Tidying the junk

There's not many glamourous things to report this week.  We've spent a lot of time dragging junk around. The piles of firewood, useless naily wood and just plain forgotten wood that we left in the yard when we trimmed the grass will be an obstacle in the spring (if not now) and so needs to be moved. We've moved some, burned some and still have more left to take care of. We also still have wood lying around from taking down the porch.

Toward the goal of finding a place to put all that wood, we've begun to empty our nearest outbuilding. It's in rough shape. It was home to some swallows over the summer - they took full advantage of the many options for entrances and exits through the roof.  The missing cedar shakes fell to the interior, growing moss and just generally being a soggy mess. Along with the holes galore in the roof, a couple of trusses are missing - presumably removed when someone decided to put a taller door in. But for now the building stands, despite it all still respectably sturdy, and it'll do fine for our storage purposes.

In the first bit of the summer, when everything was intimidating and new, one of the first things that made me feel like maybe this project was doable after all, was when Jeff turned all the junk and garbage out of the dirt floor garage beside the house and made it a usable space. This time I'm participating in the emptying of a building, ambitious though it still seems to me. Emptying this outbuilding has been a matter of pulling out from the half-mulched fallen in leaves and branches and roof all sorts of things. Here is some of the unenviable loot, all covered in dirt and rust: old tires, boxes of empty coffee cans, a sink, a pile of cupboard door samples, filing cabinets, previously white plastic patio chairs, disintegrating plastic pails, an old cooler, a half deflated and cracked soccer ball, car batteries, and other various tools and chunks of metal.  We raked and shovelled, we sorted, we rearranged, we swept. I would like to say that now everything is clean and in its place, but what really happened is that we thought "we are going to have to take a load to the dump, we should find more junk." And so into the house! Pulling out old furniture and carpet from upstairs! And then to the pile behind the other red building (the pinnacle of intimidating refuse). Throwing wood around trying to get to the old TV, the mattress, the couch, the broken windows, surrounded by stinging nettle, thistles and grass growing through the pile. So now we have not one load but two to take and still the work of putting everything back together.

It is not just looking ahead to the return to Calgary that's been giving us our job list, but also anticipating reappearing here in spring. We are trying to make things easier for ourselves. Landscaping may seem like a low priority right now, but when I consider the ticks we could encounter in the long grass later, I'm all for the short haircuts now.

Towards other spring prep I've been doing some planting in the garden.  At the weekly farmers market here I overheard a grey-haired woman ask about winter garlic. So I bought one, googled it and am diving into that. I also planted some spinach and kale that hopefully will happily pop up first thing in the spring. Sometimes gardening feels like a wild experiment and for all my enthusiasm I sure wish my results were better.  My current gardening disappointment stems from the frost we had about a week ago that managed to end the season of my tomatoes, cucumber and arguably my beans. They are shrivelled and dead, but I am clinging to hope that the few still-green leaves will mean at least 1 ripened and edible bean by the end of the week. I pulled the spinach and kale - if they're any good they're destined for smoothies. There's still some hope for the carrots too. It's hard not to compare my sad small garden to the mammoth homegrown produce that we've been given by family and neighbours, although the deliciousness of said produce does help to soften the blow. My herbs have been tucked into the  garden bed for winter. 

After a week or two of colder weather the land is certainly feeling it: today I suddenly realized that most all of our trees are now yellow. And the geese have been stop-and-go around and over our house, in beautiful large squawking numbers. Apparently this area is a good one for goose hunting - the geese don't just stop, they hang around and rest awhile. We see them often in the fields too, munching away.  Harvest still goes on, giant colourful machines move at a snails pace down country roads and through the fields. The beautiful pale oat field across the road is all stubble now and I'm sad to see it go.  It won't be long now until we're off to our winter home.