Where the Entertainment Lives Alongside the Bargains

Conversation between two employees overheard in a thrift store one October Sunday morning:

“I’m gonna be moving slow today, Janet. I rode the mechanical bull last night.”

“I hear that, Connie.”

It was enough to make me linger a bit longer than usual in front of the mismatched dinnerware from the ‘80’s section, conveniently situated right next to the open door of the store’s stockroom.

Unfortunately, the rest of Janet and Connie’s exchange was inaudible and I needed to keep moving lest it become obvious I was loitering and hoping for more eavesdropped details, or better yet, a glimpse of Connie making good on her declaration as she hobbled about the aisles, stooping stiffly to place newly-priced inventory on the shelves, groaning as she stood upright again. There’s a fine line between curiosity and “none of your business”, and I didn’t want to cross it. I frequent that store weekly (or used, to pre-pandemic). Plus, you know, basic human decency.

Years ago—circumstance and setting unimportant—a co-worker and I got to talking about human behavior. She told me how she enjoyed observing people in social settings and hearing how casual conversations took shape. Once, she sat quietly at a party and unobtrusively jotted down snippets of the exchanges going on within earshot of her perch. She then strung them together as one discussion and the results were hilarious. Fortunately, the friends she listened in on were good sports and eager to hear their individual contributions to the mixed up word salad she’d created. It quickly became a game for this circle of folks and I suspect they’ve archived some doozies in the years since. Given our present circumstances of more distanced and virtual gatherings, I doubt we’d get the same results. Zoom has its limits. Another reason to keep praying for an end to this pandemic.

We’re a fun bunch, humans. In any setting, we offer up what essentially comes down to our ongoing attempts to figure out the life we’re living and we occasionally accomplish this in the presence of unknowing spectators, also trying to figure out life. If you enjoy people-watching, what’s your favorite setting? For me, it’s thrift stores, hands down. The customers (of which I am one, and fully aware that someone may be observing me) are givers, representing a wide and varied swath of circumstance, background and purpose, as well as skill sets and word choices (spoken aloud if unruly children are present). In all my decades of shopping at thrift stores, I have yet to interact with anyone who isn’t kind or quirky, creative or just browsing. Sometimes we chat about the headlines, but most often we trade comments about the items we’re picking up, turning over in our hands, and then putting back on the shelf. At the store I (used to) visit weekly, one of the regulars sings gospel songs as she travels through the aisles, witnessing to everyone and no one in particular. She’s cheerful and harmless, and doesn’t ask for anything from the rest of us except a smile. I’d go every week just for that.

As a writer, there’s a bonus here—endless story prompts as I try to imagine the history of the items donated. The coconut husk monkeys, an entire rack of XXL t-shirts with the misspelled company name over the left pocket, the inevitable Blue Boy figurine (or painting) and the odd 90’s wedding dress. We donate items to the Goodwill nearly as often as we buy them, and it’s funny to see a set of plates we no longer needed sitting among the unfamiliar dishes that might once have held our neighbor’s dinner. We always check the price, nod in agreement that yep, that’s about what we’d pay for them now. It’s also important to note that every single room in our house boasts at least one if not seven thrift store purchases; let’s not even talk about what’s in the barn and the outbuildings. But where do those coconut monkeys come from? They’ve got “bad vacation souvenir” written all over them (just like the glued-up seashell sculpture I found in a tote in our attic a few years ago). And why doesn’t anyone want Blue Boy in the house anymore? Let yourself noodle around on that for a few hours.

Some weeks after I shut down our antiques business, I stopped by the Goodwill near our house on the way home from work and came across a complete three-piece set of Pyrex mixing bowls in the Gooseberry pattern. Not a scratch or stain on them, and after parting with $6, they were mine (the current price on eBay for the same set is clocking in at $152.50. Retirement plan anyone?). They are fully employed because I live in a functioning house, not a museum, and the largest one is the perfect size for making no-knead cold-rise artisan bread. When dough needs to sit for 18 - 20 hours, might as well look charming while doing it, right? But who donated them and why, I’ll never know. I’m just grateful they did, contributing a prize gem to my retro kitchen vibe.

