Thursday, May 21, 2020

Time in Lists

Every morning I make a list of three things that made me happy the day before. A practice I started when life became crazy - and that was a while ago - years ago. Little things: walks, dinner, kid crafts, baking bread, flowers opening, bathing, sleeping in, having a shower to shower in.

Time is tracked in lists.

April - The numbers of eggs our chickens lay per day.  What is the average?  (3.6) What is the MAD (mean absolute deviation)? (.706) What is the normal range? (2.89 - 4.3)


May - The wild flowers we see on hikes. The birds we mange to identify.


Time moves fast, slow, doesn't exist at all.
Adam dates a check the 8th.  "Where have you been", I say. "Today is the 15th."

Time is tracked in shopping lists and meal plans.


Ivory pours over recipes for cookies, candies and desserts.  She creates excuses to makes sweets and delivers them to neighbors: toffee, gummies, french macrons.  I discover wishful items added to my shopping:  corn syrup, marshmallows, food coloring, candy molds.  I ask her to make a list breakfast, lunch, and dinner ideas.  Sylvan does the same.  His has a singular theme: meatballs.  While, I am sequestered in the bedroom in one zoom room after the other, I text Adam the link to the night's recipe and he cooks dinner.

Ivory lists what she wants for her birthday.

Some days it is challenging to get work work done, other days I tally up my hours, and realize I accidentally worked too many.  School takes all day.  School takes half an hour.  The kids are bored. They want attention, direction, anything.  I feel guilty. The kids disappear for hours into their own, self directed projects.


Sylvan's creation: a sea gull in a sea side setting.  Made from felt and embroidery floss.

Ivory's Creation: A Sea Otter holding a Sea Shell.  Made from felt and embroidery floss.

The kids amaze me.

They drive me nuts.
Adam drives me nuts.
I'm glad I like them.
I drive me nuts.

Sylvan writes hot glue sticks below balloons.  My grocery list has been taken hostage.

Time is tracked in arbitrary goal lists for the month, the season:
  • Try out a new hike per week. 
  • Transplant plants.  Plant plants. Give away plants.  Pull grass. Plant more plants. 
  • Make a list of all the plants we grow, harvest and eat. 
  • Figure out what to do about summer camps 

We get outside.  

We cross a swollen stream on a log bridge and I'm scared that this is stupid, that I should have filled out the card at the trail head before we entered the wilderness area, even though we plan to be only a few hours. I think: "maybe I should have brought another adult." I have bear spray for bears or strangers.  I have visions of  the kids being whisked away by rushing water. I only breathe easy after we cross the stream the final time, and make a note to return later in the year, when the snow is no longer melting off the mountain tops - and to bring Adam. 

We park at hidden trail heads. 


We hunt for river bottom morels. We find a dead porcupine.  We keep looking and find a few mushrooms in the mud.  They are gritty. 

We watch a humming bird do an elaborate dance.  A stranger points out a giant snag with a cavity holding three great horned owlet.  I sadly decline their offer of binoculars. 

Arrowleaf Balsamroot
I look for Clarkia.  I keep looking. 

Missoula Phlox
I give away tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, borage and basil to people on my list and folks who just happen to walk by my house.  I plant sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, milk weed.  It rains and rains.  It is rainbow season. 

I turn my notebook upside down and backward.  Early harvests are logged.
  • Sorrel, #of bunches: 111
  • Parsley, # of bunches: 1111
  • rhubarb: 1 1/2 lbs, 12 ounces
  • green onions: 1111
  • walking onions: 1 
I cancel the first two weeks of summer camp. I tentatively hold onto the later spots, unwilling to commit to canceling all plans, but then think I should have just made the call.  So many unknowns. 

I get a notice to pick up Ivory's items for the Band Coffee Fundraiser.  These orders were made a reality ago.  I add it to the list.  

Sylvan is over tired. We stayed up too late and I'm not sure how.  I go to kiss and tuck him in and he is crying in bed: "I am not learning anything." The statement is untrue, but I know how he feels.  I worked 8 hrs today.  I don't know that I got anything done.  "Buddy, did you see the countdown today?  There are only 17 days of school left."  Seventeen days. Where does the time go? 

