Walls built on the ground as a unit–an efficient way to frame and build walls. But it does require muscle to raise them.

I have walls. Not all of them, but enough that the house is beginning to take shape “above ground.”

Here’s what Steve of SKT Construction and his crew did today:

First, Steve and Mike finished building the front and back walls right on the slab, complete with door and window openings and house wrap. The photo at right is shot from the back of the house, and that’s the back wall with its sill plate facing you. (The front wall is in the background. And beyond it, across the creek and the parking lot, is the ugly blank wall of Safeway. Not the best view, but as you’ll see, it’s not my whole view. By any means.)

On three….

When they finished those two walls, the largest as single units, Steve called for reinforcements to begin raising them.

Here’s the front wall of the house going up.

Put a little more muscle into it…

Raising 500 or 600 pounds of wall is less-fraught when the air is calm.

A little more muscle…

Keep stretching…

And it’s up! (The wind wasn’t blowing, which was a very good thing.)

Hang onto that wall!

Then it needs to be settled on the bolts, which go through holes in the sills. If the holes are measured correctly.

Sometimes the wall needs persuading.

Gentle persuasion, framer style….

With a length of 2X4.

Then comes bracing. Which has to be done very quickly, just in case .

Braced, with hands and the first cross-piece

Walls like this make great sails. Not something anyone wants to see.

Once the front wall was up, the guys moved to the back wall. I took pictures and stayed out of the way. In a little more than half an hour, they had both the big walls up. The other guys headed on to other jobs, leaving Steve and Mike to start work on the smaller wall sections.

My southerly view-to-be

And me to shoot a few photos out what will be my living room windows.

(The round-backed mountain on the left is Methodist Mountain, the lower one on the right is Poncha Mountain. They’re part of the Sangre de Cristo Range, which smacks into the main stem of the Rockies out of view. I’ll see that mountain-range-junction out my west-facing living room windows.)

By the end of the day, Steve and Mike had another wall up at one end of the clerestory windows between the front and back of the house.

It’s starting to look like a house.

That’s my tiny house, sitting high above Ditch Creek on the wrong side of the former railroad tracks. It’ll have a deck off the front of the house (the left side in this photo), and the side toward the street (on the right), will be terraced with boulders and colorful native plants down to the sidewalk. (There will be fill around the blue stem walls below the house walls.)

Thanks guys, for framing, sheathing and raising the walls. I can’t wait to see the rest of the place grow….

The first page of the sale flyer for my house/cottage/historic studio. (Click the “sale flyer” link in the blog text to the left to download the actual flyer.)

I’ve done it. After more than a week of agonizing over just the right words and photos, I finished the sale flyer for my house, its attached guest cottage and Richard’s historic studio.

I printed out the first copies and distributed them around town. I gave them to friends who will pass the word around, and posted them on bulletin boards in key places. Next comes the email campaign. I’ll send them to out to my extensive list, starting here in the Upper Arkansas River Valley and rippling out across the country, spreading the word.

Why would I sell this beautiful house/guest cottage/historic studio complex on an unusually large city parcel–nearly three-quarters of an acre, a place with a spectacular view of the mountains, a place that’s walking distance from the Arkansas River and Salida’s lively historic downtown? A place I’ve put sweat, time and a good bit of cash into finishing (and I’m close to being done)?

Richard and I imagined this once-neglected property as our “last home.” He lovingly restored the crumbling old studio and then helped design and build the house and guest cottage, applying his gorgeous terraphilic sensibility to bringing the earth inside with sinks carved from local rocks, sandstone shelves sprouting like outcrops from the walls, and many other custom details. It was perfect for us.

This decidedly junky property before we adopted it. (Or it adopted us. I’ve never been sure.)

Until “us” ended with his death from brain cancer in November of 2011. Now it’s just me. I don’t need the 4,100+ square feet of finished space that comprises this creative complex. And while I’ve loved the challenge of reviving what once was a rundown industrial half-block anchored by a neglected brick millwork building, the property shines now. It’s time to let it inspire someone else.

