Sunday morning coffee …

in my backyard at 5:30 a.m. for the first time this season!!  Finally I do believe winter’s fingers are melting away.  The air is still a bit crisp, so a blanket is on my knees and I’m wearing my pink fuzzy bathrobe and winter slippers.  The city is quiet at this time, except for earlybirds and squirrels starting their day, plus the regularly scheduled trains that run regardless of what time it is.  I love how the first few sips of coffee trickle inside my body and push away the aches from yesterday’s labours, preparing for another few hours of grunt work today.

Two summers ago I moved into town from my acreage.  Hard to believe it’s already been two years.  Summer of 2016 was a blur of selling the acreage to N, finding and buying a house all on my own, packing only what I wanted to take from my past into my new life, and then moving.  Pure adrenaline for months … it was the end of a long chapter in my life, and the start of a new one … a mixture of excitement and sadness.  I wish I had written more back then, but whenever I tried to, it hurt too much.  Now though, after two years, I look back with amazement at what I accomplished.

Last summer, I sat hours upon hours on my land … a 60’ x 120’ foot lot in the city instead of 33.33 acres in the country.  I was getting to know the feel of my new life as much as the feel of my land … the new sounds and smells … experiencing neighbours on the other side of a fence rather than two miles ‘down the road’ … sirens that wailed whenever they wanted to, scaring the bejezuz out of me … a big truck collecting my garbage every Wednesday and taking it away … paying money for water … mail delivered to me instead of it being an errand to run on my lunch break … driving to work in 6.5 minutes rather than 25 … walking to Market Square every Saturday morning with my handbasket to fill and experiencing the energy of a small town.  I live in that energy now … a country mouse living in the city.

My land, or yard as I need to remember it’s called, holds so much potential.  It’s the only plot on the block that is not fenced in, and I’m still ‘on the fence’ about putting one up.  I definitely miss the privacy of my acreage and the wide open space of fields surrounding it, and I find it just plain weird to be working my land, errmm working in my yard, and looking up to see my two lovely neighbours from across the alley, Jake and Agnes, sitting in the open door of their garage watching me.  I wave every time, and then slowly move out of their line of sight …. sigh … so a fence of some sort is necessary.  How can I give myself privacy without it feeling like I’m boxed in?  The answer finally came to me at the tail end of last summer.  A green fence made up of trees and bushes and flowers.  It’s always interesting to see the reactions from people when I tell them what I want to do, from scrunched noses to a vacant ‘you’re downright coo-coo’ look, but it feels right inside me, and that’s how I live my life now.

This is the first day sitting in my yard this summer, yep I said yard, and it’s not quite summer yet, but almost:)  Today is a good day to start making my ideas and dreams come alive.