The Winter Tree 2022 edition

I didn’t deliberately set out to take such a long break from blogging, but as events unfolded, it seemed, hmm, well, necessary … so I did.

-oOo-

First this happened …

(this video’s being a pain to embed into this post. If you could let me know if it’s working, that’d be great, otherwise you can watch it on YouTube itself)

It was only a short pootle from the BeeLazee campground, through town, along the highway, and on to a quiet street, where …

… oops, getting ahead of myself a bit.

We knew we needed to move on before the campground closed at the end of September or we’d be, almost quite literally, orphans in the snow.

Rentals in town were ridiculously astronomical, and apparently nothing was to be had elsewhere. But, just as Mrs Widds went on Craigslist and found our cottage on Widder Island, so too did she find us a house, on a quiet street, with an acre of lawn, (which I’m going to turn into a huge garden next year), and surrounded by mature trees.

This is the view from our front door, and the back – Tree heaven!

The trees, the trees, they stole my heart.

-oOo-

Even though we hauled in whatever we needed from the trailer, the house was so large (three times bigger – at least – than our little cottage on Widder Lake) we felt like two little lost socks in the Washing Machine of Life. Very disconcerting it was, after living so small for so long, (ten years in the cottage) and then smaller still in the RV.

Being on unstable ground for so long, (people with bad knees should not live in a small RV for any length of time – I’d far surpassed by ‘use-by’ date) I could hardly walk by the time we signed the lease and officially moved in, if you could call my hobbling along a ‘walk’. There are steps up to the front porch and off of the balcony at the back. There’s also another set right in the middle of the living room, (don’t ask me why they had to be in that particular spot – it’s a mystery) that lead to the downstairs craft/workshop, the storage room, and Mrs Widds study.

Hobbling up and down all those stairs was hard, painful, time consuming, and exhausting … however, we had our Winter home.

We set up camp in the living room and began to figure out, 1 – how we could afford twice the rent we were used to paying, (which is slowly sorting itself out) and 2 – how we were going to bring up all the rest of our worldly possessions from our storage unit 700 kilometers to the south.

U-Haul, it turned out, was U-seless … their business model only works if there are as many people needing trucks going one way as there are going the other. Unfortunately, all the U-haul trucks of the size we required were in Alberta, (the next province east of us) and weren’t likely to come back any time soon.

After literally weeks of not knowing if we would be able to even do the move this year, let alone before winter set in, a friend of the family, I shall call ‘Sir L’, stepped up to the plate with his 7-ton moving truck.

The catch was, (of course there was a catch, there’s always a catch!) we needed to be at the storage unit to help with the loading … 700 kilometers away.