Dear Everybody,
The house is still here, Cricket and I are intact, and we have not had to fight off an alien invasion. So there’s that.
Winter is always a slower time, and to some degree I’ve had to simply work with it. The weather is not conducive to spending any time out of the house—or even in the unheated rooms indoors—and short days filled with trying to stay warm and fed mean life comes in smaller bites. I’ve gotten some important things done, but I need to recognize that one of those things was rest and recuperation.
I was granted a white Christmas, but not the sort one looks forward to: a cold snap delivered nearly half an inch of freezing rain, coating everything in ice and turning the driveway into a skating rink. That was followed by torrential rains and wind, and I spent more of the week between Christmas and New Years in the dark than I did with the lights on. I managed to celebrate them both at last, on the last day of the year and the first of the next, but it was a somewhat bare-bones holiday all told.
I had called the county before Thanksgiving, warning them that one more heavy storm would clog the culvert out by the road; they seemed to have the impression that it was a pipe for my driveway, one of the little 12-inchers that are common in ditches around here, and filed my request for clearing it at the bottom of the stack. So when the actual 36” culvert plugged solid and sent the lower creek flooding across the gravel, the crews were dismayed by the task of putting it to rights. BLM came to the rescue first, and cleared it just long enough for a 34” rock to get sucked in and stick like a cork in a bottle; they consulted with the county, who belatedly claimed jurisdiction, and promised to come deal with it after New Year’s. I had driven up the hill to get phone signal before BLM got there, so the truck was parked out on the road—I was grateful for that as the crisis wore on, as I could hike out through the pasture to the layby and drive down the hill.
The county came with a backhoe and eight people and started in. First they tried to jam a couple of pieces of safety rail up from the bottom to dislodge the rock, to no effect. They resorted to demolishing the culvert from the upstream end, pulling out one segment after another. At last the rock came out like a cannonball, and all was well… except that the roadway was down to about 7 feet wide with eroded cliffs on either side. They added large boulders and a load of gravel to stabilize things, put up “Road Hazard” signs, and promised to fix it properly…. in the summer. So I now have a 10-foot wide, less-than-level driveway with chunks of culvert on the shoulders. (That comes into play later.)
I decided to get serious about the vegetable garden, and stop messing around with buying single transplants and random seed packets from the nurseries. I had been struggling with getting a good stand of carrots, beets, parsley, peas, and other veggies, and after The Rutabaga Debacle I realized that seed quality was at least half of my problem. So I hit Territorial Seed and Southern Exposure, and ordered fresh seeds I am almost certain will grow. Since seed packets almost always contain more than one gardener plants in a season, most of these will last me for several years… which is good, since the seed order cost about $85. Ouch.
Want to help me defray that cost, and the expense of soil amendments for this year? I have a fundraiser for the garden on Ko-fi.
With that sort of commitment, I dug out my folding PVC light rack and hooked up the lights, and it’s humming along in a corner of the living room. As I write this, I have kale, green and Chinese cabbage, and two varieties of lettuce under lights, plus broccoli out on the back porch. It’s time to sow the tomatoes this week. Spring is coming, even if it doesn’t feel that way when it’s 40 degrees and drizzling.
By the end of January it dropped below 16 degrees Fahrenheit, though nothing took further damage. The rain that broke that cold spell made me realize something in the kitchen wall behind the sink was moldy: every time it rained, on the second day I would start getting exposures while washing dishes. I went outside to see whether there was a window frame that was allowing water into the wall or something, and discovered the culprit: the back porch was built right up against the kitchen wall, with a potting bench along that side. Years of shade, rain, and water from potted plants had rotted away the shingles, the bottom boards of the wall, and parts of the subfloor and sill. I tore out as much dry rot as I could and pinned up a plastic apron to keep it dry, which seems to have mitigated it for now; remediation will come this summer, though I fear it will also include rebuilding the back porch. At least one of those supports is rotten as well.
My headaches and blurred vision continued, suggesting I still had mold somewhere about. I geared up and tackled the last part of the living room, hauling out the accumulated empty boxes from the rummage I’d been sorting, the clutter on the typewriter desk, and the piles along the far wall. I cleared out nearly everything that hadn’t been present 30 years ago, and swept away decades of debris. It looks great, and made it possible to glance around the room and see what might have been added recently—a must, when I’m sorting through items which can make me sick if they linger in my living space too long.
