My grandmother died Friday the 26th. My sister and I rode down to Tallahassee together for the funeral and had a wonderful time reminiscing and visiting family. Atlanta and Tallahassee and Apalachicola and Valdosta  were gorgeous, with trees leafing out and azaleas and cherries blooming; coming home to the bare trees and mud and chilly temperatures in the mountains was a little depressing, though at least there wasn’t snow!

DH is always ready to move, and it’s only me and my force of will that keeps us here. All I would ever need to do is say the word and he’d be packing up, especially if the move was to the south and warmer climes.

Now my dad is talking about moving from Asheville to south Georgia. Right now, family gatherings are really convenient for us, since they take place at Dad’s place in Asheville, an hour from here. Once he moves south, I have to wonder if we’ll ever see family again! As many of you know, having milk cows severely curtails one’s freedom and mobility—just getting all four of us off the farm for an overnighter requires lots of planning and finding willing (and able) helpers.

It’s been a long and somewhat miserable winter—dark, wet, snowy, cold and stressful, so it’s really a bad time to make any major life decisions, at least until we’ve had a chance to enjoy spring a little.

Which brings me to another point. Finally this winter, I’ve had to admit that I don’t like this particular farm or house. We’re going on five years since we moved in here. The first year I was deeply depressed, and couldn’t figure out what my problem was—after all we had just finally bought a farm—my dream my whole life! I finally came out of the worst of the depression, but haven’t felt happy being here, and have really struggled with motivation and inspiration.

The two best parts of this farm are the neighbors and the sunshine. We have a wonderful southern exposure and tend to run several degrees warmer than a lot of the surrounding areas. The neighbors are a dream, worthy of envy, and we have so many! There of course are a couple of bad apples, but overall we could never ask for a more amazing community of people.

There are unfortunately more aspects of the farm that don’t work for me. I think the worst is the complete lack of privacy. We’re right on the road, which wraps around us, so there is no place on the farm that I can work without being visible from the road. I can’t even pee outside! This is probably a head-scratcher to those of you who live in town, but in my whole adult life I’ve almost never lived in a situation with so little privacy. And out here in the country, people are really nosy—they want to know what you’re doing. Cars go 10 mph by our house all the time, trying to get a good look at what we’re doing down here. Admittedly there’s a lot to look at, what with the animals and the garden and the random assorted projects that are always happening, so I can’t really blame people, but I get so tired of working in the garden or at the barn and having somebody stop and just watch. I mean, really.

There’s also a Baptist church practically in our back yard, and the lady whose house this was before we bought it was a very well respected and beloved member of the church and the local community, and alas, I think we’ve not quite lived up to her example: I hear through the grapevine the snide comments made about us by the parishioners who stand around on Sundays looking down (in every way) on our little farm.

Then there are the infrastructure problems.

The spring isn’t a very good one, and has to be pumped uphill to the house, and the water filtered before we can drink it.

The septic tank is kaput, and the yard is so boggy that there’s really nowhere else to put a new one.

All the wooden structures are termite-ridden and falling down, including our bedroom, whose floor slopes so badly that we have to put six-inch shims under the legs on one side of our bed.

There’s no topsoil in the garden or pasture after years of chemical fertilizers, and though after four years the garden soil was showing great improvement in structure and organic matter and earthworms, the two floods this past summer took care of that! Now my beds are so heavy and dense I don’t know if they’ll ever be dry enough to dig!

There are security lights on all sides of us, lighting the inside of the house at night like a Walmart. I’ve had severe sleep disturbances since we’ve lived here, which I finally realized while out of town, where I slept like a dream. I feel like a new person after just four good nights’ sleep!

So something’s got to happen. I don’t think I can continue living here on this farm. I love my family, and I love the animals, and I’m ready to love my farm again. I can’t imagine moving away from the mountains and all my dear friends, though I can imagine living somewhere with a shorter winter! But even if we don’t move farther south, I think we’re going to have to move from this particular spot.