This place

It's an indoors day today. Finally we are getting more seasonable weather. When we got up this morning there was snow on the ground. The temperature was in the mid thirties and it began melting as a light drizzle began to fall. Yesterday was spent taking care of fencing around the garden and today with shelving another ten boxes of books.

No, I am not going to write about the hens. And no, I am especially not going to write about our finding fourteen eggs in a newly discovered nest under our pole barn (barn makes it sound more rustic than it is).

I've used the words settle and settling a number of times in this blog and I think they can be misleading.

What got me thinking about this is that I bought a new fruit tree last week and planted it. As I was digging the hole for it and then setting it in I had the thought that I was marking this place the way a dog marks territory. I was saying that planting this tree made this place mine. Well, that's a pretty poor understanding of the reality of this place. We have five acres here and maybe one is open, the rest is woods.

This place is inhabited, more or less permanently, by newts, frogs, moles, rabbits, mice, various birds, and unknown kinds of insects and micro-organisms. It is often visited by turkeys, weasels, raccoons, bears, and deer. Many of these beings, and their ancestors, have been established here long before I "took title" to this place and will continue their use of it long after I have left.

My settling here is a pretty short term affair that is blown out of proportion by my own sense of self importance. This idea is not some original insight. What I am experiencing here is an urge to settle in a way that is not possible. I want to establish myself here and extend my idea of self to include this land and thereby believe that I am more permanent than I am. I'll just try to get comfy here and settle into not being settled.

A couple of local bits from the weekend to be noted. Saturday we had breakfast at the local grange. This is a regular thing that helps support a local food program (there's been a big increase in the need for food support out here in the past couple of years) and it turns out that the Valentine's weekend breakfast is something of an attraction, at least for a vintage Ford V-8 club in Eugene. The grange folks are very friendly and focused on the community (for scale Cheshire covers 30+ square miles and has a population of about 1100) and have a great little library. The older folks do the cooking and the kids doing the serving. Payment is purely donation. We ate with Dwayne and his wife, who were part of the car club. He farms and drives trucks and was quite friendly.

After breakfast I burned a whole lot of yard debris hearing all sorts of gunfire, some of it obviously automatic. There was a "3D Shoot" about a mile from here. I don't think I want to know much about a 3-D Shoot. They did keep going all weekend. The big spreads in the Sunday paper ads for sporting goods are for guns and ammo.

Just finishing things up the next morning (it's Wednesday) as I had to go into Eugene last evening for what has become a regular Tuesday evening trip to Eugene Zendo. Right now there's a heavy wet snow fall. It's in the low thirties, so I don't expect it to stick, but it sure looks beautiful. If it keeps up it will be a wonderful walk to get our newspaper.

Last note: it's clear and sunny! Impermanence!