Is It Over Yet?

Wow, what a year it has been.

We knew that 2009 was going to be a year of great changes, personally and generally, but I had no idea what that would become. Tentatively, I have begun to look back over the past twelve months, being gentle and painstaking in my traverse. There is a lot of hurt here, as well as joy and triumph, and I am still a little fragile even now. I can't deal with a lot of in-depth soul-searching, and I don't want to relive the madness I endured over the summer, but I can at least acknowledge the process and rebuild that sense of wonder I felt at the way things work out. I need to remember that things always work out.

I mentioned the other day to my wife that I had noticed how things seemed to be consistently going our way; nothing major or huge, just a series of little things that have resolved in our favour, a progression that has made me begin to wonder when I should start expecting the other shoe. She replied that this is not something to be amazed at; now that we aren't fighting it, and allowing the flow to work, this is how things should have been all along. I felt a little ashamed. I felt cheated of the years, all the time spent resisting the good stuff. I felt that I had let my wife down.

She would say, though, that everything happens in its' time. She would say that there is no blame. She would say that the moment is all that matters. And she would be correct.

I have learned so much this year, and I am a happier, stronger, more contented person because of it. I am pleased at the way things have turned out, but still I feel a small sense of disappointment, as if something is holding me back. Something is blocked. It is a subtle one, this feeling, and I had not really noticed it until I wrote it down just now. Stephen King says that people don't really know what they think until they write it down, and I have been surprised by this phenomenon ever since I read that. Still, I will give this some thought over the weekend and discuss it with my wife at some point.

I don't want the ride to end. Things are going great just now, and I think my fear is that this is only temporary bliss before the next round of horror. I am resolved, however, to ensure that clarity, peace, and balance remain my watchwords, now and forever more.

Despite the clouds on the global horizon, which we are well aware of, there remains joy to be found in the simplest of things. And we notice these.

We will continue, and improve, and be blessed in all things.

Where we live now

The snow is beginning to accumulate as I write this from the safety of our warm house. We live on a landform called an alvar, which is a not-terribly-well-understood formation characterised by primarily flat topography, very thin overburden, and a high water table.
This area is officially known as the Carden Plain, and is a provincially recognised Important Bird Area. It is host to the last 300 or so breeding pairs of Northern Shrike, as well as being beset by multitudes of other winged warriors year-round. My wife and I have even, on three occasions, positively ID'd a three-toed woodpecker in our wood room, which is extremely rare and an occasion for kudos. We will get a picture someday, and then the sighting will be official.
Our road is a dead end, and traffic on it is restricted to locals, the odd snowplow, the postal carrier, and, in the spring and summer, hordes of city people come to ignore property lines in their desire to see the birds. Dressed in identical Tilley hats, imitation Banana Republic cargo vests, and sporting very large and obviously expensive optical equipment, they rather rudely block the narrow back roads and yell imprecations when a local attempts to negotiate the resulting obstacle course.
For now, though, the snow is falling rather thickly, the fire is settled, and the cats are lazy. We have nowhere we need to be today, though if we did have a destination we could get there thanks to our trusty Subaru. Even if the power were to fail, we would not really notice, since we have a stove for heat, lots of wood to burn, and several options for cooking purposes.
We love living here. It is not, despite appearances, the middle of nowhere; there is lots of somewhere all around us. Ours is thus a little oasis of nowhere in the midst of the chaos that surrounds this area, and even though it seems isolated and lonely, this is manifestly not the case.
My wife is particularly firm on this point. Her family was appalled when they saw what we had moved to, soon after we took up residence here. They thought I had purposefully isolated her from them. They thought that I was so neurotic, so hateful, that I had engineered a means by which my wife would be completely under my control at all times. They thought I had even refused to allow her a driver's licence for the same reasons.
What they did not know, and have since been appraised of, is that all this was her idea too. We moved here in mutual agreement, citing the privacy, the awesome silence, the space, the calm, as being of primacy. She had no licence because she had not wanted one. Her choice.
And we continue to love it, even though getting anywhere requires a car. That's the way it is out in the country. There are some other things that go with this beautiful territory....
The only gunfire you hear out in these parts is the sound of somebody filling their larder, not settling a score or completing an initiation or proving a point or scoring some smokes.
There is no street racing, other than the odd encounter with a road-filling combine.
The police have an average response time of forty minutes upon getting a 911 call. This is not because they are lazy or indifferent; this is because they have a huge territory to somehow cover. And so on.
This life we have is wonder-filled, and we find that our education really allows us to appreciate the land around us, the antics of the wildlife, the reasons why things look the way they do. It is nice to not have to lock our doors at night, either on the house or the car. Crossing the road does not involve taking one's life in one's hands. We don't even have salespeople, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, or survey-takers show up out here. And that's the way we like it.
Anyone who has an objection to that should really stay in the city, where it is apparently much safer. If you must come up here, try working on your manners first. We don't take kindly to rudeness, and we certainly won't welcome you back.