Tennessee to Pennsylvania to Oregon to...

Three weeks have passed since my last update.

Near the late-middle of June, I loaded Honeychild on a trailer and sent her ahead of me to Pennsylvania. My father met her when she arrived in the late night at our neighbor's farm up the road. Honeychild stayed in the paddock for twenty-four hours until I arrived on a bright Sunday morning and led her out into her new slice of heaven: eight acres of rolling, grassy, green hills; a huge spring-fed watering tank; long lines of strong, straight fences; tall stands of shady trees; and the companionship of 23 hair sheep, owned by a local Amishman.

Each successive morning I arrived with a nosebag of oats which I fed to her in the small paddock before turning her loose again. The plan worked, and by the time I left Pennsylvania one week later, she was eagerly waiting at the gate each morning for my mother, father, or Bob (the farm owner) to meet her with oats. I can rest assured she won't go wild in my absence; she loves her oats too much.

I was in Pennsylvania for one week, and I think I spent most of the time in the garden. Or perhaps I spent most of my time in my room, dusting and sorting my things into piles: things that used to be important, and things that were still important. Working in the garden was the more enjoyable of the two tasks. My mom had warned me many times before my arrival that she was behind and that she felt she wasn't keeping up with the garden.

Of course, she exaggerated: the garden was beautiful and I was amazed at how many beds were already full of vegetables and flowers. She must have invested dozens and dozens of hours in the spring. We went to a garden nursury one day and bought some herbs and flowers. Her vegetable garden is impressive enough, but she also has flowerbeds, trellises, fruit trees, and a little stand of beehives. Down at the train station she and my father have window boxes, hanging baskets of flowers, and even six long planters of flowers along the edge of the bridge.

My mother had started a garden for me in the yard of the train station since I'll be living there this fall. While I was home I planted sunflowers, amaranth, and zinnias along the wall of the train station. At the bottom of the porch steps I planted lavendar, basil, parsley, and sage. In the sandy soil along the top of the creekbank I planted sweet potatoes and watermelons. I started some pumpkin seeds to plant there, as well. Just beyond the evening shade of the sycamore I turned a patch of soil just big enough to accomodate three tomato vines my mother had saved for me. I mulched them with the bamboo leaves we'd clipped off the fresh poles we'd cut for trellises. We transplanted big clumps of black-eyed susans to the front of the guard rail leading to the bridge. Over in front of the gazebo I began guiding volunteer trumpet vines up a prexisting metal framwork to form a shady arch. I meant to plant some winter squash for myself before I left but didn't get the seeds started in time. At least my mother will have a crop to share up at the house.

I left Pennsylvania on a Saturday and arrived in Corvallis late at night. The next five days were an exhausting blur of sorting, packing, recycling, distributing, and trashing the entire contents of the house I'd leased for the past year. I had "inherited" the lease from somebody who had "inherited" it from somebody else, and I was left with several year's-worth of at least a dozen different tenants' discarded or forgotten furniture and knick-knacks. The process of cleaning the house was a chore from hell, but it was aided, at least, by Andy, the one remaining subletter. Thankfully, he'd begun getting rid of furniture months beforehand, and had already made several trips to the dump.

On the morning before the landlord came to walk through, I swept every room, wiped down walls and sills, vaccumed the stairs, and hand-mopped every floor on my knees. I scrubbed the refrigerator inside and out until it shone so immaculately white that I felt I was gazing upon something from another world. We swept and dusted the basement, carting out a decade's-worth of dirt and grime. I wiped down the washer and drier and emptied the lint traps. In the kitchen I washed every shelf and every cupboard door. I scoured the stove burners and ran the dishwasher. I scrubbed the bathroom with bleach and polished the mirror.

Once the house was finished, I locked the doors and went into the garden. Andy helped me empty the last of the compost around the roses and then he rolled up the wire and put it away in the garage. I pruned the rose bushes and weeded around the garlic. I swept off the front and back steps, hosed dirt of the side of the house, and raked the yard. I swept the garage and put the few remaining items into their places.

Andy spent the day running our final errands (good will, recycling, the co-op, the hardware store) and carefully packing all of his belongings into the back of his truck. Once his boxes were packed, he managed to tie our tandem, his commuter bike, and my motobecane onto the top and over the bumper. The resulting sight was something so purely country we were almost embarrassed to drive out of town.

The landlord arrived and took our keys. We showed him the sketchy wiring in the basement and the broken light fixture upstairs. He offered us the roll of aluminum foil we'd left in the pantry cupboard. We admired the mimosa tree in the front yard, he shook our hands, and we headed off to our truck. "Have a nice life," he called after us. "Thanks," we said, as we climbed in.

The truck engine started without complaint and we drove out of town looking straight ahead of ourselves.