesting than Arkansas.  I saw a shed decorated like a circus tent, a museum called “The Devil’s Rope,” cattle and horses everywhere, and multiple-story high silver cross surrounded by lots of little crosses borne by bent statue people trudging in a circle.  West of Amarillo there was a vision so clear I wanted to stop the truck and call Congress:  on the left side of the road, a grayish brown feedlot with bellowing cattle moving slow as slugs stunk for miles before and miles after.  Tractors, trucks, buildings and silos all cluttered the area, and while they may have all been painted different colors, they had all developed the same grayish brown film.  On the right side of the road, cattle quietly grazed in small groups on hundreds of acres of green grass while more windmills steadily turned.  How could anyone miss the fact that the right side of the road was less costly to the environment, the wallet, the eyes and the nose?

In Tucumcari, New Mexico we spent the night at Mountain Road RV Park.  An employee with a trailer there came up to me shyly, hands clasped behind her back like a sweet girl in a cartoon, and offered me her fenced back yard for the goats.  I thanked her for her kindness but said I was afraid they’d jump out and I’d have a heck of a time catching them again to pen them back up.  Again, we were leaving early. Truth was, the fenced area was tiny and there were dogs everywhere, including the employee’s.  All three goats hate and fear dogs.  In the pen, at least they were high up and the pickup sides provided them solid shelter to hide behind.  I replaced the goat and trailer tarps for the third time, this time wrapping all the edges of the cage and trailer with duct tape to lessen the sharpness.   I also cleaned out the goats’ and ducks litter as best as I could without letting any of them out.  The RV park was home to several female Killdeer, which nervously guarded their nests in the sandy grass.  All of us, goats too, flinched repeatedly throughout the evening while mosquitoes bit us. There were tons of incredibly noisy birds with movie-bat shrieky calls.  It got very cold and my right hand, hip and knee were on fire.  I couldn’t sleep (again!)

In the morning we drove for hours, seeing virtually no houses at all.  Pretty blue flowers and an occasional dinosaur statue lined the road.  When we got close to Albuquerque, highway barriers and bridges were made of Adobe and were decorated in Southwest motifs.  Very cool.   Mixed in with the normal ugly box architecture of suburban shopping everywhere, we saw mission style buildings complete with towers and adobe arches.  

My check engine light came on.   The truck was driving fine.  All the gauges were normal.  We stopped at a truck stop west of the city to fill up.  I took a little palm- sized case holding my credit cards, atm card and id out of my purse, carried it over to the gas pump, removed a card, inserted in the pump, put it back in the case and threw the case on my car seat through the open door.  Zofia went inside to use the bathroom and look at the ice cream freezer.  I went over to my brother the next lane over while my truck was filling up and told him about the check engine light.  When the truck was filled up, I pulled off to the side, opened the hood and nosed around for a loose vacuum hose.   Then I crawled underneath, looking for the same.  (The only symptom less thing that I could fix without parts that could cause the light would be a vacuum leak.)  For good measure, I checked the fluids.  Everything was fine.  I went inside with my purse, failing to notice my credit card case was no longer on the seat or in my purse.  I paid cash for two ice cream bars.

We stopped a few hours later at a Navaho shop in Arizona.  I gathered some dry, unpalatable looking weeds for the goats and they ate them.  Maybe, looking out, they could see there was nothing better for miles.  We took turns leaving the trucks and walking the dog to go inside.  I bought some little birthday presents for Zofia, again paying cash.  About an hour later my light bulb went on and I was really rattled the rest of the day.  Fortunately I had a secret stash of cash in the truck.

There was a sign on the highway advising that all truckers and livestock trailers had to pull over for inspection.  The signs said to stay right if you were driving such a vehicle and that changing lanes was prohibited by law for the next two miles.  I stayed left and radioed Dan that if we got pulled over I was going to say we had no livestock in a trailer; we had pets in the pickup bed.  He sounded nervous when he agreed. Then we passed under cameras checking BOTH LANES.  Then a camera in the right lane.  Then we passed a pull-off where sheriffs were checking vehicles.  No one chased us, so we went on.

That night, at the KOA campground in Kingman, AZ, I frantically pulled everything out of the super-stuffed truck cab, moved the seats up and down, back and forth and searched with a flashlight, even though I knew in my heart that I had stupidly left my cards open to a thief.   I tried calling the bank and credit card companies after I repacked everything in the truck, but it was by then very late.  The campground was pleasant, although packed because there was some kind of special event in town. There were RVs, motorcycles and dogs everywhere.  Physically and mentally sore, and annoyed over some dude talking really loud about the chicks who worked there, I didn’t sleep (again!)

