Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

"I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster."

Catherine the Great

Today Wyldswood roars with machinery, punctuated by the sound of chainsaws and huge buzzsaws right outside the office window.

This is one of the last, most significant, and most expensive steps in setting things right again after the mess Idalia left behind eight months ago. The farm was home to lots of mature pines that day, and although most survived we also encountered smaller trees that had blown over and bigger pines that snapped off twenty or thirty feet up.

This was the view out our bedroom window my first morning back, a few days after the storm hit.

I've already chronicled how Issac, George, George's family and I were out here that weekend, creating massive burn piles of the smaller stuff. That process took weeks, but left behind brown, rotting, and dangerous snapped off, and partially-snapped off, trunks that required heavy equipment to remove.

After weeks of waiting, that day is upon us, and Scott and his crew are out there right now cutting down all those broken pines and creating new burn piles. They're moving pretty briskly, and it looks like they may be about done by close of business. Given that the equipment rents for something like $1,500 a day, that's fine with us.

Meanwhile, the facelift of the main house is about finished, coral cladding giving way to a clean white with pale mocha trim.

That's Beth's car out front. She's here on her day off helping George work on the party barn. Given that it's to be the venue for their wedding, both are motivated to get this across the finish line.

Peg's unhappy with the soffits, which were so weathered they couldn't be pressure-washed back into shape, and so the painters will be back out here (for a small fee) to paint those as well. She also decided the ceiling of the screen porch needs to be painted haint blue, so that's on the agenda for the same project.

It's all getting there. And what a transformation from the disaster we encountered when we first stepped back onto the property after liberating it in 2018. That aspergillum, and lots of cash, swept away all the bad juju, and brought back the liminal space Peg had created long before we ever met. Only better, I reckon.

And that last thought reminds me it's time to pay for this party. Back at it.