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There’s no point to this post, but apparently I can also waste a lot of time staring at our cats.
I think it’s jealousy. I am totally envious of any creature that can come and go at will, feed itself and find a place to flop when it’s bored or tired of feeding and looking after itself.
The falling leaves are bathing Vermont in antique gold, and lately I feel as though I’ve entered a malfunctioning time machine that teases me with glimpses of the past. Leaves and, soon, snow are coming to cover the painted yellow lines on the asphalt, camouflaging the trappings of the twentieth century. But this only heightens my curiosity, not about the recorded history of the area, but about what life was really like.
In some ways, our off-grid, out-of-the way life gives us unique peeks into an older lifestyle – we heat and cook with wood, we grow and put up some of our food, we hang all of our laundry on the line. But every time I pop a tube of roll up cinnamon buns or hamburger helper in my shopping cart, I wonder how ye old housewives managed to do all of this by hand.
I loved the Little House books when I was a kid, and Farmer Boy, the one about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, as a boy, actually took place not too far from here – you can visit his homestead in upstate New York. The story of their family was fun, but my favorite parts were always the copious descriptions of how Ma and Pa put up a house, a garden, a bear they just killed.
It’s at this time of year when I’m freezing instead of canning the last goodies from the garden or when I’m nurturing my inner slacker mom in other ways that I most often think of Laura’s Ma, and the detailed description of Almanzo’s Ma – the original SuperMoms – raising a sizable brood of super-obedient kids in nearly pristine houses stocked with food they grew and furnished with homemade furniture covered with homemade quilts. I don’t just wonder what it was like to be them, I wonder if there was something magical in the well water back then. I get exhausted driving my saucy kids (no idea where they get it) to school, bringing home part of the bacon, and trying to keep the house just neat enough to keep from being condemned.
I don’t yearn for life in that “simpler” era. I like antibiotics and being able to vote. But I would pay good money to know their secrets.
A Little Mountain Music
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It was the most action that piano had seen in months, and it was to be the beginning of a change in perspective for it and all of us.
Shortly after that night we began rearranging cabinets and furniture in our kitchen/living area with the hope that we would be putting the finishing touches on a house we had built five years earlier. Our breakfast table changed spots five times. I rearranged cabinets and tag sale buffets in every possible combination, trying to make the most efficient use of space. And, in all of my arrangements, our piano occupied a new, more prominent position in the center of the living area.
We had several dinners with the same couple – our kids are all in the same age range – and, after solving the world’s problems over meals of varying formality, we continually ended up at the piano, looking through the songbooks for something easy to play and familiar enough for all of us to sing most of the words. We never planned these music nights, until a few weeks ago.
We had spent the day managing a multi-family tag sale, and everyone – including the kids – was exhausted. Somehow, however, we found ourself gravitating to the piano once again, and it was then that we noticed that one of our younger guests had brought a trumpet. People started to perk up. Thing1 got his guitar out. Thing 2 found a recorder (a dubious blessing most nights). And it started to dawn on us that music night was now an actual tradition. We said goodnight with plans to do it again, sooner this time.
Now, the Rolling Stones and the Carters have nothing to fear from our little improv group – most nights we’re picking through tunes note by note (although we had started picking songs ahead of time). But when we’re crooning and carrying on, I often think the critics and crepehangers of the world should be shaking in their boots.
Surrounded, as we all are, by a cacophony of can’t, it is easy to assume that not only shouldn’t we congregate and question and discover but that even the trying is beyond us. But when we do try, not only do we discover that we are capable of entertaining ourselves without direction from the arbiters of trend. We find that, as Cat Stevens once wrote, we can sing out if we want to. And when we do, we make ourselves free – at least in a small way.
One of the disadvantages of living in an earth sheltered house is that a lack of planning can cause unusual conundrums.
Today was the the perfect example. I was pulling things out of the fridge for dinner and noticed that we were out of propane. It is fall, and in our old colonial farmhouse I would have automatically fired up the woodstove and made a stew. Our current woodstove is even better for these situations – its massive oven and cooking surface make me feel like Ma Ingalls whenever I start it – but wasn’t the perfect solution in this house in this weather.
