Arrival

Important! 

If you happened to reply to my inaugural newsletter last week, I have bad news—it disappeared into the black hole of no-reply emails, and it was never received. I’ve since reconfigured my settings, so moving forward, it’s safe to reply.  But if you don’t mind, please re-send me anything you wrote last week. You can forward it to bucoliafarm@gmail.com, or just reply here. TY TY

HERE

On Thursday June 5th, I woke up an hour before my alarm, which put me on the road at approximately 3:45am.  I usually like to get to the Anacortes ferry terminal 45-90 minutes early because it serves as a decompression chamber—as soon as I cross into Skagit County, my blood pressure lowers, a calm descends. I have entered The Portal™.  But despite my expectation that I would breeze through Tacoma and Seattle traffic by 7:30…I made it to the terminal 11 minutes before the 10am sailing.  Arriving less than 30 minutes before sailing will put you in standby, whether you have a reservation or not, so I was resigned to miss the 10am and chill out until the 11:55. But having accepted my fate, and feeling fine about it, I still managed to get on, the second to last car on the ferry. I took that as a sign that the island wanted me.

Once on Orcas, we hit the dog park, then went to the fantastic Lone Pine Larder for a tuna melt and to say hi to owners Sabrina and Spencer, the folks who connected me to Clayton, who has been this property’s caretaker/custodian/whisperer for the last 5 months. I picked up some groceries at Island Market and headed to Olga. 

This is the 9th visit I’ve made to the property in a year. Now that it’s June, I have finally seen it in every season. When I first visited, one year ago at this time, the fruit trees, wild roses, and scotch broom were all covered in creepy tent caterpillar nests.  No sign of them this year apart from one lone bush, and there are hollyhocks everywhere, which I didn't remember before. (SEE NOTE) But since familiarizing myself with the many invasive weeds and noxious plants on the property, all I can see now is the proliferation of tansy ragwort. I spent hours pulling it up in April, but I barely scratched the surface.

Since Thursday, I have been surveying the house and the property, trying to understand what needs to be done first, now that I’m here. Clayton, who has been here since the Eaton Fire has been culling bamboo and blackberry, building berms and digging out cliffs and generally giving the land some much-needed love. But the house is my domain, my current and future domicile, and oh boy. The last trip up, I noticed that woodpeckers have been drilling holes on the south side of the house.  This trip, I discovered a barn swallow’s mud nest on the north side, and a full-on bird cave (tree swallows?) facing east. These will have to be dealt with in November, since it’s illegal to disrupt migrating birds’ nests when they are active. In the meantime, there’s not only bird shit to clean up (naturally), but also the carcasses of two baby birds that fell out of the mud nest (again, naturally).   Below the nests are missing fascia boards, below that are sagging gutters, and of course the whole house needs to be resided. There may or may not still be water coming in through some questionable places on the roof. None of this, though, addresses the structure of the house itself, which is dubious, since it’s been annexed and patchworked from a one-room cottage with a thatched roof for the last 140 years. I have yet to see any vestige of the 1887 home, though there’s plenty of story oozing from every floorboard, sconce, and colorway.

On Saturday morning, I dropped Clayton and his girlfriend Riz off at the Orcas Island Airport and they’ll be gone for the next 5 weeks. Jed and Tina, Clayton’s shepherd mixes, are staying here with me and Sarge, and we’ll be forming a new pack. Shortly after dropping them off at the airport, my car’s tire pressure system alerted me that these next few weeks are not going to be all smooth sailing. To say that there is a profound sense of overwhelm would be correct, but not descriptive enough. Normally when I don’t know what to do, I grab the Grampa’s Weeder and start attacking the tansy ragwort, but the tendonitis in my right arm is conspiring against me, so my work at this moment appears to be to Be Here Now. 

For the last year, I thought I was performing an elaborate balancing act; leaving then coming back to Portland, starting grad school, and paying mortgages on two homes but not living in either of them. But a few days after arriving I’m realizing that period was a mere warm up.  Even if I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this house and had the means to do it, it would still be many tests of patience and lessons in non-attachment. One of the ironies of being sentient is that often the things you long for most are the things that cause you the most suffering. That’s not my idea, someone else came up with it like 2500 years ago. You can read or hear that statement and nod your head in agreement, “word.” But you have to actually be in that push-pull of craving and aversion, or wanting and fearing, and experience those moments with as much consciousness as you can muster for the medicine to work. What I'm most conscious of right now is that I am profoundly out of my depth, and the only thing to do is try floating.

EDIT: Since publication, I have learned they're not hollyhocks, they're foxgloves. One of my hopes in writing this is that I would learn more about plants and gardening by my readers, so my plan is proving successful. And no one's eating them. Not to worry.