Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Happy Season of Yard Work


Hello finally!

Wow, posting on this blog has really gotten away from me these past few months! My husband got a new job and our schedules are almost the same now! Which is really exciting, because now we wake up at the same time and have fallen into a relaxing morning routine... we hang out in the kitchen together, drink hot tea and talk. We both love it. And I've really been enjoying our evenings together, Mike doesn't have to go to bed super early now, so he can stay up and we can work on projects together.

Mike's current house project is our master bath remodel, but he and Dozer always seem to end up outside, working in the yard with me (the weather in the evening has been so good lately!). Around 6:30, Mike will head inside to make dinner (he makes the BEST food), we then eat, I do dishes, then usually head back outside.... we'll take Dozer for a walk, or have a fire in the back of the yard... one night we got excited about garden boxes, ran to Home Depot, and then built them using our garage lights to see once the sun went down.

In early May, we went one Saturday morning to the annual plant sale at the community garden and got a ton of fun tomato plants... we got a hillbilly, a siberian, a purple tomatillo, a green zebra, an 1884, a blondkapfchen, and a chocolate stripe. We've been checking on them, and fretting over them, and walking out to just stand and look at them ever since. At night we fall asleep, listening to audiobook, Animal Vegetable Miracle (Barbara King-solver's book about living off the land and farming), and we dream of canning tomatoes, sun-drying tomatoes, fresh salsa, and speghetti sauce.

While I mulch, I dream of the end of summer and the days we are hopefully hauling in large bushels of tomatoes and all the fun summer things we might do in between (I have a pretty good list for this summer). We had our first camping trip a couple weekends ago, and came home relaxed and resolved to camp as much as possible this summer... Mike's going to get better at parking our trailer back into the garage, and I'm going to get better at packing us up and making the campsite cozier with each trip.

I just feel like I am in a golden and happy season in my life. A season that I will look back with fond memories for the rest of my life. Time spent with my new husband, planning our life together, fixing up our home side by side, and just chilling, enjoying simple life at home. We've turned into such home-bodies.

I have so many thoughts and ideas for this blog, all the time, all day long. Blogging is my favorite creative outlet. It inspires me, and gives my life an overall theme or thesis - to become a proper mountain woman, I don't think my soul could rest if I didn't blog and carry out some of these ideas and projects... even if the only one person who ever reads or cares is me, I just love doing it.

A few months ago I had a crazy prompting that hit me so profoundly, that it's sort of changed my life. It was a voice telling me to take advantage of this rare and wonderful season of my life where I am setting up my first home with the man I love, and just soak in every minute... to wander and walk and be inspired by my surroundings, feel out the vibes of the neighborhood, look up at the giant mountains, and not have the internet or socail media in mind while we create our home. I want to put good, happy, deliberate vibes and energy into these foundational house decisions. Like where to plant my flowers that will come back for years to come... the flowers that Mrs Dodge planted years and years ago when she was a young newlywed shouldn't be planted with Instagram in mind, does that make sense?

There's something so refreshing about taking pictures of your life just for your memories and bookeeping - and not to post anywhere. Taking pictures to just show my husband, and our future kids, feels so magical.

But, I do hope to blog more consistently here, this break and purge has been good for me... so, between reading my garden magazines and books in the morning before work, and then rushing home to do more projects with my sweetheart, I plan to devote a healthy amount of time here. I have been looking forward to it.
 
XOXO,
Joy Dodge

2 comments:

+ + + + + +