As I said in my email transmitting the sale flyer:

As part of right-sizing to fit my new solo life, I am putting this whole “creative complex” up for sale, including my beautiful custom-designed and built house with its attached guest cottage, and Richard’s renovated studio. (I’m not moving far–I’m building a tiny house at the other end of the block.) I’m eager to find just the right someone(s) who will love and be nurtured by this extraordinary property with its incredible views and inspiring spaces!

June wildflowers in the front yard “unlawn.”

So please help me spread the word: Feel free to re-post this and send the link for the sale flyer to anyone you think might be interested.

I’ve even planted the organic kitchen garden. Whoever buys the place will get eight varieties of heritage tomatoes, ready to pick, plus strawberries, asparagus, sugar-snap peas, scarlet runner beans, mesclun lettuces and herbs and more…. Yum!

I’m ready to move on. This beautiful place, bursting with wildflowers in summer and love and light year-round is ready to embrace its new people. Thanks for helping me find them, whoever they may be.

Pouring the slab, the floor of my tiny-house-to-be. (The blue walls in front are the foundation.)

I feel like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: running and running just to stay in place. As she explains to Alice,

…It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

I am running as fast as I can, but life is still speeding past me. Perhaps because I’m trying to do too much? Huh. I’m going to consider that. Later.

Construction on my tiny house is one thing speeding along, despite a spate of bad weather in late April. The house is  coming “out of the ground,” thanks to my excavator, Tommy Meyers, my concrete guys, A-1 Construction, and my contractor, Dan Thomas of Natural Habitats.

Hand-troweling what will be my finished floor.

Today the cement truck beeped its ponderous way backwards up the ramp leading to the top of my foundation (which rises 5.5 feet above the lowest point of the lot) and splurted wet cement onto the rigid foam insulation beneath what will be the floor of my house.

Jimmy and the A-1 crew began spreading, screeding and finally, troweling it into a floor. (The bathroom will be in the left-hand corner of the photo, and the right two-thirds of the slab will be my open living/dining/kitchen area.)

The master bedroom in this architect-designed, sculptor-built house, with interior trim and doors by me and friends.

Finish work on this house isn’t speeding along, mostly because I’m squeezing it between spiffing up the yard, writing a new memoir, masterminding the launch of a landscaping-for-wildlife project for Audubon Rockies, hosting this year’s first Terraphilia artist resident, Jill Powers, reviving the social media efforts of Women Writing the West,  for which I somehow became Vice-President of Marketing, and sundry other projects.

(I guess that illustrates “trying to do too much.”)

Tony, teaching me how to cut a window-opening in a sheet of galvanized steel for a tub-shower surround.

Still, I have made progress, thanks to the help of patient and generous friends, especially Tony and Maggie Niemann, multi-talented creatives to whom I owe most of my carpentry and finishing knowledge. (Bob Spencer taught me doors.)

Almost all of the door and window trim is up, almost all of the baseboard is in and I’ve trimmed out a steel counter in the guest bath that Richard built for one of his beautiful basin sinks but never got around to finishing, and also trimmed the backsplashes for the kitchen counters about which ditto. What remains is the master bath, a complicated and challenging project both in terms of time and creativity. (See photo above.)

Guest bathroom counter with its new galvanized edging and the glorious Richard-carved basin.

The memoir, which I call Bless the Birds, is also coming along. I think I’ve only got four more chapters to write. Of course, those four cover Richard’s third and fourth brain surgeries (both in  March of 2011), his 61st birthday summer, our Big Trip, and coming home to those last two transcendent months of his life.

To write compelling and lyrical memoir, I have to relive that time. I read through my journal, blog posts, letters and emails and Richard’s snippets of writing, and look at his art, the books he was reading and the photos I took. It’s sweet, poignant, illuminating, humbling, painful and freaking hard. Some days I have to procrastinate a lot before I sit down and write. Once I get going though, the story sucks me in. It’s hard to stop. When I do, I’m wrung out.

And I have other things to accomplish. Hence the feeling of running as fast as I can and not quite managing to stay in place.

