Our Plans for Orchard House

If the first day of spring seemed a little bit nippy, the second day was downright arctic.

March 21, 2013 started out normally enough, and by the time of Bow's afternoon snack, I was not aware of any snow. Bow was so nice to me that afternoon! He shared part of his snack with me.

But when Sword came home from school, it was already snowing, and  by dinner time, the snow was coming down strong. In the short video below, Bow was napping on a full belly from his snack of sweetened pecans, when I looked out the window at the snow.

When Bow realized it was supper time, he handed me the rug, and I went to get the meal ready.

The nuts left over from Bow's snack were part of his meal.

After Bow had gone to bed, I observed many of the sights around our property.

I went for a walk around the house and ended up sniffling a little in the snow.

You can see why I had the sniffles in the picture below.

Afterwards, I drove to Orchard House. This is what it looked like.

 

Orchard House was a house that I bought in order to house the interns who came to work with Bow. They were volunteers who worked for no salary, but they needed a place to stay. Many of the scenes in our Project Bow videos were shot at Orchard House. For instance the one with Carrie Stengel. Carrie was a Spring Intern with Project Bow, and you can see by the background that in those days, spring was really spring. But this year spring looked very different.

After the interns stopped coming, when I realized that introducing Bow to new people was not practical, for a time Orchard House remained vacant. We held a few birthday parties for Sword there, but on the whole it was a drain on the finances. Recently, I rented Orchard House out. That was a nice arrangement, but the tenants moved out unexpectedly, and again we have an empty house on our hands.

I will probably have to sell Orchard House. But until it sells, I have a plan of turning it into an internet cafe. It will be open during those hours in the evening when Bow is asleep. There will be free internet access, and I will be serving snacks like ice cream, coffee and hot chocolate. It will give me and my daughter a chance to socialize outside the presence of Bow, who sometimes tries to veto our choice of friends. But hopefully it will also add to our income, or at the very least help defray the cost of keeping a second house.

When I took pictures that night, on the second day of spring, of the swing at Orchard House, a strange optical illusion appeared in some of them.

Was it a ghostly apparition or an alien come to visit? Probably not.

By the time I drove home, the light was fading. But if our plans for an internet cafe go through as planned, we will be making that drive quite often. Hopefully not in the snow, though. Spring is bound to come eventually!