It's comin' on Christmas...

It is the Sunday before Christmas. The house is decorated. My 2-year-old grand-daughter is coming all the way from Los Angeles to visit us and I want the place to look like Macy's. I want to see that Christmas magic in her eyes. Even if only for a minute or two when she first gets here.
We don't have much snow. I'm still hoping for a White Christmas this year for my Los Angelinos. But we've had little cold weather here. Hardly any snow. I think it will be a short winter. My husband is anxious to rev up his 54" snow blower on the front of his John Deere. But so far it's only been a few inches here and there. Not enough to bring out the great Green and Yellow Beast.

Here is a picture of our big red barn. It was built in 1870. The siding is new, as is the roof, but inside there are hand-hewn timbers and very old floors. The lower level is where dairy cows were once kept. The previous owners had cats and when we bought the place the lower level smelled like cat pee. But a summer with fresh breezes the the doors open have dispelled the odors. I think of black and white Holsteins down there getting milked. Once this was a thriving farm with dairy cows, cattle, chickens and even pigs. There is a huge cement pad over in the corner of the property and it has an odd circle in the middle of it. I finally found a woman, my age now, but who grew up here. She said it was the pig barn and the circle in the middle was a corn crib that all the pigs from the four different pens could reach it. But now it is just our vegetable farm. And, I hope, in the Spring, a flower farm.
Meantime, I have put a wish into the universe. Two wishes actually. Don and I were sitting around the other night having a glass of wine. I got to wishing out loud and wished for "one more adventure" and "one more baby." This is because all my children and grand-children live far away and I miss them. My friend Pagyn would say you must be very careful about the wishes you cast adrift in the Universe.

Here I am with my new baby. Her name is Cricket. She is a two-year-old pug. She is zany, crazy love. We are thrilled to have her. After two years as a kennel dog and one litter of pups, she is more than thrilled to be the small darling of two people with nothing better to do than to pet her and coddle her. She has kennel manners and will need to be spayed, but all in good time.
And the adventure? Well the adventure is yet to come. Often nervous about the future, I have decided to embrace it sight unseen this time. Sometimes I get glimpses of the future but at the moment it is merely the man behind the Green Curtain. So with Christmas only a week away, I'll just click my red sequined shoes together and say, "There's no place like home."

November 26, 2011

It is the week after Thanksgiving. My older sister came for Thanksgiving day. She brought her dogs with her, two Corgi's, which were well-behaved and made me want a dog. I am trying to hold off until Spring, but I am still checking both Rottweiler rescue and Pug rescue. Because I am pretty much insane.

This is a picture of me that my husband Don took about a week ago. No make-up, still recovering from a 3-week bout of some pulmonary something-or-other, and I see I have many wrinkles these days. It is because I try to laugh a lot and because I am 60.

This is a week of contemplation and quiet. Most everyone else is standing in line somewhere in front of Wal-Mart or Target or Best Buy. But I don't like shopping and can't stand crowds. So I'm staying home, finishing up the last of the Christmas decorating. Frankly just the thought of shopping in pushing or shoving crowds makes my eyes roll back up in my head. I saw all of that on the news this morning. No thanks.

Don and I are planning a round of trips to keep us busy over the winter. California, Texas, Florida -- all good places to visit in February and March.

It is supposed to snow again tomorrow and our weather man said this morning, that this morning would be our last nice day of the year. Nice being a relative term for most people. But it's in the high 40's and cloudy. The two small lakes you can see from the house are quiet and gray today. But when the sun is out, you can see them sparkle and dance from the living room windows. Am I falling in love with this property? Yes. Some. It grows on you. All the beautiful maples trees and the gentle roll of the land here is wonderful to look at. The birds are frantically at work at the feeders and a black squirrel, who grows larger and fatter every day, comes once a day to jam his jowls with black sunflower seeds. Wildlife abounds here. We have even read newspaper accounts of black bear in this county.

I am hoping to see a red fox one day soon. I imagine him loping across the white snow, black-tipped ears, on the hunt or perhaps just heading over to the lake to catch a large frog for a quick meal.

Friday, November 18th, 2011

I got up early this morning. It was windy and the wind was roaring through the leafless trees. Normally the time change makes me crazy and it takes me a full two weeks to readjust to the single hour change. But this morning I was grateful it started to get light early.