A rainbow arcs over my neighborhood.

My work days begin before dawn and run until nine or ten at night. Still, they bring me gifts. Like today at lunch, when I snatched half an hour to watch the floor of my new house take shape. Or this evening, when a spring shower yielded the grace of a rainbow.

I take my blessings where I can. Which is, come to think of it, a good way to live.

Under the right-hand row cover are tomato plants in insulating teepees. Greens shelter under the left-hand cover.

I fell asleep last night to waves of wind washing over the house in rolling currents of air, as if April and its contradictory weather was flowing out of the valley.

I woke at a few minutes after midnight when wind changed direction from westerly to easterly and came crashing back up the valley in walloping gusts. I lay awake as wind slammed the house, banged the corrugated metal fence, clanged the temple bell, and thrashed through the yard. A blustery beginning to May, indeed.

I listened for unusual noises and reviewed the house, guest cottage, yard and Richard’s historic shop building in my memory: Had I checked to make sure the heavy wood shop doors were shut? Were the row covers clamped tightly over the tomatoes and the greens bed? Had I latched the side door to the garage when I took the recycling out?

A strawberry flower “drinking” snowflake-melt droplets.

When my worries switched from the merely unlikely to the totally improbable, I sighed, rose, put on my bathrobe and waded into the roaring waves. The garage door was firmly latched. The row cover clamps were holding. Both shop doors were shut tight; inside, all was still and curiously peaceful, save for a slight creaking as the roof beams and decking flexed with the gusts.

It’s survived Salida’s weather for 111 years. It’s not going to fail now. I heard Richard’s voice clearly in my head. Reassured, I walked back to the house, crawled under the covers and fell asleep.

Morning did not dawn balmy and springlike. At least, not the way we imagine spring. The wind still howled from the east, and the temperature, 42 degrees at dawn, dropped steadily as the day crept in.

Daffodil blossom collecting snow instead of pollinators….

The storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Colorado barely touched my part of the state. (We just got the howling wind off its southern edge.)

Still, it’s been snowing lightly all day, enough to make me glad the tomatoes are snug in their insulating, water-filled teepees, the blooming daffodils and strawberries are tough, and the arugula, spinach, and lettuces are under cover.

Starting like this, May could bring more moisture than winter did. Stranger weather has happened here in spring. Like the May weekend ten or so years ago when a storm stalled over the valley, dropping 50 inches–yes, that was fifty inches–of wet snow in just over 48 hours. That was a record.

****

Moving the tamper inside the foundation to compact the “dirty” roadbase–the kind with lots of fines so it compacts well–under what will be the slab floor. (Note the sewer pipe going through the foundation in the foreground and the orange water pipe in the background.)

As you can imagine, the wild weather hasn’t made things easy for house construction. Still, my excavator, Tommy Meyers, has worked steadily  at filling inside the six-foot-tall stem walls that form the base of my house. (The lot slopes downhill from the sewer pipe in the alley, 128 feet away. We had to go up with the foundation so that my sewer line would go downhill.)

Tomorrow the plumbers will lay the under-slab pipes for water and sewer, and once those pass inspection, the slab will be poured. Then the house can finally rise “out of the ground.”

All is quiet, and the temperature outside is dropping. I hope the asparagus sprouts in my garden don’t freeze tonight….

Happy May Day!

Still, I do have some great books on my to-read stack. Here are three capsule reviews of three books I enjoyed so much I wanted to share them with you.

Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World by Kate Braid

Kate Braid slinging studs for a house.

It was the summer of 1975, and Kate Braid needed to earn “a chunk of money, fast” to return to college in Vancouver, Canada. How would she get it?

‘Up north.’ Actually, until the words came out of my mouth, I had no plan at all, but in 1975, whenever a guy wanted money in British Columbia, he went ‘up north’–to Kitimat, Smithers, Prince George–and came back with pocketfuls. It was boom days in northern BC…. If a man could earn big money up north, why couldn’t I?

