Mom Never Did Drywall

The first eight eggs of the new season are washed and tucked away in the fridge; I collected two of those eight this morning after driving the trash down to the bin at the end of our driveway. On the way back I let out the layers, and checked the fluffed-up pine shavings in the far corner of their coop—two light brown unfertilized ova encased in smooth hard shells were resting in a chicken belly-shaped nest. I scooped them up and put them in the right side pocket of my hooded flannel jacket, with some encouraging words for the other layers to match or surpass their co-workers’ morning donation to our breakfast menu. I climbed back in the front seat of the truck (no easy trick with two fresh eggs in that pocket), and finished the short trip up to the house. We’re well on our way to quiche and scrambled season, a stretch of time that lasts through November. Another reason to love spring.

The mud room renovation continues to chug along, with setbacks that include but are not limited to old house bones and the previous owners’ attempts to fix them, and our own old bones that aren’t used to 10-hour physical labor jobs. I’ve renewed my ability to mud and tape, using that necessary feathering technique with the joint compound 6” knife blade, and am noticing that my wrists hurt more than they did when I was doing this in my 20’s. Go figure. Patrick and I have both remarked this past week how nice it will be to go back to our day jobs where we can sit for a few hours at a time, and nothing we put our hands to will require feathering or ladders or a three-Advil slam dunk as our after-dinner cocktail. I’m not looking forward to all the emails that await me at the office, but my desk chair? It has all the anticipation of a first date with Sting.

During this whole renovation, whenever I could catch a few 15-minute breaks, I’d wander into the downstairs guestroom which doubles as an art studio, and put my hands to gentler work that had guaranteed faster results. The projects awaiting me there involved colorful cardstock and book board, permanent double-sided tape, decorative-edged scissors, old bits of sparkly vintage costume jewelry, and unlimited imagination. I went easy on myself this week, nothing as elaborate as a full-size Lakota star quilt, and found great delight making little jackets for sticky note pads (a volunteer at a recent training made some and gave them as gifts to all the participants and us trainers too). I embellished them with the appropriate bauble from my stash and sat back to admire the growing pile of accomplishment. It’s an easy craft, and a great excuse to visit both the office supplies store AND the closest Michael’s, a rare nirvanic treat I don’t experience that often in one day. So now I have twelve newly-encased sticky note pads, and am deciding what I’ll do with them.

That seems to be the way with the art I create—what next, after the production line stops and the factory lights are turned off for the day? I tend to give my creations away rather than arrange a scheme to sell them (though I have no values-based objections to doing so. It’s a selling setup and maintenance issue; having an online store is work, as eBay has taught us these past two years), and enjoy amassing a tidy supply of hostess and birthday gifts to have on hand when the occasion arises. But even without that as an outcome, I would still make sticky note covers, handmade journals, bed quilts and table runners, and small canvas paintings to rest on small wooden easels because I get lost in the process of creating. It’s neat to turn an idea into something tangible albeit frivolous or without practical purpose. I have Frasier or Downton Abbey reruns going in the background, or an 80’s playlist with me on vocals, and I know that heaven is real and the mud room can wait another fifteen minutes. Call it economical therapy, or meditation, or your other favorite nurturing word. The outcome drinks from the same river of possibility and satisfaction.

I grew up with the arts within arm’s reach. My mom was a music teacher before she had the first of her five children, dad loved listening to classical music and opera while he paid the bills in his den, and my siblings and I can all sing. On key. Between us, we can play the guitar, drums, mandolin, piano, and if pushed, a rather dicey-sounding harmonica. Almost Ohio’s answer to the von Trapps (almost). Dad was also a huge PBS fan, and mom would sketch in the margins of her crossword puzzle books while her mind wandered around hoping to find that six letter word for “stays away from” (it’s “avoids”, in case you’re working that same puzzle). Mom never claimed her sketches as art, or even talent, and it made no sense to me, as I needed tracing paper most of my childhood to get my version of a horse to actually look like a horse (you should also know that I can’t read a note of music. I learned everything I know on the guitar by ear and hand position observation and copying).

But mom was special and other-worldly, guided by muses I have yet to meet. She could draw on demand or from boredom with equally-stunning results. Once, during one of his many rebellious streaks to vex his more conservative father, Patrick asked mom to create a tattoo template that captured his high school nickname “Running Fish” (don’t ask), and she delivered in spades. In fact, one entire crossword puzzle book seemed to be a study of the many variations of “Running Fish”, with a range of detail from coloring book-simple to stained glass window complexity (Patrick never did get that tattoo, but how nice to know that we have the sketches if he ever changes his mind). What joy it was to find a stack of her artwork after she passed, drawn randomly and with gorgeous precision on the back of an old phone book, or on a scrap of grocery list paper, or an envelope containing a birthday card. On the latter, she would take the first letter of our names and morph them into the most fantastical creatures, then finish the rest of our names with a flourish. We saved the envelopes in addition to the cards; we knew what treasures they were. As I grew older, I spent more time looking at the envelope than what it contained. I think she was fine with that.

Looking back, I realize that creativity was the fertile soil in which I was raised and coached through life. The hand-held lessons were just as meaningful as the more abstract ones (dad was a brilliant psychologist and employed his creative juices toward the rebuilding of someone’s confidence or emotional agility), and there wasn’t much, if any, focus on perfect results. We got the occasional parental lecture on “hard work = satisfaction”, but my folks were just as comfortable with art as play for its own sake. On those occasions when I wanted perfection, I’m sure I was frustrated by my limitations, but thankfully, no one raising me let me dwell in that place for long. It was “climb up and sit next to me at the piano while we go through the Reader’s Digest book of songs”, or watching through the cracked open den door as dad conducted his own private symphony using his check-writing pen as a baton. Those are the memories that fortify my creative impulses, and pull me into the downstairs guestroom/art studio in between snapping scored drywall sections and sanding down the edges.

I’ve honed my mud-and-tape feathering skills this week, and I feel good about that.

And I have an impressive stack of jazzed-up sticky notes if you’re interested.

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.