Deborah Hining's Blog, page 3

Sometimes, Growing Old Isn���t So Bad

The first time Eleanor flew, she was as surprised as anyone.

She had been standing at the western edge of the Copper Canyon beside her sister, Martha, when suddenly Ruth Ann started making retching noises behind them. ���Montezuma���s revenge,��� began Eleanor, but before the words were out of her mouth, Martha turned to look at Ruth Ann and bumped Eleanor with her backpack. Off Eleanor fell, into the vast, yellow sunlight.

Panic and a strong instinct for survival set Eleanor to flailing, her skinny arms and pudgy legs windmilling through space like a swimmer with sharks behind her. Part of her knew her exertions were useless, but she fought anyway, churning the air with a vigor she hadn���t shown since she had been twelve years old and determined to win the sack race at her 6th grade field day. After several moments, Eleanor realized that something unusual was happening: the ground seemed to be getting further away. She was no expert, but was pretty sure that the ground was supposed to rush up at you as you plummeted toward it. But it definitely looked farther way, and as she flapped her arms harder, it fell farther away still. Shocked, she fell still, and the falling sensation hit her���she tumbled down through space, the air rushing by her so fast that she could hardly breathe. And when she looked again, the ground definitely was rushing up toward her with astonishing speed.

Panic set in again, prompting��her��to rotate her arms and kick her legs once more. To her surprise, she felt her body pause, then lift again, and she realized with a jolt that she was actually flying! It felt just like swimming, except that air was easier to navigate than water. There was no resistance, just a light buoyancy that made her flaccid, puny arms feel like powerful swimmer���s arms, and her cellulite-riddled thighs felt capable of some serious horsepower. She looked back from the place she had come. Back at the lip of the canyon, the other girls were mere specks, she could hardly make them out at all, particularly since she had lost her glasses shortly after she took off. Without even thinking about it, Eleanor did a neat turn and confidently began a smooth breaststroke through a fine cloud. All she did was kick her feet the tiniest little bit, and she straightened her course and sailed through the air with a grace he had never known in her 63 years.

She drew closer to the rim of the canyon until she was able to discern four of the girls standing agape, watching her. Martha lay behind them on the ground, obviously in a faint, but no one was tending to her. They were all staring at Eleanor as she swooped over their heads and flipped on her back, commanding the air currents as if she owned them.

After that day, Eleanor flew often, but she clearly was not the same sweet Eleanor that everyone had known. No, she became arrogant and proud, and lorded her newfound abilities over the others so much that eventually they got tired of hearing about her flights. They even began to ignore her when they actually saw her run through the grass and take off like a great gray heron, at once ungainly and graceful. She didn���t care. She could fly, and nobody but she knew what that felt like.

The China Road

Until I was seven years old, my mother had never had a set of matching dishes. She almost got some early in her marriage, but she never even saw it. Here���s how the story goes: my dad, in a fit of generosity one payday, bought her a set of service for eight, complete with platters, a teapot, and two vegetable bowls. Pleased with himself and in the mood to share his surprise, he stopped at the local tavern on the way home and had gotten a little drunk.

Now, let me set the stage. Mama and Daddy lived on the banks of the Little Tennessee River in those early years, and their house was accessed only by foot across a swinging footbridge. It was tethered by ropes, and a few of the planks were missing, so you had to walk carefully to keep from tripping, or worse, falling into the river. Daddy, too tipsy to walk straight even on solid ground, attempted to carry that china in his arms on a windy night across the rickety bridge. Long story short, the china ended up smashed on the rocky shoals below. He did manage to save the lid to the teapot, but that���s all.

Skip forward about fifteen years, when my sister was accepted into a prestigious private college in upstate New York. I can only imagine the sacrifices Mama and Daddy made to send her there. Of course, at the time, I had no inkling of any sacrifices. At 7, I didn���t notice that my mother hadn���t had a new dress in years, that my father���s shoes were shabby, or that sometimes, he came home from work nearly too tired to eat dinner. All I cared about was how much fun we were all having. My mama was pretty and full of laughter, and my daddy could play the fiddle and was brimming with wonderful stories that all the kids in the neighborhood came to hear.

