Coming Home

The big day had arrived. My sister, Cari and I were finally moving to our hobby farm in BC. The moving vans had packed up all our belongings the day before and we had spent a long night giving our house one last clean to prepare it for its new owner. I had spent a restless night sleeping on an inflatable camping mattress and all I wanted was to be on the farm already. But, we still had to pack up our small pick-up truck and make the six hour drive one last time.

Earlier, I had questioned Cari how we were going to transport four cats, a bird and a very large dog in our small vehicle but she assured me that they would all fit. She had even bought a canopy for the truck so that the cats would be safe and comfortable in the back during the ride.
Cari and I both got up at four that morning, as we wanted to get the earliest start possible. The moving vans would be leaving at nine that morning, so even if we had to stop to let the dog out, we should still beat the movers to the farm by several hours.

In the dark and chilly morning, we stuffed the back of the truck with four cats in their carriers, two litter boxes, a birdcage, pet food, two suitcases, a vacuum, and cleaning supplies. In the small cab of the truck, Bear, our hundred pound Great Pyrenees-cross, had to squeeze into the small space between the seats and the back of the cab. We had put our bird, Zoe, in a box and he was to make the six-hour trip sitting on my lap.

It was five a.m., when we drove away from the house that I had lived in for fifteen years. As all houses do, this one held memories and had been a silent witness to my heartache and joy.

When I moved to Calgary with my then-husband, I had no idea how many changes would occur within those modest walls. From being new in a strange city to having a circle of dear friends that I would cherish forever, from being married to divorced, from being alone to living with my sister. All these events marked a time of awakening for me; a rediscovery of who I really was and what I truly needed in my life to bring me peace and contentment.

For giving me shelter and a safe haven to grieve my losses and to welcome the new, I gave my little house in the suburbs a silent Thank-You as we pulled away from the curb in the eerie quiet of the predawn street for the last time.

We made good time on the drive, stopping only twice to let Bear get out and stretch his legs. We were scheduled to get to the farm no later than one in the afternoon. Everything was going according to schedule and the cats seemed to be handling the trip in the back of the truck just fine. That was, until we hit the outskirts of Golden. We had already encountered a few places along the highway where we had to stop for road construction, so when we hit yet another line up of cars we assumed that it was just another fifteen-minute stop. You know what they say about assuming anything.

We had been stopped in the line-up for over an hour; the dog suffering from the heat threw up in the back of the truck, and Cari and I desperately needed to use a bathroom. Cari took the dog for a walk in the shade of the forest and gave him a drink of water while I cleaned up the mess in the truck. That solved his problems but what about ours. There were no public washrooms nearby. We were stopped on a highway in the middle of nowhere. At the three-hour mark both Cari and I desperate to relieve our bladders, hiked into the woods on the roadside. I've always tried to avoid using roadside bathrooms and now I was forced to heed the call of nature in nature.

Finally, someone from the highway maintenance crew told us what was really going on. It wasn’t just another highway construction project, it was a rockslide. It had occurred literally minutes before we pulled up to the area. For three hours, the crews had been trying to clear the rocks but every time they removed a truckload, the mountain would release another avalanche of rock to replace it. What they thought would take a few hours to clear was now looking like it could take all night. We had no other choice but to turn around, head back to Alberta, and take the route up through Radium Hot Springs.

The rest of the trip was a nightmare. We drove though a snowstorm, a heavy rainstorm and then sweltering heat. Cari had to keep her wits about her the whole time she was driving. We were sharing the road with hundreds of people that were also delayed by the rockslide. To make up for lost time, quite a few drivers were taking huge risks on the road.

We made it to the farm at nine-thirty that night. It had been fifteen hours since we first left Calgary, more than twice the usual travel time. Oh, to finally be home, safe and out of the truck. It would be two months before Cari and I would get back in the truck to venture farther than the fifteen minutes to the village.

One of the two moving vans was waiting in the driveway when we pulled up to the farm. The driver had taken the longer route to Nakusp avoiding the rockslide at Golden all together. The second driver wasn't so lucky. As it was just the driver and us, we had no choice but to schlep all our belongings into the house ourselves. When we finally said goodbye to the driver it was well past midnight. We would be up early the next morning to unload the second van when the driver finally arrived.

All journeys, whether they be internal or external start with faith and a leap into the unknown. With these first tentative steps, we become emboldened, as the doors to our dreams open with ease, as if a guiding hand is there to offer support. As the journey progresses and the dream gets closer to realization there is a test of endurance, or bravery or even a rockslide.

During that seemingly endless trip, I discovered that if I wanted something bad enough no challenge is too great. Cari and I were faced with the obstacle of a mountain and when we couldn't go through it, we simply went around it. We didn't let anything not even an insurmountable pile of rocks stand in our way of our dream and the new adventures that awaited us.

Keep It Simple Sisters

In today's society, most of us believe technology holds the answers to our desires and the solutions to our problems. To some degree, I believe this is true. Technology allows me to have hot and cold running water at the turn of a tap, to light my home by a flick of a switch, to write this article on my laptop sitting in a lawn chair on a sunny day and to instantly connect to my friends and family by punching a few buttons on a phone or by sending an email.

