Flexing Muscles I Didn't Know I Had

In the living room just to the right of the old primitive blanket chest that serves as our coffee table, our window air conditioner unit rests on top of a wooden end table Patrick made during his furniture-as-art phase. It’s a lovely and sturdy piece, and he could tell you better than I about how he painted (stained?) the wood so many different colors, or why the drawer doesn’t have a handle. But he’s sleeping right now, and I doubt I could convince him to interrupt his horizontal morning bliss to add a paragraph or two to today’s post. Let’s be satisfied with the meager description for now, and a promise that I’ll ask him for the construction and finishing details when he’s more alert, and not bracing himself for another 8-hour day of muscle-stretching, marriage-testing do-it-ourselves mud room renovation.

We’re both off work this week, a mutually agreed-upon arrangement that centers on a long-overdue upgrade to the room off the kitchen, where the washing machine, woodworking supplies, and the window air conditioner unit share space with empty egg cartons, most of our plumbing, and all of our boots. Over the years, it has served multiple additional purposes beyond storage and laundry. We have fond memories of keeping day-old turkey chicks there in a round galvanized metal wash tub under a heat lamp until their larger pen was ready, and it’s unlikely we’ll forget the time two orphaned goat babies slept in a large plastic storage tub until they were big enough to rest their front hooves on the tub’s rim and climb out, hilariously startling the cat. I suspect most old farmhouses have a mud room or some other-named equivalent, where the more “works-in-progress” aspects of a family’s daily life could be curtained off when entertaining, or “put it here for now, we’ll get to it later” intentions eventually gathered cobwebs and dust until someone felt inspired to dig in and declutter once and for all. I’m smiling as I write that, because “later” and “once and for all” have yet to take up permanent residence here. They are extended houseguests at best.

I’m fairly certain we moved here unaware of what two people were capable of doing in the realm of home repair, until circumstance forced that card upon us. Now, coming up on our twentieth year as caretakers, I can bring back the right wrench from Patrick’s rolling red tool chest when he sends me on a fetching errand, lift the lid off one of the septic tanks (with assistance, as those are mightily heavy), start a fire using flint and steel and some char cloth, hook up the garden hose to the sump pump in the basement on an especially rainy day and drain the rising water from the crawl space where the furnace lives, and drive in metal screws while sprawled precariously on the roof of the turkey shed as Patrick cheers me on from below. Not enough to sell my services to our fellow county citizens, but plenty of experience to approach the next project with an expanded skill set and some rather plucky confidence. I’m less afraid to be here alone than I used to be.

So while Patrick sleeps, I’m prepping for today’s mud room to-do list: we’ll put drywall on the now-insulated ceiling rafters (really dry old wood that doesn’t take the screws well, stripping them before they rest flush with the beams) and walls, and study up a bit more on what we’ll need to mud-and-tape them seamlessly. In my brief stint as volunteer coordinator with Habitat for Humanity, I do have a blurred memory of watching a group of bankers do this one Saturday afternoon, but it’s less than helpful now, as the specifics of how much to apply and what it looks like when it’s dry enough to paint are completely gone. It goes without saying that I’m not the foreman on this project.

We’ve been at it three days now, and except for a brief case of the cranks yesterday while threading the electric wire through the large holes Patrick was able to drill into that dry old wood, we’ve partnered up well and are getting along famously. The time passes easily between us, we haven’t dispensed with the pleasantries (entirely), and laugh more than brood our way through any setbacks that an old farmhouse will naturally offer up when its secrets behind the warped brown paneling are revealed. I am also pleased to report that we have not uncovered any other relative’s actively inhabited den or nest filled with squirming offspring; only thirty-year-old dust and long-vacated neighborhoods with memories of behind-the-wall midnight scampering and gnawing. It felt good not to be in the evicting new landlord position.

For today, facing the drywall task is plenty. There will be a new floor as well, but one thing at a time. There are at least two levels to the current floor situation—one made of concrete that meets the out-of-square back doorframe, and one wood subfloor above a patch of dirt and gravel, atop which sits the hot water tank, the water softener, and the bladder for our plumbing system. The current plan is to install a floor that’s level with the one in the kitchen. But we’re still thinking through what to do with the wooden subfloor after that. It will be a step down, or at least a slope that comes with any variety of imagined “watch your step!” warnings if I want to make it safely into the living room with a load of laundry on my hip. Again, grateful I’m not the foreman here. I’ll fetch whatever tool Patrick wants as long as he’s wearing the yellow hard hat for this one.

