We have been up on the mountain for 5 months now. It has been an unexpectedly simple lifestyle change for us, despite the snow and frequent, heavy rains. Fog rolls up the side of the mountains, bubbling like witches brew. We watch it far away in the valley below, changing, surging, and finally engulfing our house so that we cannot see the the fir tree 10 feet from the kitchen window. Then we are in a blanket of peace for a day, or two days, or three days…or a week. It is noiseless. Even the sounds of our feet on the gravel drive seem impossibly silent on those days. Then it is clear all the way to the farthest planets and galaxies. We take out the telescope to watch the sky close-up, or we spy on the cities below. Our footsteps are silent, and it is peaceful, even when it is clear. This is exactly what we moved here for.
Things are really different up here from the moment we wake up to the moment we crash into bed at night. Things have to be different and planned precisely. Days at home are leisurely with no expectations except that we get our day of school done and our chores finished so that we can spend the rest of the day as we please. Right now that means that the kids play and explore the wilderness and I go through 15 years of compiled, terrible stuff that we packed into boxes and moved up here. It seemed like a great idea at the time the boxes were packed. Now I know we ought to have piled it all on the driveway and called the Salvation Army truck to haul it all away.
Town days are different, though. I teach 2 days each week for a few hours, and the kids dance classes are those days, so those days become precisely planned, finely-tuned times of dashing from one place to the next, hoping there is time to stop in at the grocery store or the feed store before kids need to be dropped off or picked up, school subjects worked in while driving, battling carsickness from reading in the car, and hoping the baby sitter, the dance teacher, the mother (that’s me!) is on time. 5 minutes late, and everything goes wonky for the rest of the day. We make this work and have become good at timely drop-offs, pick-ups, feeding times for the human animals, and we have even gotten carschooling down to a science. We have every second planned from 6:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, which is when we pull up the driveway and barely make it into bed. We thrive on these days. It’s a great, difficult puzzle in which the pieces have to be placed exactly. What a great challenge!
Part of this challenge is the fact that our timeline for renovating and renting our house in town was set back 2 months when we became horribly ill with the bubonic plague. I’m pretty certain that is what it was. I’m pretty sure we almost died. I have never been so sick for so long. At one point I told my husband I would rather die. And, of course, my natural remedy sensibilities won out, and we did not get meds for it. We are really smart that way. Ha! We have advised everyone we know, should they come down with this flu, to put down the oils, put away the teas and herbs, put that Airborn back on the shelf. This bug mocks natural remedies and takes revenge on anyone who dares to try them. Instead, get yourself down to the doctor for the steroid/antibiotic combo that kicks this bug in the but in 2 days. Spare yourself 2 months of suffering.
So the house in town is still not finished or rented out, but it is getting there quickly now that we are well. It’ll get there, and that means that we spend most days packing and scraping and sanding and drywalling and paying friends with pizza and the promise of returned help when this project is done. So we have missed out on some of the snow and lovely glass raindrops that come to this mountain. We still feel a bit like travelers in a strange land up here, particularly after a few weeks in the carbon-laden town air. But the mountain is soaking into our being so that we are quickly becoming part of it.
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