It’s jacket weather outside, but between the low-hanging sun blasting our house with heat and the three feet of earth on three sides keeping it in, the house was already 71 with no additional help. Lighting a fire hot enough to cook with would not have made the place more comfortable.
So now it’s 6:15 PM, and I’m standing in the kitchen of our earth-friendly, earth-sheltered house trying to decide between making sandwiches or doing the ultimate ‘un-green’ thing by opening all the windows and building a fire. I’m rationalizing – it’s going to rain tomorrow and the fire will give us hot water, so it’s not a total waste.
I’ve stopped pretending that our off-grid lifestyle is as environmentally altruistic as it is self-serving, but we do like being green when we can . Sometimes, though, figuring out how to do the green thing and still get dinner on the table and homework checked can be a real head-scratcher. I was still scratching my head when the Big Guy waltzed in the door and announced he had finished switching the tank on the stove. Tonight getting dinner on the table without wasting our wood heat became the green thing.
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Have I mentioned I love the light at this time of year? Every time I head out our dirt driveway, I have to slam on the brakes to catch it as it bounces off the mountains in their increasingly flamboyant colors. The tableau only gets better as I head towards the horse farm at the bottom of our road, and the wooden fencing recalls an earlier era.
I know the first settlers to this area saw these same mountains, but sometimes I wonder if, in the struggle to survive, they had the chance to marvel at them very often. For us, autumn is beauty, but it is also a time of stacking wood, clearing out the garden and mulching, and getting fall cleaning started (sometimes done). And, as our action-packed to-do list dominates our calendar, I sometimes have to remind myself to stop and look around. It begs the question, was stopping to stare at the scenery anywhere on the priority list in 1763 (that’s the year carved into a ceiling beam in our old house)?
About a year after we moved to our neighborhood I got my answer. When we moved to Vermont, I found a group of women who were avid quilters. They were true artists, but my knowledge of the art was very basic, and I headed to the library (there weren’t many quilting websites back then) looking for inspiration, instruction, and easy patterns.
What I found was a chronicle of thrift and creativity interwoven by women. I still look at early examples of the craft in Vermont, amazed at the designs conceived by women who often had less than an eighth grade education. But what was most interesting was the way many surviving patterns so beautifully mimic our shared landscape.
I was on this journey of discovery on the months following 9-11. As world events unfolded, our nation considered how to protect simultaneously its citizens and its identity, and sometimes it seemed as though we were all just focusing on surviving. I realize now we were all in an extended state of shock. At the time, however, as the feeding of our collective soul became an afterthought, I often worried that the national hyper focus on security had eliminated everything but utility from our consciousness. And, it became even more important to me that these people I had never met had been able to do something more than just survive.
Today as I drive up the road, watching the colors climb down the hill to meet me, I am connected to the women who were here before; whose homespun legacies suggest lives that were inspired and not just mere existence. And, as I have come find in my own life, that inspiration may have fortified their strength when survival became more challenging than usual.
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This morning the purple clouds against the orange trees filled me with awe. It was a perfect blustery fall day, tailor made for a fire – even if I didn’t need one.
As the day wore on, however, I learned of friends who were now enduring health issues – some temporary setbacks, some life-threatening. I learned of friends losing friends and almost losing friends. And the day outside my window seemed to mirror theirs, and I forgot about awe for a while. And then I learned of a friend whose life has just been forever changed by the suicide of a loved-one, and I quietly broke down.
I walked out to look at the sky and trees again, thinking of the day almost thirty year ago, when a close friend changed – forever – the lives of everyone in our group of teenaged misfits by taking his own life. Already trying to cope with mental illness that had plagued me from early childhood, our friend’s death sent me into a nearly-fatal tailspin that was only halted when a dear friend forcefully intervened. You know who you are, and I don’t think I’ve ever said, “Thank you.”
Thank you.
That event coupled with Olympian denial on my part led to a sustained, sometimes intentional, retreat from meaningful interaction with family and friends, and any emotions that required honest reflection. I found my highs in dangerous places and people, and crashed often. And only when I stopped to let awe in – watching a sunset or enjoying a celebration as a spectator – did I ever admit how meaningless life was becoming.