I’d like to suggest that thrift stores are the great economic leveler. If we shop there, we do so for such different reasons it’s impossible to draw a hard and fast conclusion or establish any sort of sociological pattern. The act of buying anything second-hand stretches across the continuum of desire and need, and even those can be dissected into limitless variables until one wonders why one is asking the question in the first place. The answer doesn’t matter. What does matter is finding what we were looking for (insights and light humor via people-watching or that thingamajig without which we can’t repair the walk-behind lawn mower properly) and trading creative repurposing ideas with folks who just might be our neighbors the next block—or farm—over. When this pandemic is over, I’ll gladly return to the shelves and aisles of other people’s stuff, listen to a woman sing her joyful faith out loud without a trace of self-consciousness and smile knowingly in front of the coconut monkeys.

I just hope Connie is feeling better.

To Move a Chicken. Or Seven.

On the metabolic strength of a single hardboiled egg, three teaspoons of crunchy peanut butter, a Honeycrisp apple just about gone off, and a cup of hot organic green tea, I refortified the chicken coop. It took just a little over two hours by myself, putting me a day ahead of schedule on the plan to move our new flock of egg layers into their winter home.

If I liked beer, it would be Miller time.

I primed my energy pump on the pre-dawn walk around 17+ acres of frosty dead goldenrod stalks and naked sycamore saplings before sitting down to that humble breakfast and a few New York Times mobile app games (Vertex is my favorite, then Spelling Bee, and the Mini crossword). Most days that’s enough to make me feel virtuous about my daily activity level and get me out of the house on Mondays for the only day I work from the office. By the time I connect that last set of numbers on the Vertex puzzle to create the image (they give you a cleverly-worded clue, but sometimes it’s the opposite of helpful), I’m ready for a comfortable chair and some noble nonprofit tasks that don’t require boots or work gloves.

But on a Saturday morning that’s sunny, with seven egg layers in a pasture pen in the field just beyond the now-tucked in garden, my mission was clear and involved the use of all my limbs: upgrade their living quarters to a slant-roofed coop that would keep them safe and warm, and make egg-gathering in the spring so much easier. I collected the tools and supplies I’d need, put on my big girl work jeans and boots, and breathed in a gentle Zen approach to the work ahead. No rush, Sunday was supposed to be just as sunny and a bit warmer in case of work plan overflow, and by Monday morning no matter what, those girls would be moved uptown.

We have two coops, one we inherited and one Patrick built when we expanded our laying flock to number in the low 30’s. The inherited one is a beauty, made of cinder blocks and clapboard, with a charming double-slant corrugated roof and three cut-out windows covered in chicken wire inside and out. The new one took on more of a floating deck with walls design and a single-slant roof made from those wavy plastic panels one finds way in the back of Lowe’s in the lumber section. Patrick smartly installed a clear section in between two solid white ones to give some light and hope during the gray winter months (layers need about fourteen hours of light to produce an egg). Add two 1” x 6" boards for roosting at night and a floor all fluffy with pine shavings, and you’ve got a poultry palace, a chicken version of the Ritz with daily room service provided by the two-leggeds.

Both coops have been vacant for more than a year. The last of our meat chickens spent their final days in the cinder block structure before resting comfortably in the upright freezer. A weasel (or maybe it was a fisher?) took out all but one of the layers, turning the new coop into a crime scene of feathers and headless carcasses; we moved the one surviving girl to the largest empty rabbit hutch behind the potting shed where we could coddle her through the trauma of it all. After a thorough investigation of the structure, we knew it needed to be reinforced with all manner of hardware cloth and chicken wire to close up the gaps where a weasel (or fisher?) would flatten its ribcage to gain access.