Braid and a woman friend bought camping gear at an Army Surplus store, hitchhiked their way north, “and for the next two weeks applied at every sawmill, paper mill and fish processing plant between Williams Lake and Prince Rupert.” At each one, “the foreman took one look and said, ‘Sorry, girls’….”

The two did finally find work stacking lumber at a planer mill. That summer spent “dancing with lumber,” as Braid puts it, gives her a taste of the world of working with muscles and wood, a world she eventually joins as one of the first women in the overwhelmingly male trades. Braid’s book is a portrait of a time, and a cracking good read. (Read the full review on Story Circle Book Reviews.)

Middlewood Journal: Drawing Inspiration from Nature by Helen Scott Correll

The book cover gives a taste of Helen Scott Correll’s eye, and her art.

You know the sort of book you can pick up, open any page, and be enchanted? Middlewood Journal is that kind of book, because Helen Correll is that kind of observer. The book is a year’s record–in journal entries and gorgeous sketches–of Correll’s daily walks from her house, the Middlewood of the title, through the surrounding countryside of South Carolina’s Piedmont. Correll’s surroundings aren’t grand or particularly wild. But through her eyes and talented hands, they are compelling.

Full disclosure: I wrote a blurb for this book. It begins, “Warning: Middlewood Journal is addictive.” I stand by that claim. It is, in the best possible way: that of inciting wonder.

The Women Jefferson Loved by Virginia Scharff

Jefferson’s Monticello, with two of the women he loved strolling the lawn

I picked up this book because I’ve admired Scharff since we became friends in grad school. I kept reading because her view of Jefferson through the lives of the women who in many ways defined him is fascinating. A professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Scharff is a dogged researcher, a creative thinker and an outspoken feminist. She’s also a witty and trenchant writer, as this passage about Jefferson’s mother’s reaction to his early revolutionary views shows:

What was a mother to think, as her son and his compatriots tacked toward treason? Jane Randolph Jefferson had been born in England and reared among British gentry in Virginia. She valued the fine things connected with the mother country. … In ordinary times her men might hold any number of bold ideas or unconventional philosophies, but such notions would have fewer real consequences.

The Women Jefferson Loved brings alive the five key women in Jefferson’s life: his mother, his wife, his daughters, and his mistress, who was also his slave. It’s a great read, and a window into the women–and men–of an extraordinary time.

*****

And now that brag:

Every year Story Circle Network, a national association of writers of memoir and life-stories, picks a blogger for the previous year to honor with their “Super Star Blogger Award.” This time around, it’s me, for this very blog. I’m deeply honored. Thank you, writing sisters!

And thank you, community of readers, for walking this journey with me.

Fall planting of Monet’s Garden mix plus mache (corn salad), overwintered under row covers and now ready to eat.

Yesterday, I planted spring and early summer seeds in my kitchen garden: Wasabi arugula (yes, it is really spicy!), Pixie cabbage, Bright Lights chard as colorful as its name, Paris Market mix (piquant and flavorful greens and herbs including chervil with its licorice overtones), Monet’s Garden mesclun (the lovely ruffled lettuces in reds and greens in the photo), Five Variety Mix (beautiful heritage lettuces including the aptly named speckled troutback), Regiment spinach, All-Season Blend broccoli, Baby Ball and golden beets, and Trieste bulbling fennel.

All come from Renee’s Garden Seeds, a pioneer in bringing flavorful, beautiful and easy-to-grow varieties to home gardeners. Seedswoman Renee Shepherd was passionate about local food and home gardening long before the locavore movement made both trendy, and is now working to source her seeds from organic growers. Thanks to Renee, I grow a bounteous kitchen garden and share that earth-healthy harvest with friends and neighbors.

A native Mammalaria or nipple cactus hiding among the curling leaves of the blue grama grass.

Today I spent much of the day sitting in my front yard, “pronghorning” my native dryland meadow. (The second half of that blog post explains my spring grassland-cleanup methods.) I don’t mow my mountain prairie, a tufted expanse of bunchgrasses and wildflowers.

