Up for Air

Well readers (all 1 or 2 of you, whoever you are ;)...it's been a long stretch of bloglessness on the Ridge. Been pretty busy with a few things. Had a family trip out to CA. While there were certainly lovely moments, the whole thing cost a bundle and fried the kids right out. Fried the parents pretty crispy, too. And then we got home and the whole friggin thing came unwound for, like, another week. So. No more trips for a while. Just too damn hard.

Also been working my backside off on a never-ending project. Well that's not true; it's truly almost done, though there's another heavy one lined up right behind it. Sigh.

Good news is, had a great holiday. Kids received some great gifts, though not too much stuff. And the nice thing is that there wasn't any junk; just high-quality, thoughful, sometimes very personal gifts. Awesome. Plus Liam got a bunch of trucks and stuff that I got to play with ;) As always Kelly knit up a storm for lots of folks, finishing the last piece Christmas Eve. Anyhow, we're still decompressing a bit from that whole thing.

Hopefully, her blogger silence will come to an end here as well; on our trip she checked her laptop in her suitcase, which I always told her was a bad idea. This time I was proven right as on arrival, screen no worky so well. Back home several things lined up and I picked her up a new MacBook for her very own. No more hand-me-down machines. No more waiting for me to finish my work to get a little machine time. No more, ever, packing laptops in suitcases. We'll see now that the knitting's all done and the dust is settling ;)

On another fun note, the Fedco Tree and Seed catalogs are out!!!! W00t!!!! What is Fedco, you might ask? It's a cooperatively owned seed and nursery supply outfit. Not only are they an incredible supplier of organic goodness, especially organic goodness that will thrive in our zone 4/5 boundary, but they're just up the road in Waterville. How cool is that? So we've gone through and marked pears, peaches, cherries, kiwi, plums, strawberries, and grapes so far. No apples. Got too many apples already. Kelly's now working her way through the seeds. Suddenly our planned garden patches aren't looking so big. I mean, we've got 250 strawberry plants alone queued up ;)

Seriously though, looking through the trees got me so fired up about being here. Planning additions to the orchard, and planning about beginning the rehabilitation of trees that are there, gets me pretty emotional. Several times I blinked away tears as I read through the pages of varietals we can grow here. Our own food. Our own land. The blessings run deep. And as I spend time in the woods here, pruning and tending trees, I realize just how much I can do for them; I know how much they do for me...to be able to reciprocate makes the bottom fall out in a good way. Deep, good, soothing medicine, being the hands that trees simply don't have.

On the weather front, we're back to snow. First few weeks of December were down right white; had more than 2' of snow on the ground in places before a warm high pressure brought to bear over the weekend and rained. A bunch. Melted out most of what we had; what was left continued to melt in the balmy sunny 40's of the next few days. Initially I was pretty bummed by the setback in the local snow pack. It'll take the crew at Snow Bowl a fair bit to recover from that melt out unless we get some more big dumps. Today it snowed a couple more inches; nice to be cold out there again. Winter is quite possibly my favorite season...just so incredibly beautiful. And then there's snow boarding...

Went up to Sugarloaf last week for a day. 10 days ago they got 21" of freshies. By the time I got there it had all settled in and been groomed into perfect corduroy. Still some patches of soft stuff here and there, but mostly just big wide open groomers of hero snow. Snow that you can carve every which way. Snow that's deep and firm; holds an edge as hard as you want to carve it in. After a few runs of getting my boarding legs back and remembering all I'd learned last season, I realized that I had crossed into the space of physical prayer. Of moving meditation. Of an expression session. Where the board becomes a brush on a canvas of snow; each carve a stroke. And what shall this stroke become? A link of quick snap turns? a long swooping high speed carve? a pushed out tail? A drop into that little section of powpow I spied from the lift? The whole time grooving to whatever tunes come through the iPod. What a gift; the whole thing. I miss that space. I used to be there all the time on my bike when we lived in Santa Cruz. Out here though, there's just not the same opportunities to play in gravity; so I wait for winter to come, and then take my turns...