If you look on the left side of this photo, you can see the flag moving in the wind. The wind is from the south today which normally keeps the air warmer. But the wind chills are in the mid-20's and it's cold. We know winter is coming. We try to stave it off by doing whatever outdoor chores we can before the snow comes. Don was out picking up leaves again, I went around and picked up all the fallen branches and threw them on the outdoor fire pit. But by now, there are probably hundreds more branches blown down. If we used our fireplace it would be a constant source of kindling. We don't know if the fireplace works yet. We haven't had anyone out to look at it.

The deer come every evening around 5:00 p.m. to munch on the apples. People around here sell "deer apples" and people use them as bait to lure the deer close. Gun season started this past Tuesday. We hear shotgun blasts regularly throughout the day, starting early in the morning. But at our house, we let the deer come close and munch on the apples in peace.

Out in the garden there is a plastic beach ball blowing around everywhere. It started out as part of Dolly, our scarecrow, and gave her an impressive bustline. Later, halfway through the summer, it sunk down and she looked pregnant. Now she stands out there, more or less headless, bustless, and not pregnant. And the beach ball kicks around happily in the wind gusts.

Winter is coming, winter is coming, winter is coming. . . . It is like a drum beat in my head. I don't dread the winter. It's not the cold weather. It's not the snow. The older I get, winter is just a season, a short part of the whole year. I fear the inactivity. The boredom. Being house-bound. What will we do?

November 11, 2011 Veteran's Day

This is the garden we woke up to this morning! The deer fencing is all draped on top like garland on a Christmas tree. The trees are frosted with snow and hoar frost. It's hard to imagine that 6' tall tomato bushes groaning with wheel barrow loads of tomatoes and beautiful translucent onions standing in rows like soldiers used to grow here just a couple of months ago. It is so beautiful!

On the other side of the house, it's a scene from Peter and the Wolf. The pine trees are loaded with perfect snow. I wish I had to dog to go outside and romp in the snow with. Don wants a big Rottweiler. And he wants a small, black pug. Today, I want them all. A happy house full of wagging tails coming in from a romp in the fresh snow.

This week-end promises to be warm and sunny, in the low 50's. So all the snow will be gone. We are going to dig a "pumpkin hole" next to the garden. This is a two foot high, two foot diameter hole, lasagne-layered with soil and cow manure and leaves and whatever else I can find. It will cook all winter long and by spring, it will be a warm pot, perfect for the Cinderella pumpkins I plan to plant. They are prickly enough that the deer will not bother them. I hope the vines take over the entire west side of the garden. Then we'll have less yard to mow!

Halloween 2011

The garden has been put to bed. The trees are turning colors. The lawn has disappeared under a carpet of leaves. It is beautiful here.

Most of the trees are yellow. But a few, hidden here and there in the woods, are spectacularly red.

It is Halloween. I have asked a few neighbors and have been told not to expect any trick-or-treaters. It's too bad because I would love to decorate the walkway with pumpkins and corn stalks and lights.

It is getting quieter here. My sister and her husband have gone home to Florida. The garden, as I said, is put to bed, my husband is considering going back to work. What will I do all winter? Could I load the wood stove all by myself if I had to? What if I get snowed in? As I ponder these questions, fall deepens its hold on Michigan and the skies are turning the familiar November-gray that lasts all month. I am already thinking about spring and wishing I had planted more bulbs in my fledgling flower garden. The ones I did plant, white daffodils and deep red tulips in the main garden, small blue scilla and miniature yellow daffodils in the shade garden, are peacefully slumbering under dark, cool soil. I also got rid of the rocks and removed the plastic tarp from a small bed by the barn. I filled it up with leaves and manure, underlaid with newspaper and hope it will be rotted down in the spring. I have visions of the "Spring Celebrities" hollyhocks growing there next summer. A red barn should have hollyhocks next to it.

Terra Firma, Terra Farma

We have been gone for a week. We went to South Carolina to see Don's family, and then to Boston to see our daughter, grand-daughter and son-in-law. We had a wonderful trip, a great time in both places. It was good to get away from the farm for a while. She is sometimes an unrelenting task mistress. But after 6 flights in 8 days, I was ready to stop moving. It was good to have my feet on the ground.

The trees had all turned yellow and the grass was disappearing under a carpet of leaves. The garden was put to bed, manure added, leaves piled on top, a half bushel of green tomatoes in the garage.

