Apples and Nettles

Our First Year at Baggebo Homestead - Chapter 4, August 2023

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When I got pregnant with our daughter, we lived in a small cabin quite far away from our families. People where quick to tell us, that we would move home, once we had our child. We merely brushed the comments off as people being ignorant of our dreams and choices.

We had moved away from Northern Denmark, as far away as we could come, to stand on our own and break free from the limiting believes of the most rural part of Denmark.

I was not ready to give up my dream of independence, of moving far away and making a life on our own. In my head, we would be capable of taking care of a baby, because I was at home, and Herluf had started studying again for his masters which came with great flexibility in working hours.

There was never really a question of when she would begin in daycare. I wanted to be home, more than everything, so I was sure, so sure, that I would not need any help in taking care of my baby.

Mostly, it was Herluf that had pushed for the move back to Northern Denmark, back home to families. I had all these dreams, you see, of living in nature, on a homestead and taking care of our little ones, but Herluf knew, better than I, that we would not be able to accomplish these things without help.

And that very first August at our homestead I finally began to understand what he had meant.

The home in the beginning of August with the front porch in front.

In August the weather had shifted, and we were once again called outside by the bird songs and the smell of a good grain harvest that our neighbor down the road would store in his barn. Everything was ripening, and the leftover dew and wetness of July was drying quickly in the yellow summer sun.

Amongst ourselves and our visitors the big topic of discussion that month was our front porch.

The porch on our house was rotten, badly built and not original to the house. Actually it did the whole facade a major disservice, and personally I wanted nothing but to get rid of it.

Everyone we spoke to about taking down the porch had an opinion on the matter. They usually fell into two categories: 1. the dreamers, like myself, who wanted to see how beautiful the house could look without a rotten porch to bring the whole thing down, and 2. the realists, who said to wait another year or two to take it down as it would become very practical for storing firewood and for working under cover.

Since I was familiar with the building style of the house, I knew, that removing that front porch would be the best design choice as it would reveal the facade of a proportionally built home, like it was originally built. I also had a small inkling, that the original cobblestone would reveal itself under the porch as it was a danish tradition to lay cobble stone outside farmhouses, and there would be no logic in taking them all up to built a porch on top.

Needless to say, I was very keen on the removal of the porch.

It was only when I came up with the idea of reusing the construction to build a new woodshed, that Herluf was persuaded in the end. Then the idea did not only serve the design, but also had a functional advantage.

And so he began the task of removing the big clump of nettles and spiky berry bushes that had come from the forest edge in order to lay the foundation of a new woodshed, facing the south and sun rays that shined upon us in that August.

He called upon most of his family who now only lived a short way from us, to come and help, and they were eager to.

And lo and behold, under those rotten boards, buried under a thick layer of soil, was the beautiful and original cobblestone. Some time in the future some of it had to be mended, but for now, I was nothing but ecstatic with my found.

Herluf and his father is assesing the front of the farmhouse after the removal of the porch, while his sister is picking flowers with our daughter.

Together with his father and his siblings Herluf took down the entire porch and redid the facade. They built a new construction and managed to reuse the whole roof in only two segments. They took down the porch and rebuild it in that month, while they laughed, and talked, and worked together as a complete unit in the sunny days of that first August.

In the meanwhile I was sat on a carpet with our now 1 year old daughter, as she watched them work with great curiosity. In between breaks they would come sit with us, have a sip of cold elderberry concentrate and play with my daughter. She was shy in the beginning as she had always been, but she quickly warmed up in the sunshine, and soon her face was brimming with joy.

I was not fully there though, not fully present.

Whenever I started to zone out, I was watching the old apple trees in what was left of the fruit orchard, and I dreamed of what they would taste like. I knew they would be an old sort, that was probably planted by the original owners.

But they were surrounded by nettles, and I had no way of reaching them with my daughter on my hip. She still had not learned to walk on her own, so taking her anywhere meant to carry her, and that I would not be able to do whilst fighting off those high nettles. I could only watch the apple trees at a distance, go from green, to yellow and in the last of those sunny days of August, gold.

Before I knew it, I would be interrupted in my daydreaming. My daughter would cry because she had stung her hands on a nettle beside our carpet, and the crying would inevitably bring me right back to reality.

The truth is, I was completely drained and frankly overworked like I have never been before.

I was on the brink of finally finishing my masters degree in Literature. I had put it on hold for several years when I had become pregnant with our daughter and again when we had bought the house. But now it was time to finish what I had started, and in every nap my child took, I would be writing and working to be able to turn in my final paper in the midst of September.

I would still nurse through the nights, always on alert even in my sleep to make sure I could nurse her before she woke up entirely and would be impossible to put back to sleep, as she would do about every other night.

In those warm August nights I never dreamed anything, because I would simply not be able to sink into that deepest of sleeps where dreams occur. I only ever woke up to the stress of my child crying.

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