I don’t expect we’ll complete the project entirely before we have to return to our 9 - 5’s next Monday. We have visions and plans to install a workbench below the east-facing windows, and find just the right set of rolling storage shelves to hold bins and totes of the various necessary bits of hardware, zip ties, foam brushes and chalk paint that are temporarily sharing living room space with the window air conditioner unit. There are weekends in our future, and, if the sun keeps coming up, we’ll have the chance to keep getting along famously like a couple of newlyweds as we put the finishing touches in place.

All I ask from the universe for now is that no other projects make themselves known until the walls are painted and that wooden table with the window air conditioner has found it’s way back to the freshened-up mud room without incident.

Sounds fair to me.

What To Do?

I took my new garden gloves for a walk this morning, for two reasons:1) there was a lovely frosty chill to the air, and 2) I always find something I need to pick up that I’d prefer not to touch with my bare fingertips (sludgy tires stuck in the creek bank, feathers dropped from a sharp shinned hawk, the most interesting fungi on the ribbed bark of a fallen black walnut). Around here, walks are as much about tidying up as they are meditative excursions. Now, tidying up 41 acres one walk at a time has about the same impact as tossing bricks in the Grand Canyon, but, with enough bricks…we do what we can in the space and time we’ve been given.

If you’ve ever lived on a farm, you know that the view from the front porch or just out the back door is a project in every direction. That’s caretaker security in the short run, and it feels good to be needed. Those tangles of grapevines aren’t going to unwrap themselves on their own, and there’s something immensely gratifying about giving a particularly stubborn one a strong, final tug and feeling it cascade down around my head and shoulders. Lesson learned: don’t look up. You can’t blink fast enough to dislodge that flake of vine bark from inside your eyelid. And your fingers will be too dirty to go digging in there to move it to the inside corner of your eye where you can nudge it away. When you’re on the job, you don't have time for such delays.

The garden gloves kept my hands warm enough, and it was nice to grip the cold metal handle of the scoop for the chicken feed with just a canvas degree of separation when I arrived at the coop to let them out for the day. Farm chores by nature aren’t known for the comfort they give, but whenever I can make them less uncomfortable, I’m there. Gloves are a rural necessity, and it’s not foolish to own a few styles (nitrile-dipped for gripping, brown jersey ones that are almost a nickel a dozen and disappear like socks in the dryer, thick leather ones for field fence work). Boots are also non-negotiable, and I like to line up the ones I have according to height, popularity, and season. Patrick bought me a nice pair of green knee-high muck boots when we first moved here, and their first time out on a walk right after a heavy rain, I nearly lost the left one in a soggy leaf-covered gopher hole that caught us both off-guard. Water from a nearby depression in the grass poured in as I pulled my foot up, and to this day, I can hear that suction sound clear as a bell.

As I surveyed the late winter landscape this morning, it was clear we wouldn’t be wanting for something to do in the weeks and months to come. Here’s our short list of projects that promise to deliver on sore muscles, weary bones, and that incomparable sense of accomplishment that only hard work can bring:

Tear out the chicken run and rebuild it as a fully-enclosed structure.

Drag the old chicken run pieces and parts up to the old turkey pen, and repurpose the lot of it into a new meat chicken pen, complete with fully-enclosed run.

Set up a new raised garden bed using bales of straw, and reinforce the cattle panels that have been staked into curved trellises for vining tomatoes, runner beans, and cucumbers to climb.

Clear out all the wood in the old old goat barn, sort and discard what’s un-usable, and restack the balance on the other side of where we currently keep the straw and hay bales, atop which rest a tottering assortment of antiques that MUST GO.

A full-on rabbit hutch cleaning and re-fortifying with hardware cloth and my trusty staple gun.

Add to these the daily and ongoing tasks of clearing and cutting up fallen trees to haul out to the sweat lodge circle and stack according to size and purpose, picking up branches before getting the mower out for the first cut of the season, cutting back those hopeful and tenacious blackberry vines that line the paths in the field, tamping down mole mounds around the front deck, sweeping twigs and stones and branches off the bridge, and relocating the lawn furniture throughout the meadow so visitors have places to stop and rest when we go for walks after brunch.

