Here in southeast South Dakota, we are in a “blizzard watch.”  Not sure if it will actually hit with the full fury that they’ve warned us about, but we have had a nice four inch snow to start our Sunday.

I’ve been AWOL from Cobbled Together lately.  It’s been a busy few months and my need to cobble together an income has meant  more time and mental energy has gone into places other than the creative outlet that is Cobbled Together.

I’ve been putting together a new resource for language learners, working with more clients as a language coach and am creating a new online course that I’ll feature at a very cool new platform called Udemy.  The course is called Language Learning 101 and I’ll begin shooting the lectures next week.

On top of that we’ve begun packing in order to vacate the home we’ve been able to live in for the last six months and preparing to move into a new home at the end of the month.  We are excited to get to a place we can call home for a while.

We ordered seeds for a garden and my wife and kids are talking seriously about raising some chickens for eggs in the back yard.  I’m dreaming up ways to build that home office I’ve been thinking about for the last eight months.  (after a chicken coop perhaps)

I’d like to build it completely (mostly completely) with second hand or natural materials.  Strawbale has always been a dream of mine, but I’ve recently come across a new idea that excites me to no end.  Building with shipping pallets.

Seriously!

Malachi is pretty insistent on whatever structure I build having a living roof.  Better insulation, cost savings and another place to grow strawberries are all part of his reasoning – and I agree.

I am going to create an email reminder to put a little more emphasis on writing more regularly – namely each Sunday if I can.  Once a week, just for fun and a change of pace from all the language writing I do.  We’ll see how it goes.

 

I live in Freeman.

It is a rural town of just over 1,000 fine folks located in the southeast corner of the state of South Dakota.

Freeman is a fine place with a teeming main street, two schools, a museum and plenty to do.

But it’s not Disney World.  It’s not Chicago.  It’s not the Rocky Mountains.

Here in our corner of the prairie, we have a matrix for how much friends from other parts of the country love us:

1. If they don’t  visit, they probably still love us.
2. If they do visit, they are crazy about us because no one comes to South Dakota.

If they take pains to travel to tiny Freeman in the southeast corner of South Dakota, they have come to see us – there is nothing else to see.

If you live in New York or California or anywhere else really, well, they may just be stopping by on their vacation to the beach.  There may be mixed motives.

You may just be a free motel. 

But if someone comes to visit us, they aren’t on vacation.

We are their destination.

And we feel loved.

Small town realities.

I began this blog in a rocket launch flame of glory back in June and did well to break through the stratosphere in the first three months, publishing three to four weekly posts.

But then I got lost in space.

I’ve wandered a bit as I worked to gain focus on other aspects of life – namely resettling after four and a half years living in Turkey and working to get my income generating corners of the web up and running in a way that pays the bills.

Well we aren’t really resettled yet and, while the other sites are not yet paying all of the bills, they are beginning to pay more of them.

Thankfully, our bills are pretty minimal right now.

Anyway, I’d like to work at writing more here again.  A little every day perhaps.  A few times a week if I’m doing well.

We’ll see how it goes and I hope I’ll keep up with it all.  I’ll do my best because I know that:

Good intentions are fodder on a field of broken dreams.

If you are on Twitter, you can tweet that.

The grass grows up to the foundation, a crumbling remnant of what once was and upon which sits a crooked shamble of  bone dry wood devoid of paint and life.  A front door hangs open, fractured hinges falling forward, trash heaping inside hallow rooms and the life that once was this farm is now gone.

It’s amazing how fast it happens.  A farm is sold – for the land usually – and the house sits empty.  The old houses especially, those built before composite siding and quality paint, compost back into the landscape in a quick succession of years.  A door is left open and the coons and swallows get in.  A tree falls on the roof, punching a hole through so that rain pours in.  Mice invade in droves.

It is sad, for most of these skeletal remains of homesteads could, with a bit of care, have been the future home of the new homesteaders, those urban families looking for a few acres, for the chance to grow their own food and raise a few chickens.

But now they litter the landscape, wooden corpses sinking back into the earth, never to be reclaimed.  They will be bulldozed soon, great piles will rise up.  Dead barns and granaries and homes will be pushed into a great funeral pyre and burned, then buried.

And next year it will all be corn.

Tomorrow our lives will return to normal – sort of.  What normal is for us is yet an elusive and somewhat surreal idea that we have not figured out.  But tomorrow we will awake alone.  Just us. Just our nuclear family.

One part of our journey toward the new normal will be to find our own place to call home.  We are staying with our folks for now and their generosity has been great and we all get along really well.  We are blessed that way.

But, we are beginning to feel the need for our own place.  More space is not what we are after, but rather a small corner to call our own.

The picture above would be a close rendition of my dream home.

• Strawbale
• Off Grid
• Sustainably Built

And yet our situation leaves us a fair bit off of the road toward that dream.  I am not even sure it is a dream I should work toward – there are so many other variables involved.

For now, we will most likely find something temporary.  And if it works out, I’ll practice a bit on a strawbale home office of my own.

Hopefully.

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The landscape browns toward crisp, dusty death and has been doing so for three months past.  June, July and August have held back their summer rains – a bit over one inch to be exact.

The dugout is dry.

The trees are greeting autumn in leafy shades of early brown.

The corn is not.

The country roads are ankle deep in dust.

Draught is upon the land, gripping life and squeezing green to brown.

But last night the earth breathed deep in relief as cool rains fell through the early morning dark, as life came again.

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