To Be Continued

The outhouse in our woods has to be more than twenty-five years old, and hasn’t served it’s original intended purpose for at least that long (we haven’t used it, not once, since we’ve been here, I can tell you that). It’s standard-issue: tall plywood walls, corrugated tin roof, one-seater, latch on the inside, and a thin horizontal rectangular-shaped window/air vent cut into the door about twelve inches from the top.

I don’t know exactly when our 1914 farmhouse celebrated the installation of indoor plumbing, but legend has it that on or near that indulgent and life-changing day, the free-standing privy was dragged ceremoniously (more or less) across the seventeen acres of cut cornfield and another ten or so yards into the woods to be used as a deer blind (the business end of the rifle would be poked through the window/air vent slit in the door—perfect, except that the user had to be standing if he wanted to get a decent shot at his quarry. Sitting down would have pointed the rifle upward into the trees, and who wants to sit in an abandoned outhouse aiming at crows? No one). Pinterest did not invent the art of re-purposing. Not by a mile.

Of course, on our inaugural land walk the week we moved in here, we spotted and explored every inch of that al fresco loo, swung the door back and forth on its rusty hinges, took turns looking through the narrow window slit while the other pretended to walk past the door in deer-like fashion to test the structure’s propensity for muffling sounds. If the leaves were dry and crunchy, and the hunter’s reflexes sharp and in working order, dinner was a single well-aimed shot away. We made up all sorts of stories about the history of this ingenious reassignment of place and purpose on the walk back to the house, most involving clever deer and those overhead crows besting the poor but hopeful rifle-wielder inside. Then we left it alone for years, with only the occasional check-in to monitor its condition. One spring afternoon, I yanked open the even more-rusty door and startled a ground-nesting vulture sitting on three eggs. We both reacted appropriately per our respective species (meaning, lots of feather-flapping, hollering and jumping about) and parted soon after. Who knew a simple functioning outhouse would have so many other lives? Re-purposing at its organic and creative finest.

We arrived here twenty-one years ago with the roots of a solid frugal lifestyle well-established, and were delighted at the opportunities this land set down at our feet to keep such a practice going. My parents understood the challenges of raising five children on a single income, and in our tender youth, we knew that the box of Carnation non-fat dry milk on the kitchen counter meant dad’s paycheck had been stretched to its limit that week. I muscled through the mushy dregs of my bran flakes anyway, grumbling a bit and trying as any seven-year-old can to understand, all the while dreaming of the triumphant return of milk in a plastic gallon jug the way the gods intended. But don’t let me paint a misleading picture—we were warm and clothed and loved and had three solid meals every day. Frugality was a helpful tool born of the marriage between circumstantial necessity and relentless creativity. Mom made it a game to invent something new by using what was ready-to-hand, and taught me everything I know about leftovers. On those days, saving money was an added bonus, not the goal in mind. I come by my adherence to thriftiness naturally.

In our first few months here, we came to understand that the land’s previous residents (who knows how far back?) employed their own frugal and creative powers to manage their daily routines, including burying their trash behind the shed out back (not environmentally responsible, but…frugal). Perhaps sanitation pickup fees were out of their reach, but they couldn’t keep every discarded leaving in a bag in the kitchen, so they did the next best thing. I suspect they tried to at least recycle their plastics, as evidenced by a mountain of milk jugs and soda bottles in the old hay bale side of one of the barns which greeted us when we arrived as prospective buyers with the realtor. But clearly, the pile outstripped their ability to keep up and just accumulated. Near the shed by the house, an industrious groundhog would regularly dig up all manner of items, from lidded plastic carryout containers (one with the chicken bones still in it) to toy action figures—some minus their heads—and shards of pottery. I cleaned a few of these up (the pottery shards, not the headless He-Man action figures) and glued them to clay plant pots in random mosaic patterns. I felt good about it.

During our initial tour of the house, we saw more evidence of kindred frugal spirits—canning jars, newspaper insulation stuffed into the cracks between door frames, and a barn filled with all manner of items dreaming of a second life just as useful as the first one. Rusty mattress springs, piano keys, mismatched Hartstone pottery and old ceramic field tiles all piled on top of each other, patiently waiting their turn at rebirth. I thought the tiles would make lovely landscape accents once I potted them with some nasturtium and ferns. Maybe that’s what the folks moving out had in mind too.