I curl into bed holding a copy of an Anne Rule collection I found in a little free library down the block.  I add this book to my 2020 Missoula Public Library Reading Challenge under the category of guilty pleasure.  I stay up too late. 

I wake up later than planned. I hit the snooze button.  I write down three things that made me happy yesterday and overcook (almost burn) the Cherry Claffoti.

I can't keep time. 


Current Reading 

As a Family - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Me - But I Trusted You,  Anne Rule's Crime File #14 
Adam - A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut 
Ivory - Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Sylvan - James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Right Here. Right Now. Breathe.

There are moments when anxiety squeezes my lungs, I blink to push away tears, and I focus on what is around me right now.  Life at this moment is scary with so many things unknown, but at the same time I deeply grateful to be where I am, at this moment, with my family, and hyper-aware of just how much privilege this moment holds.

At the beginning of March 2019 we turned on the heat in our house that we had been working on for almost a year. After living in the bus for seven months, followed by house sitting and couch surfing for the coldest of the winter, we made the decision to move out of our 30 foot school bus and into our house.  We had no kitchen and unfinished bathrooms. It was rustic at best, but warm. We camped out in a construction mess and for months as we finished bathrooms, built cabinets, added doors. In March of 2020, I am hyper-aware that warm water and hand-washing is a luxury, that having space (or money) to store essentials and minimize grocery runs isn't universal, and how integral a home is to a shelter-in-place order.

For the first time in a really, really long time I planned a week off from work for Spring Break.  I just wanted to be home.  We planned to finish kitchen shelves, plant seeds, explore close by hiking trails, go cross country skiing, and ice skating.  We listen to the news.  We check statistics and maps compulsively.  We talk about it constantly.  I make the conscious choice to stop looking as often, to let it dominate conversation, to tune out of social media and tune in to what was around me. I refuse to count the days. With growing worry of Covid-19 spreading through communities, I reexamine my list, and I mark off ice skating and pack up the skates for the season.

We build a fort.


We venture into the mountains a few more times, and then move the skis to the attic too.

 

In some ways, the household rhythm of spring break just stayed, or rather, each day defines it's own rhythm. I get up early, earlier than anyone else in the house, and go back to work, without leaving.  The kids get up hours later and check in with their distance learning.

We finish the kitchen shelves.

Adam builds the shelves I drew, and I finally unbox all those jars I filled last fall. 
We have accidental science lessons.

We notice that the sprouting sweet potatoes and morning glory look similar.
We wonder why.
We learn sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family. 
We run intentional experiments.

The percent moisture content of popcorn kernels, we calculate, is 11%.
We start logging daily how many eggs our chickens lay, so we can apply Ivory's current Mathia lessons, to a real world scenario at the end of the month.

We forget to participate in calls.  My conference calls and the kid's calls overlap.  There are tears and arguments and screaming.  There are days that feel failure, mornings that start all wrong (snow on April 15th? wtf?!?), and evenings where it feels like nothing happened at all.

We rock recess.

Sylvan's answered this day's writing prompt with:  School from home is boring.
We sit around and do nothing.  Ha - try Rollerskating Basketball at school?!?!?
We bake bread, tortillas, cake and have pie for breakfast.



The kids help me sew masks. 


We read:

As a family - A Young People's History of the United States adapted from Howard Zinn
Ivory - Re-reading All the Harry Potter Books by J.K. Rowling
Sylvan - Crenshaw by Katherine Lasky
Adam - Panic on Level 4 by Richard Preston
Heidi - Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Tightrope by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl DuWunn

We plant the first early food crops in our garden.



It takes me hours to transplant baby tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, and borage into larger pots.  We pot up the sprouted sweet potatoes.


These actions mark the passage of time. (I realize that I haven't been to the grocery store since before we planted the seeds.)

We think of creative ways to use our food completely and make a first, and then a second batch, of candied orange and grapefruit peels.

We spread hundreds of puzzle pieces across the floor and put them together.


The 1000 piece mushroom puzzle the kids and I got Adam for Christmas is completed.


We start the puzzle Sylvan got for his birthday.  We pull a out a box full of puzzles Adam impulse bought at a neighbor's yard sale years ago. 

We visit and revisit frogs at a city park.