But, sometimes the things that are supposed to enhance our lives or give us ease do the exact opposite. Do you remember the promise of a shorter workweek and a paperless society when personal computers were invented? The incessant need to talk on a cell phone or text message while in public venues has created a whole society of rude people and a strange disconnect with what is happening around us. The internet has opened a Pandora's Box of ills, giving people easy access to cyber porn, online affairs and gambling with the click of a mouse.

Yes, technology has made certain aspects of our existence easier but I wonder if indiscriminately adding more of it into our lives really enriches our experience or deprives us of what we were seeking in the first place?

Cari and I relocated to a small acreage in an isolated part of British Columbia by choice. There is no cell service on the farm and we can only get dial-up internet, and basic phone service. The closest village has one main street with not a McDonalds, Wal-mart or Superstore in sight.

But even here, where we are limited in our access to the newest gadgets, when challenges arose Cari and I often found ourselves reaching for technology to solve our problems. The two examples that immediately come to mind involve two very unlikely things; bread and cat litter.

Soon after we had settled into our new home, Cari declared that she wanted to bake her own bread. Without even considering that we could bake bread from scratch, we toodled off to the village hardware store and bought the most expensive bread maker we could find. It was stainless steel and fully loaded. It gave you the choice of three loaf sizes, different crusts colors and eight different dough settings. After reading the instructions and following them to the letter, I produced three pans of inedible glue. I gave up in frustration. Cari didn't have much luck either. Her bread came out hard as a rock and only a few inches high.

Disappointed, we gave up on the idea of eating our own freshly baked bread and consigned the behemoth of bread making wizardry to the cupboard to collect dust.

Months later, we attended the Fall Fair held at the village community centre. There we met a local woman who was selling her own baked goods. Her name was Grandma Fay and she was known in the village for her irresistible bread. As we stood admiring her table laden with golden brown loaves, she pulled out a bowl, a measuring cup and three glass jars containing pre-measured amounts of yeast, flour and salt. She placed the ingredients on the corner of her table and commenced to make bread.

We watched in amazement as she swiftly mixed the ingredients and expertly kneaded the dough. She shaped the dough into dinner buns and when the dough had risen and was ready to be baked, she headed into the community centre’s kitchen. Minutes later, she handed out the most delicious melt-in-your-mouth dinner buns I had ever tasted.

The following day, Cari, using Grandma Fay's recipe and her own two hands, made her first of many loaves of bread. The whole house filled with the warm yeasty smell as the bread rose to perfection. It came out of the oven with a golden brown crust and perfectly baked on the inside. It was the best bread I had ever eaten and it didn't require an expensive machine to do it, just a few simple ingredients, a couple of loaf pans and an oven. We eventually gave our bread maker to a friend that had always wanted one.

Now, onto the issue of cat litter. We have four cats and back when Cari and I lived in the big city we had two cat litter boxes discretely tucked away in the basement for their bathroom needs. In our mobile home on the farm, we didn’t have the luxury of a basement and the only place the cat litter could go was in the bathroom tucked into the laundry closet next to the washing machine. We could only fit in one litter box so that would have to do.

Even though we cleaned it daily, the smell of used litter permeated the house. Every month the smell seemed to intensify. It was unbearable. Cari and I decided the only solution was to get an electronic, self-cleaning litter box.

Procuring one turned out to a complicated process. No store in the village carried anything like that so we tried to order it on-line from a pet supply place only to find out that they did not deliver that item to Canada. Friends of ours who had recently moved to the Burton area were heading back to Calgary for a visit. They offered to pick up one from the city and bring it back home. Four hundred dollars later, we installed the electric self-cleaning gizmo.

Three of the four cats adapted to their new bathroom facilities with out a problem but the fourth cat was having nothing to do with it. Flea is his name but I think his previous owner should have called him Flee. He is a very skitterish cat, afraid of his own shadow.

The first time he used our epitome of cutting-edge feline toilet technology he did his business and then stood just outside the box shaking off the litter from his feet. When the automatic rake began to move, whirring and grinding as it scooped up Flea's deposit, the movement and noise freaked Flea out. He scrambled out of the bathroom as if his tail was on fire.

For days, Flea wandered the house yowling miserably. I tried to coax him back into the bathroom to show him that the whirring, moving cat box was nothing to be afraid of but he wasn't convinced. I figured he would get over his fear when the call of nature became more urgent than his dislike of our whiz-bang fully loaded cat litter box.

A few days later, I was sitting on the couch talking on the phone, absently watching as Flea paced around the house, moaning and looking completely unhappy. Suddenly, he hopped up on the couch and perched himself on the cushion next to me. Flea gave out one last terrific yowl and then proceeded to evacuate his bowels and bladder. I watched in shocked amazement as an avalanche of cat turds hit the pillow. I screamed out Flea's name more in horror than in admonition. Of course, true to his flee-like-nature, my screaming frightened him and he leapt off couch sending his deposits flying up into the air. For a brief instant, my living room was raining cat poo.

