This is my haunted house, I live here with Eric and dogs and chickens and two feral cats and sheep.
I'll start from the beginning.
In the mornings now I wake up at 4:30am or 5am and slip to down to the kitchen, flip the coffee on. Thats when the thinking starts and the looking out the window. With ages to go before it's light enough to go outside. So I hit the computer. The fact that I have a computer here is strange to me. Nothing here is computed. Nothing here understands or speaks the language of computer. It's a one way relationship. All this goes uploaded into the ether and gets stamped WORLDS END
It feels sometimes like a lonely odd job, ferrying all the things - all the moments up to their after life in the cloud. Keeping up appearances in instagram.
No, now I'm in the city. I'll start from the beginning, feeding myself...an act which I take serious as a heart attack and what keeps me motivated to never stop working. Ever. I'm food motivated.
I eat alone a lot which I rather enjoy. Here are my major food groups:
coffee
kale
nuts and nut butter
kefir
steak
I eat so many nuts and nut butter. We make jokes about nuts that are appropriate for a 6th grade audience, I don't care. I rub coconut oil on my face everyday now, this is one of the self care acts I've installed to keep myself from the edge of self pity. (I nut myself) I carry a peanut butter sandwich in my bag about 30% of the time. If I'm on the traveling that increases to 100%. I paid $18.99 for a jar of nut butter recently on Martha's Vineyard.
Things at Saipua have been so good but so complicated lately. Asheley retired, moving on to her own projects and I miss her so much. But I like the drama of change, the energy of things shifting and we're working with great new people.
We did the biggest wedding we've ever done in September. I watched that come and go like a dream. As we started doing bigger and bigger events these past 2 years we noticed our payrolls were harder and harder make on time. Doesn't make a lot of sense. Relied on our credit cards too much. So in September we stopped and switched gears, released ourselves from the high end only market and started picking up smaller weddings and generally just saying yes to everything. Which is really fun when you have a positive attitude about it. I was tired of being a flower snob; it got boring. And I miss the smaller budget brides because it's how we started, ball jars in the back of my pick up truck. Friends are all like don't dilute your brand!
Which gives me pause, but then I'm like fuck it. What brand? Us? I want to farm and have money to feed my pack of dogs, give my girls raises and finish the barn so I can start my next big project: SARAHS INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF ASTROLOGY AND HIP HOP DANCE
Through all this, Eric has held down the farm so artfully. I am back and forth like a nut (!) managing the flower fields (now finished) and helping with chores, trying to make plans, figure out how to move forward there. We lost a sheep, caught in the electric fence one night. Aster, our oldest ewe. I was in the city when it happened and Eric dealt with it alone. Relatively unfazed, I noticed him differently that week... if one becomes a farmer -- goes from playing at it to really being it then he crossed that line some time ago. He hauled her body out to the back 70 acres across the farm and left her for the coyotes. Days later I walked the dogs back there sort of timidly looking for her remains. I wanted her horns. The sheep was long gone. To greener pastures, obviously.
On my drive between the farm and the city I get a lot of thinking done. I feel like I'm resting when I'm driving, listening to music. Stop at all my happy places for a coffee or to eat some kale out of an old yogurt container. This is an old abandoned house I pass on my way. Its a greek revival, similar to ours which was popular in the early 1800's before the war and the proliferation of victorian frills... before machines. Where we live in the mohawk valley - Central NY - you can throw a stone and find an abandoned greek revival. Built to look epic and substantial as new Americans forged their way, they are often very simple and modest on the inside. I think about the time when these houses were built. The bravery, the false bravado, the desperation. I laugh out loud. Because it's very Saipua.
