We, Rebecca and I, have been living on Waschke Road nearly two months now. Albert and Victoria, our dogs, are used to being back on the road in a new house with a larger yard, but I can’t say that we are settled in.
This house is much smaller than our previous two houses, has many minor and not so minor things that need repair, replacement, or change to suit us. I begin each day with a task list that grows longer as the day goes on. I think that some morning, I’ll wake up and the list will be empty, but, somehow, I know that day will not come.
The decision to move back was hard. We loved the Ferndale house and the Gardiner Terrace neighborhood. The kitchen and the layout of the house is as perfect as I could imagine. I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, but I enjoyed learning about Ferndale city government and began to think that I might be able to help a growing city of wonderful people that seemed to need lessons on how to grow. A city that builds sleek new streets but fails to maintain the old, continually playing catchup on infrastructure, and generally fumbling its value proposition might benefit from my experience with corporate infighting and governance.
But I put those thoughts behind us when Rebecca’s surgeon recommended a fourth back surgery as soon as the covid-19 lockdown was lifted.
After your fourth trip to the rodeo, you begin to plan for your next visit. The Ferndale house with two stories and spacious layout would not work for us any longer. We thought about installing a chair lift but adding another complex device to our lives was not an answer we liked. We already owned a house that is an easy walk from our children and grandchildren, single story, a ramp to the front door, with space for my office and Rebecca’s craft studio, and a panoramic view of Mount Baker’s glaciers and buttes presiding over fields that my father, grandfather, and now our son, have farmed for over a century. The tenants who were renting the house were ready to move on to purchasing their own house. The instant we finished thinking it through, the decision was obvious.
So here we are. Albert, the border collie, and I are back to walking up and down Waschke Road several times a day, waving to the neighbors, treading paths and looking at sights that I have tread on and looked at my entire life.
Feels good. Not what we expected a few years ago, but we had soup made from kale grown by our farmer son and daughter-in-law last night. Feels good.
Yesterday, I went out to the farm to check on the progress of awakening life. Snowdrops are showing up all over and have been for a couple weeks now. I missed visiting the farm earlier this season during our snow days, but I will bet the green blades and white flowers of the snowdrops were poking through the snow, justifying their name and adding welcome grace to the scene. Snowdrops are not a native species of the Pacific Northwest. I suspect either my grandmother or my mother planted them around the house. Now, patches of snowdrops show up in the woods and windbreaks, even along Waschke Road. They may be invasive, but I welcome the gentle little flowers and tender leaves that are the first proof of longer days. In a month, they will be almost invisible and forgotten.
Spring was certainly progressing in the woods. Tiny, tender nettles were showing. We never ate nettles, but some of the neighbors, I can’t remember who, used to pick tender nettle sprouts in the early spring and cook them into nettle soup. I never tasted their soup; never have I had the slightest desire to taste nettle soup. I know nettles too well from the stings I used to get on my arms and legs while running through the woods where the nettles grew in masses of emerald green, although, when I think of it now, nettles have a sort of refreshing smell. When I was a kid, I heard of old folks rubbing their joints with nettles for their rheumatism. The tiny new ones already have a sting.
The Indian plums, which my grandpa called “hardhack” along with all other species of pliant, tough, and hard-to-chop shrubs, had unfurled a few tiny leaves and white flowers. Despite the sweet name, the leaves and flowers have a sharp bitter smell when you crush them in your fingers. The floor of the woods was green with deer fern, which is not a sign of spring because deer ferns, unlike bracken or fiddlestick ferns, for which Ferndale was named, are green all year round. They say deer graze 
on deer fern during the winter, but the leaves are tough and leathery. My mother considered deer fern roots a treat. She would dig out the thick roots (rhizomes) brush off the dirt and chew the raw roots. They have a sweet licorice taste. I haven’t tasted a deer fern root in sixty years.