Off at college, Becky became something of an overnight sensation. I have heard that Tennessee women are known for their beauty and charm, and it must be true, for up there in New York, the boys found her irresistible. Before long, she wrote to tell us that one of her boyfriends was dying to see the Smokies and had somehow finagled an invitation to come visit over Spring Break. This threw my mother into a panic. A rich boy from the Northeast was going to be coming to our humble home, and we didn���t have matching dishes! She did the only thing she could think to do: she rushed out and bought a set. She probably had to put them on the payment plan or get a loan from the bank, but by golly, she was not going to embarrass her daughter by serving said boy dinner on mismatched, chipped plates.

As oblivious as I was to our circumstances, I still remember those dishes, how they looked so pretty on the table, how I always set them out so carefully and lined up the silverware, which as far as I know, also may have been purchased at the same time for the same reason, but that I don���t remember. I don���t remember the glasses, either, but that Jewel T china was about the prettiest thing I had ever seen.

The visit went well, as far as I remember. The boy seemed smitten with my sister and didn���t seem to mind sleeping in the upper bunk bed with my brother in the same tiny room. I got to sleep in the double bed with my sister, who was glamourous, beautiful, ten years older than I was, and my absolute hero. Becky and friend spent every day of their Spring break hiking through the Smokies, returning home in time to Mama���s fabulous dinners of pot roast or fried chicken or pork chops cooked to death (pork is dangerous. You have to really cook it good and done). But as good as her cooking was, it was all the more fabulous served on those beautiful Jewel T plates.

The boyfriend didn���t last. Becky broke up with him shortly afterwards, probably because he didn���t love the outdoors as much as she did, and a few months afterward, he wrote her a pitiful letter that made me sob for him and his broken heart. Becky told me I could have him, but I didn���t want him, either. He was too citified for my taste, too. The next year another one came to go hiking in the mountains with her, and my mother, my sister, and I were so very glad to be able to set the table with all that matching Jewel T china.

Starting then, we all three developed an obsession with dishes. I remember the excitement when Becky registered for her wedding china over 45 years ago. Her fine set was Bracelet, by Old Ivory, I think, although it might have been something similar by Lennox���an ivory background with a simple gold band. Her everyday set was Dellia Robbia. After that she discovered Autumn by Lennox, and then she was off and running.

Once I took her to Replacements, LTD, a warehouse the size of a football stadium filled from floor to ceiling with every imaginable pattern of china, crystal, and silver. I thought Becky was going to have a stroke. Shortly into the tour through the warehouse, she disappeared from the group. Much later, I found her wandering through the tall cases of china. Her eyes were glazed over and darting around uncontrollably. Her hands fluttered above her head, she was hopping up and down, and occasionally she spun in little circles as she shrieked, ���Oh! Oh! Oh!��� I thought I was going to have to blindfold her and lead her out of there before she keeled over.

By the time Becky died in 2004, she had collected so much china that it filled every cupboard and dresser drawer in her house. She owned five or six china cabinets, all filled with fine crystal and china, and closets full of linens and silver. She scoured flea markets and antique malls in search of china patterns that were just too pretty to pass up. We spend the day before she died out in the junk stores looking for more. She was literally sick enough to die, and she outlasted me. I was ready to go home long before she was. What a happy memory!

When she ran out of room in her two houses, she started giving sets to Mama, her children, and to me and to my children. Mama and I were happy to get most of it���while our addictions were never as bad as Becky���s, we, too, were known to be right beside her scouring the junk stores for something too beautiful to pass up. Our children, however, have found the embarrassment of china riches a little much. When Becky���s daughter, Britt, moved to her own place, she set a rule: ���You must call before you come over, and you can���t bring anything.��� I never set such limits, not because I wanted more, but because it was always such fun to see how happy it made her to see someone else appreciate the beauty of fine china.

I have the same tendency to want others to be smitten by the beauty of translucent, delicately painted plates and teacups. While I can���t possibly buy more for myself, I do tend to encourage others to expand their collections. If I am out junking with a friend and we come across an exquisite set that I think matches the personality of the person I am with, I bully them into buying it. Not surprisingly, though, not one has complained about having an extra set of china or two. On the contrary, they thank me for opening their eyes to the possibilities. Once you realize it���s okay to have more than one set of fine china, worlds of delights blossom before you.