After reassuring Flea that I was not mad at him for redecorating the living room, I went about the unpleasant task of cleaning up the mess. Then, I promptly pulled out the incredibly expensive, electric self-cleaning, motion-sensing piece of technology, threw it up in the hayloft and replaced it with one of our old fifteen-dollar plastic litter trays. Within days, Flea was back to using the litter box and Cari and I noticed that the horrible smell that had prompted the expensive purchase to begin with had disappeared. We were baffled.

Weeks later, when we were house cleaning, Cari moved the washing machine to scrub behind it and discovered the desiccated remains of a mouse. The horrible smell that had originally started this whole saga wasn't the foul odour of used cat litter but the putrid smell of decaying mouse. The holy grail of cat litter boxes is still consigned to the hayloft where it has become a home to the many spiders that live up there.

When a problem arises or a desire felt maybe instead of reaching for the latest and greatest, we need to take a moment to see if buying another thing is really the solution or a complication. Cari and I spent over seven hundred dollars on the bread maker and the automatic litter box. Seven hundred dollars, that if we had brainstormed other simpler solutions to our needs, we could have used to buy things that really do enhance our lives, like books, or groceries, or more plants for our gardens. Two very expensive lessons that could have been averted if only we had remembered to 'Keep It Simple, Sisters'.

The Calling of the Trees

Recently, my sister, Cari, and I had made the life altering decision to move from Calgary to an acreage in another province. We found the property of our dreams, just fifteen minutes outside the village of Nakusp, BC, as if we had been magically guided to that particular parcel of land.
We purchased the hobby farm in November of 2005 but didn't get possession of it until May 01 of 2006 and because of circumstances beyond our control; we ended up buying the property sight-unseen.

We had no problem selling our house in Alberta and we had agreed to a move-out date of May 15. That meant we had two weeks where we owned two properties. That was fine with us because it meant we could go look at what we had purchased and figure out what we needed to do to make our new house a home. We were going to spend four days measuring for new window coverings, figuring out where our furniture would go and giving the place a thorough cleaning.We arrived on the property without incident. After touring the outside, we headed in to check out the single-wide mobile home.

We entered through the front porch, which by the look of it, had been a hastily constructed addition. As Cari opened the dented screen door, I felt a twinge of anxiety. We stepped gingerly into the small, enclosed space and I tried not to freak out. The inside of the porch was lined with pink fiberglass bats with plastic vapor barrier secured on top. The porch obviously leaked in wet weather because the insulation in the ceiling and walls were wet and the plastic had mold growing on the inside of it. I prayed that the condition of the front porch wasn’t indicative of the rest of the place.

As Cari fumbled with the lock to the main door, I stood there feeling my apprehension grow. She finally managed the lock and I watched in amazement as the door swung open into the kitchen, narrowly missing the fridge by an inch.

I knew that the mobile home was 400 square feet smaller than our house in Calgary but seeing how that translated into actual living space took me aback.

As we toured the house, my outlook became more positive. Yes, it was small but the floor plan was exactly like our home back in Calgary. Okay, it wasn’t exactly like our house back in the city. It was missing a third bedroom, a second bathroom, a basement, closet space, an office, a workshop and a laundry room, but I still figured I could make our furniture work in our new space. Besides, I would measure every room just to double check that everything would fit.

Once we unpacked the cleaning supplies and set up the inflatable camping beds in the bedrooms, we promptly went to work making the place feel like ours. However, as we worked, I noticed something curious happening. It was early May and the weather was a bit cool for sitting outside so we had placed two lawn chairs in the living room facing the large picture window. Like moths to a flame, Cari and I kept gravitating to the lawn chairs. Instead of industriously scrubbing and vacuuming, we sat looking out at the trees. Minutes would turn into hours and we would still be sitting, silently watching the trees dance in the breeze.
This curious behavior continued over the four days so that by the end of our stay all we accomplished was giving the house a quick clean and taking down the peach colored valances in the living room. So much for our big plans.

As mesmerizing as our farm was, when I went to bed that first night, I was hit by a wave of anxiety. Was it buyer's remorse or a sudden realization that I, a city girl, had bought a hobby farm and was moving to another province without a job? It seemed like a good idea at the time but now that the reality of what we were doing hit me I felt sick to my stomach.

I lay in the dark and looked up at the ceiling hoping to find the answers to my fears when I saw the strangest sight. I didn't have my glasses on, and with my extreme near-sightedness, it appeared that my bedroom ceiling was full of large circular holes. I fumbled in the dark for my glasses. When I put them on and looked back up at the ceiling, I started to laugh. What I thought was moonlight shining down through Swiss-cheese holes in my ceiling turned out to be those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that parents decorate kids' rooms with.

I lay back in bed, looking at the stars in my own private sky and quietly sang, "If your heart is in your dream. No request is too extreme. When you wish upon a star. . . Your dreams come true."

I knew, right then, lying in the dark looking up at my ceiling of plastic stars that no matter what was to unfold in my future, I would be just fine. Both Cari and I were smart, resourceful and creative. We would make this new life work. As for figuring out how all our furniture would fit, well that was a challenge best left for another day.