I’ve been slowly coming to the sad realization that I might not be as “country” as I always thought.  I mean, I grew up in the country (mostly), and I like the mountains and streams and trees and things.  That counts, right?  And I’ve been faithfully watering the veggie garden at our new house.  A house that’s on a gravel road.

But then I went outside to weed the front flower garden.  The previous owner planted some really humongous garden beds all around the house, and they need attention.  And I saw this:

It’s a little bit creepy, right?  It was making a bee-line for something or other on the other side of the bed, and I left it alone.  I gave it a very wide berth.  I did eventually go back and get the weeds in that section, just to prove that I could make myself do that.  I didn’t enjoy it though.  Not at all.

That wasn’t necessarily an isolated incident, either.  There have been a wide variety of creepy crawlies in our new neck of the woods.  So yeah, I’m feeling significantly less confident in my skills as a country girl than when we moved here.

Honestly, I’ve been in a huge funk this week apart from the questioning of my country girl skills.  I needed something to make myself feel better in the middle of the funk, so I picked up my favorite teeny tiny hammer (a relic from single life–formerly used only to hang up pictures) and started to knock down the wall between our kitchen and living room.

Scott and I have been talking about starting the “big project” on our house full of projects.  I’ve been reluctant to start, because that means finishing, preferably by our self-imposed deadline of Thanksgiving.  The house really does work fine the way it is (was).  It needs a face-lift, but it works.  That makes ripping down walls somewhat counterintuitive.

I started the project anyway, ready to pull myself out of the funk one hammer swing at a time.  I will say that tearing down a wall was way more satisfying than running from creepy crawlies in the garden.  I think I might just go back to knocking down some more wall. I’m proud of my teeny tiny girl hammer, too.  It’s doing a great job.

See, first the small pile of rubble:

That felt wonderful, so the pile of rubble got a bit larger.  Sunshine peeked through to the living room from the kitchen window.  It’s just one spot, but it still made me smile.

And there it was.  I was smiling in the middle of the funk, and it felt like a pretty big success.