The City Mouse in the Country

  So we stood there, my wife and I, looking at a train display in the window of a small bank, my eyes as wide as saucers as I watched the toy train chug around the track.   One of the cars had a moveable searchlight on it, and that brought back warm memories.                 My wife said something to me but I had already traveled back in time to when I was 8 years old and my brother and I were playing with a train set that took up the entirety of my grandmother’s dining room.    One of the rail cars on her train set had a search light on it too, another car had a missile that you could shoot up and into the tree; which was exactly what my brother and I were doing; trying to knock ornaments down.    Sort of looks like me.  Even has a beer.                 Even today I swear that every Christmas packages were as high as the roof as chorales sang of old kings and new and it always snowed on Christmas day.   Memories of my father dressed up as Santa year in and year out as generation a

      I decided that I could not let this holiday and year pass without comment.  I've started and stopped writing this entry three or four or five times now.  I've always done some sort of "year in review" for every blog I've ever wrote and this is no exception.        However I've only kept this blog since late September and really haven't done much in the way of "homesteading."      The question for me become how do I summarize a year that has been anything but simple?  How do you close out a year that has...to put it mildly...been anything but normal?   A year that frankly, I can't remember some parts of because they seem to exist in a dreamlike state?      It started simply enough, Sue and I were living in Florida and talking about moving home to PA, discussing about starting a bed and breakfast , etc.   Nothing that was to wild or out of the ordinary.        Our home in Florida had been off and on the market for the previous two years w