“There’s a car for sale on the way down to school,” Ula reports one afternoon as she walks in the door, “I think we could afford it.”  She started taking classes down at SUNY Cobleskill last year, and she’s been driving down there a couple days each week through the summer to take a riding class.  In a few weeks, she’ll be starting there full time.  It’s reasonable that she’d be asking about a car. “We may be able to buy it,” I reply, “but I’m not certain we can afford to own it.  The average annual cost of owning a vehicle these days is over ten thousand dollars.” There a ..read more

We called it berryin’.  The landowners might have called it trespassin’. What they didn’t know didn’t hurt them.  They got to own the property and pay the taxes and say what was theirs. Sanford and I got blueberry pie, blackberry pie, raspberry pie.  And lots of jam. The summer I was 15, Sanford was 83.  Together, we owned nothing…Or everything, depending on how you looked at it. I didn’t have a job.  Technically.  My brother and I mowed lawns for the second home owners in the neighborhood.  He mowed the lawns for the folks who paid him $15-20 per lawn.  ..read more

By the time you get this, it is quite possible that I will have vibrated into a higher plane of existence.  I would imagine that my body would still be in this plane, but there’s a chance I will have achieved such a state of enlightenment that you might notice a golden glow around me, emanating peace, compassion, unlimited understanding, loving kindness and deep serenity. My meditation app says I’ve completed 990 sessions since I began my subscription.  Ten more guided meditations to go, the counter will turn to 1000, and anything could happen.   I’ve been something of a medita ..read more

  “The bear pit was my grandmother’s idea,” Dracula tells me. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to royalty. Dracula, or at least the man playing Dracula, has what my British friend Becky calls a suspiciously “posh” accent. But, of course, he’s not royalty. He’s the owner of the castle we’re visiting, bereft of the aristocratic title by virtue of the archaic rules that define which bloodlines they can travel down. This all transpired last October, when Bob and I flew over to Ireland to go hiking. We had come to the decision just as we left to shut our glamping site, a Tentrr site ..read more

“We are all in the gutter.  But some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde   What was I supposed to say?   It was ten years and one month ago.  Lisa, a fellow homeschooler, had moved here with her daughter Sarah the summer before.  We had slowly become friends when she asked me if I could come down one afternoon.  She needed to talk to me about something.  While our daughters scuttled upstairs to chat and play, she sat across from me at her kitchen table, dabbed at her eyes and shared her breast cancer diagnosis. I drew my breath, closed my eyes brie ..read more

A barn can build a house, but a house can’t build a barn. I’ve never forgotten the story I read in first grade.  A homesteading family was settling on a new plot of ground.  The wife felt they should build a house first, so that she could cook and care for their family.  But the husband informed her that wouldn’t be the case.  He would have his barn, so that they would have the means to build the house.   So they camped, and she dutifully cooked for her family and cared for the children and helped him build the barn.  And then, one day after the barn was finished ..read more

  An increase in social experiences will develop the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for various complex cognitive functions, such as decision making, personality expression and emotions (The Stroke Foundation). I suppose it says something that I can finally begin reading and thinking about a way forward. That I can start to vision a way forward.   Because two weeks ago today, I never went to bed.  I got home late from sax lessons that night.  Bob, the kids and I were all sitting around the kitchen table, talking about our day, when the phone rang.  T ..read more

“I’ve seen an odd ant as weather warms up, but this guy makes the place out to be a temple of doom,” Kyle tells me.  Kyle works on the farm and oversees Tibbets house, the old center hall with the field stone foundation across the street.  The Airbnb guest never spoke with us once.  But his review was toxic.  He claimed the house was unfit for a rental (strange, with all our five star reviews for cleanliness).  He complained that the wifi was lousy (despite the tech professionals who’ve regularly rented the space for work-vacations), and then, to top it all off, compla ..read more

“You know the longest way around is the sweetest way home,” Sanford used to tell me all the time.  My eighty-plus-year old farming friend would  tell me that when we’d climb into the upper pastures to pick blackberries, using that maxim as an excuse to amble a bit farther afield, checking the water lines and the fences on our way back.  He’d call it out to me as he observed my preference to arrive and leave on foot, preferring the one mile walk each way to accepting a ride between our farms. That pace of living left an impression on me.  It led me to homeschool my children ..read more

This piece, written by Shannon, originally appeared as a story at SapBushFarmStore.com.  “Do you vaccinate your animals?” The call comes in as I’m getting ready for bed early last week.  “We vaccinate the sheep,” I tell the caller.  “They get a C, D & T vaccine, for Clostridium Perfigens type C & D, and Tetanus.” She stammers a little on the other end.  She doesn’t know what to do with this information.  “I understand lots of people are concerned about all types of vaccines,” I push forward.  “I was slow to vaccinate my own kids, even.  But if a disea ..read more