Our next-door neighbor offered us a portrait of the house made from an old photo. We're not really sure when it's from, but it's recent enough that there's an electric meter, but old enough that there was a full barn and silo in a location that now has full-grown evergreen trees.

Here's a photo of the house the weekend we bought it. It looked a little scraggly back then:



Here's the old painting. We took out the front door because there were no steps attached, but clearly they were there at some point. And look at those windows!



There's no longer any trace of that huge barn behind the house, or the silo. Kind of wish we still had them around. Not that I have anything to fill a silo with...

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It's certainly cheaper to throw all of your household garbage into a large pile in your backyard than to pay for a trash hauling service. It also means that a few decades later, the new owners of your property will have a fine mess to deal with; an acre-wide, man-high pile of wood, debris and refuse.







We found a U-bend, an axle with two tires attached, several buckets, Ball jars filled with mysterious brown goo, an old tractor, a disc plow, various pokey things that look like medieval farm implements, the head of a pickaxe, heavy metal gears, the hood of a car, piles of rebar, large screws, a well pump, concrete building footers, brown glass medicine bottles, a kidney dish, a hot water boiler, ten thousand asphalt roof shingles, barn siding, and several unidentifiable pieces of machinery.

Anyone have a trash bag?

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We planted ninety trees in our backyard this weekend. Fifty are along the back edge of our property and forty are heeled in near the garage and will be moved later.



The forty near the garage are a mix of different evergreens (fraser fir, balsam, etc.) which will someday be Christmas trees. (They look large because Trevor got down on the ground to take the picture. They're actually just a few inches tall.) The fifty in back are sugar maples for syrup-making in about a decade.

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I started my life as a bathtub. Then I became a cattle trough. Then I was dragged to various spots in the backyard and field for no apparent reason. Lots of mosquitoes hatch in my water. Frogs like to live in there too. The Liloias emptied the mud out of me. The little one likes to sit in me an awful lot. Even when I'm full of ice. I hear talk that I'm going to be repainted red and moved to the front yard as a planter. I'm surprised by that. Can you tell by my expression?

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We ended up with two solid feet of ice on the right half of the drainage ditch, and none on the other half. It makes a fun little waterfall that Trevor must play in.

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Mom gave me these beautiful plates from my father's Aunt Lottie over the Easter weekend. The back of the plates are blank, but the saucer says "OVEN WARE Fire-King Made in U.S.A." which puts the date for that piece in the 1950s.



It's funny how things like this come back in style. The dishes fit in my kitchen as if they were made this year.

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Our lake was deep and wide enough to have waves.

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Question: When 20 inches of snowfall on a four-acre field suddenly melts during a weekend warm up, where does the water go?

Answer: Nowhere.

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Gone is the stained wallpaper, the sagging ceiling, the dust-clogged cast iron heaters along every wall. The left-side door (where Dad is standing) has been widened and the right-side door (through which you can see one of the many stoves in residence when we bought the house) has been sealed up to create an L-shaped kitchen, instead of a work area that's broken up by a six-foot opening.

Where there was once presumably a large hanging picture, there is a pass-through to make the living room and kitchen feel more connected. We replaced the warped floor and ratty blue carpeting with new hardwood that continues into the kitchen. You can just make out the refinished white staircase on the left.

Living in apartments and condos, we have small, portable paintings and wall-hangings. Time for a few larger pieces that fill the space better.

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We took off that sticky runner on the stairs, refinished the wood and put down a carpeted runner. The handrail and posts are the refinished originals (a couple awaiting their coat of white paint), but the balusters are new since so many of the old ones were mysteriously missing.

The heater traversing the wall has been rerouted and there's a helpful light fixture instead of a burned-in image of a cross. The original window still needs refinishing, but it cleverly hidden by the new curtains. Now I need some good ideas for a large piece of art for the huge expanse of the two-story stairwell, which looks a little bare without the heater, wallpaper and wood paneling.

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The floor is level and carpeted, the walls and ceiling are insulated and there's lots and lots of stuff out there now.

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