Most of my china is put away, up in the attic, waiting for a child or a grandchild who wants it. In my china cabinet(s) sits Becky���s set of Bracelet, along with my own wedding china, Blue Regency, and a couple other sets I found at the junk stores. I drag them out for holiday dinners and tea parties, and every time I do, I think of Mama���s Jewel T and our 1200 square foot concrete block house on Redwood Avenue and how much laughter rang out there. As I pour tea and admire the way the light plays on the gold rims or turns the blue band on the cup iridescent, I sometimes find myself wishing to my soul I was seven years old and excitedly waiting for Becky to come home with her new boyfriend so we could show off our spiffy table, laden with Mama���s fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, and green beans that have been cooked all day with a slab of pork.

Not A Vegan Thanksgiving

We’ve done it. We finally have earned the right to call ourselves “homesteaders.” Aside from the laying chickens who provide us with eggs, the vegetables and herbs we manage to harvest from our weedy garden, we also have passed the ultimate test: we raised, killed, cleaned, dressed, and cooked our first Thanksgiving turkey. I say “we” in the same way The Little Red Hen’s friends said it, in the sense of “We will help you eat the bread.” Other than that, I didn’t have much to do with it. Well, some. Just not the hardest part.

It all started last May when Mike said, “I want to grow turkeys.” I wish I could report that I replied, “Of course, darling. Whatever you want to do, you know I will support you 100%,” but instead I said, “Huh-uh! No way. I’m not doing it!” That gradually gave way to, “I ain’t havin’ nuthin’ to do with them turkeys.” Eventually, I drove to the farm which raises heritage Narragansett turkeys and bought twenty newborn poults, and paid for them out of my checking account, the one Mike isn’t supposed to know about and I can use for my own whimsy. But somehow, Mike was busy and these turkeys had to be picked up right away and, well, you know how these men manage to get you to do things you don’t want to do. . . .

I remember this well because it was two days after my grandson, Wells, was born. He and the baby turkeys were both hatched on the same day, and both were as adorable as you can imagine. The turkeys may even have had a little bit of an edge because they were smaller and covered with down, and they were able to follow me around endearingly. Wells stayed latched onto his mommy so I couldn’t see his face for the first week or two.

You can see where this is headed. Them turkeys I wasn’t havin’ nuthin to do with ended up being cuddled and fed by me (and the feed was paid for out of my “whimsy” account). But I didn’t get attached. Not really. I mean, I did get attached, but only to those little baby turkeys. As they grew, I discovered they are wicked creatures: not kind to each other, and they are awfully dumb. By the time they outgrew the baby swimming pool underneath the pool table in the garage, two of them had been squashed by their brethren, and one had drowned in the water dish, so I decided it was time to distance myself a little. After all, I knew I was going to be eating one of them in a few months, and you have to keep things in perspective.

By this time, our son-in-law Nick, had taken over most of the poultry duties so I could make good on my promise not to have nuthin’ to do with them turkeys. Nick and our daughter Mary Elizabeth and their baby Wells live with us, thank God. He not only is a marvelous field-hand, but he also takes care of all our culinary needs (yes, I am to be envied. My son-in-law does ALL the grocery shopping and cooking around here).

Anyway, during the swimming pool stage of the baby turkeys’ lives, while the poults were still cute and worthy of my attention, Mike and Nick spent countless hours building a charming little house for the next stage. Unfortunately, no matter how much chicken-wire they wrapped around that thing, coyotes managed to snatch a few turkeys for a midnight snack, so within weeks, we were down to 10, and half my investment was reduced to feathers and a few guts lying around in the yard. The guys then built another shelter of sorts, a hideous contrivance of wire, PVC pipe and a big blue tarp that was so ugly that even the turkeys, which have no aesthetic sensibilities at all, hated it. We had to go out every evening at dusk and chase them around with a net to herd them in to safety against the coyotes. They would roost inside, but during the day, they were free-range, so it got hard to chase them down and haul them back into their enclosure. We finally decided it was time to clip some wings.

That was fun. Feel free to imagine me saying that with all the sarcasm of Joan Rivers saying Miley Cyrus dresses like a classy lady. We chased turkeys around for a very long time, and I had the pleasure (again, sarcasm) of holding them down while Mike clipped off feathers with dull scissors. Ladies and gentlemen, turkeys are big and strong. And they have sharp toenails. And when they get upset, they throw up on you. Deliberately. And they aim.

Clipping the feathers keeps them from straying too far for a while, until the feathers grow back, which happens in a couple of weeks, at which time you have to repeat the whole process. At this point, it is wise to make sure your spouse is the one holding down the vomiting monsters while you do the feather-hacking.