We got a little snow in mid-February, which delighted Cricket. I cleared out the spice cupboard one slow afternoon, another chunk of the ongoing process of reclaiming the kitchen. I started thinking about how I could make some additional money on the side, and perhaps build a business that would support me when my aunt no longer needs a caregiver. I mucked out a chunk of the workroom, and brought my bandsaw out of storage. I also finished clearing the dining room save for one last set of shelves, and it’s a much more inviting place.
When 8” of snow arrived overnight in the third week of February, I was enchanted. I love snow, and I hadn’t gotten a whole lot during the usual December-January period. It never lasts more than a week or so, especially in spring, so I worked on digging out the mailbox while the snow was still light and fluffy, and otherwise enjoyed it.
Then another six inches arrived. And another. I topped out at 20 inches, and every time I started to dig out, or it melted a bit, another few inches came in. I gave up trying to keep the mailbox clear, and settled on shoveling a path to the Annex, where my belongings and additional firewood are. I called the post office to hold my packages and settled down to wait. The vehicles were nearly 500 feet from the road, along a driveway covered in 12-18” of snow; when the plow obligingly cleared most of that length one day, I normally would have coaxed the truck down to the end and parked it on the shoulder, with easy access to the road. But the shoulders were eroded away, or occupied by chunks of culvert. So even when I was able to clear the foot of the driveway on the approach to the mailbox, shoveling away for a few hours a day, I was a long way from getting out.
And still my health issues continued. I would wake up, go downstairs, and immediately get a fresh headache and lose all focus and motivation. It finally occurred to me to take a hard look at the trusty woodstove, which was burning a slow load of wood overnight to keep things bearable when the nights were below freezing. I checked the symptoms of carbon monoxide exposure: headache, lethargy, blurred vision. Airing the house helped, of course, but I’d figured I was dealing with mold fumes… after all, my CO alarm wasn’t pinging, and it tested fine.
One of these days I will learn that I react to far lower concentrations of things than a normal person. Those slow burns weren’t creating enough draft to go all the way up a 20-foot stack on very cold nights, and the combustion gases were leaking into the room through the gaps in the ill-fitted chimney pipe. Which I figured out, of course, while being snowed in with no ability to hit the hardware store, let alone get a stove professional in to have a look. Even the plow was making hard work of it every other day. So I wrapped the joints of the chimney securely with aluminum foil, cinched it tight with steel wire, and the situation immediately improved. It isn’t perfect: the inner sleeve has fallen down far enough into the stove collar that I suspect the draft is impaired, and slow burns leak out through the stove vents as well. But I’m getting to the end of winter, and by next fall I will have a rebuilt chimney that should avoid nearly all of this.
It was a week later when I started to grasp how badly injured I had been, though. It’s taken most of a month to overcome the brain fog and anemia, and I’m just starting to get back on my feet. Fresh spring air and physical work outside should complete the cure, and that’s coming very soon.
But not just yet, despite a couple of sunny days and the first song sparrow. The Equinox marks four weeks I’ve been snowed in. It’s unheard of to have snow last for multiple weeks in March; when Recca delivered groceries for me about ten days ago, she said that my next door neighbor just had plow ridges in the ditches, and the next house down didn’t even have that, but I was having to flounder through a foot of snow to get to the road. When I called the post office to allow her to pick up my mail, they didn’t need me to tell them the address—I was the only one still socked in. Yesterday, the cold rain was eroding the last few inches, and I can almost see the ground on the upper driveway; I’ll attempt to get out today. Assuming, of course, that the truck will start.
The delays—power failures, deep snow, and CO poisoning—have put me behind on some necessary projects. Foremost in my mind is the writeup for the bridge, so that I can get a determination from the Bureau of Public Lands as to whether we need permits to rebuild the driveway bridge this summer. I can’t start calling contractors until I get that, and many other things hinge on being able to being vehicles down to the house. I also need to make fresh efforts to sell the Red Bug, and the other half of the kitchen needs paint and new flooring so that I can move the refrigerator indoors at last.
Cricket and I are both restless and ready for spring weather, though I know it will mean more work than ever: mowing, pruning, clearing moldy things out of the garage, supervising delivery on Jenny’s new shed, and a host of complications that are sure to arrive. I need to build a fifth garden bed, finish burying the poor septic tank, and make a lot more dump runs. I’m hoping the spring breezes will fill my sails and get things moving again.
I hope the second quarter of 2023 treats you well, and I’ll be back with another update on the Summer Solstice!