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Sleepless Thoughts

taxes both body and mind.

lmost every morning I awaken too early, my brain overwhelmed by the minutiae of our task, a frothing sea of details: materials I need to compile, people I need to call, tools I need to fix. And on top of that, the usual tasks of the season: cows to be milked, calves and pigs to be fed, the meat birds moved to a fresh swath of pasture grass. Every morning, we check the blueberries, ripening slowly in the midsummer sun; soon we’ll pick them by the gallon. For a time, I lie still, pushing my eyes shut, hoping to trick myself back into sleep, but my body feels as restless as my mind, and I soon rise into the dark for coffee and food.

If our project feels overwhelming at times, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Early on, we decided that we wanted to do all the things that we’d hired out when we built our first place. I don’t mean totally by ourselves; it was abundantly clear from the beginning that to build a barn and a house in a single summer—while developing the associated systems, maintaining our current homestead, and putting up our usual allotment of food reserves—we’d need some help.

We’re prideful—but not so prideful that we don’t recognize our obvious limits. Some of those limits are related to skill, some to equipment, and some to sheer person power. In automotiveperformance circles, there’s an old adage: There’s no replacement for displacement. That’s just a clever way of saying that ingenuity and technology can take you only so far; at some point, it all depends on the sheer size of your engine.

So yes, we have help (and amazing help, at that), but we’ve also taken it upon ourselves to orchestrate and participate in every aspect of site development and construction. Partly, that’s owing to finances—we simply don’t have the money to hire everything out in full—but it’s also owing to a base desire to understand the very minutiae that pull me out of sleep every morning in the four o’clock hour. Though we’d built our previous home (again, with help) and know all too well its myriad faults, we simply didn’t have the same familiarity with the systems that serve it. If for no other reason than that we’d know better how to fix those systems should they fail in the future, this time we’ve resolved to get our hands dirty.

The first big unknown is the septic and wastewater system. We’re fortunate that our site has perc-tested for a conventional, in-ground installation; indeed, we made our purchase-andsale agreement contingent on the perc test, since a mound system can quickly run north of $20,000. That means that the installation should be relatively straightforward and affordable, and we’re doubly blessed in that our friend Jimmy has recently purchased an excavator and is eager to put it to the test.

Naturally, we’re happy to oblige, and the machine makes short work of clearing the site, burying the tank, and laying the leach field. The septic installation goes more smoothly than I could possibly have dreamed—a day and a half at most—and, better yet, ends up costing us a full $2,000 less than I’d budgeted. Naturally, this imbues me with a vastly inflated sense

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