When I call them monsters, I mean it. By the time they are grown, which is at about 4 months, when human baby boys are cooing and stealing your heart, turkeys have become strutting, hissing, ugly, dumb, dinosaur-resembling critters that do not even look like the same species as those little balls of fluff that once sat in your hand and cheeped at you.

By this time, good luck getting them into the ugly house-contraption thingy to roost. They’ll barely go in there to eat, but stay outside 24/7, roosting in trees, no matter how wet and sloppy it is outside. And believe me, a turkey yard can get pretty sloppy during wet weather. By then, you can forget wrestling them to the ground and clipping their wings. When they’re fanning and strutting, which is every time you approach the yard, they are bigger than you are.

By the time they are five months old, the males begin trying to kill each other by ripping off combs and wattles and also trying to swallow each other head first. The hens aren’t so bad. They stay pretty sweet and small, which is unfortunate for them, because they have little defense against the attentions of the males, which, believe me, is about as welcome to the hens as it would be to you. By the time they are 6 months old, you realize you’d better start culling out some of the males or nobody’s going to keep their combs or wattles, and somebody is likely to get swallowed. The hens will have suffered a nervous breakdown.

So, Thanksgiving came just in time. Wells and the turkeys celebrated their 6-month birthday on November 19, which meant that the turkeys were ready to be “harvested.” I think it’s interesting that chopping an animal’s head off and ripping its guts out is called “harvesting,” as if it’s as easy and as polite as strolling out to the tomato patch and pulling a few off the vine. This is a time of determination, of resolve, of examining your commitment, the time the rubber meets the road and you have to decide if you are going to be real farmers who grow their own food or just pussy-footed ones who claim to farm but run out to buy the neat, clean, plucked, bled, gutted Butterball down at the Harris Teeter the day before Thanksgiving.

One of us made the grade. I suddenly remembered that I ain’t havin’ nuthin’ to do with them turkeys, and Mike had to call up our son George to help him do the deed. Nick had chickened out long before I did. He can’t even kill a fish without drinking a bottle of Seagram’s 7 afterward and then lying around moaning about how traumatized he is. The last time he tried to kill something—a crab, I think—he went vegan on us for months, which was hard. Suffering through Nick’s vegan phase was so bad we vowed to keep him away from the premises until the turkey was already in the refrigerator.

Anyway, Mike and George showed up after work on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in their office clothes, ready to “harvest” a turkey. Mike wore nice wool pants, a cashmere sweater, and his Cole Haan shoes. George, being a metro-sexual, was dressed better. Why they didn’t think to maybe change into rubberized coveralls before rolling through a turkey yard wielding an axe is an indication of how much they faced this challenge with dread and trepidation. They couldn’t even think about fashion attire, they were so busy psyching themselves up to commit cold-blooded murder. I can understand that, sort of.

Anyway, I hid out. I did open the back door once to see a turkey strung up by the feet from the garage door and feathers flying. George looked like a defeathering machine, arms whirling around, yanking out feathers as fast as some sort of mechanical gizmo. My two-year-old granddaughter Corinne was with me, so I shut that door pretty quickly. Later, I peeked again to see Mike yanking at something I don’t want to describe with a very bloody hand. This was about the time the UPS man rolled up to deliver some packages. His eyes grew huge and sort of rolled back into his head before he muttered, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He threw down the packages and fled, scattering gravel all over my newly-spead mulch just as Mike gave up on the yanking, picked up the butcher knife, and started hacking.

When Mike and George finally came in with clean-ish carcasses, both of them were covered with blood from head to toe, and Mike’s cashmere sweater was in shreds. The story of how that happened is pretty funny if you have a sick sense of humor, but I won’t relate it here because it might actually make some of you sick.

In the end, we got 2 monster turkeys, one of which went to our friends, and the other, the 21 pounder, ended up on our Thanksgiving table.

“So who will help me eat the turkey?” asked the Little Red Hen?”

“We will!” shouted everyone, and we did, and it was fabulous. And now you are looking at a real homesteader. I figure I earned it. I certainly did my share of suffering through it. Mike deserves some sort of award.

