Busy Hands Homestead

I brush a cobweb from my hair and bag up remnants of old insulation bats.  They are damp from a week of rain and no roof.  I pull the trash bag behind me, through the shallow space, under what is left of the original house.  A giant spider scurries up a wooden post.  I pause to watch. Last Picture of the Old House!  After the frantic final boxing up of everything we own, the roof came off and the walls came down (courtesy of Heritage Timber ), and we relocated into 200 square feet (?) of a school bus.  It seems sudden, but years of planning and saving might just be reality. Decon in Process There is no going back now. We are a month and a half into our remodel/rebuild and the walls are going back up.  I dance around the a space that looked good on paper, and feels even better. The walls of the Laundry Room, open space of the dining room, viewed from the kitchen.   I'm wishing I had remembered to put on sunscreen. The t...

I braid one thin braid after the other and secure the ends in a rainbow of hair bands carefully selected and organized. The motions seem like right of passage and it is officially summer break. We are on the tail end of a whirlwind road trip, moving down the highway at moderate speed.  We took the converted school bus we are currently living all the way to Niagra-on-the-Lake and back.We are rolling along, somewhere between the east and west boundaries of South Dakota. We cooked dinner while the day darkened and the stars emerged in the sky. We drove and drove and drove as we put the jagged peaks of the rocky mountains behind us and the landscape became flat then then the plains grew to hills and mountains and water.  The lush green of a deciduous forest, ferns and flowers all around us.  Somewhere along the way our bus gained a name - meet Alice. The dense vegetation broken by ponds dotting the landscape, the intermittent water become vast a...