Compared to spring and summer, fall is going to be a breeze. We brought in the potatoes and popcorn and onions this morning. The garage will eventually freeze and I want everything to be okay. Plus the mice had been at the popcorn and we wanted to save it. The trees are yellow in the sun, the house is full of food, my children are happy, healthy...life is good.

October 15, 2011

Don left for the day, so David raced out to dig up the okra skeletons. Amazingly, they still had blossoms on the top of the stalks that were over 5' tall. Nature wants to succeed. Things want to grow. Flowers, vegetables. . .even children. My children are both grown now and have families of their own. I am amazed that I can still be hurt by the fact that I don't see them as often as I'd like. Especially my grand-daughters. When they visit their other grand-parents I always ask, why can't I see them, too? I am possessive, have trouble sharing. Kahil Gibran said "Your children are not your children. They are life's longing for itself." Well, he certainly got that right.
To take my mind off this, I head out to the almost non-existent garden to pick a few tomatoes. Here's what I came up with on the 15th of October!

Twenty-three pounds of tomatoes! The tomato plants themselves are threadbare and mostly just stalks standing inside their cages. But they are still producing. At the last, we will pick the green tomatoes and have fried green tomatoes and watch football and drink beer.
I planted three oriental poppies in my new flower garden. They came to me all carefully labelled. They better be right. In the past, I've purchased poppies that were in delicious sherbet shades, only to have them spring up wildly healthy and day-glo orange.
October 15th. 50 mile per hour winds outside. My sister is baking wild rice bread and I made cookies this morning. We baked a pumpkin and hope to have pumpkin pie soon. I love fall.

Summer Gives Way

Are you one of those people that drives around the country sometimes? Do you see small farm houses and wonder who lives there and what it would be like if you lived there? Do you sometimes long for the peace of your imagined farm life? I used to do that. My husband used to love driving in the country and looking out over the fields and the farms. He especially admired the perfectly neat farmsteads, where the grass was always mowed, the weeds were non-existent, and the barns were freshly painted. I've never liked driving that much, but I used to gaze out the window and wonder what is was like to live in those places.
Now I know.

This is the view from the windows of the sun porch where we sit having morning coffee, making our plans for the day. It is early October now and you can see the faint reds through the trees. Our trees are still mostly green and I am waiting for all of the maples to turn red or yellow. Every day we get up and have coffee and eat breakfast and decide what we are going to do that day. Finish taking down the garden. Mow the lawn. Again. Put up more tomatoes. Again. Our freezer is overflowing downstairs.

This doesn't even show the door of the freezer, which is also full. So here's one of the secrets about "what it's like to live on that farm out in the country."  It's a lot of work. I guess in my mind I had fantasies about sitting on a lawn chair in the shade, sipping iced tea. And granted there was some of that. Oh the meals we ate at the outside table under the shade of the 300 year old maple! We set the table with table cloths, linen napkins and dishes of food that mostly came from the garden. So there were times when we sat down. But there were also many times when we worked and worked. Plus we were still trying to get settled so we had to continually clean out the garage because things kept collecting in there. My garden gloves had holes in most of the fingertips. The shovels were notched at the tips. Many of the tomato cages were snapped and broken, groaning under the weight of our six foot tomatoes. Most everything grew. And grew and grew. We had a few failures -- the celery, spinach, and lima beans never really came up. But everything else did just fine.
Now we are taking down the garden. Don tills the empty rows. We added manure -- free from our neighbor who had the baby Holsteins. Susan and David have begun to gather the fallen leaves to heap on top of the rows. I planted garlic. It is still warm here. We don't have the heat on in the house yet. But the end of the gardening season is coming. The chores are lessening somewhat. Only the tomatoes and the zucchini and the Swiss chard are left in the garden. The skeletons of the okra are still standing because Don can't believe the okra harvest is over. They look vaguely "Halloween-ish" so I am leaving them.
But winter is coming. It looms ahead of me. What will I do all winter?

September starts....

September is upon us and though it is early, there are already signs that summer is waning. Most days it was still warm enough to hang laundry outside on the new laundry lines that Don and David built. It's me in the sunglasses, my sister in the pink hat.