I’m not what anyone would call a carpenter. My go-to tools for most construction jobs include t-posts, zip ties and bungee cords (you’d be surprised what you can build with all that). Time and weather had created larger gaps between the flooring and the walls of this newer coop, so closing those up was Job One. That meant chicken wire and a staple gun. I was up for it but needed to consider the torque it would take to deliver the staple to its destination. I looked down at my arthritic hands. Patrick was asleep and recovering from a disagreement he’d had last weekend with his bandsaw and two of the fingers on his right hand, so I was on my own (a rare short stint in the ER and six stitches later, we were back home that rainy Saturday with pain meds on board and a full pot of tea steeping on the kitchen counter. But here’s some added fun: guess which finger needed to be splinted? We’ve already gotten some great humor mileage out of that). I breathed in that Zen approach again, and not surprisingly, the job went smoothly. More than a dozen staples missed the target on the chicken wire screen door I installed, but I wasn’t leaving that coop until it was fisher, weasel, mink and stoat-proof. Patrick stopped by offering encouragement and his keen but skeptical engineering eye as I was attaching the tin-snipped edge of the wire to some nails pounded into the bottom of the doorframe. The design concept was to ever so slightly pull the wire down to catch on the nails, making it fully enclosed but removable to refill the feeder and watering can (we’ll see…).,I lugged the two bales of pine shavings into the coop, sliced them open, and kicked the chunks of fluff around just enough to cover the random “restroom” areas of the floor; the girls would scatter the remaining piles of shavings once their curiosity and instinct for scratching kicked in. The dining area set up on some old milk crates and open for business, it was time to get the layers from their pasture pen up behind the house and settle them in.

It went more or less to plan. I climbed into the pen while Patrick held the blue plastic tarp down over the top to discourage any panicked flight risks (the chickens, not me). I crouched down, talked reassuringly to them about their new living quarters, and then reached for their feet and grabbed. Lots of squawking and flapping (the chickens, not me) and I climbed out gingerly, holding a chicken in each gloved hand and maneuvering my way out of the pen with my elbows and legs (grateful for my morning yoga practice). Only two of the seven girls escaped and I cleverly lured them back into the pasture pen at dusk, propping it up on a storage bin so they would crawl back in to roost. By that time, Patrick was back in his studio making peace with his bandsaw, so I plucked them from the pen myself. Same technique, but a little slower having to manage the tarp with my head since my hands were full of chickens. Sometimes I think we should have a YouTube channel.

We’d been talking about this project since early spring. It felt good to see it done and working its purpose, without injury or permanent setbacks. Of course, the real test would come in the morning when I opened the door to the now Fort Knox of chicken coops to find them all thriving and thankful as only egg layers can be. Coming back from my morning walk before dawn, the fields all soft and frosty against a backdrop of cotton candy pink and blue skies to the east, I expanded my final orbit to include this morning-after inspection, calling out a cheerful “good morning, girls!” as I approached their new digs. They’re all fine, I’m happy to report, and I’ll refill the waterer after lunch. They’ll stay inside for a couple weeks to get them used to roosting there. That’ll give me time to design and build their enclosed “patio” so they can peck about in the sunshine and snow with nary a care about predators as the winter months unfold.

Best go check on our inventory of t-posts and zip ties.

I Like It When...

…the morning walk is more of a mosey.

…a hardboiled egg peels easily as I’m pressed for time before going to work.

…people care enough to confront rather than sidestep tension in a relationship.

…Bumper drops to the ground suddenly and rolls onto his back when we’re walking the field path, demanding affection. And does this every two feet.

…after a hot bath, I put on my red plaid pjs, get a blanket, and sit outside on the front porch in the chilly winter air.

…the northern flickers dangle patiently from the bottom of the red barn bird feeder and continue to eat and sway, and I’ll bet they never throw up like I would.

…books we’ve reserved at the library come in, and we pick them up at the drive-through window.