Instead, once a year I cut it back and hand-rake it to remove the fine dead grass leaves and wildflower stalks. Stalks with seeds go to whatever patch of my formerly blighted industrial property is currently in need of revegetation. The curling dead grass leaves get placed around the yard as nesting material for house finches, mountain bluebirds and other songbirds.

Bright spring green Rocky Mountain penstemon leaves with red edges.

The gift of the time I spend up close and personal with the native grassland Richard and I so carefully restored on this difficult site is in seeing spring appear. Here at 7,000 feet elevation, nights are still wintry, dropping into the teens and low twenties, and spring showers are likely to come rattling sleet or dropping wet flakes of snow.

Green is never abundant in this high-desert climate. Which makes it all the more cheering to cut back dead flower stalks and find new spring leaves sheltering close to the sun-warmed soil like these Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus).

The silky hairs on pasque flower leaves trap heat and slow air movement, helping this early-spring plant modify still-wintry conditions.

Or pasque flower, the grassland rival to crocus with its blowsy purple flowers blooming while most other mountain prairie plants think it’s still winter. Or the tiny burgundy-colored leaves of wholeleaf indian paintbrush (Castilleja integra), the ferny rosettes of scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata) or the wavy-edged leaves of blanketflower (Gallairdia aristata). Or the soft new green leaves of big sagebrush (Seriphidium tridentatum), the shrub whose characteristic turpentine and orange blossom pungency marks the part of the West I call home.

Big sagebrush, Seriphidium tridentum, the indicator shrub for the landscapes I call home.

Sitting in my native grassland yard as I comb my fingers through the bunches of fine grasses and snap last year’s seed stalks from the wildflowers gives me the opportunity to observe the community of plants and their flying, crawling, burrowing and grazing partners in detail. That close attention is a kind of love, a way of honoring these resilient lives with whom I share this particular plot of ground.

It’s my love-my-own-earth Day observance, a reminder of the annual miracle of life renewing itself, no matter killing drought, horrific bombings, accidental plant explosions or other tragedies. When I uncover the new green of spring, my heart sings along with the warbling house finches. When I smell moist soil and the unmistakeable fragrance of spring sagebrush, I am reminded that life is resilient, bursting to be. And I am glad to be here, part of it.

*****

Troweling wet concrete after one foundation wall is filled.

Down at the other end of the block, the concrete trucks lined up on Friday, our first good-weather day in a week, to pour my stem walls. The foundation for my little house is now in place! Next up, back-filling around those stem walls, and then excavating for the garage/studio foundation. Step by step, a house takes shape.

Installing the blue styrofoam footer forms on a windy afternoon. (We’re still “below ground.” The tops mark the floor level of the new house.)

The wind is howling outside, roaring by in gusts that feel like they must be going 80 mph, although my wind gauge hasn’t recorded any higher than 30. There’s another spring storm blowing in, our third in a little more than a week. As one of my concrete crew said late this afternoon as they were struggling to anchor the footer forms for my new tiny house, “Springtime in the Rockies.”

Yup. And I can’t complain (much), since the last two storms brought us a little more than an inch of moisture, more than we’ve had so far the whole dust-dry winter. If whatever’s blowing in brings us more snow, especially the wet kind, even the wind will be a gift. Of a sort.

Sea kayaking at La Partida, where the sea turtles feed, Isla Espiritu Santo

This kind of weather has me thinking about running away to warmer climes. Which is what I’ll be doing when I gather a group of writers and companions next February for the second Write & Retreat workshop on Isla Espiritu Santo in the Sea of Cortez off Baja California del Sur. We’ll leave La Paz on Feburary 9th, headed for Espiritu Santo, an island so incredibly rich in biological and cultural features that it is a protected area. Our outfitter, Baja Expeditions, the founding ecotourism outfitter on Baja, spearheaded the movement to preserve this extraordinary place and operates the only permanent camp on the island.

Baja Expeditions’ comfortable “eco-camp” on Espiritu Santo.