You can keep barriers up in a marriage – not for long if you want it to be successful – but you can for a while. You can’t, however, have barriers of any kind if you want to be a good mother. Giving birth completely obliterated mine, and I have never had a chance to fully reconstruct them.
Surrendering my defenses, opening up was the scariest, best thing I did. It let romance with my husband become real love that endures the worse and the poorer. It let me completely subvert my wants and needs to another human being and be happy doing it. And, today, it let me cry thinking of my friends, hoping their healing will be swift and complete. And, as I went outside again at the end of the afternoon, it let the purple sky and orange leaves still fill me with awe.
It’s the Big Guy’s birthday, and I’m making apple pie. He and Thing1 eschewed birthday cake in favor of pie a few years ago, so after a day of excavating our mudroom (perfect birthday activity), I pulled out the Joy of Cooking and started making the crust. I go back and forth between the Joy of Cooking recipe – is it possible to use that and not think of your mom – and the one in the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, but, as I was peeling apples, I remembered I was out of the lemon called for by both of these recipes for ‘Classic Apple Pie’.
It’s amazing how your mind wanders when you’re peeling apples, and mine usually has a good head start anyway. I was on the 3rd or 4th apple I started wondering, not if I should make a dash to the country store – but how Classic Apple Pie became a classic. It’s the quintessential New England dessert in fall – every year we get so many apples that we sometimes have pie or apple-something every night for a mont. But, almost without fail, most Apple Pie recipes call for lemon juice.
Now, I know Joy of Cooking has been around for a long time, and it was certainly possible to find lemons in urban areas of New England even a century ago, but our town had year-round residents living the original off-grid lifestyle just 50 or 60 years ago. There was a country store – the one we still shop at – but it’s hard to believe lemons were a commonly stocked item then, and certainly not 100 or 200 years ago.
Now, I’ve learned not to use dinner guests as culinary lab rats, but I figured the Big Guy might want to eat adventur – I mean, authentically – on his birthday. I started thinking about what the earliest European settlers would have used for their Pie. I planned to google it later, but it was getting late, and I opted for experimentation over transportation.
I figured a mountain mom who made it to the country store every few weeks or so might have kept flour, sugar, and molasses, and maybe some kind of spices on hand. They would have had milk and butter, of course, and probably some kind of lard/shortening. But not a whole lot of lemon. Now, Julia Child’s mantra may be ‘Keep Calm, Add Butter’ (an admirable outlook on life), but in Vermont the rule is, ‘When in doubt, add maple syrup’. I figured that tradition was probably established early on and decided it was a good substitution.
Later, as I sat on the couch smelling the results of my experiment bubbling in the oven, I did a quick google and found that Apple Pie goes back in history as long as apples and flour were in existence. Some old recipes call for champagne in place of lemon, others were just apples mashed with flour. Apple Pie a la Mode made its first appearance at the Cambridge Hotel in Washington County New York in the 1890s, and the phrase ‘American as Mom and Apple Pie’ was coined in World War II.
But whether it was mom or the cook in the castle kitchen, experimentation was the most common component. The pie pan emptied quickly, and in the end, the family decided that it was also the most delicious ingredient.
To anyone getting the last post twice. My provider had a power outage last night, causing some data to be lost and then reposted.
Three Sisters
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I love the light at this time of year. Throughout the day, the acute angle of the sun bathes the trees and garden in a pinky-gold, giving even our contemporary cave an antique atmosphere. I think it’s that sepia glow that always gets me wondering about the property’s previous caretakers.
Thing 1’s history project a couple of years ago put a new perspective on my wonderings by sparking an interest in genealogy. We were looking for Revolutionary war figures to report on and shaking the family tree a little helped a few ideas fall out. I began tracing the rest of the family tree and soon found that the Big Guy’s – and our kids’ – connection to Vermont went farther back with even more branches than we had anticipated.
The most intriguing and mysterious inquiry has been the search for a Native American great-grandmother’s (Alice Fox) roots. We had pictures and family memorabilia to track some of her history. Unfortunately, history and history of record-keeping make tracing Native American ancestors a unique challenge. Even when we lose her trail, however, our collective curiosity about the area’s first people spur us to follow in her – or their – footsteps when and where we can.