We left Arizona by way of Highway 93 after buying gas and a lot of coffee for me.  I called the card companies early, and it was frustrating because the phone signal kept dropping out.  But I was afraid to wait until we got to Las Vegas.   I felt a lot better after I had cancelled the cards.

Then we saw a sign saying ALL traffic had to stop for inspection.  The road was blocked and sheriffs waved us over.  Dan had his own group of sheriffs checking under his tarp while Lacuna growled softly.  I heard one of them, laughing, shout out, “Hey, there’s a CAT penned up next to the dog!”  I told my little group of sheriffs that my id had been stolen but I was moving from Virginia to Oregon with the fellow in the red pickup over there, and he still had his id.  Sternly, they told me to uncover my trailer.  I started on several dozen bungees while they looked the goats over with their flashlights through the pen bars.  Aeroplane looked them all right in the eyes, a challenge visible in hers.  Her sister and nephew cowered in the back.  After I’d uncovered half the trailer, one of the sheriffs said I could stop and he started opening boxes (which were filled mostly with shoes, tools and clothes, both dirty and clean).  I stood near Aeroplane, who reached out through the pen bars and started nibbling on my hair.  The sheriffs started to laugh.  They helped me cover the trailer back up, said they didn’t need to check the rest, and gave me much advice about being safe and watching out for thieves at rest stops.  I think if I’d been a goat less man they would have detained me longer and searched the entire trailer.

Hoover Dam was under repair and traffic crawled.  But it was a fine piece of architecture in a canyon so crawling gave me the chance to look. 

After the Dam we took the expressway around Las Vegas, where it was already 90 degrees at 8:30 am!  My truck has no air conditioning.  The underpasses and highway barriers were decorated here, too.  Most of the palm trees were brown on top like they’d all suffered the same disease. 

I called Donnie while we had a signal and he advised me not to worry about the check engine light, that the truck barometric pressure sensor was probably suddenly reading high altitudes it had never seen before.  This made sense.  After worrying all day yesterday over the light and the credit card fiasco, my heart finally slowed to a normal rate and I felt human again.

After Las Vegas there were no towns for a long time on Interstate 95.  However, some sand buggy and truck races marred several hours of quiet roadway with sand flying through the goat pen (they all lay down to avoid it) and windows (so we had to close them and be hot).  Trucks would fly across the road in front of us from one sand dune to another and sometimes one would pull in front of us, drive a few miles, hit the brakes and suddenly turn off into the sand on one side or another.  Or we’d crest a hill to find a camper going about 45 mph.  This went on for two hours of driving in a 75 mph zone.   Afterwards, we saw only miles of scrub, sage and white sand. Sometimes a large stretch of sand would glisten in the sun like a big lake.  There were no grasses, trees, houses or people.  Periodically a truck load full of hay would lumber past, going south.  The mountains were sometimes gray green, sometimes gray purple, sometimes gray gray.  An occasional one that looked like it might be topped with snow turned out to be topped with sand.  There were a couple of creepy gold rush towns with shacks worse than any pictured in a feed the children ad.  And people lived there, although we didn’t see how.  It was cold at night and hot in the day and the winds would blow sand through all the broken board walls.  We stopped in Tonopah for gas and food at a little grocery store that also sold garden stuff and hardware.  The cashier asked me for my member card.  When I said I was from Virginia he looked at me like I was a ghost and said I deserved a discount just for that – and he gave me 10% off!  I kind of thought their town needed that 10%, but I didn’t say so.  Dan was right behind me but the cashier didn’t ask him any questions, so he got no discount.  Zofia was waiting in the truck, which I’d parked far away under the only tree.  She said some punk-looking kids came up, dressed all in black and poked at the goats.  One of them said, “They’re alive!”  And then another kid poked the first one and pointed:  “There are PEOPLE in the truck!”  Then they took off. 

We drove on towards Hawthorne, which looked to be a decent sized town on the map.  Rows upon rows of mysterious unlabelled buildings and mounds of dirt with the centers sharply cut out lined the highway.  Zofia said she saw a sandy park with a few benches and missile heads coming out of the ground.   The town was as scary as the gold towns.  It was nearly empty, although several brightly colored motels waited.  We stopped at a two-pump gas station and I took the dog for a walk down an alley scattered with beer bottles and needles.  It was a very short walk.  I didn’t think I should leave sight of the trucks.  The goats got nothing fresh pulled from there. Yuck.  I refused to use the rest room or even go in the store. 

We drove on, past Walker Lake, the first water we’d seen since Hoover Dam.   It was shallow, long and narrow.  I wondered if there was no snow to melt off the mountains this year.  All through Nevada thus far we had seen signs for elk, bighorn sheep and moose, but we had seen no four legged animals other than our own and a few miserable looking cattle.  Signs also alerted us to watch out for privately grazed livestock on public lands, but since there was nothing to graze, there was no livestock, either. 