We look like a couple of idiots, but it was fun and the sheets smelled wonderful after being dried on the line. It was far enough back from the road so you couldn't see anything as you drove by. But pretty much everyone else hung laundry out also, so no one cared.
The onions were pushing up out of the ground. We grew Texas Supersweet, Walla Walla, and some kind called Alisa Craig. I tried to keep them straight, but we were harvesting basket after basket. At the last minute, I managed to keep two different piles. The Walla Walla's made me cry when I chopped them, but the Alisa Craig's were sweet and tearless.

September was also the month of my Mother's visit. She is 87 and slowing down, but came to stay for two weeks. I learned a lot. About myself. About her. My sister and her husband gave up the Summer House and moved back in with Don and me. My Mother managed the 14 steps to the top just fine a couple of times a day. We cooked. We chatted. We took her apple picking. We took her to feed the calves. Mostly I thought about how if I visited my children when I was 87 and they were in their 60's what I would do differently. I would smile more.

Here she is out feeding the calves. Her hair is still red because she refuses to go gray even at 87. Will I still dye my hair? Probably. Nonetheless here she is in her white pants and black sweater and pearls, out feeding the calves.
The garlic also came in the first week of September. I was disappointed because it was so much smaller than I hoped it would be. But I planted it too shallow in the ground and probably the soil wasn't as rich as it should have been. Still, I harvested it and braided it.

I hung it in the garage to try. Later, when we used it, it was rich and sweet and almost nutty-flavored. I wish I had grown twice as much. Something to note if I live through this year, right?
Secretly, however, I rejoined every time we were finished with a crop.

August 2011

August was the month everything came in. And I mean everything. Take a look at this wheel barrow full of veggies and remember -- this is ONE morning's picking.

Our days were a haze of food processing, mostly tomatoes. We put up 50 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer, probably 20 quarts of tomato juice, uncounted packages of broccoli, sweet corn, beans, peppers, zucchini -- I can't remember it all. My sister kept joking that all her clothes were splotched with tomato seeds and we forgot to wear aprons. The daylilies had come and gone. My sister Susan and husband David went out and spent an hour picking all of the browned stems and making the place look better.

We still had so many zucchini and cucumbers that we couldn't eat them fast enough. I googled every zucchini recipe on the net and we made them all. Chocolate zucchini cake, zucchini manicotti, zucchini with parmesan pasta shells -- we ate them all. But for the rest, they went down the road to the baby Holsteins.

"Hey guys!" they shouted when we drove up with the truck. "They're back!" They came running to munch on corn stalks, cucumbers, zucchini, and they loved kale. This last was a blessing because we had so much kale. My sister wanted to grow it. At first it was tiny and we thought, well, this will be fine. Soon it was hip-high and truth be told, I didn't like it that much. It was coarser and chewier than swiss chard (which I loved) and so it grew and grew. But the cows loved it. Especially the one we named Snowflake. Look at those eyelashes.

We finished up August in a whirlwind of more tomatoes. They were coming in at a rate of one wheelbarrow load per day. More than we could eat or process. At the end, my sister read about a way to make tomato paste. We put them through our processor that skins, cores, peels, and seeds them. (This little machine clamps on to the countertop and you wind the handle like an old-fashioned meat grinder. This little puppy saved our lives). Anyway, you wind up with quarts of luscious, pinkish-red seedless, skinless tomato juice. It's relatively thick because all the pulp is still in there. Then you pour the juice into a clean pillowcase and hang the pillowcase over the sink. After about 12-15 hours, hey presto, there is tomato paste at the bottom of the pillowcase. I was a huge skeptic. Didn't think it would work. But work it did and not only did we have tomato paste, but it got rid of huge loads of tomatoes. We took the paste, plopped it onto cookie sheets, and put them in the freezer. Later we took out the little paste plops and put them in a plastic bag. Worked like gang busters.
So August was over. We were tan, we ate everything in sight and stayed the same size, and many of us had sore muscles. My sister's shoulder went out after she weeded the strawberry bed, my husband's back was bothering him from standing over a sink washing tomatoes, and I cut my hand pretty badly on the blade in the food processor and had to have three stitches. But boy oh boy, did we have food in the freezer.

