Week Two

Has it really been two weeks since I started this survey? So far, most of the work has been performed solo, without so much as a neighborly interaction to break the surreal nature of time in isolation. Keeping up with days and weeks is allot harder without social interactions to give them meaning.

Hubs came up this past Saturday and was even inspired to take an extra day off from his high stress duties to perform some "unskilled labor" scrubbing out the dairy barn. So far it is still a dairy barn. As we scrubbed, surveyed and inventoried together, it started looking more and more like an Herbal Honey Barn. It is not big on the barn scale, but it is far more dedicated space than is available in our Urban Homestead. Then we get to the herbal wonderland of the over-grazed pastures. . . Where is my distilling equipment!!!

Hubs returned to the Urban Homestead yesterday. The drafty old house feels way to empty and cold without him. The good news is that he will be back for Thanksgiving weekend. Probably Thursday. There are still no dishes, furniture or stove here, so it won't make a primetime Holiday Special, but that is fine by me. This is the first of our 36 Thanksgivings together that his parents and/or his father's employees have not been dictating the events. Well. . . Does the year he was in the hospital fighting through his nearly fatal gall bladder drama count? That year was about as far from the Holiday Special episode as you can get. Even further than cooking turkey on a hotplate and serving it on dishes from a camp kit. Fits my own childhood traditions of holiday chaos, but not his. Between us there is balance? At any rate, I started excusing myself from his parentally produced productions within the first decade of our marriage. I am still not housebroken enough to understand how to behave on a silver platter stage set. My firmest Holiday tradition is to begin my official Therapy Month as soon as hubs and sons are off to do their part in said productions. The under-side of the 50's and 60's Holiday Stage set turned the entire month of December into an extended PTSD episode for this kiddie whorehouse survivor. Turning December into my official Therapy Month was worth the effort. I still ain't no Doris Day, but at least I haven't felt like I was touring Dante's 9 Levels of Hell during recent Decembers.

But I haven't spent a December with this level of isolation yet, either. One of my most insistent dialogues this weekend was about breaking that isolation. It is still too early to have a viable plan of action for this place, but if we are to continue developing as we have been, a physical, human presence other than my own is absolutely essential. I am doing okay for now, but just okay. Not being able to track time is only one of the symptoms that I am at my healthy isolation limit already. Much as I to think of myself as a lone grizzly bear who needs no pack, it remains a physical fact that I am human and humans are a gregarious species by nature. People are hard-wired to need people, whether we like it, or knot. Hubs solidly agreed. In our 37 years together, he's lived through enough of my psychotic breaks to fight me on it. He met me during the string of psychotic breaks that accompanied the pregnancy which washed me out of engineering school. Sometimes I wonder what kind of sicko would be stupid enough to exchange vows after witnessing that drama. . . For sure, it's all his fault we are still married. There is not a family court in the world which would deny his petition for divorce. Not even mine.

The course feels steady and healthy. Works in progress. . .