Milestones & Coincidences
What can we really own?
I gazed at the mountain before me and caught my breath…
In the sunshine, red-twigged vine maples glowed, and vibrant green young firs dotted the landscape. A hawk sailed high above us, coasting on the thermals rising up the hillsides. I drank in the sight of the green-gray Foothills to the northeast, folding one upon the other like origami. This is it, I thought. Our Shangri-la. This is our dream.
I felt a new, fierce possessiveness for this place. It’s ours, my heart sang. It’s got to be ours!
It’s the moment I fell in love with our woods, from my memoir Little Farm in the Foothills.
This month is a major milestone for my husband and me: we’re making the last payment on our mortgage. The ten-acre property we chose twenty years ago will legally be ours.
Yet do we really own it?
I do feel a sense of ownership of our garden, the orchards and food-growing beds we’ve nurtured all these years.
But outside our fence is different. It’s a sea of green with the riotous May understory, the tall firs, and lush big-leaf maples, the trillium that blooms so fleetingly in spring, a muted white-pink blossom you won’t see unless you’re looking for it.
I don’t feel this woods belongs to me. To us.
Do we own the bumblebees buzzing in the berry patches? The bunnies sprinting into their burrows? The heavily pregnant doe browsing in the grass on the other side of the fence?
The bears that stay out of sight, although we know they’re around?
The owls who call out Whoo-who-Whooo from the tall firs, that you only hear at dusk?
(Or the ones we heard making strange sounds all afternoon, from just above the chicken coop…John and I thought they were mating!)
How can we possibly own all the flora and fauna we’ve come to cherish?
Rather, I think we belong to the woods. John and I are only the caretakers of the trees and shrubs and wild berries, the animals that make their homes here.
In a couple of weeks, the county will sign off on their routine reconveyance, and ownership will be official. But here in our peaceful woods, John and I know “ownership” has little place in the natural world.
Little Snacks Check-In
Although paying off our mortgage feels like a bigger deal, I also had an important milestone birthday this month.
It’s the kind of birthday when you finally, really and truly accept (because you’ve been sort of denying it the last decade or two) that most of your years on this earth are behind you.
Yet there’s an upside to this birthday: you’ve discovered you really are wiser than when you were young.
I wrote about my latest bit of hard-won wisdom last month: the power of “small.” The recognition that you really can get a lot done, or have wonderful experiences, in bite-sized segments in time.
Oliver Burkeman, the whiz behind the book I mentioned, Four Thousand Weeks, calls it “radical incrementalism.” But…
Come on.
Amie McNee, the writer and artist I quoted in my April post, has a much friendlier version for staying on task. “Little Snacks,” or “Small Bites.” This week, I also came across another: “Little Sips.”
I love all three!
Maybe business-speak/productivity jargon is entirely appropriate for how we deal with our “should’s,” the routine of chores and tasks and to-do’s.
But when it comes to the things we do for our health and well-being, doing what we’re called the do, the pleasures of life, I’m all for Little Snacks.
Besides my Little Snack of novel-writing, here are other daily Little Snacks:
*Little breakfast.
*Little Farm TV
On my daily cycle, I can’t get enough of watching the herd of cows and their calves down the road. The cows don’t really pay attention to me, even when I call out, “Hello Ladies!”
Yet there’s a lone Brahman cow among the Black Angus who always looks up, twitches her droopy ears, and watches me with a benign expression.
But…sometimes my Little Snacks turn into Big Meals:
*Little 400 words somehow become 1,000.
*Little garden chores turn into overdoing it.
I’ve been creating a new 5’ x 5’ bed for peppermint, by digging up a nasty patch of invasive red moss. Yesterday, after yarding out the heavy clods of moss, I hauled two full wheelbarrow loads of it deep into the woods.
Did I wake up sore! So today in the garden…
*Little horsetail weeding. (Although there’s no such thing only a little horsetail.)
*Little blueberry mulching with John’s freshly-made wood chips.
*Most important of all: Little Snack of joy in the tasks.
If you’re a food gardener too, you may like the natural pest control tips from my Spring Homestead-Style gardening class, at my Little Farm blog!
Two Parallel Novels?
I’ve shared before about the possibility of a universal consciousness out there, the one Carl Jung wrote about—the stories and human experiences that inform artists of all kinds.
I’ve been convinced of it myself, since in my early writing days…
You may recall me mentioning that I’d just started a novel set in Ireland, when I picked up the latest release of bestselling novelist Nora Roberts. Her book had the same everything! Same hero and heroine’s names, same character motivations, even the same locale!
I let go of that story in a hurry, let me tell you.
Still, I think this kind of “coincidence” happens more than we think!
Like the two novels I read this month that were eerily the same.
Both are set in London, the main characters are single mothers of two children and both are professional writers.
Well, that’s a common enough scenario in women’s fiction, right? But read on:
Both protagonists are newly divorced from a husband named Dan, both Dans are keen cyclists with expensive tastes in bicycles, and both Dans have lost interest in their kids due to paring up with a beautiful, leggy, much younger blonde. And…
Both main characters have forced themselves to start dating, as material for a writing project…and each is seeing a younger guy!
What are the chances!
Jo Jo Moyes’ new novel, We All Live Here, clearly shares a nearly identical set-up with this other novel (which shall remain unidentified). Still, there the similarities end.
The unnamed novel, a rom-com, has one of those cartoon covers, and the conflicts and relationships are just so…superficial. I wasn’t interested enough in the other novel to finish it.
However, I was deeply invested in Lila and her circle in We All Live Here.
Moyes’ previous novel, Someone Else’s Shoes, was so stellar that as soon as I finished it, I read it all over again!
We All Live Here is a quieter story, yet engaging and compelling in its portrayal of the love and joy and pain in family relationships. Shoes had one of those immensely satisfying endings—the villain got his long-deserved comeuppance!
But the warm glow I felt at the finale of We All Live Here will stay with me far longer.
Have you ever come across two books that were oddly similar? Or ever experienced a sense of this universal consciousness?
As always, I appreciate you so much for spending time at my Little Farm. If you felt even a tiny glow at reading this, I hope you’ll press the handy ❤️ “Like” button…and your comments mean so much to me!
Sending my best from our mossy woods and garden,
~Susan, from the Foothills
Beautiful poetry about your journey with the woods you are lucky enough to care for!
Happy Big Birthday, Susan. It's funny knowing that the largest part of life is over but it also acts as a motivator, I think. To make the most of every day to the best of our capacity.
I think it may have been your recent post where I saw a link to Amie Mcnee and her small bites. So thank you for that because at the time, it made an impression on me. When I wrote last week's post and quoted it, I couldn't remember where I saw it. I love the idea of your 20 minute reminder and think I need to do the same.
I think you are so right that we're just caretakers of the Big Wild, even though that 'wild' might only be our own back garden. It's what encourages us to save bees, to welcome butterflies, to nurture trees and green space. But it's also really humbling to know that we don't own the Wildings - those living creatures who populate the land, air and water that surrounds us.
Congrats so much on the mortgage payment. That's something really special. Cheers and best. XXXX