On March 11th, our turkey vultures returned. I say “our vultures” only because they choose to spend the summer in the tall trees near our house. They may well look down upon us from their perches as “our local two leggers” … or perhaps “those keepers of strange flightless birds and even stranger waking hours.” Regardless, the vultures are a welcomed seasonal fixture at Farm Folly, a reminder that warmer weather has finally arrived and we can venture outside once more.
Ironically, we really don’t know when they leave. Summer gives way to the rains of fall and at some point we are splitting wood in the cold drizzle and realize that it’s been weeks since we’ve heard the quiet murmur of their large wings. This year it appears that they took much of our motivation with them. The winter is always a hard time to blog. The pleasant ritual of daily woodstove fires in November becomes a tedious March battle fought with damp materials. The cold and dark seep into your veins and bleed off your momentum. I know we don’t have much to complain about compared to other areas (Svalbard?), but this season has been particularly rough. December set records for cold and February brought an ice storm that cut off power to tens of thousands. The rainy mild weather that typifies most Oregon winters was strangely absent.
The other problem with blogging is that we haven’t felt much like homesteaders lately. We didn’t grow a garden last year or raise a new batch of chicks. The last quart of canned tomatoes was consumed months ago and our meat comes from a local butcher shop. We’ve always kept the focus of the site intentionally specific–nature, gardening, livestock, home improvement–but this means that time spent pursing a variety of other interests doesn’t translate to the blog. In the last year we’ve pushed the culinary limits of cheap hot plates, dabbled in foreign languages, and focused on one really big project, but homesteading?
New hop shoots are pushing their way to the surface and the Toulouse geese are violently drowning each other for love. Everywhere there are signs of spring and we feel compelled to go outside and plant things. We’ve been making plans for the garden, baby chicks, fences, finished drywall and more. I know it’s been a quiet couple of years on the blog, but we still love this medium for connecting people around common interests. We still have ideas to try and stories to share. There will be successes and failures and the occasional outbreak of silliness. Nothing has changed, and everything is different.