I know that everyday life is fundamentally disrupted, that the gaps in our social systems are glaringly obvious, that people in our society that have been failed are likely to be failed worse. I recognize that there is huge inequity in who can self-isolate, who can isolate safely, who has help and resources, and even in the demographics of people that are dying.  I know that the number of people that are un-housed in Missoula is growing, that an unprecedented number of people have lost income, that the future is uncertain.  I watch groups of teenagers roam the neighborhood and worry.  I worry about what I see and am not seeing, about people I don't speak to, about those folks who are always invisible and still unseen.  There is a dichotomy to all these truths and my own.  After the last few years of an insane workload, work stress, never ending meetings, all while living in a bus, building a house, and trying to keep life somewhat normal for two kids - this disruption forced a chance for me to breathe.   I hold all these conflicting feelings, recognize that many realities are true simultaneously, and try not to feel guilt. 







Friday, August 23, 2019

Construction Update 7: Suddenly Summer

Time is rushing past.
 
The windows are down, my hair tangling in the wind, as I sing along to the radio, and my hand rests on the stick shift, flying down the highway in fifth gear. I have twenty minutes of, what feels like open time, on my way to pick up the kids from horseback riding camp. They have enjoyed a week of horses, ponies, baby goats, tiny bunnies. I’ve endured a week of begging to bring tiny, furry, undeniably cute creatures home. 
 
They almost convinced me. ALMOST. The default answer is: “not until the house is done.”

Time is rushing past and it is hard to stop and take a moment to pause, and even harder to look back and reflect on where we have been. We move from day to day, week to week, month to month while also tackling project after project. It is hard to prioritize. It is hard to focus. Sometimes it feels like we are moving in circles. 

It is suddenly summer, and not just summer but the middle of summer, almost the end of summer. 

Everyday is full.
Everyday has been full. 

Our everyday lives operate against the backdrop of construction: painstakingly slow, but rewarding projects, that get us closer to finishing our house that is already home. 

January and February the sub-floors steadily became floors: the reclaimed maple and oak parquet, after using 40 lbs of sandpaper, finally smooth and glowing and the slate tile puzzle completed. With that milestone, the heat system is finished, and appliances installed. 

 


During March, items tucked away in the shop migrated out of storage and finally are moved to their final locations: the ceramic sink I purchased the first week of living in Missoula, the claw-foot tub, the kitchen hood, a pile of lumber that became stair treads. Final coats of paint covered up the dings and smudges from installing the floors.

April, May and June Adam transforms a stack of lumber and two my drawings into physical form. The sheet of discounted cherry-ply into a two-sided bookcase, desk, and deep shelf storage that is our stair railing.


  The birch euro-ply are now kitchen cabinets. 



I am slowly making the tile components for our upstairs bathroom shower. The concrete counter was carried into the house in four pieces and put into place and after a long process, our kitchen finally became fully functional. The laundry basket, stuffed full of washed and wrinkled fabric become closet doors.

 

These finished spaces become the final, or temporary place, for our things as each box gets carried down the attic ladder from the shop back into the house. 

It has been over a year since we started this adventure.

It is July. 

I hit snooze a few too many times.
Adam grumbles. 

I make coffee and step into the morning light to spend time, crouched between plants, that my and the neighbor’s kids seeded over spring break. The transition from seed to plant never ceases to amaze me. I look up, recognizing the same faces that walk or ride past, and find comfort in the rhythm of a strangers daily commute. 


This spring’s chicks start laying eggs. 

Adam builds the balcony railing.  

We travel out of town for a weekend - it is our only not-working-on-the-house weekend that is planned for the summer.  The kids play with a tiny turtle. They want to bring one home. 

Not till the house is done, is my mantra. 

The craigslist cedar siding, that has sat in bundled bunks behind our shop for years, is migrating into our yard one board at a time. Each piece is being stained. Exterior trim is being painted.
The list to-do is still forever long: finish the siding, one bathroom, finish interior trim, doors for the bedrooms.

My cherry pitter, applesauce mill, and canning jars are all accessible again. I can’t resist the offer of cherries and spend too long searching through the remaining boxes in the attic to find my favorite canning book.



