Delicious Detox

This is how it feels to live in California in the winter after so many years in Michigan and Connecticut. I feel like I am detoxing a lifetime of ice in my veins and Seasonal Affective Disorder in strata so deep that the bottom is kind of unknown. Delicious detox. 

February Floridian Dreams

We have sifted on into February, all the snow finally coming in poofy piles and heaps, our snow shovels dusted off and being all loved and hefted every day. We now have a little banks on either side of our driveway and this morning when I shoveled I was having a little trouble stacking more snow some places. Its kind of cozy to have so much white stuff outside and the boys sure have been logging sledding hours in the backyard.

My hens are hiding in the coop and sometimes making it out in the yard for a tiny peck and forage in the snow in the afternoon but mostly they are sitting indoors, fluffed up, snuggling together and doing little more than looking outside through the door for variety. I have to say that I can relate. Its the time of year for reading, circling things in seed catalogs and baking....but not much else. I went out this morning and shoveled until I had cleared the whole front walk and then part of the driveway and I felt all woozy and dizzy by lunchtime. My body is not used to vigorous exercise + multiple cups of coffee. Whew! Back to the books and the research and my paint brushes.....with maybe a few more detours for movement in between.

We were hoping to go to Arizona this year for a little mid-winter pep. Some of our friends from the homeschool world moved to the Pheonix area and a little desert visit sounded like just the thing in the dregs of winter. Unfortunately, I am not super adept at internet ticket price nabbing. I totally missed the amazing tickets that saw when I first shopped the idea out. So, the whole idea of a desert tour has gone by the wayside for this year. $399 per person was just a little out of our range. We did however manage to flex a little and snap up some seats heading to Florida in March for a week. We'll stay in some little out of the way corner and recharge, scavange shells, drive out to The Keys, see alligators and manatee and hopefully drop in on our numerous friends and family in The Sunshine State. Being flexible is good and being in Florida in sludgy March sounds great. I have been perusing Pinterest for great ideas for one or two key daytrips while we are there. So many pictures of sunshine, palm trees and surf have to be warming me somehow, right?

Now, I'm off to research "best way to weatherproof doors,"  "crockpot dinners" and other important things like, "what do meercats eat." Ah, internets....you are so good to us. We here at Homeschool Central and HomeStead United are forever in your debt. What would we do without you on a chilly winter day when bundling up in snowpants and damp knit gloves seems like way too much work?

Good People Are Cold People

Winter has been grueling this year. I have always been a person who has said that I love the change of seasons but I have to say that if I am truthful, I think that's my Northern Michigan roots speaking out of pride. I think in my head that good, salt of the earth, energetic, humble, country girls who grew up in the ice and snow should take a certain amount of pride in the grueling grind of winter, in the flagging spirits of those around them and their own contrasting stubborn appreciation for the beauty of ice crystals and falling snow. I feel like a wiener admitting it but I long for sunshine and warm and green, green, green and I hold no special place in my heart for chunks of ice and falling snow.

It was 62 degrees outside today and I felt positively giddy, the last of the snow seemed like a silly joke and I really feel like I am going to make it. I rolled the windows down as we drove errands, hunted up the first crocus in the woods around the corner and felt like singing a Julie Andrews anthem. I love that we have made it to the other side, warm weather is actually going to start happening now, slowly but surely.

I also ordered a SAD light to mount over our computer keyboard for sunning outselves during the last few cold and dreary days. It is time to be honest. I don't think I am a cold weather person. This year, I told my husband after years of insisting that I could never live in a warm climate, "I think I love green and sunshine more than I love four seasons." We can always visit snow and ice. I can make ice cubes. Those I love will always live in chilly places. I just feel like I need the green and the warmth and the hope of sunshine. Maybe we won't be moving to California tomorrow, (I have a friend who lives in mortal fear of her friends moving away to warmer places.) but I'm open to it. After The Bahamas I decided that I totally could even live in a place that was tropical which seems like a silly admission but took a fair bit of vulnerability and guts.  I was raised to believe that strong, good people love the cold.

