I have been at the farm for 14 days, including today. It has been as wonderful and amazing as I hoped, and also, at times, incredibly difficult.
The first thing I have learned is that for every day you spend driving on a road trip, you need one day to recover. I believe this is true even for someone much younger than myself, for I observed that both myself and my 20yo old son needed 7 days here on the farm for each of the 7 days we spent driving from Seattle to Meridian. When I was roughly planning the timing of our first tasks at the farm, I was assuming we would get started on those tasks right away. And we did. But we also needed to unpack the car. Do our laundry. Catch up with my father and his wife. Get the tour of the farm and the locks and keys and shutoff valves. And each day would pass and I would realize that little, if anything, had happened. The first week was busy but also not nearly as productive as I had envisioned it might be.
The second thing I have learned is that my sense of timing is still rooted in Seattle time, not Mississippi time. Things here take longer. And while I have known that intellectually, it is another thing to experience it. At minimum, I have to drive farther to get to places like the grocery store or the hardware store. Land is cheap, by comparison, and so everything is more spread out. Plus the farm is outside the local city limits, and thus everything is a bit farther away because I am no longer living in an urban setting. In addition, the pace of customer service and simple human interaction is about ten times slower here. At least. Seriously, I kid you not. Purchasing and transporting 30 4×4 fence posts took me multiple store trips and a full day and a half rather than a single trip and a few hours.
And the last and third thing that has affected the timing of many of my initial to-do items on the farm is that I am in partial mom mode. My 20yo is capable of taking care of himself, but he did not grow up in Mississippi like I did, nor has he spent as much time as I have at my dad’s place and the surrounding area. Because I know the area better, I have been the primary food and supply procurer; and because I enjoy playing mom to my oldest who doesn’t need me anymore (in the same way), I have also been making the meals and cleaning the kitchen. I know I could set things up more equitably, but that is also part of my own personal struggle. I hate asking for help for something I can easily do myself. That is a post for another time!
TLDR is that my mailbox is finally installed but it took almost a week and a half after our arrival from Seattle for it to come together. I managed to do the majority of the shopping online and use curbside store pickup, which was nice, but the weather was too cold to pour concrete until the 13th and 14th. Then there was confusion around how to best install the mailbox onto the post, given that I thought I had purchased a mailbox mounting plate, but instead got two flimsy brackets; and I was wondering whether the tulip magnets I purchased from Etsy would arrive because I mailed them to the farmhouse and we had no mailbox up yet. (FYI, I had realized after we arrived that my mailbox was not going to go up as quickly as planned, so I went to the post office and put a hold on my mail, and the magnets did arrive there safely).
I am thrilled with my new mailbox. I will change out the magnets with the seasons and will paint or stain the wood post eventually. My only remaining task is to go to the post office and remove the hold on my mail. I tried to do that yesterday but the post office was closed for the inauguration. I will do that today. VOILA and TA DAAAA!!
The Feminine Farmer 