June 17, 2010
Only 4 days away from the summer solstice. The days are very long here in Vermont, starting at 4:45 am (I think) and ending close to 10 pm. Yet it doesn’t really feel like summertime, at least not the summertime I remember. Feels more like spring; every now and then a good hot sunny day but more days of clouds and rain with the sun emerging when it feels like it. You better be ready to drop everything you’re doing inside and rush outside to get the full benefit of the sunshine or you may miss one of your few opportunities. Yesterday was one those days. It didn’t start out very hopeful but by midmorning it was sunny and dry. I mowed around the trailer and the tent and I put up a rain tarp creating a cool little area just outside the door for the lounge chair I picked up at the Saturday swap shop and an end table. Great place to put a thing or two out of the weather. This morning the wind is so strong the tarp is flying high above the trailer like a parachute. That’s the thing about this part of the world. The weather is such a force to be reckoned with, you can’t do anything half-assed. There’s one of those expressions that only works one way. You never hear of anything full-assed! Well, this isn’t a cool thing for me because most of what I do is half-assed. Need to work on that other cheek, I guess.
So these are strange days of waiting and imagining possibilities; waiting because we are working with a realtor to set up appointments to now see inside houses, where we were before driving by on our own to locate parcels of land. Now we are sitting with about 4 or 5 different possible futures to consider. One takes us well north of where we are now about 3 ½ hours by car to a 9 acre farm which sits well back from a well traveled route and across the road from a general store. It’s a typical Vermont farmhouse with an attached barn. There are two other large workshop/garage type buildings, open sunny fields for farming and it’s nestled against a wooded hillside with a long view to a distant mountain. It’s priced very low but makes no qualms about needing repairs. It’s full of possibilities and with little photographs up close, only so far a work of imagination. Will it be windy? How freaking cold will it be on the 44 and ½ parallel? It looks like we can get some privacy from drive-by traffic up against the hillside, but how much road noise will we have. Yet, art studio space galore! And the potential for great farming, not to mention room for other people, maybe even an apartment. And horses….. But until we hear back from David, our realtor, we can only sit and stare at the printout and wonder.
Another possibility is a cabin in the woods, already off the grid, remotely private, great views of the distant mountains with a little clearing on more than 20 acres, a year round brook. …Too soon to know without a visit. So different from each other; a different future and a different Paul and Mindy depending on what we end up choosing. And these are only two of several possibilities.
Whatever we choose however will need lots of renovations or additional building. It has to be this way because we are shopping in the bargain basement, still trying to have no mortgage or a very small one, preferably to a person and not a bank. The houses we’ve found are tiny footprints, some with upstairs space that isn’t finished. Some have some power, some are off the grid. Some have out buildings, while others don’t. One even comes with a jeep with a snow plow. The possibilities abound. But I have to put my head around being where it’s cold and rainy a lot of the time. This is not the tropics! Weather is the main event.
Speaking of weather events, when the sun comes out around here so do the airplanes spraying barium chem-trails. They criss-cross the sky as far as you can see. I’m longing for a place free from the chem.-trails but Paul won’t return to Brazil with me and that he says is where we need to go to get away from them. I’m kind of hoping if we get further away from the heavily populated areas perhaps in the upper kingdom of Vermont, they won’t be as prolific. Call me crazy if you want, but I swear I can feel the effects of them. With HAARP controlling the weather events who knows what’s in store for our coming future. Still some of the places I think I’d like to live are also heavily rainy…..Oregon, Wales…..
In other news, Paul has completed his first oil painting after many years of working in the field of psychology and away from artistic endeavors. It is quite beautiful and he remains a magnificent painter. Having an art studio in a tent doesn’t seem to have any adverse affects on his ability to produce remarkable work. I am simply delighted because anyone who has this kind of talent, in my opinion, should do nothing but create art.