By the way, I still have 8 turkeys (they’re technically mine, since I paid for them originally). Only 3 of them are hens, which we are keeping to produce next season’s “crop,” and I’ll also keep the two biggest toms (one for the obvious reasons and the other one in case the first is a dud in the daddy department), and another is reserved for our table, which means I will have two great big, yummy, free-range, hormone-free turkeys for sale for Christmas. $6 per pound. And yes, the way I see it, it’s my investment, so I get to put all the profits into my whimsy account. And I’m not buying Mike another cashmere sweater.

Important Lessons I Learned From a Two-Year-Old

1. The only person you need to please is yourself.

2. If people haven’t done what you want them to it’s because you haven’t been demanding enough. Never give up. Everyone gives in at some point.

3. If it’s cute, it should be squeezed.

4. The best defense is a good offense.

5. Ice cream for lunch is perfectly reasonable.

6. “Because it’s good for you” is an absurd argument.

7. Yesterday and Tomorrow don’t exist. Live for now. This minute. Right now.

8. If you feel bad, everybody else should, too.

9. Somebody will always come to your rescue

10. Grownups are suckers for hugs and kisses.

How to Tell Who Your Friends Are

Every Monday morning during the school year, a group of ladies come to my house for Bible study.  Today was our last gathering before summer break, and as per tradition we always stage a fabulous lunch all decked out with linen and china.  Looking forward to all of us sitting around the table having a grand old time, I jumped up this morning to scurry around and get the house tidied up and the table set.

Bad Karma must have intervened in the form of Mary Elizabeth’s cats.  The litter box resides at the top of the stairs, and sometimes in the morning, just after somebody has used it, it smells pretty awful.  This morning, as I got out a table cloth, I noticed the distinctive odor as I passed the stairs, and I hoped that it would dissipate before the ladies arrived in just 30 minutes or so. 

I put the tablecloth on, walking around the table a few times to straighten it out.  It was too small, so I took it off and went back to the hall closet to find another one.  The bad cat poop smell was still in the air as I passed by the stairway again.  After I walked around the table several times putting this tablecloth on, I realized it was too long, so I went into the living room to get the leaves to the table that we keep behind the sofa.  Going back into the dining room, I put in the first leaf, then walked around to put the second one on, complaining to myself the whole time that the litter box smelled so bad I could still smell it all the way in the dining room.  That’s when I glanced down and saw something on the floor.  A footprint.  More footprints led both ways around the table.  Footprints leading to and from a pile of cat poop the size of a dinner plate on the carpet beside the table.  They led around the table three or four times, out into the foyer, into the living room, tracking across about every carpet we own.  Cat poop was smeared all over my slippers and up the sides.  Little bits flecked over the top of my foot.

Thirty minutes later, I am scrubbing up piles of cat poop and footprints tracked all over the house when the first lady arrives bearing a scrumptious dish she had lovingly prepared for our lunch.  I am puking and gagging, trying to scrape up slimy, gooey, semi-liquid cat poop into a dustpan with a glob of wet paper towels.  My slippers are resting on the back porch after a brief stint in the toilet. (I can’t leave them there because people use the toilet)

You know who your friends are when they ignore the fact that the kitchen isn’t quite clean, the house room smells like cat shit, and you are dashing around, trying to discretely remove soggy, slippers from the back porch (after realizing that we probably should eat on the porch).  Your friends laugh and tell about the time they have done the same thing or how their elderly mothers managed to run their walkers with wheels back and forth across a pile of dog poop.  Your friends open the refrigerator to pull stuff out and get the place ready and offer to help you scrub your carpets and convince you that walking through cat poop six or eight times and around the house with it all over your shoes is a pretty normal occurrence in most households.

Lunch was wonderful.

Redneck Central

Farming gets into your blood pretty quickly, and when it does, it tends to dilute any pretensions you have about refinement. Maybe whatever refinement I ever thought I had was simply veneer anyway. Coming from a long line of hillbillies as I do, the farming blood probably attached itself to existing dirt-loving DNA and went wild, shattering that fake glossy patina I have so carefully cultivated in years past.

Sunday was a beautiful day, the kind of day that most people want to get out and do something fun, like bike riding or hiking or picnicking at the park. Mike and I spent the afternoon dumpster diving for used pallets so we can build a chicken coop. We want the chickens not only for the eggs, but mostly for the manure.  We need to build the coop out of salvaged materials because we spent all our money on gussying up a used doublewide that we have moved onto the property. 