…a mini donut muffin recipe is wildly adaptable.

…not all the mail is bills.

…friends send me chocolate candy wrappers for an art piece I’m working on.

…I find that $10 Amazon gift card I hid for safekeeping and then couldn’t remember where that was, and can now resume wondering what I’ll spend it on.

…Patrick says “love that girl”, and he means me.

…the ginger we added to the chicken in the Instant Pot makes it’s presence known in the last bite.

…words and tears flow in the most cleansing way.

…Pam laughs.

…Maria finishes her sentences with “and all that happy crap”.

…the washing machine plays that little digital tune at the end of the speed cycle and it startles me when I’m alone in the house.

…I’m the only one awake and it’s dark outside and everything is possible.

…the first snow of the season feels fresh, and the last one feels like it really is the last one.

…every single leaf on the 41.1 acres of paradise where I live with the man of my dreams and we keep dreaming into the next twenty-seven years of our magical and humbling life hangs from its branch in complete stillness.

…my friend Ann texts me these really humorously irreverent memes and I laugh out loud at the most inappropriate moments.

…the PO box holds the key to one of the larger PO boxes, and the big package we were expecting has arrived.

…people read this far into one of my blog posts. And keep reading.

…Copper sits as close to the space heater as she can, or smoothly settles down on top of the register when the furnace kicks on.

…there are leftovers from any Mexican-themed dinner and all you gotta do is put an egg on ‘em and it’s breakfast.

…that one hummingbird hovers outside the studio window, looks at me, then at the empty feeder, then back at me…with that look in his eye. You know the one I mean.

…no explanations are needed.

…a book I haven’t read in a while is still as good as I remember it.

…I walk outside and the colors and bits of white clouds in the blue sky make me feel like I’m living in an oil painting by one of the masters.

…the vending machine at work has Veggie Straws.

…a murmuration of starlings shape-shifts its way across the outerbelt, and I take my eyes off the road for the tiniest of moments to watch them transform from a flat wall to an undulating moebius strip.

…the ground beneath the last mulberry tree in the meadow to shed its summer coat is covered with caramel-chocolate colored leaves and I pretend I’m walking through a most unusual al fresco candy store.

…a trip to the ER doesn’t result in a hospital admission, and we’re out of there in less that two hours, heading toward pain medication and empathetic caregiving cats and the dual recliner and…home.

…I trade needing approval from pretty much everyone for the less unencumbered mantle of vulnerable authenticity.

…I need a dictionary to make it through one of Michael Perry’s essays.

…on the morning walk, I lower the hood of my OSU sweatshirt and remove my unicorn headwrap so I can listen to the silence of the woods more clearly.

…there are enough ingredients to make a second batch of those mini broccoli Parmesan quiches.

Dear reader, fellow traveler and noticer of life, what do you like?

I’m wide awake.

You have my undivided attention.

I Can Turn It Down, But I Can't Turn It Off

Last night, I dreamed I promised to take my friend Jackie’s husband home after they’d spent the day with us and ended up leaving him in the red Tacoma all night in the driveway with the driver’s side door ajar because I got distracted by Joe and Jill Biden staying with us overnight.

I don’t know why he didn’t come back into the house (not our real house but an upscaled ranch-style house with a massive open kitchen and for some reason, blue gingham curtains) after oh, say, the first hour, or why I didn’t realize he was still out there until much later in the dream, but dreams don’t seem to care about logic and rationale like that. They’re mostly about color and action and the most unrelated characters coming together naturally to create a little story behind your eyelids while you’re stretched out flat. I really do love Jackie and her husband and would never leave either of them that way in my driveway, no matter what the distraction.