July 2011

How can it be July already? We were working every day in the garden. Raccoons came at night but were unable to get into the garden. They climbed high in the mulberry trees, four of them at once. "Did you shoot them?" asked a neighbor. No, we didn't. They came every night and ate mulberries. And so came the scarlet tanagers, the cedar waxwings, the Baltimore orioles, even my husband. Everyone loved the mulberries.
Next came the tomato horn worms.

Mornings start out quietly. My husband and my brother-in-law are standing and staring at the tops of the tomatoes. Amazingly for their size, the horn worms are hard to see. My husband says this is about pattern recognition. You have to look for something slightly out of the ordinary. So they stand and stare. Every once in a while, they say, "here's one," and they cut off the branch and put the horn worm, branch and all, in a box. This is because I have insisted they be saved. I've read that tomato horn worms turn into hummingbird moths. Since I love hummingbird moths, we save the horn worms. At first, they are alone in the garden. So when I come over quietly, they don't hear me. They are talking the language of men. "Generals aren't as tough as they used to be," one says and the other agrees. Viet Nam Veterans both, they talk with some experience. "It's all political now," the other says and both agree.
About the military I know next to nothing despite the fact that my husband is a veteran and my son was in the Air Force for nine years. The garden is my General. She tells me what to do, when to harvest, when to weed, when to water, and what to pick.
Some things were coming in. We still had great piles of cucumbers nearly every day, zucchini, more tomatoes, lettuce, the beans were starting, and best of all, the sweet corn came in at the end of July.

June 2011 at the Farm

The summer is going by so fast. I am trying to catch the blog up to present time and it's already a struggle to remember what we did in June. Mostly I think we weeded. But we also carpeted the garden.

This is how it looked when we first started. The plants were so tiny you could barely see them. The carpet was free -- taken from a huge van full that all got soaked and they were giving it away. Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, I called it and for the first few weeks the wind blew it around. Eventually it got heavy enough so it just stayed. And it really cut down on the weeding. As it was, the weeding was very intense. My brother-in-law and I spent a half an hour on our knees trying to pick out the swiss chard seedlings from the crab grass.

By the end of June the garden looked like this. The corn was (forgive me) as high as an elephant's eye, the tomatoes were, no lie, well over 6 feet tall, and the winter squash, seen in the center of this photo, was taking over the world. That's Dolly standing in the background. Named by a neighbor, she watches over the garden rain or shine.
At first the cucumbers came in with a vengeance. And believe me, we tried everything. My sister came up with recipe after recipe but as it turns out, there are only so many cucumbers you can eat in a week. We fed them to the calves down the road, we threw some out, we tried to give them away but no one wanted them. The road side signs went from "Cucumbers, 4 for $1" to "Cucumbers, 10 for $1" to "Cucumbers, Free." At the end of June we had visitors, my husband's sister and her husband. We had exactly one fresh tomato from the garden. We held it aloft, a perfect ruby, gleaming in the sun. By God, we had grown a tomato and it was perfect and red and round and tasted like heaven. We were farmers after all.

May 2011

I want to write about what really happened today. Today we pulled down the corn stalks and fed them to a neighbor's heifers. But I need to go back to May. I'm trying to catch up to real time here.
In May, it rained. It rained nearly every day. The ground was soaking, there were constant flood warnings, and there was no way the garden could be plowed up. So we left town. We flew to California as a surprise for our son's 30th birthday. We met our son and daughter-in-law at a lovely restaurant in El Segundo and we all kept it such a great secret that he was truly surprised. We spent four wonderful days in sunny (not rainy) California playing with our grand-daughter and having a great time.
And, another surprise -- when we got home and drove in the driveway, our new vegetable and fruit garden had been plowed up! Lovely, lush, fertile loam -- our farm soil merely waiting for us to put in rows of veggies and new fruit trees. Or so it seemed to me at the time.
The first thing was to put up the deer fence. What state isn't crawling with deer? Michigan is no exception, so without the fence, the whole exercise would be pointless. Putting up the deer fence took the better part of 4 days. We fenced in 5,000 square feet. So my new house was 2,000 square feet and my new garden was more than twice that. Undaunted, we ordered the fruit trees.

Oops. I don't know how to fix this yet. You'll have to turn your head sideways to see us planting our first dwarf apple tree. The catalog has promised 3 bushels of apples by the 3rd year. We'll see.
By the end of May, we had planted 20 tomatoes, 16 peppers, potatoes, spinach, beans, cabbage, broccoli, lima beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, peas, garlic, onions (300 onions!), eggplant, and shallots. And that was just the first wave. We had high hopes, high opinions of ourselves, sore backs and dirty fingernails.
But we were farmers. We were gardeners.
We were insane.

