“My barn having burned to the ground

I can now see the moon”

I did it.

After all these troublesome months of so much frantic driving back-and-forth, and the heartache, and the struggle, it’s over.

I feel so much relief, but I also feel like I’ve come through a war, still with sword in hand, stalwart and blazing, bloodied and scarred, having lost so much,  but still I have tasted victory in the end, like Golveig, who each time jumped out of the burning pier brighter and more beautiful than before.

I have had to let go of everything, live in the moment, take devastating bumps and bad luck and set-backs as they came, be flexible and bend out of the way of lies and deceptions and trouble, matrix-style, twisting the very perception of my reality to make it here, like a shipwreck survivor, wading exhausted and seaweed-strewn through the surf onto the firmament of an unknown shore after a long and uncertain journey through the stormy waves.

It was so, so hard, and I couldn’t have done it without my friends and family – thank you, thank you, thank you, all of you, who helped me on this journey,  whether it was making the fences, contributions of money or advice or materials or plants or loans of equipment, or even just offering something I didn’t take you up on, or writing just to check on me… I appreciate all of it, every gesture of assistance, no matter how small, and your presence in my life most of all….I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for all of you. Every time I felt like I was really falling, there were hands outstretched to help me back up.

My old farm, the place I had sunk my heart and all the young years of my life into, I felt it holding on to me, not wanting me to go, but as this journey went on, my path veered more and more away, until it felt so right to say goodbye.

First of all, the icky neighbor no one likes bought up the 85 acres that borders the property on two sides, clear-cut all the trees, and turned it into a devastated wasteland with displaced wildlife picking through the rubble. The whole energy of the place has shifted completely.

Secondly,  when we built a lot of the infrastructure there, it wasn’t well-done or well-planned. Most of the structures we relied on have reached their organic lifespan and are crumbling. It was getting so bad that living there had become dirty and difficult and unpleasant:

The kitchen ceiling has a big hole with black mold growing around it where Laura’s unsupervised children once had climbed up there from the loft and jumped on a weak place between the sheets of roofing metal, and now every rainstorm not one but two big mixing bowls must be placed under it to catch the water that comes through.

Termites have taken up residence in the kitchen walls, and fire ants live under the floor and get restless.  The fridge is broken and will sometimes freeze everything solid, and sometimes doesn’t work at all. One of the big freezers had broken spring 2023 and was left just sitting there in the shed with the other ones. You had to try not to bump it, so the smell would stay in (it was too big and heavy for me to move myself. Ethan had said he would deal with it when he stayed there for months last summer).

And it turns out that the plywood nailed straight to the concrete slab on the kitchen floor DID need a moisture barrier! 

Years ago, the outdoor shower handles had broken and leaked constantly, stressing the well by making it always go on and off,  and Ethan never cared to repair them, and it became a disgusting mudpit, where the ducks and geese would come and puddle and poop.  The well electric box was constantly needing jiggled to restart, foreboding the breakdown of the whole system at some point (thank goodness we got out before it happened. It’s only a matter of time). The outhouse, once a neat little shed, has succumbed to the intense Florida humidity and the walls are peeling away.

The deck I always said needed sealed had needed sealed seven years ago and by now is a collection of dangerous, ankle-breaking holes. Last year a friend came out and helped repair the worst parts so we wouldn’t fall through and get hurt in the dark. He complained about it having been made with nails instead of screws, making it difficult to pull the boards up to replace them.  By now it has degraded so badly that the whole thing needs replaced (not my problem anymore!).  The trampoline has collapsed and is an unattractive nuisance. The playhouse, once so fun and cute, is dangerous and derelict.

Things continued to break down, and because Ethan took all the tools away, I couldn’t fix anything. The fence charger broke down. When I tried to tell Ethan about things breaking and needing the tools back, he told me they were his and I needed to “stop relying on him now.” So I hired an electrician to look at it, who also couldn’t make it work.

By and by over the last couple of months, the animals gradually discovered the fences didn’t zap anymore. It was the goats who found out first, of course, and then the cows. Soon, there were also the gigantic pigs running all over,  knocking around the big bins of Ethan’s empty beer cans and bottles that had sat for years and years, scattering them all over. They ripped into big tote bags of trash, some of which had sat around for half a decade waiting to be taken to the dump (the ones I always would ask Ethan to deal with before we had a party) and just before I left they broke into five gallon buckets filled with what had been Ethan’s attempt to make watermelon whisky but had become vinegar about three years ago, and were left abandoned around the edges of the patio. When the vinegar spilled, they rooted up the patio bricks and tossed them aside like pebbles. We came back to it looking like a muddy ruin, reeking of vinegar with a wide, deep trench dug down the middle (for reasons known only to himself, Ethan had designed the patio to pool water in the center during rain storms, so the vinegar must have pooled there as well).

My mom came out to help one day and observed that it looked like an apocalyptic nightmare with all the junk tossed everywhere and the out-of-control livestock rampaging around. It did. We have been through a lot.

So imagine me walking widdershins around this broken place I once loved with all my heart, gathering all the goodness I had put down there, lingering in places my small children had played, and the cherry grove that was once my special spot when my heart felt so heavy….

Imagine me petting my beautiful cows who I love like they are my family, honoring them one last time for all their years of companionship and nourishment, and trying not to think about their future of Ethan shooting them and feeding them to Laura and her kids.

Imagine us rounding up the geese, while they are honking and flapping and biting like distressed pterodactyls, and then the goats and sheep, diving around and getting trampled and gored, stumbling over junk, and the last stupid sheep leaping over fences and running away, and eventually having to be chased down in pouring rain until it was so tired I got close enough to grab its wool, and Kasey, my helper, sliding through the mud football-style to tackle it, and us carrying it upside down by the ankles into the livestock trailer (it was happy it came in the end).

Imagine Rose and I making a role call list of all the cats so we wouldn’t forget any (there are a lot), and fitting them in through the car window one-by-one, and Sleepy Bear, the littlest, shyest cat, turning into a demon of whirling claws, and both of us covered all over in scratches, driving an hour with a car packed full of cats and me pulling a kitten off the dashboard and wondering if I was sane enough to be driving….

Imagine me in my black work clothes (a black midrift tank top, and leggings – the pair with the stylish rip on one of the legs where it caught on barbed wire while struggling with the goats). I’m smiling, a tough kind of smile, and walking away, flicking a match over my right shoulder like Indiana Jones, and behind me the old farm exploding in a huge fireball of mold and rot and brokenness and ugly drama, while I walk forward, planting knife in hand, on the threshold of new and exciting things.