- “I am definitely going to take a course on time management… just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.” – Louis E. Boone
- A stitch in time saves nine.
- Time waits for no one.
- There’s no turning back the clock. (although if I could go back to the silence of January, I might.)
- Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. ~John Archibald Wheeler (ah, now here’s a particular favorite! except it may not be entirely true.)
Mid-week, I was caught mid-way between screaming overwhelm and bleak depression, trapped by everything-happening-at-once. Building a home, even an add-on to an old structure that’s been on the farm for forty years, has more details than I could even imagine.
The Little House, as we call it, Dad-built in the early 80’s as an addition to the double wide mobile home he’d bought for Mom and after we’d torn down the old house which set right about where this addition is. Then they moved to town and sold the mobile home. And then they both died. But I’d moved to Kansas. The Little House has been my writing room for years when Cliff and I went up to the farm, staying in the old camper whose nose you see on the left in decidedly poor condition. It was already old when we bought it. That small piece of camper tells little of the story — the leaks, the held-together-with-duct-tape ceiling, the dying air conditioner. We’ve been going up there and staying in the camper for ten years after I cleaned out dead birds and pack rat nests from the Little House. Now the Little House is getting an 8 foot extension for a bathroom and an office overlooking the prairie and a corner kitchen inside the old structure. It’s a process, as they say.
But time!!! What a monster it is. It took months last fall to get find the contractor (he’s great – a friend of the plumber who put in the rural water lines), get the okay from the rest of the LLC members, get the permits (we’re doing gray lines and composting toilet), and take a loan out with the bank in town.
But once it got started, the guys went like a whirlwind. Above is what it looked like when we got there Thursday noon; this is what it looked like by Friday afternoon: the roof finished and the siding done except for where they are finishing up building the front deck. (That’s the old chicken house in the background.. the one I had to clean waaaaaayyyy to many times. It needs tearing down but I’ll think about that tomorrow….said in my best Scarlett O’Hara voice.)
In the meantime…..yep, there’s that time again, I’d had a huge glitch at the bank that necessitated finding MORE papers and another conversation with the LLC members to sign MORE papers (which of course was crazy-making since construction had already begun), and finding my cousin to see if he could pick up a range in Beatrice (30 miles north of farm) and finding said range and ordering it; and making a list of all the other things we needed; and and and. But by then I was out of melt-down mode and into simply doing.
Probably the only way, really, to deal with chaos. Just do.
So here’s another old proverb for you: a woman’s work is never done. But then, as you can see….neither is a man’s.
janetsunderland.com 