I don’t think we embarrass our children any more—they’ve gotten used to it–but I do sort of feel sorry for our children-in-law. Fortunately, their parents live in different towns, so I hope there is no danger they will be driving by one day to see people attached to their families climbing up on the fender of a beat-up 1994 truck, hauling pallets out of a dumpster, excitedly talking about how good that chicken manure is going to be and wondering if we have to worry about coyotes hanging out under the porch of the doublewide.  It’s just too awful to contemplate.   

Men Talking About Sensitive Stuff

MMen are funny in that they don’t really talk about important things. Like their feelings. Sometimes, when men are being creative, they try to talk about it, but it just doesn’t fly. Consider this conversation I had with Mike last night:

Mike: I had a great idea about a new kind of greeting card.

Me: Really?

Mike: (long pause) Yeah, but you probably wouldn’t like it. It’s kind of sad.

Me: (starting to giggle) Is that right?

Mike: I can see some men wanting to send it to their wives for an anniversary or something. (long pause) But you probably wouldn’t like it cause it’s kinda sad.

Me: (snorting with laughter) Well, what’s sad about it?

Mike: I’ll tell you if you stop laughing (starts to laugh)

Me: (laughing) Okay

Mike (long pause) Okay, (laughing) but you have to stop laughing. It’s sad.

Me (laughing harder) Okay. (long pause in which I stop laughing). You can tell me now. I’m not laughing.

Mike: Now I forgot it.

A Wonderful Review by Summer Kinard

I am honored and delighted that Summer Kinard, author of the bestselling novel, Can’t Buy Me Love has not only read  A Sinner in Paradise, but liked it and gave it a wonderful review on Amazon!  Thank you Summer!   Here is her review.  Anybody reading Sinner now, or who has read it and hasn’t gotten around to writing a review yet, you can just copy and paste this one.  ; )

A coming of age love story that draws you in, August 17, 2013

By 
Summer Kinard
 
I was fortunate enough to read an advance review copy of this book. I admit that I was hesitant about loving the main character at first. Like any oldest child, I couldn’t help getting annoyed with Geneva (the protagonist) for some of her younger sister-style foibles. But she made me laugh and cry, and I loved her anyway! The setting in this book is beautifully written throughout, so that the sense of place shines through and carries the reader right into the story. The supporting characters are wonderfully drawn, with rich local flavor. There are so many things to love about this book, besides the fact that it had me alternately gasping in awe at beautiful passages, crying like Peter Rabbit, and chortling loud enough to send my children running to find out what’s so funny. Here are a few:
-A wonderful sister relationship
-Well-drawn characters
-Gorgeous mountain scenery, vividly written
-Holy Miracle Jones
-Horsemanship that is realistic (rather than stilted and awkward as one often encounters in romances)
-People with virtue
-Loyalty among the characters
-A memorable and beautiful love scene that didn’t make me worry that my grandma was peeking at me from heaven
-One of the funniest endings I’ve read.
-Healing and faith worked out in gentle everyday fashion.

I could go on, but I am trying my best to avoid spoilers. I am so glad that I read this book here near the end of summer. I can imagine it being a great autumn, winter, or spring read as well, of course, but in the summer, my tea doesn’t go cold quite as soon. I wound up sacrificing several good cups of tea to my absorption in the story. The only thing lacking is an on-location vacation! I hope that the author eventually offers reader tours of the locations in the story, because I have fallen in love with the mountains in the pages!

I highly recommend this to lovers of women’s fiction. There are a few small anachronisms in regards to technology, but on the whole, the story stays well within its time while speaking accessibly to modern readers. The story has rich elements of Christian faith and maintains discretion on intimate matters. I plan to recommend it to my friends who love Christian fiction as well as mainstream women’s fiction.

A Mountain Weekend in the Tardis

 

If you’re going to make lifelong friends, do it when you are young. Do it when you are in graduate school, with beautiful, gifted, smart people who know how to frolic with abandon. Do it when you have enough physical and emotional energy to squander, when you can burn your candle at both ends and in the middle and when you fully believe that the purpose of life is to enjoy it.

 

When you do that, you find that when, 30 or more years later, you connect with those old friends again, your mind automatically makes the assumption: I am with these people now. Therefore, I must be 25 years old and smart and beautiful and invincible. Never mind that you have become crippled with arthritis, that your overnight bag contains prescription drugs and sleep aids rather than bikinis and bangle bracelets. You are able to turn back the hands of the old grandaddy clock and once again become that person you were before life’s little tragedies sucked out the juices and wrinkled your skin.