We’ll stay on Espiritu Santo for six days, ensconced in safari-style canvas tents on the beach of a quiet cove, waking to the sound of brown pelicans “thwacking” the water to stun their breakfast of sardines. We’ll paddle sea kayaks in turquoise bays, snorkel with sea lions, watch flying fish leap out of the water like falling stars, hear canyon wrens trill and great horned owls hoot. We’ll fish and hike and lie in the sun on the beach–and we’ll write, read our work, talk craft and art, and recharge our creative wells. We’ll also eat great food prepared by our camp staff.

If this sounds good, download the flyer on from my workshops page. Spaces are limited, so sign up soon.

Sunset on the Sangre de Cristo Range from the pools at Joyful Journey.

The original Write & Retreat workshop, held last month at Joyful Journey Lodge & Spa in Colorado’s San Luis Valley was so successful that I’ve decided to make it an annual event. (“Do not change a thing,” wrote one participant. “Reserve me a space for next year.”) I’ve already reserved the lodge at Joyful Journey for March 20-23rd, 2014. Mark your calendars….

****

I have to confess that my malaise and restlessness are not just from the weather. Yesterday’s bombings at the finish of the Boston Marathon weigh on my heart and spirit. I cannot understand such cruelty. I believe we will recover from the shock and pain and fear given time, just as I believe offering each other compassion and love is the only way to live, whatever happens. Words have great power to heal, and to restore our hope, our faith in the basic goodness of our fellow travelers on this numinous planet.

I am reminded of the first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope” is the thing with feathers:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches on the soul
And sings the song without the words
And never stops–at all

Bless you all.

Summer lettuce blend, mache, and arugula, all from Renee’s Garden Seeds.

Monday evening at about six, in a break in my long work day, I went out to the kitchen garden, un-clipped one side of the row cover fabric on the raised bed that holds my winter planting of spinach and mesclun and did a quick thinning and harvest. So quick, in fact, that I didn’t stop to shoot a photo of the growing tapestry of greens and reds.

The weather bureau had changed the forecast for the next day from 30 percent chance of less than a tenth of an inch of snow to 80 percent chance of 2 to 4 inches. I thought I’d better harvest before the storm hit. Just in case.

I yanked crowded mache, pinched back arugula, and thinned ruffled red and green lettuces, pulling up small plants, cutting off the roots with my garden scissors, putting the leaves in my garden basket and tossing the roots to the compost pile. In ten minutes, I had a basketful of fresh greens, the row covers were clipped tightly bed over the bed and the wind was rising.

I carried my harvest inside, weighed it (3/4 of a pound), dumped the greens into the sink, washed them in cold water, and spun them in the salad spinner.

Organic greens, fresh from the garden—yum!

Then I made myself a simple green salad, my favorite spring meal:

1 bowl mixed salad greens, freshly harvested
1/4 avocado, chopped (organic, Mexico)
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped (uber-local, from Maggie’s hens 6 blocks away)
1 T chopped roasted pecans (New Mexico)
1 T grated Rocking W Swiss cheese (Ploughboy Local Market)
1/2 T lemon-infused Stonehouse olive oil (organic, California)
2 tsp balsamic vinegar (organic, Italy)
pinch salt
fresh-ground black pepper

And went back to work on a landscaping-for-wildlife project that will launch later this spring. I worked until bedtime, did yoga, brushed my teeth, washed and creamed my face, and fell into bed. (That’s my life: sleep, yoga, eat, work–either writing, consulting, or carpentry, take a walk, eat, yoga, sleep, repeat….)

Two inches of wet snow and more falling….

When I got up in the morning, I was very glad I had taken the time for that quick harvest. Because snow blanketed my garden. The greens bed is the middle one in the photo, with its row cover hanging down.

We’ve had almost no snow all winter and spring and my valley is desperately dry. So I didn’t complain as the wind blew and the snow fell–and fell, and fell, all morning, all afternoon. I didn’t complain as I shoveled, heaving a layer so wet and heavy that water came out as I pushed it off my half-block of sidewalk. I didn’t complain as I shoveled the second time, when the temperature, 35 degrees F at dawn and dropping steadily all day, was down to 20 degrees.

