Off The Beaten Path

The foundation was prepped Thursday. Concrete wasn’t available until Monday, ‘sometime’. My experience with “sometime” thus far was that it meant approximately ‘somewhere between Wednesday and Never.’ So imagine my surprise when we were wakened by the sound of trucks on Monday morning before the sun had fully risen. By lunchtime, we had a beautiful…

Wednesday, Jesse levelled and anchored the forms. The pad was so soft that the braces didn’t want to stay put, and extras had to be braced in from several feet away. Thursday, the gravel came, and then the layer-cake that is a frost-protected slab took shape. Gravel, vapor barrier, rebar, solid foam, remesh. It came…

Being left in the lurch is never a fun feeling. Being left in the lurch when fall is fading fast and you live in a tent with three small kids and even at barely-dipping-below-freezing temperatures wool sweaters and six blankets apiece and winter hats and thick socks are necessary to not freeze to death at…

Nothing at all had happened for so very long, and then all of a sudden, many things happened at once. Only a day after our friends had returned home, the wood arrived from the mill. Being only used to your basic Home Depot type lumber, this was a revelation. Rough-cut, true-measurement lumber. The 6x6s were…

Once the building pad was in place, the next step was to mark out and auger holes for concrete pilings. I reached out to the one person I knew who had the equipment to do the work. He assured me that even though he was busy, he wasn’t TOO busy to get it done. We…

Having a useable driveway is important, because nothing else can happen without it. The well-drilling company had been on standby at this point for almost 2 months. “As soon as there is a road in, I’ll call you back.” The day I got to make that call was a good day. And yet, nothing in…

For my birthday, I got homelessness. For my husband’s – six months after we moved into my mother’s home – all he wanted was to move out; to finally settle on our own land. There was a problem, though. A hurricane was coming. We thought and evaluated, spent time in prayer, thought and discussed, and…

Life doesn’t stop just because one’s circumstances are in limbo or one’s health takes a surprise downswing. Time passes. Things happen. When we arrived at Mom’s, we had 13 chickens and 2 ducks. By the time a few months had gone by we had buried several chickens and hatched out 4 new ducks. Our original…

We lost a month to my physical recovery. A month of being weakened and tired to the point that a trip to the mailbox was an epic trek. A month of emotional pain that I had to shove down and try to appear normal. A month of laying on the couch and trying to get…

At the very best of times, saying ‘goodbye’ to the house that built you is a difficult thing. This was the house where we got married in the back yard. This was the house my children were born into. The youngest was born upstairs. The doorway held the record of their ages and heights. This…