We continued to Fallon, which billed itself the oasis of Nevada, and it was.  Fallon is just east of Carson City, Reno and Sparks, big cities on Nevada’s sharp corner jutting into California.  At Fallon’s border, grass suddenly turned green, so cattle on part of one big farm had dry brown stuff scattered in dust and on the other part of the same farm had very short bright green grass.  Seems the town sponsors irrigation to attract tourists.  Flags depicting flowers, marathoners and boaters hung from telephone poles and street signs.  We stopped in a modern Safeway that had a Starbucks and a sushi counter, which I didn’t tell Zofia about since she was waiting outside and I didn’t think sushi should be eaten from a Nevada grocery. 

We spent the night on a secluded beach!  No kidding!  Lahontan State Recreation Area has a white sand beach bordering a big lake that made realistic wave lapping sounds all night.  The goats ate well there, enjoying some kind of aromatic herbaceous bush that grew near the shore, tall grasses and tree leaves.  This was the only campground with no running water at all.  The toilets were composting toilets that were scary to look down (the hole went down, down, down!) and there wasn’t even a manual water pump outside to wash off at or to get water for the animals.   I had brought two 5 gallon water containers with us, though, and had refilled at the previous campground, so we were stocked.  We saw jack rabbits and bobwhite quail here, but people only from a distance.  Zofia was happy because she had a good cell phone signal to call friends in Virginia and a camper out of view played grunge rock loud enough for her to sing along while she sat at the water’s edge.  We set up the tents right on the sand and I slept well for the first time on the entire trip. 

In the morning we took 95 North to 140 West, which took us through a long stretch of scrub that occasionally delighted us with pronghorn antelopes.  Then we entered the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, where we also saw burros.  They were brown, scruffy and chubby.  Mountains in the distance started to have snow on them, and I knew we were getting close to the Oregon state line.  When we crossed over, within 50 miles, sage and sand started to yield to grass and evergreen trees.  There were several scary 8% grades coming down out of the Nevada mountains into Oregon.  A helpful sign, the first we’d seen for quite awhile, warned “Rocks” miles after we’d passed both Easter Island straight stacks and haphazard piles that looked like they could topple any instant.  Fences along both sides of the roadway were tightened with circles of more fence, filled with rock – a little idea for you folks in Shenandoah.

We started to see the first deciduous trees since those artificially irrigated in Las Vegas and Fallon.  Pink and apricot-tinged buds swelled into lacy, light green foliage.  A stream appeared alongside the road, and when I saw a little waterfall, tears literally sprang up in my eyes.  I was home. 

In Adel, population 78, we stopped for gas but the only station was closed because it was Sunday.  Some kind of crazy red headed crane-type bird stood next to the road. We saw pelicans not long after, when the stream widened to a river.  Hemlocks, cedars and pines tenaciously gripped the hillside as we drove on.  Pinecones, not trash, littered the shoulders.  The trees and grass grew taller and taller as we went further into the state.  There was a covered bridge at the end of Fremont National Forest.  We stopped in Lakeview for gas, then continued on to Klamath Falls, where we stopped again, although we didn’t really need to.  It felt so much like OREGON I had to stop.  The goats pressed eagerly up against the pen side, looking at knee high, dark green grass.  I walked behind the building, away from the road, and pulled an arm load of it.  I told the goats to enjoy their first Oregon meal, which they gleefully did. The Upper Klamath Lake was huge, by far the biggest body of water we had seen on the whole trip, and was loaded with pelicans.  Evergreens stood five and six stories tall.  The soil turned dark brown from volcanic activity two thousand years before. We continued to Interstate 5, which passed all the towns I had thought about living in, Ashland, Medford and Grants Pass.   Mom had warned me against them, and I was glad I listened.   The last time I had been there was 27 years ago.  Riding in the back seat of someone else’s car I didn’t quite understand how tall mountains, although very lovely, could make daily living and commuting a pain.  The valley is very narrow at the southern end of the state. 

We rejoiced when we saw signs for Roseburg and called Mom, who was waiting at our new house, to tell her we were getting close.  Mom met us in a parking lot off the highway in Sutherlin and we followed her Honda to our new home.  At one point we had to slow down to allow wild turkeys to get out of the road.

You can see where we live (almost) if you Google “Rochester covered bridge, Oregon.”   We have to cross this bridge every time we go anywhere.  Covered bridges were built in Oregon to provide safety in winter bad weather; by keeping the bridge dry, they minimized accidents.  That said, Zofia said the protagonists in Beetlejuice died when a motorist hit them head-on on a bridge just like ours. 

