Although SpringHouse captured my heart and imagination immediately–leashed me to it, actually, my corporal self scrambling against its pull sometimes like a puppy on a choke chain– its effect on my life short term has sometimes felt like one of  Sam Peckinpah’s balletic death scenes–a hypnotic series of staccato body blows. Okay, that sounds melodramatic. I’m overstating. But it’s been a steep learning curve.

A quarter of a century ago, I began a poem about the bondage of home ownership which began: “To homestead is to marry…”  Four houses later, the metaphor stands.  To have and to hold, for richer or for (usually) poorer,  for better (eventually) or worse–until death do us part. For most of us who buy our homesteads on a note from the bank, this last clause is literal: the literal meaning of “mortgage,” a French derivative, is “death pledge.” Once in, not so easily out.  This post is an overview of the Dark Side. What could go wrong? Well…

“It’s The Life of the Spring.”  🐈‍⬛Spring House’s eponymous pump is venerable.–nobody seems to know how exactly how old the creature is, ( 1980’s?) but every plumber who has examined it shakes their head and intones, in a range somewhere between reverence and horror: “That’s an old pump!” Furthermore, the trough it drinks from needs shoveling out at least twice yearly to remove the red silt inherent to its bottom-of- the-ravine situation. Spring and Fall. High tick season and the first wet, miserable frosts. It must get done, though, to preserve what my philosopher-handyman terms “the life of the spring.”  Without regular excavation, the spring water grows murky and slows to a trickle in the pipes; the particulate filter in the cellar clogs, choking on orange phlegm. In the country, one is perpetually  trying to keep water flowing while simultaneously trying to keep water out. Which brings us to…

“What’s a Nice Girl Like You–?” 🐈‍⬛ At the outset, friends near and far, lovers past, current, and prospective berated her location, in the middle of g-d nowhere, bad roads, trailer parks to the east and west, and no hospital for 25 miles.  My then-romantic partner of five- plus years dug in his heels at sharing the burden of driving. For all their pledges of devotion, I learned: Old Men Don’t Drive. Within six months, I’d been rear-ended by a semi on a foggy 81-N en route to my  sedentary lover’s arms. Driving While Tired. Driving While Sick and Tired. Within a year, I’d begun to reevaluate my commitments, and within eighteen months, I was single–oh, hell, no– not single: married to the land.

“The Dark Flood Rises.” 🐈‍⬛ Within six months, I discovered a rogue water line had been leaking in the dirt cellar onto the structure’s supporting beams for– months? Years? My kitchen floor warped, oozed water. listed sullenly. One beam had rotted and semi-buckled. She is buckled still, though dry now.

“As Above, So Below.” 🐈‍⬛ Water in the cellar, water from the ceiling.  The crumbling shingled roof of my little oaken palace leaked extravagantly in three places–into a blue bucket in my bedroom closet, pinging off the rim of an orange metal bowl on the staircase, and into an open trashcan in the pantry–until a 10,000-dollar metal roof a year into my tenancy bought a blessed silence, along with a small second mortgage. The roof will be paid off in another couple of years. Then I will need to begin to repair the discolored ceilings in the kitchen and pantry.

“The Snack Bar is Always Open” 🐈‍⬛ In suburbia, I was a master gardener. In Appalachia, I am a chump; for my first three summers, I ran a 24-hour cantina

for Bambi and his whole damn clan. Hot pepper spray, solar lights, foil streamers, blah, blah, blah…nope. Until I got a seven-foot fence up (three years in), I harvested Nothing.

I couldn’t decide whether to call this paragraph “The Swarm” or “It’s Raining Men😸”   🐈‍⬛ In the heat of summer, SpringHouse’s attic ceiling hatch disgorged swarms of stinkbugs and Asian lady beetles– My bed is almost directly underneath this trapdoor; until, by trial and error, I discovered hypersonic plug-in vermin repellents, I woke up to flattened insects in my bed every morning. Possibly a hygiene issue – definitely a nightmare. When I brought stonemasons in to repair the chimneys, hornets nesting in the decayed masonry attacked the bricklayers so furiously that they were leaping off their ladders, ten feet fron the ground because, you know, gravity is the only thing faster than a swarm.

“One Is Never Lonely” 🐈‍⬛ There were other visitors: mice, every winter, suicidal mice, heedless of eight bored housecats, bent upon warmth, and a glorious Last Supper. Centipedes and millipedes, too: dark, writhing, five inches long, behind the kitchen sink. Horned beetles and carpenter ants hitched rides indoors on armloads of firewood, and once, on a night of sluicing rain, a disoriented yellow tomcat clawed his way through a screen window and into the kitchen, drawn by the smell of kibble, poor guy. Yes, I fed him– outdoors on one of the covered porches.

“This is Not a Conclusion. Because it Isn’t Over!” 🐈‍⬛ In the end–only it isn’t the end; in homesteading, one is always in the Middle–I can’t say I wised up, or gained mastery or have a master philosophy to pass on. I think, weirdly, that it helps to have bought SpringHouse for transcendent, not practical reasons. I’m not trying for mastery anyway‐- more like a meeting of the minds. Between battered old me and this battered old house– both of us flawed and beautiful survivors — I hope to build a collaborative friendship. With the spirits of this red earth, the old trees and the new trees, the birds and insects and deer, and the fair folk, beings who have only begun to announce themselves to me in dreams, whose presence I recognize with

respect and circumspection and awe– I’m still figuring out what I need to give, what I can reasonably take–I’m still figuring out the questions. **********************************

My next post will deal with baby steps, what to leave alone, and a few happy surprises.