Most of my garden is an evolving science project, often mimicking different early New England layout we’ve seen on one of our Saturday drives. But even before I went looking for Alice, one of our trips introduced me to the Three Sister’s Gardens popular among the Iroquois and other tribes in this area. Consisting of squash, beans, and corn, they provide a perfect balance for the soil and the humans it feeds, and it has been in use in this area since people first appeared here.
My Three Sisters gardens are practical – with few exceptions they are incredibly productive. But they are also my way of being mindful of the people who were here and of the gifts they left us. Now, as the pumpkins gleam in the golden light and the bean pods and corn stalks dry, I think about Alice’s trail yet again. I don’t know how much of her history I can give my kids, but in honoring the memory and contributions of her branch of the tree, I hope I’m giving my kids a special connection to the land we will pass on to them one day.
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My mom came to visit us in Germany when Thing1 was born. Like most newly re-minted grandparents, she and my Dad were there to pitch in and weigh in with their years of experience, but the real reason for their visit became clear about 20 minutes after we go back from the hospital.
I had not willingly put the baby down for six days. It had been anything but sweetness and light – we had a heck of a time getting started with nursing – but I simply could not bring myself to put him down. I think I was secretly afraid he might disappear if I did, and the Big Guy practically had to fight me for a turn.
I could cuddle overtime in the hospital when there were nurses managing the logistics of life, but when we got home, responsibility greeted us at the door. Fortunately, Grandma and Grandpa were only too happy to help with the slack – especially with the holding of the baby. We all picked up, cooked, diapered, and competed for baby holding time, and that first week home, Thing 1 rarely saw the inside of his crib. More than once my mom quipped, “You can waste a lot of time staring at a baby.”
That phrase has followed me for years – whether I was cuddling my own two little imps or wistfully staring at someone else’s newborn. It still echoes in my head, and it always spurs the obvious question of why babies are so intriguing. Love was the easy, automatic answer in the beginning. But my babies are boys now, and, while I still marvel that they’re mine, Mom’s musing had been silent in my head for a while – until last night.
I was poring through my book of drawings in search of an image of a seated woman when I stumbled on a drawing done by a French artist, Timoleon Lobrichon, in the 1850s. The image of a perfect, plump baby enjoying bath time caught my eye and my imagination, and I knew I had to copy it. I put my search on hold and opened my pad.
I blocked the big shapes in and then started zoning in on the details. As I stared at this curve or that shadow, I was struck by the immediacy of the original drawing. Created at a time when home life was very private and most art still focused on battle scenes or exalted figures and subjects, this drawing was the work of a man who had spent hours staring at a baby.
Later I went through the book looking for more work by this same artist, and while he had covered many other themes, this drawing exuded with intimacy – an not just with the subject. Through his portrayal of innocence and exploration, simple pleasure and even hope, this artist created an unusual kind of intimacy with the viewer.
And, as I viewed this baby one hundred fifty years after the message was drawn, I began to realize the time spent watching an often wriggling, crying, utterly dependent bundle of humanity is not wasted. It’s a reminder of the hope and curiosity – and even innocence – that, while often disregarded, still lies in each of us and waits to be nurtured.
Serenity for Imprfect Parents
Grant me the Serenity to accept the messes I can’t get to, the Courage to clean up the ones I can, and the Wisdom to remember that Picking My Battles is more important than picking up.
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You might think that because I write a blog dedicated to my failures as a housekeeper, I would have no angst about the unexpected guest. I thought so myself until Thing2 came home from school with a friend.
I knew the parents would come to pick up our tiny guest very soon. However the work day was still in full gear. I realized that when these mystery parents came to get their offspring, our unkept house would play center stage.
Our guest’s father arrived and wanted a tour of our energy system (we’re off the grid),and I instantly began preparing him for what he was about to see. He held up a hand and assured me he had seen worse, and I suddenly decided it didn’t matter if he had or hadn’t.
The house will get clean sometime – not today, but someday. In the meantime, I’ve decided to enjoy our house – clean or not – with no worries and, most of all, no shame.
Picking My Battles 