 

Last weekend, we had 3 glorious days in the mountains with a couple who had been our best friends during our halcyon days. Although we hadn’t seen them for ten or so years, we fell back into the old relationship, as we always do, as easily as if we had never hit the pause button. It was a time of nonstop laughter and feeling as if we had stepped into the Tardis and had gone back 30 years.

 

We hiked up the hills, we frolicked in the hot tub, we stayed up (kinda) late, drank champagne without worrying about hangovers, ate junk food, had scintillating conversations about the nature of good and evil and how to solve all the world’s problems, slept well past our usual wake-up time, stressed our joints, and took our meds surreptitiously, trying to ignore the fact that we needed them.

 

Did we pay for it? Not really. My knees ached a bit, and yes, I did have trouble sleeping after all that champagne, but it was well worth it to pretend to be that vital young thing I used to be, married to my gorgeous hunk, in the company of beautiful, witty, people. Thank you Mike and Chris, for taking us back to the way life is supposed to be. You have brought to light the truth of what one of my best buds said to me the day 29 years ago when we left Baton Rouge and some of the best people and best times I have ever known:

 

“You just can’t make old friends.”

 

 

IF YOU HAVE EVER THOUGHT MY LIFE IS IDYLLIC, READ THIS

Creativity runs amok in my house. Between Mary Elizabeth’s painting projects, Mike’s farming and architecture projects, Nick’s cooking, and my various—well, just—projects, this place is nearly ALWAYS in turmoil.  Friends come here and admire the garden and the house and the fun things that are going on, and although they are aware that things are usually a little topsy-turvey, and I am a little frayed around the edges, they have no idea what it usually is like. Rarely do they see the long stretches when no one is invited over because the place looks like Armageddon.

Right now we are in the middle of yet another remodel.  Not the first, not even the 10th, and certainly not the last.  Seems like the house always needs to be improved on, and I have realized that when you are married to an architect/artist/free-wheeling, manic creator (and, I admit, also happen to be a very stupidly enthusiastic proponent of home improvement), you are never going to have the house the way you want it.  My children grew up in construction mess.  Mary Elizabeth vividly remembers sleeping on a mattress in the floor in the alcove at the top of the stairs, her clothes in boxes all around her while we added a floor so she could have a real bedroom.  One morning she woke up a little later than she should have to find 6 construction workers staring at her as she slept.  She was sixteen. I’m proud that she decided not to let it mess with her head.

This summer, it’s the living room. When we originally restored and remodeled this house, we stupidly   tried to get by with not tearing down a wall that we should have because it was a load bearing wall and the expense would have been prohibitive.  As it turns out, it’s even more expensive because the original foundation wall underneath is not in the right spot.  We have ended up not only tearing out walls, but jacking up floors and digging foundation supports in a crawl space about 3 feet high.  Not easy.  Not cheap. Not a clean or fast process.

Here is the living room we have been living with for over a month now, cleaned up and ready for the sheetrock to go in.

And because we have had to move all the furniture out of the living room, we  had to find a place for all that stuff.  Here are pictures of the dining room and  foyer, where we are storing all that furniture.

If we were normal people, we would sequence our projects.  One or two rooms might be torn up at a time, but since we have 100,000 projects to finish before we die, we tend to work on several at a time, all the time.  All this rain we’ve been having has caused the furniture on the back porch to mildew, and I figured we had better refinish and seal everything before it got too bad to fix.  So we spend most of the weekend cleaning the porch, scrubbing furniture, painting, and sealing.  Unfortunately, all the rain means that nothing will dry.  Here is a picture of the back porch we are living with, and probably will have to live with until the monsoon is over.

And, of course, we have to store all that stuff that was in the furniture on the back porch somewhere, so here is a picture of our breakfast nook.

 

You may wonder why we didn’t move all that furniture to the garage and work on it there, but the garage is full of future projects that will be tackled sometime over the next several years.  Here is a picture of the garage in it’s current state.

 

That big piece of furniture?  Oh, well, that’s going in the workshop that is going to be built  over in a corner of the property.  We bought a used mobile classroom for a song at an auction a couple of weeks ago, and Mike has designed an addition to it so that we basically plan to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse and use it as a studio for Mike and Mary Elizabeth to paint and also as a farm store where we can sell produce.  If we can get the farm up and running and actually make a little money selling produce, we reduce our property taxes.  That’s good incentive, don’t you think? We’ve got it all figured out: If we can sell tomatoes for $50 each and blueberries for $100 per quart, and sell thousands of tomatoes and blueberries, we’ll break even in about 5 years.  Can’t wait for the crowd to show up.

