It's a cloudy day at the farmette. Finally feels like spring, though. The songbirds are chirping, the Canada geese are honking, and all is calm at the farmette.
Yesterday, it was a gorgeous, sunny day, and Rob and I took full advantage. Even got a bit of a sunburn working to reduce the gigantic pile of wood detritus we accumulated over the winter.
You can see by the tight smile that this was towards the end of the day....my back started creaking and the hips were howling. But satisfying, nevertheless.
The farmette has been a lot of work over the eight years since we moved here.
Today is the exact anniversary of our moving date back - from Guelph to Durham - in 2012.
So I thought I'd do some reflecting about the life and times of the farmette.
Rob came up a week or so ahead of the move date to get prepped. He remarked about the singing frogs - in the wetland across the road - that actually kept him awake at night.
We did a whack of renovations right off the bat. We pulled up the terrible wall-to-wall mauve carpet in the living/dining area and found gorgeous hardwood underneath. Our bedroom needed replastering because the ugly flowered wallpaper was holding the walls up. The main bathroom was a horror show from 1975 and our central kitchen light fixture was, by all intents and purposes, a wagon wheel. Yikes.
We learned a lot about living with wildlife over the years. There was the starling that nearly gave me a coronary one day when it came down the toilet vent and into the toilet while I was getting ready to go to work in Guelph. It met its end despite Rob's herculean efforts to save it.
Then there was the teenage hawk that launched itself through two plates of glass window and died on the living room floor. We figured the poor thing miscalculated when it tried to nail one of the chickadees feasting at our feeder. We've also had skunk visitors, a lone, mangey coyote and Canada geese. Wilma, our tortiseshell cat, greeted me early one morning playing with dead mouse on the kitchen floor. And, of course, turkey vultures are an annual entertainment - a bit macabre, but interesting. They love roosting on our barn. I caught this pair either fighting or mating a couple of weeks ago...
We've had hot and dry summers, cold and wet springs, and winters vacillate between producing nearly no snow (2012-13 - to trick us) to World War 1 trenches to the garage (2018).
The flower beds were a bit sad, so I perked them up. The vegetable garden was in great shape, so just dug right in there. Our harvest has always been bountiful. We actually chose the move date so I could get a crop in our first year.
The deck - which was fixed up by my nephews a couple of years ago during a particularly wet and rainy spring - has been an absolute joy. Yesterday morning, we actually sat out in the sunshine and read books for the first time this year!
Of course there's cats. We've lost some (Nora -2017, Nick - 2018, Lily- 2019) and gained some (Hobbes - 2012, Calvin - 2018, Fred and Wilma - 2019). Beatrix Potter is the eldest and the last one standing since we moved. She's getting on - she'll be 12 in the fall - but she's still a feisty one.
Yes, it's a lot of work. Yes, we get tired. But - especially during these trying, pandemic times - we love our little farmette and all the plants and critters that inhabit it. Until next week.
