I stopped off at the property we’re going to buy the other day and was surprised at how different it felt.

It had been about a week since I’d swung in there….we don’t own it… so I haven’t been spending all my time poking around on the 7 acres yet….and it really felt different from what it was in the early spring before everything started to really grow.

One week of rapid growth and the vegetation had taken over.

I guess that’s a good sign….maybe it means that the ground is good fertile ground…but it was amazing how much smaller a “jungle” felt than when the property was a grassland winter savannah with bare oak trees on it.

When the ground can just do what it wants…and nobody is rushing in to clip and mow…it turns into a jungle pretty fast.

The house we live in now was like that when we bought it…vegetation taking over…fields full of Pampas grass, vines and thorns and trash to haul away….no windows, raggedy doors.

I forget that it was like that.

It’s a lot nicer now.

That’s encouraging.

Having done it once, I wonder if it’s smart to want to do it again?

Some of these mornings, I feel kind of tired.

I shouldn’t feel tired at the end of a pretty good nights sleep.

I SHOULD BE ENERGIZED!!

Pre-caffeine, I should be energized after sleeping….

But I’m not.

And here I am thinking about dragging my family into another bout of “tear apart and put together”.

That’s really kind of wacky.

But I saw this property with my eyes…and then I saw it in my head…cleaned out barn and fixed up house, path down to the pond…small dock….goats in the fenced in “lower pasture”…chicken house in the fenced in garden area…gravel on the mud driveway…bigger house on the upper field…running trail on the old logging road that cuts over to the old church…maybe a studio or shop somewhere on the property….and probably a lot more…a lot more that I can’t even remember….

I saw all this in my head when I finished seeing it with my eyes.

So my perception is kind of colored by my dreams.

I’m looking beyond what I can’t even see for all the green that sprung up around me….looking beyond to what I hope is still there…but hidden.

(…and now, the plunge of the french press and instant caffeine fueled lucidity. We’ll see….)

Maybe this lucidity is a time-released thing…I don’t feel anything different yet.

I think that I exist somewhere in the sweet spot between experience and naiveté… I have enough experience to know that I can do this…but not enough experience to know that I shouldn’t want to do this.

New construction is so much easier…so much cleaner. I would know a little bit more about what to expect. I could see farther along, maybe.

But to take something that was lost….gone…on the downward slope to abandonment…and resurrect it…now, that’s pretty exciting.

Maybe that’s what I see when I stare into the new jungle…a chance to make something good again.

I’m going to sit here and drink some coffee…and remember that it’s pretty exciting to resurrect.

Who am I kidding? It’s pretty darn terrifying to resurrect something in my head that I may not be able to even finance.

And to top it off, I can’t get this darn horse to act right…he won’t even start trying to push this cart.