If people you know have ever featured in your dreams, do you tell them? I tread carefully into this territory because no matter how casually I relate the details, it always feels creepy or weird (although I can tell Jackie anything and she won’t judge me. Thanks, Jackie). One of my recent dreams included a co-worker whom I consider a friend (I think she does too), and we were in Spain, walking across the curved clay tile rooftops of the homes in a small town just so we could get to a restaurant that served the best seafood. There were families with small children and we talked with them about how beautiful the sky was that night, all blues and pinks fading into dark velvet with starts glittering. We ate shrimp and the biggest scallops I’ve ever seen, and there was fresh artisan bread—the kind with a crusty exterior that you tear off chunks of and dip in salted herbed olive oil. Little children ran around the tables laughing and enjoying life, and no one seemed fussed by it. A string quartet played in a corner of the main dining area, and after we ate, we moved closer to where they were so we could see how their fingers moved across the instruments. When I shared all this with my friend, she told me that a few years ago she developed an allergy to seafood and can’t touch the stuff now. But she thanked me for including her in my “beautiful escape”. That was nice.

Early in my twenties, someone once described me as having an “active inner life”. At the time, I took it as a compliment and perhaps it was, but I can see how it could easily turn in a different, less flattering direction. Either way, I still claim it because there is a lot going on between my ears, day and night, and I’ve given up trying to turn it off. Down, maybe, to a hum, but it never completely stops. Talking with other writers, it seems we share this trait and have learned to appreciate the both/and benefits rather than simply tolerate it, like an awkwardly placed mole on our faces or a toe that bends a little slightly to the left, making it hard to wear ballet flats comfortably. For a few minutes, I tried to recall my waking hours the day before I had that dream about my friend in Spain and the seafood, just to see if I’d had any contact with her that my brain stored away for later use, and came up empty. It’s fun for a while to try and trace back the origins of our dreams, but also pointless, since the brain does what it wants with all the data it collects and we have little control over any of it. She could have been waiting patiently in there for weeks before appearing as my dinner companion for the evening, eating food that would put her in a world of hurt while awake. I moved on, grateful for the ability to dream in color. I love that.

Recurring dreams are especially fascinating to me, though, and I spend more than a few minutes dissecting them for clues about where I need to pay more attention in “real” life, or what lessons they are trying to teach me about something that happened to me in the weeks or days leading up to that particular night’s slumbering episode. I watch for themes: teeth falling out of my mouth into my cupped hands, running but getting nowhere, and any that include celebrities (I have a few that keep coming back—Sting, Keith Urban, Michael J. Fox. Nothing romantic or sexual, but certainly involving a deep friend connection, like they need my advice or something. Those are delightfully cool to wake up remembering, and I hold onto them as long as I can on the way to work). I have one dream theme that comes around regularly, involving public restrooms, and I wake up having to use our private one downstairs. Nothing too hard to figure out there—I drank too much tea before bed and my dream-mind is helping me avoid an unpleasant disruption involving a middle-of-the-night load of laundry. I did read somewhere that the teeth falling out dream is somehow related to a fear of aging. I couldn’t tell you, but if it comes around again, I’ll look for context from my waking hours and let you know. For now, I’m good with my accumulated years and stories, and grateful for a body that does most of what I ask it to do. Including my teeth.

The business of dream interpretation is complex and imprecise in too many places for me to reliably draw any helpful conclusions. I have dabbled in keeping a dream journal, practiced dream mapping (which is really fun because I get to use colored pencils and markers) and found both experiences quite pleasant. The REM sleep benefits of dreaming are well-researched and established, so there’s that. Mostly, for me, dreams are highly entertaining and enjoyable, even the scary ones that have me sitting bolt upright, checking to make sure Patrick is still breathing next to me and the trucks are not on fire in the driveway (or containing beloved friends I’ve forgotten about). My brain works hard all day long, guiding my footsteps and storing information that I’ll need when I’m making out the grocery list later, and editing most of the inner commentary that is truly best left unsaid. I say let it play all it wants when my eyes are closed and my jaw drops open slightly. Drooling is optional.

For now, it’s enough that I keep waking up.