Mom, bless her, spent a great deal of time talking with realtors and looking at houses before she made the down payment so we could get this house before our Virginia house sold.  Neither my brother nor I had actually seen it.  So as soon as we hit the bathrooms and let the critters out, we explored. 

The goats have a large barn that is in good shape.  The center and front of the barn are enclosed and the back has horse stalls with gates leading to the side of a mountain that Mom insists on calling a hill (she was born here, she should know.)  The goats, Aeroplane leading, crept out of the barn like they were expecting a mountain lion to leap out from behind a tree.  Once they had determined it was safe, they ran up and down the “hill,” sometimes with heads up normally, sometimes leaning sideways and prancing like dressage horses on serious drugs.  They head butted each other, careened about and took giant mouthfuls of grass that they barely bothered to chew.

The ducks had to go in the goat pen in the grass because their area is not complete. Another use for the Sydell pen!  I wrapped chicken wire around it so they couldn’t squeeze between the bars.  The dog was chained to a huge and kind of sickly old apple tree near three other trees, two of which were already sporting tiny plums.  Other trees had dripping or clinging moss, not as dramatic as further north where it rains more, but still neat-looking.  The soil in the level garden area is deep, soft and dark brown.  The back door neighbors have more trash and trucks and storage buildings than seven or eight neighbors should have.  The front door neighbors are neater. There are no neighbors visible on either side, only steep “hills” with thick trees.  A small creek filled with butter and egg yellow flowers (toadflax and primrose) slips though a narrow ravine on the goat “hill,” under the driveway, through the back part of the garden, past a small pond and into a huge, slow creek (14’ wide is a creek here) that I own part of.  What Zofia calls the “outhouse” is a cute little pump house that Mom had insulated and painted blue gray to match the house.  Millions of daisies, purple vetch, tiny yellow, red and orange flowers dot the pastures.  The grass near the creek smells SOOOO good because it has some kind of herb I’ve been dying to name.  (Looks like marjoram, but with a little gloss to the leaves like basil, has a flavor split between the two.  I will probably have to wait for it to flower before I can identify it.)  Also growing wild are watercress, good king Henry and miner’s lettuce, three salad greens I purposely planted in Virginia, as well as wild mustards I have picked in Virginia.    There are no bindweed, greenbriar, pokeweed, beggar’s ticks or burrs to worry about here.  However, teasel (another prickly plant) is creeping across the yard, bordering the creek.  Thistle bunches on one side of the barn, near a gigantic round volcanic rock that must have tumbled down the hill.  Also near the creek are star shaped blue flowers, red clover, subalpine daisy, which is pink, redwood sorrel, blackberries, some kind of wild iris and a white umbrella-shaped flower I’ve never seen before.

On the hill, yellow scotch broom and blue eyed grass bloom in short grass and bunchy weeds.  At the bottom of the hill the grass was already waist high!  Mom’s little spaniel-mix dog could not be seen when he plowed through it; you had to watch for movement of the grass to know where he was.  I wanted my sheep back.

Mom had brought food with her.  At dinner she asked what I thought of the house. House?  Oh yeah, the house!  It  is smaller than my old one, but will be a lot less trouble, as it is not an official fixer-upper.  (Mom took care of the fixing before we arrived, bless her again.)  Both of my hands still burn and go numb from all the work I did in the months prior to leaving Virginia.  My checkbook is also numb.  A house in good shape is exactly what I need now.  Zofia and I share a huge bathroom on the first floor.  Dan has his own bathroom in a bedroom with a great view on three sides upstairs.  The kitchen is large and open, with a big island in the center.  I told her honestly that I was very happy with the house and land but very unhappy with the neighbors behind (you can see them when you crest the driveway hill to the house and the whole time you are in any part of my yard facing their direction).  She had a solution for that:  wild pines, firs and hemlocks from her forested property on the coast.  We decided to go there that weekend to dig some up.   That night five deer lay in the grass beside the driveway, watching the house.  They have since chosen a place closer to the road and farther from Lacuna to bed down at night and sometimes when we come home we have to wait for them to cross the driveway on their way to their sleeping place.

Since I’ve been here I’ve been very busy preparing and planting two enormous gardens, looking for work and dreaming of farmers markets.  Boy, do I have some ideas!  But it’s warm now (it’s awfully cool here in the morning, still, despite it’s being the end of May!) so I am ready to go outside and work.

The farm politics scene here is interesting; I will have to address that in the next missive.

I miss you all very much but am very happy here.  I think the solution is for you to take turns coming out here to see me! 

-Larisa