Are you insane...was the question asked by my Dad when I drove him down to see the ramshackle house of my dreams. Well, not actually, my dream house would set way back in the woods on a lake, with no neighbors close at hand....but we know how that story goes.But at the time, I wanted a little shop at the edge of town, I'm two miles out, so this was perfect...well his idea of perfect and my idea of perfect, well you know the rest of the story. The Pink Chateau was purchased.
Far from pink at that time, it was a drab brown, totally my color scheme, but my Daughter suggested painting it pink for the shop, hence the pink sign, Friend's Candle Shed. But I loved working in the house so much, the urge to live there was greater than the need to have a shop in it. So we eventually moved the shop to the city into the original Candle Shed and I was free to play out my fantasy.
A walk in my winter gardens leaves much to the imagination, but many of the gardens were left by the Grandmother that lived there before. Ancient tractor tires graced the gardens back in the day and would be shunned by most modern homemakers, but I find it so original to many old homesteads on the prairie, that I can't force myself to part with them. They're a part of middle class farm life in America. Most spent tractor tires were rolled into ditches or piled in the back forty somewhere.
But this intrepid homemaker planted sedum and violas in hers, to which some of the original plants remain and are fancied right alongside the rest. I shun mowing the grasses because of the wildlife and the pollution issues, but digging seedlings and pullin' weeds is a must, allowing the natural prairie forbs to exist on the sand(river bottom) plains in this lil' pink house surrounded by a Grandmothers bright purple iris.
When purchased, there was only a main two-lane highway in front of the house, but a new four-lane was being built...SOON. So the views of the fields behind my house were soon to be only a memory, however, the very busy 2-lane in front, would be abandoned to a service road, which is why I enjoy sitting on my porch, gazing at my six acres, a pie-shaped wedge in between two strips of asphalt...my testiment to Nature, a sanctuary of scrub for the fauna that once roamed freely on the plains, before the asphalts scared her surface.
So way more wooden fencing will shelter my views as time passes, shutting me away from the hustle of man in my lil' pink shack on the prairie...I feel a childrens book coming on...
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