Looking to No. 5

In numerology, the four-year cycle is said to be about “vision, management, priority, effort, determination and breakthrough.” Chris might say that I’ve had a little trouble with that priority thing in my first four years of Loveless ownership. My version: Priorities shift with the seasons.

In the warm months, having a deck railing is a priority, seeing how often we shriek at Chipper to warn him away from the edge of the deck and near-certain death. By winter? Hmm, it’d be nice to have an inside stairwell to get from the toasty sleeping quarters downstairs to the weeHouse kitchen and coffee maker above.

Of course, we have neither. Still, we’ve got a lot of great things going on – the bathroom project, the screened porch project, the shed project, the Saturn deck project.... yes, that priority thing.

Year No. 5, according to the numerology sources consulted for the sole purpose of this blog, provides "opportunities to turn my life around by setting off in a new direction." (Emphasis mine.)

Their advice? A complete change of attitude. 

Uh, I’ll get right on that.

Meantime, here’s a trip down memory lane.

October 2010

 

Still working on covering up that Tyvek house wrap...

The former living room.

Sofas and friends.

The 2010 kitchen was worse in person.

Cluttered, but in a good way.

The old place, view from road.

Walkway to new space makes us all happy.

Shoreline assessors

The stars aligned and I finally lured my friend Laurel up to Loveless on a windy September day, where I put her to work helping me catalog the state of our Loveless shoreline for a county research project.

Laurel is like a cat, working through her many lives. Lucky for us she’s still got a few left.

She worked the stern of the canoe (and took selfies) while I focused on the paperwork. As always, we eventually got going on something that gave us a whopping’ case of the giggles. 

This time it was a “just-get-‘er-done” mentality that had us paddling the canoe backwards, because it seemed like too much work to turn the thing around and crank it forward into the wind. (You probably just had to be there.)

In the end, Laurel headed back to California with a bit of the Wisconsin woods in her iPhone, if not her heart.

 

Talking trash

Now that we’ve figured out how to walk around lake, we’ve figured out it pays to bring a trash bag with you. Chris cashed in a stash of aluminum cans from a recent lap around Loveless, and added it to his Mustang Fund.

 

Strolling the south side.

A lot of beer cans end up in the ditch.

Lucky in Love(less)

If four-leaf clovers are as rare as the textbooks say – 1 in every 10,000 clovers – then Woah Nelly! Loveless is one big environmental genetic mutation.

Chris seems to spy four-leafers on the Loveless hillside the way I find sharks’ teeth at the beach. He has brought me multiple bouquets of the lucky Trifolium repens this year, the first we’ve seen them. Just last weekend, as we enjoyed a wildly warm fall day among the yellowing maples, he bent over a patch of tall grass and muttered proudly, “Yep, here’s another one.”

Not sure what it all means, other than this once-abused plot of land continues to churn up mysteries. Or could it be that Loveless is bringin' us the love now?

Our favorite folkie

My friend Pop Wagner – master musician, poet, singing cowboy and preservationist of authentic Americana – performed at the ever-popular “Music on the Overlook” in downtown St. Croix Falls back in July, and we enticed him up to Loveless before showtime for a brat and beer.

Pop and his wife, Thea, have known Chipper since he was a runt-of-the-litter pup just a few months old. Their dog, Wiley, about a year older, was Chipper’s first backyard playmate. The two pups scrambled freely through the pasture when Pop and I went horseback riding, took long walks together in the woods and splashed through muddy ponds to chase away ducks.

Chipper and Wiley are old guys now, having somehow far outlived their average life expectancies. I’m reminded how profound it is to live with aged dogs, and to be connected to friends through them and through music.

Pop charms the crowds at The Overlook.

Loveless neighbors Scott and Kay dig the show.

Wiley enjoys Indian Summer in late October.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Yikes it’s fall already. Where did summer go? We spent it playing, traveling, working, mourning and living each day as though it were our last. So I’ll try to get some focus and catch up with Loveless goings-on. Soon.