After all the closing paperwork was signed and notarized, we moved in and made mortgage payments on a home and acreage with a thrifty vibe, picking up where all the previous owners had left off. When the old dairy barn started to sag, we pulled the inside planks of gorgeous weathered oak and used them as wainscoting in our kitchen remodel (bonus: the cats can sharpen their claws on it and it doesn’t even show. It’s that old and that hard. So, money saved on a scratching post). Grapevines from pretty much everywhere we walk are cut down and twisted into wreaths that hang from the t-posts propping up and connecting sections of the garden’s border fencing. It looks rustic and decorative, especially when the goldfinches perch and pose. And while I know Patrick prefers to use virgin wood for just about any building project, he’s also quite up to the challenge of heading down to the barn mid-project to see if a scavenged piece of our friends’ former pool decking (treated and everything!) will do in a pinch. When we finally install the floating shelves in the living room, we’ll post close-ups of that final section of weathered oak, carefully ripped and cut, that the kitchen remodel didn’t need, with some objet d’art placed carefully and whimsically on top.

Giving things a new life, a different functional iteration, hones and validates the creative hum that pulses through each and every one of us. It’s our human tendency to keep the story going, to add new chapters by using that inherent creativity to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary (or at least something differently ordinary). I firmly don’t believe that some of us have this hum and some don’t, and I’ll lovingly challenge anyone who says “Oh, I’m not creative. I haven’t got a creative bone in my body” (see previous post entitled “Make Something” for more on this topic). Of course we’re all good at creating something. The question is what? And how? And when? And with what?

For some imaginative hunter-gatherer who lived at Naked Acres before we got here, the answers were:

Deer blind.

Drag it across a field.

After the new plumbing is installed inside.

Use the outhouse.

Soft Stories

Hanging primly over the open door of a yellowish grey painted primitive cabinet that Jackie gave me is a crib-sized quilt made from pastel 1930’s reproduction feed sack fabric and creamy ivory muslin sashing. The effect is charming, and if you’re ever a guest at our home, you’ll get to wake up to this bit of simple creativity looking at you from your comfy place in the antique oak sleigh bed (also from Jackie) in the downstairs guest room. I didn’t have anyone in mind as I was making it—no friend expecting her first child, or a niece on the way. I just found the prints cheering, and wanted to try my hand at something as simple as the pinwheel block pattern. I started it the autumn before I was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, and put the last hand stitch in the binding the following spring, after my thyroid had been shrunk into oblivion by less than an ounce of radioactive iodine. That was over twenty years ago; thyroid still gone, quilt still here.

On the opposite wall from the primitive cabinet hangs my first attempt at art quilting, inspired by a rather dark set of circumstances in my life that needed to be released from my broken heart and made tangible. It has all the elements of a good cry, mingled with the tiniest scrap of hope for healing and better days to come—a dark pine green fabric for the background, in the lower left hand corner, brown and mother-of-pearl seed beads stitched down with an occasional seashell to mimic the beach, and in the upper right hand corner, a rust-colored sunburst made from a scrap of upholstery fabric from which dangles a jet black crow’s feather I found in a cemetery in Quincy, Michigan. A curved line of marbleized pink glass heart-shaped beads connects the sunburst-and-feather to the beaded beach to portray the ebb and flow of grief. A length of ivory satin cord, the kind you’d see on a fancy throw pillow, wraps the edges in a soft but sturdy binding. Every time I look at it I see endurance and strength and the importance of knowing we’re all in the middle of some grand movie that is our lives. Best not to walk out before we see how it ends.

Somehow, the little misshapen patchwork pillow I made when I was nine, from squares of the wildest 70’s fabric you’ll ever see, made it through my single-digit years and survived clear through to the other side of my adolescence, college degrees, and former boyfriends and was packed away in who knows what box for who knows how long until we were reunited quietly a few years before we landed here at the acreage. Now it holds a dignified and eclectic place of prominence on my grandmother’s armless rocking chair by the bed (yep, that same guest room on the first floor. You’re really gonna love staying here, I promise).

