At last we’re getting outa town. Seems endless, the process of tooling up to leave. But I think that both Lydia and I have done our diligence…and if not, too bad. Today’s the day.

Yesterday I weeded flower beds, took food to the soup kitchen pantry, tidied the domicile. Today I woke at 3:00, hopped out of bed, started on kitchen and laundry. Did dishes, scrubbed the floor, started laundry, took out trash. Gasp, cough.

I never want to leave. Don’t want to go. Put it off as if it were a death sentence. Then, finally, I make a desperate dash out the door, and once on my way, feel like, “Whee!!!”

It’ll be the same thing when we’re about to leave the farm. I’ll groan and moan, make a federal case out of doing final chores. The thing is…once out the door, once on the way, I’m all happy-happy-joy-joy.

I checked weather in the farm’s zip code. For the next ten days it’s supposed to be rain every day but two and temps between 55 and 76. Is this attractive? Well…I don’t know. One summer when we got there, we right away had to go out and buy warm clothes. Living in southeastern Virginia it’s easy to forget how it feels to live where people sleep under quilts year-round.

Will I be able to do my blog at the farm? Theoretically. I do pay for broadband internet, cable TV and digital phone. The problem is that the electric and phone companies there are marginally functional, always have been. Tiny power outages throughout the day, that’s how it goes. A bird sits on the power line? Brief blip in the electrical supply. No kidding. Very primitive.

Venango County, Pennsylvania, is one of the poorest places in America. There are no jobs for young graduates. Who lives there? A few old people, disabled citizens, those who after generations of this, know how to survive on nothing…and a handful of others. In the entire country there are fewer than 60,000 living souls. If I’m out of the loop while there, if I produce no blog posts, you’ll realize that I’m off the map in third world America, in the big woods, worried about bears on the back porch.