Salida with snow. The forested summit in the background is Methodist Mountain, “only” 11,707 feet elevation.

When the snow quit last night, I measured almost eight inches (twice the forecast amount). The total moisture came to four-tenths of an inch. Which may not seem like much to you, but it’s significant in this high-desert parched by years of drought.

This morning, the sun came out, and the snow began melting, sinking straight into the thirsty soil. By afternoon, it had vanished and the birds were singing happily in my native grassland yard, including a small flock of western bluebirds, the first I’ve ever seen here. They foraged energetically for grasshopper nymphs, grabbing and swallowing them head-first. (Chow down, bluebirds.)

Snow’s already melted, footer forms appearing….

Later, I snatched a few minutes for a break and took a brisk walk by the new house site. I figured the snow would have prevented my concrete guys from starting to lay out the forms in the footer trenches. Wrong.

There’s the street view of my tiny house-to-be, looking toward what will be my side porch and kitchen wall. Woo-hoo–I can see it emerging!

Tommy and his backhoe cutting into the bank to begin the footer trenches for my new house.

Today at mid-morning, we broke ground on my new house. No ceremony, no photo ops with celebrities welding golden shovels. My laconic excavator simply took a pinch of chewing tobacco, fired up his backhoe and begin digging. I shot a few photos and went back to my office to write. It was such a balmy day that I opened the window in the bay over my desk facing toward the excavation half a block away and worked to the sound of the backhoe motor grumbling and the bucket clanking as it dug through the layers of industrial junk and rounded river-worn rocks that comprise my “soil.”

The results of Tommy’s backhoe work are a rectangle of wide trenches about five feet deep that will hold the ICFs, insulated concrete forms, into which concrete will be poured for the stem-walls of my house-to-be. This is the below-ground part of construction, the underpinnings to support the exterior walls of my little house. (And I do mean little: 725 square feet.)

Looking down into the footer trenches from above.

It’ll be one level, built on a slab (the slab will store the sun’s heat to keep the house warm in winter and stay cool underfoot in summer). The ICFs will be set in the trenches after the soil in the bottom is compacted. The top of the trenches marks the approximate floor level of the house.

Note the slanting layers in the trench to the left of my shadow. The deepest part of the trench reveals the rounded cobbles and even layers of an old river bed (old in geologic time, when the ancient Arkansas River wandered back and forth across the valley). Those slanting charcoal-colored layers may be mud-flows, perhaps from volcanic ash, or perhaps glacial-era sediments. There are stories in my ground.

The wide footer trenches from below.

Standing below and looking up, my neighbor’s house gives an idea of the floor level of the new house, which will sit about that high in order be above the sewer line in the alley at the back of the lot. My lot currently slopes downhill from that sewer line, which is not good. (Water in the West is said to flow uphill toward money; sewage, however, does not.)

The next photo, looking back toward the alley, shows the slope. (The red brick building with the asymmetric roof-peak in the far background is Richard’s historic studio, built in 1902.)

Looking west-southwest toward the back of the lot.

This lot has sat vacant since the town of Salida was platted by the railroad in 1879, probably because of its challenges. Not only does it slope the wrong way (although the sewer did not exist in 1879), it’s an odd shape: 150 feet long, but just 26 feet wide at the alley and 58 feet at the street. The scalloped wooden fence marks one long side of the lot, the other is the creek bank on the left edge of the photo. The creek, fed by snowmelt from Mount Shavano, one of the Fourteeners, 14,000-foot-tall peaks that line our valley to the west, has been dry since July, a consequence of our long drought. The willows on my bank of the creek are turning spring-red regardless, their roots apparently tapping groundwater.

Scarlet gilia, a native wildflower beloved by hummingbirds.

Perhaps you can’t see the small blue and sage green house with the cranberry-red-framed windows and the big deck overlooking the creek and the mountains on the skyline in these dusty trenches, but I can. Which is why I worked with the window open today, smiling at the grumble of the backhoe engine. That’s the sound of my home for the rest of my days, however many they may be, taking shape on what was once an unloved vacant lot.

