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One of the curious things about being self-employed with continuous house renovations is that there is always always always something that needs to be done. Maybe it’s work in the shop, or painting that needs to be finished, or a kitchen counter that needs to be installed. Maybe it’s something that can’t wait, [...]
Mid-afternoon and the angle of the Sun is already obtuse. We, however, are not. After some fine teamwork in Jay’s shop and a late egg salad lunch, all of us amble down the lane to the road: three dogs leashed, one girl on a bicycle, two rambunctious boys, one intern, and a [...]
In the last light of dusk, as a soft rain considered its possibilities, I walked up the hill to my studio with McKinley. Jay, our niece Emily, our intern Andy, and our neighbor L, were already up there, and had been working for most of the day installing the custom, handmade woodstove named Hot Mama into my studio. Inside everyone stood around the corner where the woodstove stood, a black pipe rising up and disappearing neatly into the wall. Emily had gathered a pile of twigs and sticks in the belly of the stove, and McKinley, reading my mind, announced that I should light the first fire.
And so I did. The sharp strike of a match brought forth the burst of flame that licked hungrily at the wood. There was no second match. The fire grew and its warmth radiated to our skin as we stood around it, admiring its beauty. Denali turned off the lamps, and the apple-shaped window of mica glowed red in the darkness.
There is no small significance to this fire. So many people have stood around me and supported my creative life. Carl Davidt made this stove for me, so inexpensively as to be considered a gift. He is a metal sculptor who has been a good friend for many years, and I can feel the love that went into this stove. Emily, Andy, and neighbor L, have put in many hours helping out around Berrytown. But my husband’s support has been unwavering and his encouragement consistent. Watching that apple glow, feeling the warmth from the fire, my own creative fire was rekindled. So many times assorted frustrations have given me an excuse to back away from my creative life. Now, with all the support and love warming up my studio, I don’t think I can do that anymore. The space swirled with possibilities and mingled with the smoke that had escaped from the door of the stove. I breathed it all in.
In eleven days, the esteemed Smoky Joe, handyman extraordinaire, will lumber up our driveway in his big two-tone truck. He will smoke a cigarette he rolled from Bugler tobacco, drink a stout cup of coffee, then begin tearing down the western wall of our house. There will be a huge mess in the house and yard.
On Sunday I went to the Useful Plants Nursery Summer Plant Sale and bought a marvelous assortment of trees and shrubs. While I was gone, Jay pulled up the old floor downstairs, which was a hodge-podge of hardwood flooring, parquet, linoleum, and tile. Now it is down to a bare slab. Later in the day when the Sun’s heat began to fade I went into the garden and picked five quarts of blueberries. The bushes were falling over themselves with blueberries. I ate a bunch, froze a bunch, and there’s still a bounty of blueberries to harvest. So begins the last week before our annual beach vacation.
There is much to do. I can’t think about the floor, and I won’t even try to put my new trees and shrubs in the ground until I get back, but I certainly can wax euphoric about my nursery purchases. I think I’m most excited about the Hybrid American Chestnut. The American Chestnut was the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachian forests, but a foreign blight wiped them out by the 1930’s. Well, not entirely. There are still chestnut stumps that produce shoots, but the shoots are killed off by the blight before they ever mature. The two chestnuts I purchased are American chestnuts crossed back with Japanese and Chinese Chestnuts to produce something close to the original tree.
I also purchased some American hazelnuts. If I had done more research before my purchase I might have bought the European hazelnut, which produces a larger nut more suitable for the home orchard, but now I’m excited that I will be able to produce nuts for our family, and for the wildlife. American hazelnuts are vigorous plants with a tendency to colonize an area, so I’ll have extra plants within a few years that I can plant back in the forest for the deer, bear, grouse, and squirrels on my mountain. By the way, it’s your mountain, too, as nearly all of it is National Forest Land.
There’s nine new blueberry bushes, which means I have now about twenty-five blueberry bushes, though not all are producing berries yet. To go along with the blueberries, I now have two Aronia bushes. These are a native berry extremely rich in athocyanins and antioxidants. Don’t even begin to think that’s enough berries for me! I purchased two female sea berry plants, which have slender silver leaves. When they are loaded down with their bright orange berries, they will be a marvelous sight.
And then there is my Vitex tree. I thought it was Vitex agnus-castus, of which I already have two small plants, but it’s actually something I’ve never heard of before: VItex negundo. Regardless, this small tree absolutely called to me. She has a supple, curvaceous trunk rising to nearly six feet with lacy leaves and delicate lavender flowers. She really does have a lovely shape. This is the information they had about her: A veritable medicine cabinet of a plant. The leaves are anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and analgesic and are applied externally for rheumatic conditions, bruises, injuries, sprains, sores, and skin infections. The seeds and leaves contain valuable medicinal compounds are used internally for chronic bronchitis, all emaciating conditions, to improve memory and eyesight, rejuvenate hair, alleviate loss of appetite, and to manage skin diseases and excessive bleeding during menstruation. The young stems are used for basketmaking. The leaves are insecticidal and used to repel insects in grain stores. The fresh leaves are burned with grass to repel mosquitoes.