But we have to have enough of the property into farm production to qualify for the tax break.  That means we are planting an orchard and getting the blueberry patch up and running. We’ve been planting and grading—we’ve put in a pond and we’re working on a stream. Unfortunately, we have to wait on electrical and irrigation to finish it up, and since the electrical has to run under the stream bed, the stream is torn up for the moment.  The rye grass we planted in the spring after we graded has already died off, and the weeds have taken over.  I haven’t gotten around to planting around the pond yet.  Here is a picture of the sad state of the site in it’s current condition.

Oh, yes, then there is Mary Elizabeth’s art business.  We’re happy she’s successful, meaning she is happily producing paintings and selling them, although, not being much of a business woman, still is not exactly rolling in dough or even what you might call “affluent.”  Or able to contribute to an IRA.

She is, however, prolific.  And so is Mike. Mary Elizabeth mostly works on small stuff, glassware that is easily stored, although there is a LOT  of it.  Mike, however, likes to paint BIG paintings.  Do you know how much wall space it takes to display a BIG painting?  How about 30 of them?    Canvases are tucked under beds and behind furniture and behind other canvases.  They hang on the garage walls. Closets are stuffed with paintings. You can imagine my joy when I discovered  these Ziploc bags that you can put all your bulky cloth items in, then suck all the air out with a vacuum cleaner and reduce 3 comforters and 6 pillows and 12 sweaters down to a 6 inch by 36 inch square, very stiff pile.  I’ve been running around stuffing everything I can get my hands on into these bags lately, and I’m proud that I can close a closet door or two these days.

And then there’s Nick.  He is a cooking maniac and something of a culinary genius.  He and Mary Elizabeth will spend an entire day whipping up marvelous organic, preservative and additive free creations in the kitchen, and to say that we eat well is something of an understatement.  But he is a bit messy.  He forgets to wipe his feet when he comes in from the garden, too, but mopping the floor and cleaning the stove is a small price to pay for the feasts he creates.   By the way,  all the bounty from the garden rests here until we either eat it or give it away or dump it in the compost.  It tends to pile up, and we also have a slight problem with fruit flies when we let it pile up too high.  Sometimes I feel like the Beverly Hillbillies in there, when we are making pesto and dropping stuff on the floor and stirring the soup and swatting at fruit flies.

I would like to say that my gardening and writing do not clutter up the place as much as Mike’s, Mary Elizabeth’s, and Nick’s projects, but I have this little addiction of finding wonderful treasures at auctions and junk stores that need a “tiny” bit of fixing up.  The mildewing furniture on the back porch that needed paint and refinishing?  All mine.  The stuffed garage is partly my responsibility, although Mike tends to find art in absolutely everything, so we also have piles of driftwood, rusty metal parts, and unidentifiable things lying around that Mike is going to turn into something beautiful.  Or at least interesting. Or just odd. And the Crate and Barrel boxes are Mary Elizabeth’s.  Just 3 of them shown here.  There have been as many as 10.  Plus huge rolls of bubble wrap.  Plus bags of packing popcorn.  I have to claim the twelve glasses full of mint that I am rooting as giveaways at my book launch party in 6 weeks as well as the garden hats and basket of gardening equipment and gloves tucked into the corner of the kitchen. And, oh, in my bedroom, the great fireplace surround I found at a junk store is currently propped up with books until I can decide what to do with the area.

And oh, there are other projects lying around waiting to happen.  We have all the old windows that we got at an auction just waiting for us to start on the greenhouse.  And the great lamp I found that has to be rewired.  And the piles of reclaimed wood waiting to be turned into a very whimsical chicken house.  And the fountain I am just trying to figure out how to make out of bits of pottery and garden statuary.  And the dozens of herbs I hope to put in an herb spiral as soon as I can find enough rocks.  And, well, there are a few others, but I will put them off until I finally get the garden weeded .. . .

So you think my life is wonderful? That I am surrounded by creativity and good things just waiting to happen?  That I live amid beauty?  That this place is humming with life and energy and wonderful things happening all the time? Yes, I do, and yes it is.  Occasionally.