Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Putting the Rock back in Rock Camp

Seth and I woke up in our comfy-as-hell, king size, canopy bed, in our cozy little farmhouse in Rock Camp, WV this morning. It was paradise. Absolute Heaven.

Seth got up first, went down stairs and got fires started in the living room fireplace, the cook stove, and wood stove in the kitchen. He cleaned up the kitchen a bit then cam back upstairs to cuddle for a couple of hours.

When we both came down stairs a little later the entire house was warm and incredibly cozy. Our friend had kept the fires beautifully and was on the couch reading Growing up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead by Peter Conners.

I cooked breakfast on our big, cast iron, wood burning, cook stove while Sethro went out into the forest with the chainsaw to gather wood. The cook stove belonged to Seth's great grandmother, and I love cooking on it! It's almost impossible to burn the bacon, rather those strips always end up perfectly cooked! On Thanksgiving my little sister came up from school in Alabama and we cooked an entire turkey dinner in (and on) my cook stove. It was a great dinner with everything from mashed potatoes and homemade giblet gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie and TWO turkeys!!

It was such a lovely morning. Today marks our first full day back on the farm. Since some time in September Seth and I had been living in Blacksburg, VA. Last summer Seth got into the Graduate School of Virginia Tech Department of Theatre in Cinema, in the Directing and Public Dialogue Masters Program.. He already has a Master Degree in Interactive Telecommunication from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, but wanted to try something else, within our community and in the region. After a semester and change there though we both realized that life in Blacksburg and at Tech was not what we wanted. We are so happy here on the farm, and we have so many exciting irons in the fire with Pink Moon, our RCP touring show, The Rock Camp Store and more. We realized that we were not prepared to take a three year hiatus from our lives. So, with that in mind (and a few other reasons) we came home.

And already, after only one day, things are so much better. The cats and dogs are super happy we're back. Ginny and Lucy (the dogs) hated the apartment in Blacksburg. One of them even chewed up a bunch of my CDs. Here on the farm, with hundreds of acres to get out all of their energy, they are absolute angels.

We've been cleaning up the whole farmhouse and while it's not quite sparkling, it's getting better and better by the minute! There's still a lot of laundry and dishes to be done, and life on the farm isn't always peaches and cream...but we're so happy here. There are a lot of obstacles (the pipes are frozen or the pump is blown up so we currently don't have any running water, and getting wood is a lot of work) but we're warm and busy and it feels great.