I am not complaining. In fact, writing all that down is actually planning, and I've just included you in our first farm project staff meeting of the season. This sliver of land we call home and paradise offers us a nearly-endless buffet of usefulness; it would be rude and ungrateful if we didn’t accept her invitation to tend to our responsibilities with a measure of joy mixed with “let’s do this” determination. We have no need to join a gym and pay for what she holds out to us in her generous green and brown hands: regular exercise, stronger and more elastic muscles, a free-flowing lymphatic system, and the best sleep we’ve ever had. I’m not sure I know what “bored” is anymore. And while I’d love to wake up each day without the framed yoke of the 8 - 5 work schedule resting squarely on my dutiful shoulders, I am fairly certain the non-scheduled phase of my life will not fit neatly into a traditional interpretation of the word “retirement”. As my late father-in-law Larry used to say, “retirement has nothing to do with doing nothing.” Patrick and I are in training for that now, as a cluttered mud room awaits, and, while the sun is shining this afternoon, the wood in the old old goat barn whispers a promise of reorganized satisfaction we simply can’t resist.

Now, where’d I put my gloves?

Housemates Remembered

Copper and Sybbie are curled up in tight round seat cushion-like circles on a vintage wide-armed chair in the living room and smack in the middle of the ticking striped comforter on the bed in the downstairs guestroom, respectively. The wind continues its howling song across the metal standing seam roof. Patrick is napping upstairs, not curled into anything that resembles a seat cushion, and the furnace just kicked on. Rabbits are fed and watered, chickens same, and the birdfeeders wait for the brunch crowd. Even with one less hour to start the day, it’s heartening to list what one can accomplish out of sheer necessary responsibility.

I've got that semi-groggy, turn-the-clocks-ahead feeling as the second hand rounds the noon corner, and it seems as good a time as any to recall some of the relatives with whom we’ve shared space in this home and land since our suburban ship landed on these remote rural shores. Here’s the list, in as close a chronological order as my memory can dispatch.

Week one:

Dead cat stuck to one of the furnace ducts in the crawl space-slash-basement upon arrival with our first truckload of belongings (we only noticed it when the furnace turned on. Ewww.). Removed by Patrick and brother Kevin forthwith before any further belongings were unloaded and arranged. I stood at the top of the basement steps, eyes squeezed tightly shut, holding open the trash bag. Drew the long straw on that one.

One starling who found her way into the attic off the master bedroom upstairs. Gently evicted through a series of door-openings, arm-flaps, and kind words in between said arm-flaps and the occasional well-placed profanity.

Three fuzzy black and yellow carpenter bees who landed with a startled “plop” on the stovetop as I was heating water for my morning tea. Scooped carefully into a blue plastic drinking cup, envelope from the propane bill slid carefully beneath the overturned cup to serve as a make-shift lid, and the whole handful turned right-side up as the three occupants buzzed frantically in circles around each other. Again, kind and reassuring words spoken as their freedom was restored approximately five yards from the front deck.

Week two — present:

A family of ambitious and creative mice who set up housekeeping in the storage shed out back (if you know mice, you know that this essentially consists of a matted and shaped nest of shredded paper, insulation, or other soft material, the primary purpose of which is to store their droppings). This particular family apparently wasn’t fussy about what they ate, as evidenced by the neon-colored rice-sized poop we found on every shelf of an old shallow cabinet, where the former homeowner had kept her paints. The droppings were a dazzling collection of sky blue, pink, green, and yellow, randomly scattered as if to make some sort of artistic point that we’re still trying to interpret.

One 34” black snake, coiled and sleeping beneath a repurposed hospital crash cart that Patrick gleefully claimed from a dumpster in a nearby town on his way home from work. The cart sat in the corner of the mud room by the back door, providing perfect cool cover for the snake, who waited hopefully for those Rembrandt mice to go on an adventure, crossing the short distance from the shed to the house with their colorful paint snack digesting merrily. We noticed in the weeks to come that the mouse population decreased exponentially, and wondered who was next on the food chain to deal with the snake.

Two rats who scampered above the drop ceiling tiles in the living room only when the house was quiet and still, making their travels even more pronounced and unsettling. Giving us our first rat experience, they performed all the appropriate rat theatrics (nibbling, making the ceiling tiles bounce in the metal frame sections during their rat fights) until we devised a plan to get them out of the ceiling and into a small metal lidded bucket. Said plan involved a broom, protective head gear, work gloves, and a flip of the coin to determine who would wield the broom and who would hold the bucket close enough to the ceiling to catch them as they dropped in. I lost the coin toss. I’ll let you decide which of those tasks was the less desirable. Rats caught and moved to an undisclosed non-house location.

