We have a gravel driveway and part of a gravel front walk to the deck. The deck still needs a couple steps at the front to replace the 6x6 board we are using now and the dumpster definitely has to go. And landscaping will be an ongoing project over a couple years, I am sure. But it looks like a real house now, for sure!
We went down to Columbia over the holidays. They grow the good stuff in that area and they have piles and piles of it waiting shipment. 
It's a bit late, but now that the laptop is back, I can catch up on some things. The kids went for a walk and moved some blocks of packed snow from the street to just outside the door. It made me smile when I opened the door. I figured it was one of the local pranksters and only later found out it was my own kids. Nevertheless, I converted it to a snowman and there it sat for many days, as people stepped around it to come and go as we left, and there it stood sentinel while we were visiting the 'ota states.
Some of us are feeling rather aimless and useless this time of year and looking forward already to spring.
I 'went home' for the holidays with my family. But what is 'home'. In that context, it typically means the residence of ones childhood. For me, that is a ranch style house built in 1961 on a former corn farm in rural North Dakota. There is the house with its deck that my dad built surrounded by shelter belts we cultivated against our will as children and grain storage bins that hold the grain raised by renters now. Specific familiar things. Last year, my mother was in a nursing home after a surgery but we based ourselves out of the house at the farm anyway. It was technically 'home' but without any parents there, it did not feel much like home. It was a house, a convenience, a shelter from the weather with a refrigerator for keeping the Mountain Dews cold and beds for keeping our bodies warm while sleeping between visits to the people that matter. In January, when I went to visit my mother in the nursing home, I based myself out of her condo where she spends winters. Because I was only a few minutes from her room at the nursing home, that place at that time felt more like 'home' than the farmhouse had a month earlier. Even though it has no history to me as a childhood home, her things were there and I knew she would return to that place soon. This visit, when the farmhouse, the actual residence of my childhood, was closed up, we based ourselves out of my mother-in-law's house, and again, though I have no history actually living there, it felt more homelike than the empty farmhouse. All this leads me to believe that is it so much less about the place than it is about the people. 'Home' can be anywhere, as long as you are with people who you love and with people who love you back.
May your coming year be full of hopes fulfilled and dreams realized. 
While we lived as though we were poor people when I was a kid, there were a few things we never were without and fresh fruit was one of them. Oranges and grapefruit all winter long and apples in spring and fall and strawberries and watermelon and grapes all summer and other delicacies like pears and peaches and cherries when they were in season. Waiting for the store bought pears to ripen is a sweet suspense to see if they will turn out creamy and sweet or gritty and bland. But during the wait, they are a visual and tactile delight.
Happy holidays. May yours be filled with joy and the company of fine people and good memories.
We gripe and moan about the cold and the inconvenience of the snow but we don't mean it. Well, okay, we mean it, but we wouldn't give it up. Okay, we would sure give it up if we had the chance, but sometimes, we do see a good to it. This trail along the river is beautiful in spring when there are buds on the trees and frogs peeping and wildflowers under the trees. 
It is pretty in the summer with trees in full leaf and birds flitting about and lush ferns in the woods. It is gorgeous in the fall when the leaves are yellow and orange and the air is rich with organic scents and the grasses turn various shades of tan and brown. But in winter, layers of beauty add dimensions that cannot be imagined in warmer seasons. 
Depending on the temperature and the wind conditions and the snow cover and the humidity in the air, there can be frost or hoarfrost or snow clinging to branches or ice frozen in crystal droplets from branch tips. The river itself can be solid and covered in snow or glaze ice that reflects the blue sky or icy chunks piled up along edges of a flowing center. Tracks of animals and birds tell us there is still life out there and berries glow red against the duller colors of the bare branches and seed pods show bare and sculptural from stems along path. 
The trail in winter varies from day to day in subtle ways that only those with the spirit and attitude to get out there anyway will enjoy. Be one of them and bundle up and get outside today!
