The Holiday Stone Home

Winter Flower Gardening. Potting and Plant Farmhouse Style

Getting inspired to get through Winter has been the primary motivation for many years when living in the land of snow, ice and below freezing temperatures. The best way I have come up with curtailing the misery of being deprived sunshine and greener days is to move inside and create my own lush oasis. For an old stone farmhouse it calls for creativity, vision, and meeting the needs of the soul while honoring the bones of the exoskeleton.

This year we turned the old basement, which was once the heart of the home, the kitchen, now wrinkled with wires and pipes to supply the main living areas above, with grow-lights and endless indoor possibilities to fuel new life and excise new life a few months earlier than nature would allow.

The nights come upon us early. I love the magical ambiance of this room at night. The lights are Edison bulbs, the over counter lights re-purposed industrial mercury glass we rescued and re-homed from a building in downtown Baltimore.

An old double soapstone sink we found many years ago in a salvage yard. It finally has a new place as the plant wash tub basin. It is deep, soft and unsurpassed in utility and beauty. Why can't an old stone house be all of that? It was in its origins.

Because everything we do has a bit of whimsy, a sarcastic veterinary charm, and always an animal.

The Halloween friends keep the plants company and the field critters reminded that cats live here.

The cat food bar...

The caged rat thinks twice about stealing the cat food.

Every kitchen needs a candy bar, and every potting area needs a bulb bar.. pick your favorites; hyacinth, tulip, paper white, amaryllis. Pick a pot, and let the imagination and anticipation run.

We also go on walks to collect the embellishments of moss, twigs with interesting bark, mushrooms, or new seedlings too fragile to be left outside over winter.

And, of course, Wren. This is her domain. She is a jungle cat at heart.. a tropical, warm, pampered jungle cat.. but fierce (in her own mind) none the less.

Daytime visit;

Outside is kept clean and buttoned up for Spring to revive it.

But a bit of company never hurts as an incentive to the days the birds will be back to start their new families once again.

Today,, winter approaches..

Stone House Shelter

The letters lay quietly clandestine in a crawl space long abandoned by a mouse in the early 1920's. How they remained unfound and unclaimed for a century is only a guess. How they were not locked away by the lovers hands after their unfolding is a story that must be footnoted by some unimaginable tragic loss. They are treasures to be passed down to the family who belongs to them.

The home we bought a dozen years ago was left abandoned to be challenged unsuccessfully by the winters and critters of rural York county PA. An old stone farmhouse formidable in the field stone and slate that protect the bones that time was unable to expose. Slate roof, stone painstakingly, back breakingly laid one by one without any form of mechanical advantage in the late 1700's. There is unmitigated fact that ancient historic structures call me. The whisper of a ghost of a long ago tale is mesmerizing and hypnotic. The calling that brings Jews to Mecca, Christians to Jeruselum and me to a past I do not know as my own. I will claim this homes ear for a few decades and then vanish to leave it for someone else.

The letters are a story of war, separation and dreams to be realized at a later time. Except that later time came, passed, and remains unknown.

The secrets, the love, the loss and the abandonment are story lines played over and over. The families who have grown, the fear, the hardship, and the struggle remain for the next generations as they have been for the last. Only she will stand strong to carry the set forward. Only she can see above the little dramas that is the lives we live within her.

Halloween 2016. The kids and candy.