What's going on with Casey Grimes?

I'm finally going to tell you

Hey,

You may know the feeling. Life is moving along and you’re doing the things you have to do, or the things your parents make you do, and the things you want to do—within reason. Going to school, going to work, seeing friends, enjoying the weekends.

Then all of a sudden, everything changes. All the things you were doing without too much trouble become obsolete and the new tasks feel harder. Better, maybe, but harder for sure and kind of weird. Your life has taken a big turn and you haven’t got your head around it. Challenges are coming at you fast, or maybe you’re a step slow, or could it be both?

I thought I’d write this a little after Christmas. Then New Year’s seemed like a good window. Now it’s hard to believe it’s March, and my favorite part of the sports year is about to begin.

What’s going on with Casey Grimes?

I’m finally going to tell you.

There were two feet of snow on the ground in Kansas when I started writing this letter. As luck would have it, this was the same weekend we were scheduled to move. You may remember I have a lot of kids—four boys and two girls if you’re counting. That explains why our family owns about 2000 stuffed animals which required a total of four moving trucks and two trailers to make the move to our new house in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

But first we had to shovel our Kansas driveway and eighty feet of our street so we could get the moving trucks in and out. This was back in January. So we did all that shoveling and salting and our neighbors complained about us having a trailer in the street. Complaining about us was one of their favorite things—they’re gonna have a lot of extra times on their hands now. Then it snowed again.

We pulled the snow shovels back out.

I’m not even going to talk about what it was like to pack up our entire house, including a garage full of Casey Grimes books on pallets, and our huge family library of kid books and classics and mystery stories and theology and philosophy (books weigh a lot), and more boxes of “keepsake clothes” than you would think possible. No, I’m not going to talk about that.

I also will not explain how we staged our outdoor gear and garden equipment by the driveway for easy loading and instead it got covered in snow and frozen in place. I also won’t spend time on how we packed my wife’s mom’s house into a moving truck as well, just to make things extra challenging.

I don’t think we would’ve ever made it out of there except we got a lot of help from family and friends over several crucial days. The morning of January 13, a small fleet of moving trucks and trailers left the Kansas City blizzard zone and headed south in search of a better life.

Unfortunately, they’d also had record setting snow in Arkansas. But six hours later, we’d all arrived at the new house without anyone getting stuck or going off the road—that would happen later.

Allow me to give you some advice. Don’t move in a blizzard if you can help it. Because unloading trucks and trailers in snow and ice is not any more fun than loading them the first time, especially if your seller’s agent happens to be dishonest and lies to you about where the house keys are so the moving crew is stuck outside for extra hours.

Despite conditions, our team took a big chunk out of the unloading before it got dark. The following day, after some more heroic work, my brothers Daniel and Johnny and my bro-in-law David headed back to Kansas.

We were on our own.

Suddenly being on your own in a house in the woods is a weird feeling. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe it finally happened even though you spent years fighting to get there. It’s a lot to take in. On the other hand, the cold furnace and the empty propane tank and the broken locks and dead lights aren’t gonna fix themselves. Then there’s the storage crisis—boxes everywhere, and more stacked in the carport getting snowed and rained on. Which boxes will be ok in the elements and which ones are going to rust and melt?

Plus the book problem. The previous owners must have owned about five, and kept them on a windowsill. We can’t keep ours stacked in the dining room forever.

For the last six weeks, I’ve been building shelves, clearing drainage ditches, mapping the crawl space under our house and fixing all sorts of stuff. I’ve been hustling and putting on muscle but also creaking a bit and collapsing into bed at night.

When it stops snowing and raining, we’ll get a concrete slab poured and build a garage so we can deal with our storage crisis. That will be a big step forward. For now, we’re living with chaos—and we haven’t even started painting yet. There’s a lot of beige in this house, and as you know if you’ve read Dark Sky’s Ashes, that’s a condition that will not stand.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. What does it mean for Casey Grimes? Well, you might think all the fixing and building could make it hard to write, and you’d be right. Progress on the new novel, Casey #5, hasn’t restarted yet. To be totally honest, I haven’t opened that file on my computer since we moved.

However, there is good news.

A small side project has been in the works and it’s 99% done. Inspired slightly by the snowpocalypse we survived, the new short story will be available for you to read within days. Absolutely free, as a thank you for being a Casey Grimes fan and Sylvan Spy subscriber.

You won’t find this one anywhere else, so keep an eye on your inbox. I’ll be in touch again soon, very soon, right after I put the finishing touches on the short story.

But first, if you live in wooded country, you’d better keep an eye out for WarHogs. Yeah, even in winter. You’d think pigs would avoid snow if possible, but their mottled, ugly hides must be pretty thick because they don’t seem to mind. We got an unpleasant surprise when we found cloven hoof prints on the ridge behind our house. It looks like the swine have been keeping an eye on us. They may be hideous but they’re not dumb—and you sure don’t want to be caught on the ground by a herd of them. Those foot-long tusks and scythe-like dewclaws can go through guts like a hot knife through butter.

Stay vigilant.