In the late fall and right through until spring, I sleep beneath the quilt I made for my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. It’s full-size plus, hanging off the sides of the bed to hide what’s stored underneath. In the design phase, I asked each sibling and their children to select a die-cut fabric heart from a sample batch I bought (with no particular plan in mind) so that I could appliqué their selections to the quilt top and hand-embroider their names below these hearts, creating a warm and functional testimony to their love across the decades. Of course mom kept it folded at the end of their bed and refused to wash it for a long time, until I told her it had already been washed before I gave it to them. That old “save it for special occasions” approach…I was touched that she cherished it so.

In my closet upstairs is a lined collar-less jacket made from fabric depicting the manual alphabet in American Sign Language, each letter framed in its own box and set into a purple and blue batik-like ombré of rich colors. I bought yards of the stuff, once again with no plan in mind save for this reckless spark of an idea that I wanted to make something other than a four-sided straight-edged flat piece that someone would only see if they spent the night underneath it. So naturally I asked our 80-plus postmistress to help me. Went to her house a few farms away with my fabric and jacket pattern and iron and everything so she could guide me through the treacherous and picky steps of in-setting the sleeves (sewing friends, is that even the right terminology??). I left her home four and a half hours later with the jacket hanging proudly on the little hook just above the back window of my truck as I headed to the local thrift store to find the perfect shirt to wear with it. All because dad worked at the state school for the deaf and was going to smile broadly when he saw me wearing it.

Each room in our home has something soft and handmade, containing layers of perspective and stories as rich as any fully-funded archaeological dig. Sometimes I’m so surrounded by them, immersed in them, I forget they’re there and who I was when I first made that slightly off-kilter placemat, or put out my hands to accept the gift of two knife-edge throw pillows for our couch that still remind me of the dear friend who spent time selecting the fabric and poly-fil and squinted to thread the needle of her Singer some rainy Saturday afternoon.

In some practical part of my brain or heart, I know they’re just things and will probably outlive me (they’re all that well-crafted). But for now, on a chilly mid-winter evening, their warm comforting presence beckons me to pause and recall the relationships that brought them into being.

Not a bad way to close off the weekend.

Christmas Presence

It’s Christmas morning.

Soggy matted leaves underfoot make for a quieter walk as I head deeper into the field where the sycamores live. Shrouded in an east-coast-like mist, I can hear last night’s thin coating of ice melting in random and singular drops from the branches of trees that line the path; if I close my eyes and forget that I’m wearing two layers of everything except socks and boots, it could be an early summer rain shower. A red-tail circles and screeches overhead, skimming the tops of the black walnuts and mulberries in the meadow. I shift my listening from the melting ice drops to its cry, and wish I was more fluent in hawk. I shall tuck the sound away in my soul for later study and meditation.

Just about the time I reach the corner where the field meets the western edge of the woods, it’s apparent that Santa gave one of the neighbors a new 4-wheeler. I followed the revving motory sound as it moved from the road I couldn’t see at the end of our driveway some eighteen acres from where I stood, and headed east through the back roads that wind through our little agri-hood. The sweet morning silence ripped clean through, I still suspended judgment and criticism, imagining the rider’s happiness spreading across his or her chilled and rosy cheeks, and let the engine’s roar fade as I pulled my attentive ear back to the hawk-song and ice-melt. It’s a skill I learned back in the 90’s when I was hard-of-hearing and heading toward deaf. Whenever the audio around me was too mumbled and indistinct, I could easily retreat to the silence within and stay there for moments or longer, until someone invited me to return to the conversation I’d just left. A couple of surgeries in 2004 slammed me back into a noisy and cacophonous world, and I’m not complaining, mind you (the first woodpeckers of spring still top the list of sounds I cherish when winter’s snow-muffled peace gives way to the party that IS new life on this land we love), but I emerged from the post-op experience with a new appreciation for one sound at a time, and a volume control in the capable hands of nature. I remember asking Patrick to stop by the gun store on our way home from a surgery follow-up appointment so I could get some earplugs. The look on his face…we just spent $60k (a grand and humorous exaggeration) to fix your hearing and you want to muffle the sounds?? He’s a patient soul; even got me a little plastic carrying case for them.

In the twenty years we’ve been here, I’ve noticed and willingly surrendered to my hunger for silence and solitude. Of course nature will do that, if we’re out in it long enough and often enough. I’m not the one to say, but wonder how that inner evolution has changed the way I carry myself around other humans. I’d enjoy hearing that I’m calmer, more respectful, patient and a better listener (please feel free to use the Comments feature on this blog to confirm that; private message me if you think I’ve got more work to do), or that I’ve at least moved the needle on a couple of those.