June 24, 2010
Back to the keyboard after much time away and the possibilities of future imaginings abounding. What a week it’s been. On Friday we drove the three plus hours to the Upper Kingdom (what they call the northern section of the green mountain state) to look at four potential opportunities. The old farmhouse on 9 acres turned out to be 10 feet from a major thoroughfare. The photograph shown on the listing shot from an angle and a distance to enhance and entice the prospective buyer. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the house could barely be entered without a mask as the stench of cat urine permeated. Dolls and children’s toys were strewn everywhere and it looked as if the place had been ransacked by drunken marauding teenagers. A chat with the young girl working the counter of the general store across the street informed us of the elderly woman with some questionable mental capacity who had lived there with twenty cats before her daughter came to move her out. But with clenched nostrils we explored the interior of the house and attached barn and outbuildings. At its bargain price we explored the possibility of gutting the place and creating some kind of commercial outlet there. An art studio coffee and bagel shop sounded like an interesting idea for a minute before the reality set in. The folks streaming into the general store across the street and the combination bowling alley/tavern and gas pumps didn’t exactly fit the profile of potential patrons to support that kind of business endeavor. But down the road a mile or two a Cajun snack bar was doing block buster business with standing room only.
That ended a day of seeing fantastically beautiful landscapes with a thirty year veteran of real estate sales and a seventy year lifelong familiarity of the region. We explored the possibility of a twelve acre parcel of land with river frontage nestled into a narrow valley. I’ve yet to see a more beautiful place. Nearly all the acreage was an open sunny meadow bordered by woods and a thirty foot wide river with distant views of the surrounding mountains. At the far end a beaver pond. It did sit just off a road with some minimal traffic passing by, but the sound of the river washed away the noise of the occasional passing car and the road itself sat above the meadow so the sound traveled mostly up and away.
As beautiful as that was we felt more inclined to another piece of land arrived at by traveling up into the hills over the far side of the same river. This one had two adjoining parcels creating the ability to perhaps sell one off, preferably to family or friend. Two springs began a source which could have created a gravity fed water supply for the needs of the house and garden in lieu of digging a well. The fourth place we visited had a great unfinished cabin but was perched upon a steep hillside with a vertical cliff at one edge. As we walked the driveway from the very bottom at the road, arriving to the house out of breath, we lamented the passing of our youth and the flexibility of once younger bodies. The thought of falling off the yard yet another downside to what was a very interesting place. On the way out a newborn owl sat just off the cleared driveway in the tall grass, it’s bright round yellow eyes staring up at us. How I wanted to pick it up and carry it back to the care of someone competent, but we hoped that its mother might come to retrieve it if we left it untouched.
We spent the next two days remembering the land on the hill over the river and imagining the kind of life we could have there. The drive midway up through the green mountain state and then diagonally northwest couldn’t have been more lovely; each small town and village more charming than the last, a scenic photographer’s dream. We liked the wild nature of the region more and more the further north we went as the mountain ranges rose higher into the clouds. One can feel the presence of wildlife there, the moose almost visible through this layer of reality we seem only able to experience. Deer tracks are frequently seen and the occasional hedgehog is not an uncommon sight. Gary, our veteran realtor of the northern region took us by his home to show us the moose he had shot and mounted now to the wall of his tree farm office. Fifteen years he tells us he waited to get a license to hunt moose. What a fantastically magnificent animal. Personally I’d rather see them alive in the woods than dead with their heads mounted to a plaque on the wall, but I am no longer in a position to judge anyone for their actions. This moose which we were now seeing in its afterlife once stood over seven feet tall at the shoulders and weighed, I think Gary said, two tons? Surely an animal you wouldn’t want close by and angry or fearful of you.
In spite of the incredible beauty of the northern territory, my thoughts kept returning to the harsh reality of the colder climate of northern Vermont wondering if the beauty would always win out over longer colder winters. Yet the allure remains. Two days later on Father’s Day we were back in the car, this time with our friend and local realtor driving only two hours or less north of where we are in Southern Vermont to the western edge of the state bordering New York to visit two other exciting possibilities. I have to stop a moment and tell you how incredibly exhausting the process of exploring possibilities is. What is it exactly that is such a drain? I don’t think it’s the long hours of driving or the walks or climbs up the hills. I think it’s the emotional highs and lows of imagining what kind of a future each place holds. There’s an adrenaline rush that floods you with excitement when you resonate with a place. Could this be it, you wonder. Yes, yes, it could be. When the adrenaline leaves the body, so too does the zest for living life and all the energetic life force. It’s not easy to be the Buddha. It’s not easy to remain equanamous, in the moment of the experience of living life. It’s all future thinking. Sometimes I get so deeply in my head, remembering or projecting forward, I cease seeing where I am. I won’t have anything to remember if I’m not here where I am when I’m actually here. And don’t ask me to recount any details of any movie I’ve ever seen, because I don’t think I’ve ever remained conscious through an entire movie without hypnotically drifting into the hyno-pompic state between waking and sleeping. Ahh, if only one could remain totally present….. We once asked a very highly ascended person if she had a meditation practice. She responded that every moment was a meditation. It can be, but will I ever attain that ascended a state of being? I can only strive.
