Do you also take roads for granted?

I do, or did… but now that I have felt the tender forest duff give under my 120 lbs of foot pressure, and seen the tracks of two tons of tractor on the soft clay, and then seen a gravel truck with 10 tons of load alone fall off the roadway and press a foot deep trench in 3 seconds… its hard to underestimate the value of a solid road. And it’s a metaphor.

Have you ever seen a new housing development go into place? The way you might pass a certain location periodically where it looks like a bunch of bulldozers are pushing around dirt for, say, a year. You get used to that, bored of it, hardly look anymore, and then all of a sudden there are something like 30 houses sprouted up like mushrooms? It’s the groundwork that takes time, and it’s expensive, and if you get it wrong, your basement floods. Joel is the bulldozer. I mean Joel... the tractor too… we call him Dear John, and they have a lovehate relationship. Seems like some part if his weak bone structure breaks more and more often. But I mean Joel, because every one of these rocks he filtered out of the clay, picked up, and tossed into the bucket. Took the extra time to pull out pavers for me. Selected out particularly nice boulders for when we re-route the stream to be trout-friendly. Cleaned and worked the edges of this vast area to allow for a beauty seamless to the forest edge, and easier long term care, nice camping spots, etc…

2020 has been rough! I’ve been so grateful we can be outside, productive. But my studio income all but disappeared when restaurants closed, and Joel and I had intense troubles this year as we struggled to learn how to live and work with the bulldozer of the other in these extenuating circumstances. I’m taking a deep breath and a break from studio work in order to really help get this project into a place where we have dry spaces and work conversations that don’t melt within a few minutes... Seems like a good time to hunker down and invest in the future…