While I dream about blueberry pie with a hazelnut crust , or chestnut stuffing for Thanksgiving in two or three years, right now I have Narrowleaf Echinacea, Golden Sage, Passionflower, Valerian, and Bloodflower that need to go in the garden, as in yesterday. Fortunately the hot and dry weather has broken with a thunderific rainstorm. I’ll pull my bolting lettuces and feed them to my rabbits tomorrow, making way for a bed of herbal delights. But for now, my soft bed of pillows calls, and I will answer, for I have much to do tomorrow—putting straw around the potatoes (and purchasing said straw), taking artwork to the frame shop, setting up a trellis for my poor beans, and some other things I’m quite certain I’ve forgotten about, but will remember at some juncture.
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Yesterday afternoon Jay and I sat at the table stripping mint leaves from their stalks, arranging them in assorted patterns on the dehydrator trays. We were both a bit worn with the day, and so I had made some mate latte tea. I had mine with honey, and that, along with the crisp scent of mint, seemed to be lifting the tired fog that engulfed me.
We talked a bit about his work, and then I made my pitch.
“Let’s try something new,” I suggested. “Let’s make our midday meal our main meal of the day. Before then, we can all work together, in the garden, on your carcycle, whatever. After the meal, you can go to your shop, I can go to my studio, and the kids can have free time.”
I had this idea that morning, as my children fought downstairs with a vengeance. I was trying to get a small task done, and had left them to their own devices. Of course this was a recipe for disaster, but only a minor disaster, the type to which I am somewhat immune. I need some sort of shift, I thought, as Renee screamed at McKinley at the top of her lungs downstairs. There has to be a way for us to move more into the life we desire with less stress and more beauty. There just has to be a way!
As it has been, our life very loosely resembles a traditional set-up, whereby Jay goes to work in the morning, albeit just next door, and usually around 10 am, and I stay at home with the kids. That is about where the resemblance ends, since “staying home with the kids” might mean swimming in the river, or it might mean discussing the current crisis in Gaza, as we did yesterday. Still, being the only one with the kids for most of the day means that when I can break away to the studio, I usually don’t have the energy. Making dinner at the end of the day usually takes what last bit of energy I might have had.
So in our constant quest–sometimes joyful, sometimes not–to do everything, we are attempting a shift change. We’ll try it for a week and see how it works. Today was the first day, and oh, today!
We started the day with coffee, as usual, sitting at the table in our outdoor kitchen. I woke the children by reading some of “The Island of the Blue Dolphins” to them. Reading with them in the morning, rather than at night, has proven to be the trick to getting my children from sleep to wakefulness without yelling. Then we read together from “Opening Doors Within,” which is a daily meditation book by Eileen Caddy, one of the co-founders of Findhorn. Breakfast was followed by jumping on the trampoline, and then into the garden we went, weeding and planting 8 butternut squash plants. The clouds came and cooled us from the hot Sun, and then the rain began to fall upon us, big thick drops, sporadic and delicious at first, and then a torrent. We rushed to the house, wet and laughing.
For our midday meal, Jay and Renee made a stack of handmade tortillas (thirty-two to be precise), while McKinley made hummus, and I made a frittata.
I sent McKinley to the garden to take pictures of the row of butternut squash and the limbs of our peach trees, which are laden with peaches. We have so many peaches that I’ll be making peach preserves, peach chutney, and peach pie come August. Anyway, here’s the pictures he took:
Baby Butternut
Rose
Baby Peach
My Marvel of Venice beans are coming up strong, and the arugula I planted with the kids a few days ago has made a fine green appearance. We’ve been getting good rain this week, so the other beans I planted, and the sunflowers, should be showing pretty soon. The garden grows, the river warms, and summer really is upon us. With my husband joining me in the garden, I feel like anything is possible!
First, I am totally sickened by what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now. I can’t even write about it. It is very, very, very bad.
But it has certainly spurred me to action, along with my super husband. You know, we drive. We all drive. We drive everywhere. I bring my own bags, I carry my own water, I buy local first. But I drive. All that other stuff is just a drop in the bucket, except maybe the buying local part, considering that otherwise food is driven across the country. I haven’t done that math on that one, though I’m sure someone has. But I know what’s going in my gas tank, and even though it is sometimes regionally produced biodiesel, 95% of the time it isn’t. And even when it is, it’s not like flowers are coming out of my tailpipe.
I see the connection between my driving and so much destruction–wars, climate change, environmental degradation, and now, full-blown catastrophe. And I am tired of living this way. My parents raised me to be honest, and this does not seem honest. That so much should be sacrificed so that I can go where I want to, exactly when I want to, at a high rate of speed & in supreme comfort just doesn’t seem just.
So, with my husband’s super powers, we are going to sacrifice the high rate of speed and supreme comfort for something else. And we are going to do it with this:
(photo from americanspeedster.com)
You can find out more about this carcycle from this website: americanspeedster.com This model is the Sidekick, and it should be noted that it can be retrofitted with an electric motor.
A friend once told me that for the cost of the bail-out every mid-sized city and up could have had high-speed rail. Imagine. And keep imaging! For months I’ve been driving and imaging how wonderful it will feel to be able to travel joyfully, with flowers coming out of my tailpipe, instead of thoughts of war and unjustified privilege. This carcycle is our first step into that dream. Only I think we’ll put a bubble machine on the back of it, instead of flowers. Just for fun.
Obviously, there’s more to come on this one!