One fully-grown and love-seeking male skunk who dug his way underneath the front deck and lived there during the winter-into-spring span of three weeks (aka mating season), making his presence known in episodic crop-dusting spurts, rendering safe front door passage impossible until Patrick pulled up the deck wood planks one night and used a length of 2” x 2” to disprove his theory that skunks are unable to spray with their tails in the “down” position. The skunk left his temporary hovel laughing, as Patrick, dazed, walked himself and the now-sprayed stick through the house, wondering where that odor was coming from and why it wasn’t going away. I moved quickly and efficiently from my napping spot on the couch to the Corolla outside, drove it to the end of the quarter-mile driveway and spent the rest of the night there, more or less stink-free.

Add to this list a series of egg layers (we started with seven, and through the years have had as many as 26), over 300 meat chickens, fifteen Bourbon Red heritage breed turkeys, 47 Boer goats, three flocks of pearl grey Guinea hens who, because of their resistance to roosting safely in the coop at night despite our vigilance and encouragement, disappeared into the hungry mouths of our meadow raccoons, precisely six stray dogs of various breeds and ages, a peacock named Sparky who cried out in loneliness every night his first summer with us until a female of his tribe picked her way down the gravel path, resulting in two offspring. We’ve also wrestled with wolf spiders as big as the palms of our hands, more carpenter bees, groundhogs who are too smart for live traps, and brilliant red cardinals (the birds, not the clerics). And lastly, Scout, our first beloved hand-raised kitten-into-cat, who owned us faithfully for seventeen years until cancer moved him to his permanent place beneath the hollowed out apple tree stump in the front yard.

It’s also important to mention the deer who have timidly left a line of hoofprints on the south side of Patrick’s workshop, and confidently blazed trails across the open fields and in the swampy woods, and the raccoon who wandered into the kitchen one afternoon (someone didn’t shut the mud room door all the way) and left clear evidence that a trash bag, carelessly left near the pantry, can offer up a snack or two. And how about the two bald eagles who made wide hunting circles over our heads, while we watched them until they were tiny specks against the bright white clouds in a robin’s egg-blue sky. And once, as I was pulling young grape vines from a corner on the east side of the house, a small brown and blue striped salamander who threaded through my fingers as I moved him over slightly to get to a particularly stubborn root.

I don’t think we expected that it would be just the two of us out here, and we had discussed the possibility of eating fresh eggs on Sunday mornings. But our suburban mindset wasn’t prepared for all of these fellow land residents. Patrick and I have no children of our own, yet we’ve mothered and fathered quite the menagerie over the past twenty years, and have had nothing less than sacred encounters with the other four-legged and winged relatives that call this place Home. For the price of a monthly mortgage, we have season tickets on nature’s 50-yard line.

Looking back, we wouldn’t change a thing. Looking forward, we wonder who we’ll meet next.

Humbled Again, and Stronger For It

Author’s note and invitation: If this is your first time here, and you’re wondering about the blog’s name, let me point you to the inaugural post, November 8, 2017, “Checking In”. It explains the title, at least. I also encourage you to keep reading posts two and three, “What We Were Thinking” parts I & II. They’ll give you a broader and bit deeper context into this writing venture of mine, and hopefully answer some additional questions. No matter where you dive in, though, I’m grateful you’re here. Thanks for reading!

Ok, so maybe it was referring to meteorologists as “weather-guessers”, or expressing a desire to be present at the beginning of a predicted wind storm with estimates of 58mph gusts. Or, if you believe such things, the absence of inconvenience for so long that brought that black walnut down during last weekend’s epic wind storm, missing our bridge by inches, and the upper branches of what we thought was a perfectly healthy tree (always more going on below the surface, or in this case, beneath the bark) bouncing just enough on the power lines above to send a domino wobble to the drop line attached to the house. At 3:30a.m. on February 25, that drop line was ripped away, brackets and all, and the LED emergency lights in the kitchen flashed on and stayed, as they’re designed to do. I was downstairs at the time, so carefully raced upstairs to awaken Patrick, who was already reporting the outage to the electric co-op that minds our power (damn, his paramedic training serves him well, doesn’t it?). He had things well in hand, so I went back downstairs and pulled one of those LED lights from the outlet. I opened the front door, shining a dim light on the power lines that now dipped across the front lawn. Too dark to see the rest of the story, I was hopeful we’d see the bright lights of a power crew truck making its way down the driveway in time for me to call in only a little late to work.

I was all poetic last week, inviting you to go outside and wrap yourselves around a tree to feel the power of that wind, and while I make no apologies for that, I sense that I may have invited the contrast that left us without power or heat for nearly twelve hours, hunching beneath layers of clothing and blankets as we waited patiently for the crews to show up and make it all better. When dawn arrived, the scene near the front porch presented another dramatic twist: the power lines had landed on our trucks. And while we didn’t see or hear any crackling or sparks, neither of us felt like playing the curious “hero” who would later be eulogized as a mostly smart person who moved to the country nearly twenty years ago to live a different kind of life. Me and my big mouth (or hand, in this case, as my words were written for all to see, and refer back to, maybe).

