I've been thinking about resolutions this year and I realized that I feel very satisfied with the past year and I made no resolutions last year. On New Year's eve we were packing a 16 foot moving truck and actually moving on New Year's Day. It's kind of cool making a transition like that at the traditional time for reflection on the past year, not to mention the empty roads on January 1st morning being ideal for the amateur moving truck driver.

So the things that I did this year that I feel very good about are blogging, yoga and quilting -- in that order, too. All for fun and none for profit. I had not a single paying web design client this year. This was my exquisite luxury, having some money in the bank for the first and perhaps only time in my life.

This blog has satisfied the perennial failed resolution of starting a journal. But there's a hitch: the thing that motivates me to write in it is that I know that peope read it, including my family, but the fact that friends and family read it means that I can only write about very public kinds of things. There have been times that I have just stopped writing because I wanted to write about more personal things. I was thinking about bagging this blog altogether in the new year when I got an e-mail from a complete stranger saying that he enjoyed my blog and was adding it to his list of "people blogging places". I hadn't really thought of what I was doing that way but I can see that it is. So that little bit of flattery from a single person makes me feel pretty good about continuing with this - and I am just going to think of it that way, as a blog about place. I'll start a new blog to appease my other blog cravings. I'd like something that is a little more like a private journal - something my son can read when I am dead. Or even my grandkids if I am so lucky. Something with memories and dreams. And I might ask some HipMama kind of people that I sort of know but will probably never meet to read it so that I continue to have that motivation to write.

Now that we've been in the barn for a full year I can say that the winter is my favorite season here. We spend most of our time now upstairs which is a completely beautiful space. I remember how thrilled we were when we first moved in here, lying in the king sized bed that the landlord gave us and looking up at the beams and the ceiling 20 feet beyond them. The bare oak tree in front of the house arches in a way that aligns with the arch in the palladian window, off-center enough to be continually interesting to my eye. The snow and the moonlight and even the darkness that come into this space are a treasure. I have thought many times that I will miss the darkness at the in-town house that we are trying to buy. The winter has also been the only time I have felt comfortable being affectionate with our pets and venturing into the woods behind the house. In warmer weather the ticks are a huge deterrent. That said, it's much too expensive rent-wise and heat-wise and we are trying to somehow make this our last month here. Steve does not share even my limited enchantment with the barn and is continually infuriated by it's shoddy construction and impracticalities.

And some recollections of the past year:

Aidan wasn't talking at all when we moved in and now we have real conversations. He ate in a high chair and now eats at the table. He often gets his own food out of the fridge. He plays imaginatively instead of mechanically. We hunt monsters and mice and he builds things with Steve.

We got the coolest cat. She is super affectionate to all of us, even the child that occasionally abuses her. She fetches things and brings them back to you and drops them at your feet, which makes her much cooler than my dog.

When we first moved in I was continually scared Wes, our dog, would get hit by a car. He almost did a couple of times the first couple of months, I would hear a honk and see him standing in the middle of the road like he owned it. I thanked god EVERY TIME he came inside that he was still alive. Now I hardly think about it at all and if he died at least I would know that he had a total blast running free and peeing everywhere and finding dead things to chew on for a whole year.

We had this vague idea that we were moving into a sort of luxurious place before we got here and the truth of the barn slowly revealed itself: ants coming up through the cracks in the cement floor in the winter, no electrical outlet for a clothes dryer, the kitchen sink and the washing maching drain right outside the house instead of into the septic - we were always worried they would freeze up and the sink finally did as we were preparing food the night before Thanksgiving. All of the fixtures are second hand: the sink and tub drip, the woodstoves have a host of problems and the oven hasn't worked for months. In the whole 3800 square feet there is only one window that opens and not a single door with a screen. The tongue and groove flooring upstairs has been top nailed and the nails pop up dangerously when the weather changes. Two of the three doors barely function. One, we no longer use, the other is our front door and Steve has done a lot of doctoring on it since the wind blew it open once in the middle of the night.

My yoga class has become a wonderful rejuvenating routine for me. I feel glowey afterwards and I like my teacher very much. She even asked me to substitute teach for her once! (I declined as it would be a total sham) I've been very consistent with it with the exception of two points of crisis in the year. I'd like to get to a point where I feel confident in doing it on my own. I'm not there yet and that's okay. I used to go to the class at a holistic center that was a house on a hill in Austerlitz. In the summer, we did yoga outside on the porch sometimes. One day we saw a fox come along and casually make its way across the lawn very close to us and then into tall grass. Only the teacher and I saw it, I whispered, "is that a cat?" - not really thinking it looked like a cat but not believing that it could be a fox.

Our quest for home has been long and winding. If you had told me last year where we would be with it right now I think I would be terribly disappointed. I AM terribly disappointed - but also the year has been a huge reality check. I can't believe we won't be living in the country, but after everything we've been through I'll just be so happy to have a place of our own, even if it is full of compromises. I think if someone had just said to us a year ago, "you can't afford to do this, why don't you just do a house in town for now so that you have something" I couldn't have swallowed it. I think I needed to go through this whole year to get to where we are now. Steve probably could have made the leap in the beginning. I'm the stubborn one.

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO READS THIS! It means a lot to me.