Mud Season

Rain! Rain and flooding and oh my! I still have potatoes and carrots on the bottom step of my root cellar - which floods! Why don't I just go and move it? Oh, because I cannot get the cellar door open on my own - it catches a corner and I can't pull it up without help (as my male guests know - they get used for root cellar access all the time).

In other news, the forsythias are starting to bloom hysterically early. Mud season, my friends, is upon us. I have seen buds on the trees.

If I don't sound that excited, it's because I'm not. Spring is that wondrous season that unveils herself after a cold, snowy, and equally wondrous winter. The contrast of a white, silent, and sleepy winter with the muddy, green, waking humming busyness of spring is the appeal of spring to me. But this year we didn't have a snowed-in winter in the Mid-Hudson Valley. We had a pathetic, broken animal of a winter. The rest felt stolen, unpaid for with shoveling endless walkways, just stolen. With no winter to tail, spring doesn't feel like an unveiling. It's just mud and work and waking green.

I know I'll get excited soon, once the blossoms start blooming and the snow melts off the mountains, replaced by that vibrant, nascent green, that can only mean the start of the busy seasons ahead. The heat and cold will compete for primacy as the seasons kick into high gear and the scurrying of spring with all of the planting and preparing will fade into summer with her glaring heat and constant work and that glorious week, tucked into late June, when everything is planted and the weeds haven't started in earnest yet, and there's nothing to do. And then the weeds will burst up and the summer will be full of swimming off the constant heat of picking weeds, and tomatoes, and the constant, flowing harvest, which will turn itself into hours at the stove canning sauces and jams, freezing everything, and slowly, the tremor of early fall will make me wake in a sweat in the middle of the night fearing a freak early frost until everything is harvested and the frosts start rolling in, and the root cellars are stocked and there's the constant smell of apples and wood smoke in the air. And then, maybe then, we will have a white winter which will remind us why spring is such a magical time.

An Homage to Home

My beautiful wooden dish drying rack broke sometime this weekend. No one told me it was collapsing, so one side caved and the second side, held together only by a peg, twisted and pulled the peg out with the force of the uneven weight of drying dishes. With time to kill as a date was running horribly late (to the tune of 3 hours), I tried my options. I whittled down some twigs to use as pegs - which were too weak to hold without twisting while I hammered the thing together. One broke and is now stuck in the hole for the peg - which will be easy enough to dislodge with a sharp knife (I hope). So tonight I'm going to go and buy some pegs. It's a beautiful dish rack that's very fixable and I have no intention of throwing it out.

Most of our waste comes from things not being reused or not being seen as reusable. We seem to generally refuse to accept the possibility that things actually are fixable, and therefore are reusable. Of course, it makes perfect sense that replacing is easier than fixing - things are cheap, and with at least 40 hours of each week going into work, who has time to fix what could just be replaced?

When things around the house break or clothes rip, I feel morally obligated by my own frugality to fix them or sew them up, and not to waste by throwing whatever broke out and getting a new one. As a result of financial need, a tinkering habit, and a deep love of older, well-crafted, simple (and therefore fixable) objects, I have turned frugality into a hobby. This hobby of mine makes living cheap fun and easy, and makes my sense of moral obligation to waste not less preachy - and less central to the point. Morality is far less effective in motivating me than simple pleasures - so I try to combine the two.

***

When my date finally did arrive (I did not turn him away at the door. I'll be honest, a part of me had wanted to, but I was far too excited to see him), he was surprised by my house. He paid me a compliment I had not even considered until the moment. "I have never seen a 23 year-old," he said "with a house this well kept."

My home is an homage to the concept of home in the same way that a poem is an homage to the concept of a poem. My home is a work of art. How could it not be? These walls are the only walls that contain me and all things mine. I have chosen them. Home is a simple and modest shrine made by and in honor of daily tasks. There is a holiness in the home. It is the only holy place I have ever known. It is the sacred heart of the tasks and objects of life, love, and family. If home is not beautiful and well cared for, if our shrines are not places of exaltation, how can we exalt within them? The quest for a life of grace, wonder, and beauty is an uphill battle if a home is not a shrine to the best that we hold inside ourselves - to the holiness of even our most mundane daily tasks. These tasks that are not only necessary, but are themselves an homage to the potential of their own perfection. it is all, on days when the sun shines and the home holds its sacred heart, a poem.

Life is going to change. No doubt about that.

I've started drawing sketches to accompany the blog, but I don't have a functioning scanner in my life. The one at work doesn't seem to work, though i spent more time than I should have trying to fix it. Please forgive me, dear readers, for my dislike of digital photos. They just take up way too much time. sketching is much simpler and more satisfying.

Now I must admit a thing that has made me sad and that will definitely impact this blog and the pace of my life, though I have no idea how (who ever knows?). Now that I've finally fallen in love with living alone, I have put out a call for a roommate. there was no way to avoid it. I can't afford to live in my sweet little house alone, and there's no way in hell you could get me to move. I have found my little piece of heaven. I intend to stay here until I have no other choice. So there it is. I wish I were filthy rich, so I could be a real fashion farmer and live wherever I wanted and grow whatever I wanted just for the hell of it - and because it makes me feel good about myself (warning about the link - don't open it if you're an ex-suburbanite-turned-rural-farmer and take yourself too seriously).

As a result of me not being a trust fund baby, you, my dear readers, can expect to find posts about building walls (because i intend to separate the loft into 2 rooms), arranging work-trades, and figuring out how to convince your roommate to do all the dishes (I will think of a worthwhile exchange and appreciate any help in doing so). Also, I will inevitably have to discover how I can listen to NPR as often as i want to with another human being in the house, who probably hates Allen Chartok as much as I do but isn't as fascinated by the constant chatter.

Wish me luck, and if you know anyone who wants to be my roommate, send them my way!

It's the little things

I have discovered the secret to joy last night and it is this - a foot bath in the chair by the stove once a week with sea salt and essential oils, tea kept perfectly warm on a brick on the stove, and crackers with sweetened condensed milk. After a day of the usual - 8 long and boring hours of work, cooking, shoveling snow, dishes, bringing wood in, and, if I'm lucky, some time on the couch with the cat - it is the perfect sliver of luxury. It is such luxury, that is makes me forget entirely about those boots I've been coveting that are $80 out of my price range. The $.03 foot bath is better than the boots anyway.

I finished the sweetened condensed milk two days ago, so last night I settled for a jar of my admittedly mediocre apricot jam, honey, and butter. It's not perfect, but at least I can afford sweetened condensed milk - now a staple of my diet above and beyond peanut m&m's which come in a now-distant second for top guilty pleasures. I'd give up a lot before I'd give up that little Carnation can. Definitely chocolate (gasp! I know! but seriously, s.c.m. is THAT good), sliced bread, and any $120 pair of boots. My favorite way to eat it is slathered on a very thin cracker that doesn't get in the way. It's also very good over nutella (but really, how could that not be?) I also like dipping my finger into it when it's cold in the the fridge and will stick - ah, the pleasures of living alone!

So in case you too have just discovered that you're not really making all the ends meet and will therefore need to find a roommate or move out, if all your muscles hurt from shoveling the driveway with a very heavy and old snow shovel, if you really can't stand the thought of cleaning, cleaning, cleaning after working, working working all day, and just want to live your own life, even though that's basically impossible - go dip your feet in some hot water and let yourself sit for a half hour. Listen to some music, or the radio, or watch a movie, or write, or read. I promise, you'll feel better. I do.