There are so many good teachers who share the acreage with us. A red tail hawk will perch unmoving for hours on a branch above the creek bank, its head bowed in almost-prayerful concentration as it waits for some future nourishment to crawl though the grasses. The cottonwoods to the west stand straight and towering as the wind sets their leaves to a dangly dance, and I notice the contrast of movement alongside stillness in the same living being. Much like us, I suppose, as our thoughts spool along in random noiseless travels while our hands rest quietly in our laps during a meeting, a sermon, or that cherished pre-dawn meditation practice that will shape the hours of the day ahead.

For reasons that are not my story to tell, I spent this Christmas morning alone with the land’s teachers. No gifts to unwrap, no holiday brunch around a table with others. And not much noise (the 4-wheeler’s intrusion now forgiven and nearly forgotten) save for melting ice dropping onto soggy leaves below my feet and the morning song of a hungry hawk above my head. This year, the best gift the land gave me was a lesson about being, not doing.

My heart is already writing the thank you note.

Why Today is a Great Day

I’m making a more deliberate effort to pay attention to my morning first thoughts and first “self-talk” of the day, and it’s been an alarming wake-up call to action, a clear invitation to soften the inner verbal blows I land on my own chin.

I don’t know how common (normal?) this tendency is; perhaps I’m in the small group of folks who awaken to mostly negative thoughts and a short list of self-critical observations, most of which consist of an age-appropriate checklist of what hurts, what aches, what needs to be stretched, and admonishments to exercise more and longer, eat better. You can see how this might not set the best tone for the day ahead. A now-deceased but at the time older relative used to call this her own personal “organ recital”. In my youth, I laughed at her choice of words. I’m not laughing now, and at a loss for a better way to describe it.

But this morning, after a few weeks of mostly nonjudgmental “noticing” what I think and say to myself at the start of each day, I interrupted the monologue with these equally-valid and more encouraging observations:

I can get up and out of bed without assistance.

My sinuses are clear.

Not one of the cats missed its aim in the litter box last night.

I cut an apple for breakfast without injury. I fed myself.

The faucets in the bathtub worked predictably again, and the water was pleasantly warm.

The nine-year-old kitchen remodeling job still looks fresh and cozy. There is simple and edible food in the fridge.

My husband loves me and is faithful still, 26 years and counting. We kissed goodbye this morning and said “I love you” to each other. Again. 26 years and counting.

I have gainful, meaningful work, good health benefits and nurturing relationships with most of my co-workers.

The furnace works. So do the heaters in both of our trucks.

I didn’t back into the used trailer Patrick just bought and parked at the bottom of the driveway.

The full moon shining through the bones of the trees was stunning on my way down the porch steps, and through the bedroom window before I even rubbed the dreams out of my eyes.

No near misses on the commute into the city for work. I wished my fellow drivers a good day doing whatever they needed to do, instead of seeing them all as reckless competition for lane-changing privileges.

Due to a technical glitch, I wasn’t able to get into the office using my key fob, but had a warm vehicle to sit in until help arrived.

My back doesn’t hurt today.

The north wind isn’t harsh and punishing, but crisp and refreshing.

I can still remember the sound of my dad’s laugh, and the shape of my mom’s mouth when she smiled.

I can hear, and see, and food tastes good, and my hands have finally warmed up.

The septic repair wasn’t as extensive as we feared (truly—Feared) it would be.

My socks are dry and clean.

I actually enjoy flossing my teeth.

Thanks to two humble parents, I have lived the bulk of my life in the “it doesn’t take much” column. And while it’s not my call entirely, to describe myself as easy-going, I do check that now and again, and ask for input from those in the Inner Circle whose opinions carry the most weight. So far, they’re on board with my self-assessment and love me enough to tell me when I’ve overstepped the mark. Let’s add that to the list: I have people in my life I can trust to tell me the truth without doing damage.

I have no idea what you’re doing or where you are in your life’s challenges as you read this. I can only hope that your inner dialogue is more kind than critical, more gentle than punitive, and more curious than resigned. Life is challenging enough without our piling on as if we could handle a heavier load, or worse, deserve it.

Leave the judge and jury behind today. They could use a day off. And so could you.