We’ve gone without power here before. In January 2000, we traveled to visit friends in Mexico, entrusting the care of our home to a friend who had modest handyman skills. We arrived home to find water in the basement, as high at the top step, which meant our furnace had now seen better days. He swore he didn’t hear anything, but did confess to wondering where the water pressure went as he tried to do a load of laundry. We stayed with friends nearby for two weeks until both plumbing and furnace could we repaired and replaced, respectively.

Then there was the Great Ice Storm of 2004, which coated everything in a dazzling couple three inches of the stuff, snapping the roof of our old old goat barn as the pregnant does gave birth at both ends of the semi-collapsed structure. We made do in the house with a couple of kerosene heaters, atop which I’d put a pan of water and some oats, to feel like I could still cook. We had a wood burner at the time, and a futon in the living room, so closed off the adjoining downstairs rooms and pretended we were newlyweds on an extended cabin-in-the-woods honeymoon (except I’d just had ear surgery and was deaf on one side for about six weeks, and Patrick was working at the local hospital, bringing home once-warm food from their cafeteria in carryout containers. Not quite the romantic atmosphere of our first legitimate honeymoon, but we look back now with the same stars in our eyes, which is rather sweet). We spent Christmas Eve stoking the fire and trying to toast squares of mochi on the grill of the kerosene heater. I don’t recommend it.

THEN, there was the derecho of June 2012, and I was on my own for that one. Patrick was in South Dakota visiting with family while I stayed in Ohio, working and tending to the animals we had (chickens, or course, rabbits, and possibly some turkeys. I can’t remember). It was the week of our annual Kids’ Grief Camp at work, the last day, and after debriefing at a local restaurant with some beverages, I had stopped at the hardware store to buy a couple of live traps to catch whatever or whoever had taken out the whole of our laying flock the night before. Said traps now safely stowed in the back of my truck, I stopped to chat with our neighbor Sherry, with whom we share a driveway and love of chickens, about the tragic loss, and how hard it is to keep the girls safe sometimes. We noticed the gathering clouds above us, but there was nothing alarming about what we presumed would be a brief summer downpour. Still, we each had things to do, and so we wrapped up our musings and I continued down the gravel driveway. Not twenty minutes later, I was hunkered down in the bathtub with a thick towel over my head, clutching my flip cell phone in one hand as gale-force winds plastered leaves against the west side of the house and sideways rain hit the siding like a barrage of bullets. I got out of the tub to look out the living room windows just in time to see lightning strike the thorny honeylocust on the ridge, splitting it in two. Back to the bathtub I went, phone still clutched in my hand. Four days of 100+-degree temps later, the lights were back on, and our large upright freezer had never been so clean. Or so empty.

So. We’ve done this no-power thing before. Twelve hours without heat wasn’t going to bring us to despair, but…the sight of power lines holding our transportation hostage did elevate the drama, and the wind was still blowing as fiercely as ever, making a sort of jump rope game of things, slapping into the sides of the trucks and then landing just inches away on the ground. After a responsible second call to the power company to ask them what they thought (would it be ok if we tried to move one of the trucks if the line wasn’t actually touching it? Please??), Patrick took advantage of a line-on-the-ground moment and moved his truck all the way to a nearby farm supply store where he bought a new kerosene heater. Once that was up and running, the temperature in the living room climbed from 49 to 53 balmy degrees. I could take off the scarf I was wearing.

It all ended well, of course. The power crew arrived just before sunset, pulled the line back up into place, and set off to relieve the next poor unfortunate soul with perhaps less blankets than we had. I showered while Patrick make huevos rancheros and paprika roasted potatoes. The chef at the Ritz couldn’t have made me happier.

My thinking is not so magical to convince me that a careless moniker written to tease a chuckle from my readers was enough to rip a drop line from the house and put a new heat source in my living room. But the whole adventure, like the ones before it, did adjust my posture to a more humble one, and reminded me that my perspective dangles precariously at times between the hard rock of reality and the tender elastic roots of poetic interpretation. I willingly walk into the balance of those two, and pray I stand a bit straighter because of their lessons.

As I write this, we’re under a winter weather advisory until 1:00a.m. Monday morning. Hazardous road conditions, one to two inches of snow.

I’m not saying a word.