Kids run in and out, over the fence, around the block, there are laser tag battles, noise and laughter. 
 
I tuck Sylvan into his sleeping bag and under his down comforter, and hand him his flashlight. All the kids, from three houses on our block, decided that they were going to sleep outside, together, on a trampoline. The night air has a chill. There are shushed conversation and giggles, as they all slide into the center. I push open the door to the house. It is warm, and smells of the baking granola.


It is August. 

Adam’s parents come visit. They help us mark things off the list: windows are cleaned, blinds are purchased and installed, the exterior wiring is finished.

We head to the fair.


I fill jars with apricots. Our peaches are ripening. I plan on making a sweet and spicy onion marmalade. I start looking for plums. 
 
I finally order the shower kit to finish the upstairs shower. I cut and shape, what I hope, are the last few ceramic tiles. I make test tiles for glazes. 

  
Adam heads out of town for work. 
 
We harvest our first Armenian Cucumber. 



Ivory and Sylvan abandon their bedrooms and crawl into my bed.

Sylvan is a Koala cuddler. 

Ivory usually likes her space, but wraps her arms around me so tightly, that I whisper: “Is everything okay?” She borrows my shoes, and in one week, is starting middle school. “Yes”, she whispers and falls asleep. It is hot, and sticky, and I’m squished between the two, but this moment feels finite, and I don’t move.


Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Construction Update 6: A Few Things Finished!

There is dirt under my finger nails is the same color as the weeks old bruise under the nail of my thumb.  I took last week off of work.



Adam took off the week before Christmas, and the upstairs flooring is 99% done: the bedrooms have wide maple planks, the great room upstairs is oak parquet, and a friend laid most of the tiles in the upstairs bathroom.


The stair landings are done.  Risers placed. Treads still need to be cut and installed.

It was my goal to tackle a giant pile of reclaimed flooring and get it ready to install. To install our heat system, our floors need to be sanded and finished.  I wanted to install heat the first week of January.  Those days have come and gone, and while the pile of flooring is now half the size that it was when I started, it still stands between heat and appliances.

I sort boards by tongue and groove size.
I scrape layers of dirt that peel away like thick apple skins from tongues and grooves. 



It is infuriatingly slow.  I wear away the corners of the scraper. 
I carry the cleaned boards from the house to the shop. 
I square off ends and then run each board across the router.  Wood flakes away as I cut grooves.  



I sort as I go, square off the other end and change router bits, and then handle each board two more times to cut a tongue.  I have been scraping boards for almost a week. When I go to bed and close my eyes, my mind continues scraping. 

I carry everything back to the house and pile the boards up for Adam.  He lays my 4 days of boards,  in just over a day… I struggle to keep up.

It is hard to remember that we are capable of finishing things: 

I wire two stained glass light fixtures that I finally pull from their attic hiding spot.




As I make the walk back and forth from the shop to the house, and look through the sliding door, light illuminates white tree trunks against a yellow wall.  It is warm and welcoming and always makes me smile. Of all the things we have done, this is my favorite and the first thing that truly makes this project feel ours and real. 

Years ago, I checked out a printmaking book from the library, and saw a project that I categorized into the “someday I hope/wish” category of my mind.  As soon as we finish painting the walls of our house I check the same book out again.  The book is called Print Workshop:hand-printing techniques + truly original projects written and illustrated by Christine Schmidt.  I leaf through and lay the book in front of the rest of the family.  “We are doing this”, I say.  “The leaf shapes are all wrong”, Adam notes.  

We start this project at the end of November.  
Little friends come over to help us tape and paint trunks.



The kids cut stencils while Adam tackles bedroom floors. We add branches. 



The kids and I tape leaves across the wall.  Moving the stencils here and there, sponging one dark yellow leaf after the other, until it just seemed right. 




We let the paint dry and the kids run off to play. 

I open up containers of sample paints that have stacked up and brush "crushed ice" and "edamame", colors that were ultimately rejected for the walls, on the trunks.  I step back and wait for the paint to darken as it dries.  


It took us a month, but there it is, finished.  FINISHED!!!!



I trudge past the view and keep moving.



Time in Lists

Every morning I make a list of three things that made me happy the day before. A practice I started when life became crazy - and that was a ...