Not Entirely Wordless Wednesday: Unknown Flower

This flower is blooming under the pines and oaks in the yard at our rental. We have no idea what it is, but it called my attention when I looked out the bedroom window yesterday morning. This is the only plant like it in the yard here. We'd like it to grow at our new home, so I think we may dig it up and take it with us. It looks like the kind of plant that flowers for one or two days. No one will miss it, right? Bad tenants, bad tenants.
UPDATE: Much thanks to Wayne over at Niches and to an anonymous commenter, we now know that this beautiful plant is a Trillium kurabayashii (Giant Wakerobin). We won't be attempting to transplant it to our new home (and mostly we were kidding, although the desire was real). It is a fairly rare species and collection of its seeds from the wild is done by cultivators. We'll see if we can find a plant at a local nursery, although the literature suggests their rarity also makes them pretty pricey. Still, we're excited to have found such a beauty. Today, Wednesday morning, it is under a dusting of snow (two inches fell, but not under the trees). I hope it likes these early spring surprises.

Spring Emerges

First, Roger and I want to thank you for your kind good wishes and heartfelt enthusiasm for our new home. We are pretty excited about it and really can't wait to get there. Now, when we see those new 4-pack and 6-pack organic herb and vegetable starts at the local food coop, we look with a longing that we know we can finally fulfill. Life really doesn't get much better than that.
With that infernal house search finally over we can engage in our other favorite activities with a lightness in our hearts and almost a spring in our step (hey, we're old, how springy can we be?). So we headed out to our favorite local trail Sunday and took a look around. We were pretty delighted by how much the early spring had changed the local scenery.
Right away, we saw our first Mourning Cloak and Azures of the season. We took a couple of photos of each, but only one of the Azure was recognizable. On this trail we mostly hike through forest where there's a lot of brown, earthy leaf litter under the trees. Here we saw the first wildflower colors of the season (update: pink flowers are Dodecatheon hendersonii - shooting stars; blue flowers Cynoglossum grande - Grand Houndstongue)

On the trail back we passed something that Roger thought looked perhaps like a flower bud. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw this:
And an even a closer look showed us what we think is a cicada that had just emerged from this exoskeleton and was climbing down. It kept its wings closed, and scurried into the safety of the leaves. We hung out with it for a while thinking how cool it is to be with a creature that had just emerged in the first moments of its spring.
Now is the season of life and happiness in abundance! We'll keep you posted about the house when we finally get there. The days can be counted down on our fingers!

We Did It!

We released all contingencies today on the house and those beautiful 4.7 acres. We are set to close on April 5th. You all know how long this moment has been in the making. We put our Port Townsend home on the market in March of 2008. We've been on a wild odyssey since then trying to find a place to call home.

Now we have this
in our future, where we saw the heron take off, and the red-shouldered hawk circle and call out.

And we have this:

and this too:

It's all more splendid and beautiful than we had ever hoped. We're not even sure what to do with such grandness, but it will be our life's work to figure that out!

Yes, we are now doing our happy dance. You can all uncross your fingers and toes, and everything else you've had crossed for us. Thanks to all of you, it worked. We found a home.

The Status of Things

I guess we really meant it when we said we wouldn't update this blog until there was something to report. There's almost something, so what the heck, here's what we've been up to in the nearly two weeks we've been silent.

At 10:00 am this Monday morning we are meeting a surveyor at a piece of property we are in the process of buying. There is one last bit of boundary detail that we want hammered out before we affix our very important initials and signatures on a thousand pieces of paper that will finally make this 4.7 acre piece of land and lovely house our home. We made a ridiculous full-price offer on this place, and realized later that it was a little like proposing marriage after a single riotous speed date. But we've gone back and continued to fall in love with all the very good and beautiful things about the property and house. It's really surprising to us that we have no regrets about our impulsive affaires du coeur. Sometimes things just happen that way. It's very much like the beginning of our own marriage! So we proceeded.

Still that's all we're going to say about it at the moment. Things have a way of falling apart or blowing up or disintegrating even with the very best intentions. So, just wanted to say hello, we're still here on earth watching the birds, jack rabbits, and deer. All is well.

Above photo is of a Pileated Woodpecker we heard and then spotted on the property. A very good omen we thought. We're not even going to mention the heron we saw in the pond... Ooops!

Wordless Wednesday: Sunday Afternoon; Tuesday Morning

We're fine here. Opened escrow on another house. Completely in love, like the best rebound love affair for an aching heart. This one has the most amazing potential for working out. We're happy. When we feel more secure we'll post more photos. Now you see this: a spring day on Sunday; a winter day on Tuesday.

Oh, winter, will you ever let us go?
Yes, winter answers, yes I always do.


PS: Roger trimmed his beard, but has not cut his hair. The cautious optimism of true love.

A Slip Twixt the Cup and the Lip

Ah, just when we thought it was safe to be dreaming about our new home, we learned this morning that the well in summer produces less than a gallon a minute. If someone were trying to build a house on this property now, it would not qualify for a permit. Now it's likely that a well test today would show a higher production because of the winter rains, but in the summer when we would need a lot of water for our dream gardens, the water would simply not be available. So, we've decided to not buy it. Fini.
So, back to dreaming about something we haven't yet found. In the meantime, here are two photos of a rainbow that showed up in the woods behind our house. After yesterday's crazy snow began to melt and the sun burst through in a dazzling blue sky, the rainbow appeared. It's an interesting phenomenon, this little rainbow in the trees. I've only seen it once before, and it was here in this backyard last month. None of my google searching shows me anything quite like it.

What News, Horatio?

There is news, and so I can write. We have in fact entered escrow. Isn't that an amazing thing? We made a ridiculously generous offer to keep the property from being foreclosed. The bank said "okay" and now we are in escrow. It's kind of like being engaged to a bad person who you don't really love, but whose promises have the potential of being good, and with a kiss could turn into a princely thing. The wariness of present day real estate is a daunting thing. A hall of mirrors, a trickery of wishes, desires that render us vulnerable. Still, we are positive that the outcome of this particular dance with the demons will be safe. If the transaction actually closes, we will emerge unscathed with land to garden and a place to put chickens, sauna, solar generators, pond, and game cam.

Roger, true to his commitment, is still not cutting his hair or beard until escrow closes.
One day we looked up the road. It was foggy. We were socked in and we could not see the future.
One day we looked down the road. The sun poured like fire that lit the western sky and rendered the pavement and trees in a halo of sensual reality. We could see a welcoming promise.

We have a pest inspection Friday; well inspection Monday; house inspection Tuesday. If all goes well, we could conceivably close escrow on the 12th. We are cautiously optimistic. Still, we are realists down to our toes.

We never sleep.