Interludes and reflections

It has been six and a half years since I last used this blog.

Since then, I have moved away from my family home and taken charge of a homestead.  I'm in a different house, in a different state, in a different climate.  My life has turned upside down, and the shape of it is something I never imagined.

But I took many things with me.  My knowledge of plants, which gets deeper and more intimate with every season.  My connection with crops and food.  My love of cooking.  My need to work the soil and help things grow.  Those things serve to ground me (sorry) in a place where I might otherwise feel uprooted (oh dear) and isolated.  And, in a very real sense, I am realizing that plants are my life now.  What I learned and the skills I had acquired back when I started this blog were the apprenticeship for what stretches before me now: symbiosis with the land, where my husbandry is returned in sustenance.

My focus has shifted a bit, which was inevitable.  But I am more interested than ever in growing food all the way from start to finish.  I'm growing more herbs, as the grocery store is far away and such frills are expensive, and herbs and spices are what bring dishes to life.  And I'm finally discovering medicinal herbs, now that I am no longer relying on the uncaring hands of strangers to supply them--when one only pays attention to an herb's commercial value, harvest and handling bows to convenience, not what preserves freshness and potency.  I still have a place for modern life, but on the mountain, the land is much closer than civilization, and I'm learning to rely on it for more of my needs.

Fixing up a homestead is a long and complex journey, full of hard work and project lists.  I do have a newsletter that follows my progress, currently on Substack... it's a chatty letter, sent out once every three months.  I update so rarely mostly to sidestep the conundrum where one is writing blog posts so much that it takes up all the time one could use to actually do things.  However, that means it's all broad strokes and overviews, with a few anecdotes to keep it moving.  I talk about some of the day-to-day life with my friends on social media.  But if I want to make a journal entry, writing up something which caught my interest, or noting down an experience for later, I haven't had one place to do that.  Perhaps this will do.

I'm still cleaning out the workroom here (every space was full when I moved in) and slowly collecting or building tools, but at some point I may resurrect the Shopwork blog to talk about woodworking and fixing things.  And I also brought my love of crafting, which I hope will help to support me once my time isn't totally consumed by rebuilding.  So Fiber and Fabric will stick around as well.  For right now, I have to eat, and the vegetable garden was one of the first things I started to renovate here, so this is where I will start.

Will blogging fall by the wayside again?  Probably.  There are times when I'm almost too busy to sleep or eat, when events feel like they're all piling in the door at once.  I can't promise regular updates.  But I don't need to--this journal is for myself, though I hope that a few other people will find it helpful or entertaining.  If you want regularity, subscribe to the newsletter.  This will be here to catch the irregular bits.

Enjoy.

--Sam