That was Sunday. Today is four days later. We have yet to have what we saw on Sunday leave our thoughts while waking or sleeping. Yesterday we drove back up to revisit this place and explore the surrounding area on every side. I believe we may have found our future. I hesitate to say too much in detail or specific so as not to jinx it or even force my will upon the natural unfolding of the Way, but in every analysis we find poetic metaphor answering each request, both spoken and unspoken, we’ve ever voiced.
So I’ll be somewhat vague for now and say simply the following: somewhere near the edge of New England where Vermont meets New York exists a small village. In this village is a little library with wireless internet. Across the street is a general store, but not your typical traditional general store. This one is owned by a woman who gets up early each morning to bake muffins and donuts. In the cooler along with the usual coke and Pepsi products are locally made soda pops from things like sarsaparilla. Green Mountain gourmet coffees are served from high tech pressurized thermoses, just like in latte style coffee shops. A selection of fine wines including a chocolate wine (?) line the shelves. A deli case is filled with sandwich makings and a lunch menu on a chalk board overhead details your choices. Not your typical general store but the homemade muffins and especially donuts answer one of Paul’s strongly voiced requests. Up the road in one direction you pass a long and very beautiful lake, lined with small vacation cottages built in the fifties, now lived in full time, on the way to the next town where an environmental liberal arts college which matches the look of every Ivy League college I’ve ever seen resides. Down the road in the other direction, a turn up the gently sloping hill takes you winding into the wooded hillside, twisting and turning into a remotely populated area back in the woods and hills just outside of town. At a fork in the road past a story book picture perfect farmstead, the road continues to twist and turn, rise and fall to a small bridge crossing a brook. If you’re going slowly enough you might notice the driveway and the little cottage that rests on the side of the babbling brook. The house is tiny with just under 700 square feet of living space, but has everything a person needs to live a simple life. A well exists, a septic system in place, the major expenses are already covered. The house rests in a cozy nook at the bottom of the hills with the brook meandering past. Across the brook an overgrown field looks easily cut and tilled to provide a large garden for two or three, while a lightly wooded knoll in the bend of the brook seems the perfect idyllic setting to construct the yurt where Paul will paint. At the top end of the field an old logging road crosses the brook and continues up the crevice between two hills along the brook to a level area near the top where I can imagine a future homestead. The possibilities are endless.
I speak a lot about possibilities, perhaps to the point of frustration on the part of you my readers, but the true nature of my individual reality is that possibilities are the essence of life. Given several choices, I always choose the one with the most possibilities. This week’s search showed me the most beautiful sunny meadow along a stretch of white water riverside with distant views of mountains on four sides. A home there would never cease to reveal beauty at every turn, food in abundance and an unending source of water for Paul, Rocket and I. But the little house on the brook with twenty acres of land could accommodate several friends or family members having small homes and gardens and living a simple life close to the land out of harm’s way. It is livable now but holds all kinds of potential for expanding possibilities.
Twenty five minutes drive south takes one to a town that likely draws more tourists than any other town in Vermont with access to the finest shopping and dining, skiing and boating and any other kind of outdoor recreational activity. I see it as a great place to market our artwork. The college fifteen minutes away offers possible employment opportunities, not to mention educational ones. In another direction is one of Vermont’s largest towns with every resource one could want or need. Yet nestled into the crook of the mountains is a remotely private place to live out the coming years of change.
In other but related news, I’ve been given an opportunity to apprentice on a natural building project with an artist of phenomenal skills in earth plastering. We are plastering with a cob like material the interior of an artist studio. With a natural builder’s colloquium coming up at the end of next month, the opportunity to intern alongside her during her presentation for the workshop should enhance my repertoire of building skills. I love this organic way of building with natural materials. Seems the Way is unfolding to provide me with the new skills I’ll need moving forward.
July 5, 2010
Just a quick note to end this post today.....As you might imagine everything has changed in the days (or is it weeks?) since writing this post. I am hoping to find the time to write an update so hold onto your hats as the winds of change are fierce around here.
I send my love out to each of you. Stay well, happy and in the moment.