First Three Weeks

The first three weeks have passed. I have stopped crying. I am sitting on the sofa in the sun porch having coffee in the morning. There is a really old apple tree out in the yard. I have my 60th birthday coming up this week and I wonder if the tree is that old. Maybe older, I think. It is going to be shaded by an enormous maple, so I don't even know if it will bloom, much less bear fruit. But there is this one branch that hangs off to the left, a large gentle arc, perhaps a place for a swing for my youngest grand-daughter, and it is beautiful.
My daughter and son-in-law and grand-daughter have come to visit for a few days. Before they arrive, I have feverishly tried to make things look as good as possible. I've painted over the dings on the walls made by the moving company. I have cleaned and dusted and polished the floors. There are clean sheets on the bed and I have a turkey in the oven and the place smells pretty good.
But my daughter is tired from travel, too much work, and an impending move herself. So now she is crying and saying, "Oh Mom, it's so little and old!" She means the house. At least she doesn't mean me. Not yet anyway. My son-in-law seems to like the place, though, and he goes on the trampoline with his daughter and pushes her on the trolley swing we have hung between two large trees. And my grand-daughter seems to love the place. Two out of three.
One other thing:  There are still no leaves on the trees so every morning when I get up, the sun hits the two small lakes, one to the east of us, and the other to the south, turning them silver. Two swans have appeared from nowhere and they are gliding across the larger of the two lakes. I take this as a magical sign.

April Fool's Day

I'm not sure where I am when I wake up. It's a strange bedroom. Oh. The farm. Ah well, much to do and a million boxes to unpack. It is still cold and we turn up the heat but the house is slow to get warm. Of course it is, I think, testily. After all, it's a million years old and all the heat is probably going straight up the chimney.

I spend the morning unpacking. All four of us are unpacking. My sister makes lunch.  After lunch my son calls on the phone to see how it's going. I burst into tears. "Mom," he asks, "is this some weird April Fool's joke?" "No!" I wail into the phone. "It's NOT."
I am crying because I am over tired and because moving is hard. Down-sizing is a popular expression these days and it is the politically correct thing to do. But right now, for me, down-sizing is about not unpacking any fancy shoes or fancy clothes because I'll never have a place to wear them anymore. Ever. Do I know how this sounds? Yes. Childish and spoiled? Yes. Do I care? Not at this moment.
A new neighbor arrives in a white pick-up truck. He is cheerful, asks if we've fired up our outdoor wood stove. There is no wood, but he is in the business so he drives off and reappears half an hour later with a cord of wood. My husband fires up the wood burner and heaven -- the house is warm. I am happier because after a 10-hour day of unloading in cold weather, I have developed a cough and a cold. Still, having the house evenly warm is a blessing.

Moving In Day

March 31, 2011. Moving Day Day. It is about 35 degrees, cold and sunny but I am grateful it isn't raining. We are moving into our farm house on 10 acres in southwestern Michigan. My husband's dream. Not mine. Not today anyway. The movers can't pull the van into the driveway so four men spend the day carrying all our furniture up the driveway, either by hand or with a dolly. I spend the day in the driveway pointing and saying, "Put that in the barn," or "put that in the garage," or "put that in the house." It takes 10 hours. I am exhausted and cold.
My sister and her husband have come up from Florida to help us move in. At the moment I don't know what I would do without them. My sister has put herself to work in the kitchen. She tirelessly unpacks, decides where to put things, and cooks lunch for 10 people. There are four of us, four movers, and two teen-aged boys who have stopped by. One of them used to live here and is picking up the last of his things. They happily wolf down their Frito pies.
My husband and I, 68 and 59 respectively, have come here from a very large home in Madison, Wisconsin, population roughly a quarter of a million, to live in Delton, Michigan, population roughly 7,000. But that's a rural population spread out over a wide area. When you drive around here it looks like the population can't be more than 500 or 600 people. If that.
We are retiring.
We are down-sizing.
We are going to have a large vegetable garden.
This is the plan. Right now all I can think about is how exhausted I am and why on earth did I let my husband talk me into buying a house that's 140 years old?