Homing

A strange thought, endings.  A stranger thought, beginnings.

I've spent the last week and change painting walls and ceilings, planning walls, and moving box load and car load after box load and carload of the objects I surrounds myself with in my life.
Every time it seems that there's still so much to do, or when the sofa seems really heavy up the stairs; I remind myself.  This is the last move.  This is not the same as the other 5 moves I've made from cabin to cabin in the last 6 years.  This is it. 

And when I start to despair over the fact that the wretched carpeting will stay for another year, or that the propane water heater has a limited capacity that won't be replaced in the near future; I remind myself.  This is the last move.  This is the home that will grow and breathe and change and morph to fit our changing needs for our lives.  This is not a space to inhabit until.  Until the homestead finds us, or until we build a house, or until we get goats, or until we have kids, or until ... This is the place I will be living in ten years from now, despairing over how much there is to do to build the lean to additon to the barn, and will look back to when there was no plank flooring, and no barn, and no mulched over compost enriched coldframed garden.  Way back when the back bedroom wasn't painted for the first year, and when you still had to turn on the tub to get hot water in the bathroom sink.  Way back when there was no moveable electric net fencing and the dogs had the run of more than an acre, back when the only berries or fruit that was producing were the red raspberries. 

I can let myself dream.  Dream the dreams that do not disappear upon awakening, but that grow from a thought to a plan to material reality.  We have land enough, and time.  Yet even as I realize this, my homebody hermit soul is feeling the shock of her roots being transplanted; the disorientation of looking around a bedroom or a kitchen that lives so clearly serene and chaotic and alive in my mind and seeing only the maelstrom of moving... cardboard boxes and bags and scattered strewn piles...
And yet, life goes on as it ever does, flowing like a river past the eddies and swirls in my psyche caused by this branch-dam of moving:  friends get married, calendula blooms, the constant demands of never-enough at work at the shelter, the state fair comes to town and leaves again, CSA pick up day comes again and fills my kitchen with fresh garden produce I struggle to make time and space amidst paint brushes and screwdrivers to prepare and eat.