True Country

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while, about our “Adventures in the Country” – I was assuming that our life would be full of them when we moved out here. Now that we’ve been out here for about 6 weeks, I almost actually feel like I live here. We’ve made this into OUR house. Mostly it’s been hard work though, not much time for adventures!

I gardened all day today in the beautiful sunshine (more on that later). As I hobbled into the bathtub not too long ago, I went downstairs to the room that we affectionately call the library (which is currently just an empty room with 3 bookshelves in it, packed with books…someday it WILL be a library!) to grab a book, and picked up this book called Letters from the Country. I’ve read it before, but felt that I may appreciate it more now! This woman (Martha) left a glam job at Macleans Magazine, to move to a farm near Mount Forest. She was almost 30 when she did this, and now 15 years later she has made a bit of money off her farm by raising sheep, a probably a whole lot of money with her Letters From The Country books. I think there are 6 now, all filled with amusing antidotes about her charming life on the farm. She inspired me a bit – I just turned 30 and moved to the country too, these are the amusing antidotes that I want to have, her life sounds like so much fun! Mind you, I never plan to tell stories about sticking my arm up inside an ewe to turn the baby lambs around so they can be delivered, but I imagine there will be some sort of amusement at times. She doesn’t have kids. That’s where we’ll catch up.

I did my first “True Country” thing yesterday – this is the sort of thing I have always imagined being able to do – I went for a walk into the back field and picked apples off a tree. I should say that it’s not actually our field, so I suppose they weren’t actually my apples to pick….so to rephrase – I went trespassing and stole apples off of someone’s else’s tree. And then came home and sat on the porch and peeled them in the sunshine. And then made Apple Sauce. Delicious, cinnamony, thieved Applesauce. And if someone comes to my door and says “Hey, I hear you’ve been stealing apples off my trees”, then I will gladly share my bowl of delicious cinnamony thieved applesauce.

I spent the day in the garden today, trying to methodically determine what was plant and what was weed. Since a lot of plants have given up on the summer, most of it looked like weed. So I pulled out a bunch of stuff – likely some of each! The people that used to live here have put all sorts of interesting “Decorative Stuff” in the gardens. I think they were trying to achieve a Country sort of feel (Kitch, I call it) I found an old straw hat, a rotted barrel, a decorative white basket, an old bent wheel painted farm house red, a bucket and two watering cans. And Rocks. Rocks upon rocks upon rocks. Put there on purpose. Mostly big. Rocks in the middle of the garden, rocks along the edge of the garden. Rocks in artful piles in the garden!! What the heck is up with the rocks?? Rocks in a garden does not a Rock Garden make!! It just makes a garden full of rocks!! So I moved them. Well, I moved about half of them, I was too tired to move them all. I figure in the spring I’ll have more energy!

For those of you that haven’t heard, we now are the proud owners of a dog. Dudley is a Standard Poodle, that came from a cutsey little town in upstate New York. Dudley is a cutsey little town dog, and is going to take some training to realize that he has to start acting like a country dog! Dudley is currently barking at Gawd only knows what at back door. He sees things that I don’t see. He came complete with somewhat of a poodle haircut – the poofy head, and poofy ears, and a bit of extra poof on each of his paws. And the tail – the first three inches close to his bum shaved, and the rest…you guessed it…poofy!! That all went away pretty quickly, with the help of a pair of scissors. He looks a little more like a real dog now. He’s still no match for the 3 mean looking dogs that live next door though. Or maybe two. Steve the neighbor came to tell me today that one of his dogs has gone missin’. He’d just gone “out back” to see if maybe he’d been got by one of the coyotes. (Pronounced Kai-oats) But no sign of him.

Speaking of Kai-oats, there are a pack of them that hang out around here. We heard them for the first time on Labour Day Weekend, howling away in the distance. The next night we heard them howling away in the back yard! We’ve heard them a few more times since then. Maybe that’s what Dudley barks at.

I just heard a cow moo across the road. That still makes me giggle, that I live somewhere where I can sit in my living room and listen to cows moo. Hehe!