The notion of "should" is really powerful. I think I feel a lot of cultural/familial pressure to be attached to cold weather and feel personal pride in my toleration of it. But that's not the same thing as actually loving it. Truthfully, for who I am it seems like a kind of insanity to keep insisting on living in the land of the chilly. I get depressed and dry skinned and weepy, lethargic and drab and filled with ennui and try to hide it under a mask of should-laden Arctic identity connected to a vague notion of strength of character. Having my sister Lucy here has been emboldening. She's gotten so brave about her own love of warm and it took me a while to unravel the fact that I'm cut out of the same cloth. Its scary to admit it out loud but I think I'm a sunshine girl. I like warm. I like grass that never goes grey brown. I like flowers all year. I like water, not dry places. I like being able to open the windows whenever I want to. I like maple syrup but I don't have to actually make it myself. I like snowmen but don't find them essential to life. I can snow shovel if I have to but I'd really rather weed. I am from Michigan but my ancestors are from all kinds of other places and I'm me, not any of them. I love being able to be comfortably outdoors all year round and I love being honest.

The good people are not the cold people and the tough people and the deprived people and the people who live in more traditional ways but the people who live honestly, the people who give their bodies the things they need to be healthy, the people who are willing to try new things and those who live authentically even in the presence of "shoulds" galore.

What climate is really "you?" Where would you live if you had nothing to lose and all your dreams could come true?

Tropical Cure

We have been to parts further south, warming our toes and tanning our pelts in the tropical sun. The world is a much better place now. We are home to our beige and grey yard and it all seems shockingly wan but the snow is almost all gone, the garden catalogs are piling up in a heap on my To Read Shelf and the chickens are started laying like gangbusters. I feel a change in the wind. We 'gon make it!

My life has felt like a ridiculous tumult lately, painful and crazy and feeling out of control. I hate, hate, hate to even tell you that I know part of it has been hormonal woman-timing. PMS is so humiliating and it makes me feel so shammy and non-legit. Blech. Also, I think its a good year to just certify myself as clearly sucked under by Seasonal Affective Disorder and realize that the endless bland, bone-chilling cold and lack of sunshine has screwed with my ability to remain stable. (I am seriously considering getting one of those dorky lights to sit under, folks!) My world has also really been truly stressful. We are trudging our way through marriage counseling, one of those scary things that nobody talks about out-loud. Marriage is hands down the hardest thing, the scariest endeavor and the deepest learning experience I have ever, ever been through in my life. Honestly, it kind of terrifies me and I long for "easy" and "happy" in my marriage but its been everything but. Nobody talks out loud about marriage, you know? Its kind of this confidential, if you-have-one-you-are-supposed-to-feel-blessed kind of a thing. I don't want to make A feel bad or dump our relational dirty laundry but I do think its important sometimes to whistle blow and just be authentic and I know we both agree on the honest desire to be .

Marriage is hella hard, yo. I have never cried harder or felt deeper or worked more from the pit of my own soul than this. I am encouraged to know that people change, relationships are dynamic, that I am growing, that we love each other, that we have resources, and that we are not the first people to walk this way. Please know, if this is you in any way....not everyone marries their high school sweetheart and gets to post on Facebook that they feel so lucky to be married to their best friend. Lots of us out there are working out our marriages, its about growth and change and hard self-work and grace and patient turtle medicine in bucket loads. I have been doing some serious soul searching and I honestly believe that life belongs to the over-comers, to the learners and the doers, those who will not be defeated and will not give up, to those who humbly and vulnerably connect and believe in a spirit of change. I'm clinging to evidence of our progress and firmly planting myself in the committed but unwilling to be victimized category. I'm committed to our marriage, to the pain and the growth and the believing in each other, to preserving myself and encouraging him to do the same, to sacred advisors and the village that surrounds us, to showing our children and people who don't have it easy can be winners too and figuring all this craziness out. Please know that you, struggling married person of great worth, are not alone. I'm all about creating a new culture of humanity, openness and growth around marriage....I'm super over the trite happy-happy pretend that all is bliss or that all conflict is sickness.

This is what the tropics hath wrought. I read and prayed, and dreamed and saw things on the shore, talked and argued and made resolutions and said brave things, soaking in sunshine, slept and slept and slept, wrote lists, took photos and just *was* in a hammock on the seashore. And I'm more whole, more honest, more awake and determined to make it.