I never thought I’d leave this house that Richard built for us. But then, I never imagined that “us” would end so soon. Now that it’s just me, finding my way as Woman Alone, I can’t wait to move to my little house, plant wildflowers, hear the song sparrows practice in the willows, and watch the seasons change.

That’s really what Tommy’s backhoe broke ground for today: the rest of my life.

Baby tomato plants, just putting out their first real leaves.

My bedroom is alive with the fragrance of moist earth, as if spring has moved inside with me. In a way it has: The floor closest to the 8-foot-wide sliding glass door that opens to my bedroom patio is full of tomato and basil seedlings.

Two and a half weeks ago, I spent a happy couple of hours planting their seeds. I unearthed my seed-starting flats from the shelves in the garage, found the heat-mat and the bag of organic seed-starting mix, and laid newspaper on the floor in the bedroom.

I poured water on the wicking mat in the tray the flats of pots sit in, filled each tiny pot with soil, and wrote the names of the eight heritage varieties of tomatoes, plus one kind of basil on post-it notes to label the rows in the flat.

Organic seed-starting soil, pots, and the flat with its water-wicking mat to help the pots stay moist.

Then I began pressing seeds into the soil. First, two varieties to eat fresh off the vine: yellow pear and silvery fir. (The tiny and sweet yellow pear tomatoes are a favorite variety from my primary seed-supplier, Renee’s Garden Seeds, run by the brilliant seedswoman Renee Shepherd, whose life-mission is to bring flavorful, beautiful, and now, organically grown varieties of vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers to home gardeners. The silvery fir tomatoes come from Colorado’s own Botanical Interests.)

Then six varieties of slicing and cooking tomatoes: Persimmon, huge, orange and citrusy; Marvel stripe, beautifully marbled red and yellow; Black krim with a dark green top and rich flavor; Stupice, intensely flavored and productive; Pompeii Roma, the best for cooking and paste; and Cherokee purple, sweet with beautiful ruby flesh. (The first five are from Renee’s Seeds, the Cherokee purple comes from Botanical Interests.)

Black krim seedlings with their first real leaves appearing between the outstretched cotyledons or seed leaves.

Next to that flat are three pots containing hanging basket begonias. The fat tubers spent the winter in the garage in their pots, dormant. I brought the pots inside this afternoon, carefully watered the soil, and then set them in the sun next to the tomato and basil seedlings. In a week or so the begonias will begin to sprout leaves, “waking up” indoors until it’s safe to put them outside.

The fragrance of moist soil and growing plants in my bedroom smells like spring to me, like new starts.

There’s another new start just beginning to appear at the other end of the block.

The site of my new house. The boulders in the foreground are Richard’s spare sculpture materials. I’ll use them to terrace my front slope. The house in the background is my neighbor.

Yesterday afternoon, a yellow backhoe chugged up onto the tail end of this formerly blighted industrial property and dug two five-foot-deep trenches in the rubbly soil for the project engineer to inspect. Looking into those trenches with their layers upon layers of river cobbles embedded in sand and gravel (this land is a prehistoric river terrace), I don’t think the engineer is going to have any problems with the stability of my “soil.” It’s not going anywhere anytime soon!

Once we get the engineer’s okay, Tommy, the excavator, will begin digging out a place at the back of the lot for my garage with its studio on the second floor, and using that fill to create a level spot closer to the street for my small house, with its big front deck coming right to the upper bank of the tiny spring creek that bounds my long, skinny lot.

An early version of the front of my tiny house-to-be. Plans by Tom Pokorny, Natural Habitats

If all goes well, this vacant lot will sprout a finished house and garage/studio by my birthday this fall. I hadn’t consciously planned to start building in the first weeks of spring, the time of new life and growth, and finish in fall, as life here in the Northern Hemisphere tucks in for the winter. But now I think about it, it feels right to be part of that cycle.

My bedroom smells like spring. And down the block, the promise of my new house is beginning to appear. As the love of my life used to say, “I am a fortunate person.” I am indeed.