Neo-Shaker Values

We lay in bed in our first home. He was holding his left arm crooked, forearm straight up, palm bent back and opened upward as if he were holding a crystal ball or perhaps a great sandwich he’d built and was admiring from all sides before consuming.

I peered into his empty palm. “What do you have there?” I asked.
He rotated it toward me. “This is the front door,” he said. We were talking about the house we would build.

“The ground will come here on this side,” he lowered and rotated the hand again for my inspection, “and here on this side. There will be a swale here behind the house” he gestured with the other hand, “and the grass will come straight up over the roof.”

I could begin to see it. That was the late 70’s. Copies of Mother Earth News could be found by our couch, in the bathroom and under the bed. We were going to have a house with a grass roof. Yippee!

We had no architect or contractor. We had one summer to get something under roof that we could live in. We had $22,000 and after the long driveway was bull-dozed and graveled, the well drilled and the site leveled, we had $14,000 left to build a home.

The first summer we got under cover and divided the space into two small rooms for sleeping and the rest we left open as combined living, dining and kitchen. We made the ceiling 12 feet at center and cut oaks for support posts. The floor was concrete and still is. Windows and cabinets came from an assortment of buildings being demolished. I painted them to match and put on new hardware.

We built an outhouse of rough sawed wood. The inside was painted white and I made a sunburst stained glass window for it that splashed afternoon rays around the interior with the full spectrum of colors. It was actually a rather dazzling place to be; with its odd assortment of olfactory, kinesthetic and visual opportunities. It was a good place to ponder paradox. Especially in the warmer months.

The second summer we doubled the size of the house adding a bathroom, large multi-purpose room, small walk-in closet and laundry-tool room. A wide hallway gave access from one large room to the other. Eventually I built an carved glass partition between the two.

We did not need a lot of space but we wanted a spacious feeling. I set up the flow of rooms and window placement so you could see through the entire house north-east to southwest. Outside and inside seem all in the same space because of the many windows on three sides and the lack of neighbors. We also added five skylights.

I notice and enjoy the creative energy that seems to flow in architectural spaces that are not designed to a particular style. I’m also most comfortable without a lot of self-conscious artiness around me.

Our house was not meant to look eccentric. It was created in response to its setting. It was created in gratitude. It was created with great frugality. I wanted it to please without impressing. Maybe you could say it was built with Shaker values but not in typical Shaker style. I don’t know. I’m too close to it. I do know that the scriptural imperative from Colossians 3:23 was, and is, always in my heart as I work. “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;” And though I’m quoting scripture here, I do not mean to be stating anything about my own spiritual values. There is something about this hill that just draws that kind of feeling out of the heart.

Share Without Being Over-run

All creatures have at least minimal requirements for their home. Any of us, however, are capable of missing the big picture in our push to make ourselves comfy. Sometimes our homes shelter us. Sometimes they lie in the path of a tsunami.

I erected two bluebird boxes on posts in 1987 with the help of my friend Ed. One I placed where I could watch it from the porch. It faces south. The other I put up behind the house near some fruit trees and I oriented it east, where I could see it from my hammock.

Every year since then I have watched bluebirds sit on the south facing house. They go in, they go out. Male and female confer about it, but ultimately, in spite of my agenda for easy observation, they build in the home with the view to the east and the other box becomes a battling ground for diverse species. Wrens usually win. Despite a few calamities caused by snakes or rival birds, the eastern box has fledged maybe as many as 50 families since the 80’s. The south one, zero. If you want to see bluebirds, you have to get with their program.

I am an artist. That’s how I've made my living for 30 years. Last Wednesday I went up to my studio to pack up for an installation and I saw that a Carolina wren had constructed a charming tunnel nest of leaves and moss in behind my inks. She had half-raised a family since I'd been in that room. I fastened the door open for her easy access and she continued to fly in and out with food while I loaded the car. I looked just once at the babies. Five fierce little heads waved inside with gaping mouths.

I knew something was wrong the second I walked in there today. No cheeping. No hopping mad mother. At first I thought squirrels, with whom I also battle for control of my studio, had killed them. Then I thought with trepidation of snakes. When I found five little starved bodies deep inside the cavity I realized what giant calamity had probably befallen them. I was the most likely source of their devastation. They made an unfortunate choice of real estate. It could happen to anyone.

Earthquake, fire, toxic soil, tornado, aggressive neighbors, the list of potential threats to what we view as 'our property' is very long.

I was sick over this unnecessary loss of life. I would have shared my space with these birds until they fledged.

I'm less keen on sharing studio space with squirrels but after years of struggle I have to admit that building my shop under a grove of nut trees was maybe a bit myopic and, again, all about me.

How to share without being over-run; an unanswerable question on a large or small scale. All solutions seem to involve either violence or some kind of myopia. I prefer to weigh that question day to day rather than opting for any kind of 'ultimate solution.' I try to make decisions on a case by case basis. This is not an entirely comfortable position for me but it does leave room for possibilities.

Maple Appreciation Day

I often work straight through Memorial Day, Labor Day and the Fourth of July. There is always so much to be done.

I prefer my holidays to mark stellar moments of weather and circumstance rather than the sacrifice of veterans or the birth of our nation, both of which have my gratitude all year round.

There are a few annual holidays that can not be marked in advance on the calendar. You have to be ready to act when they show up. Maple Appreciation Day is my favorite.

One Day in late May or early June I will wake up to air of such transparency that the sun illuminates every leaf, every curl of bark. Dark shadows are thrown by the trees. Breezes are light, just tickling the hairs on your arm. The maple tree which shelters my hammock is in full leaf and all prior plans must be layed aside.

Maple Appreciation Day is celebrated with all your senses and all your need to re-create. The accoutrement of the day are blankets, good novel, reading glasses, beverage of choice, snacks, binoculars, bird identification book, pillows and, of course, a double wide well placed hammock. The attitude is one of receptivity and gratitude. I do no work on this day, though sometimes I am inspired to by what I see or think about.

Animals do not register the occupant of a hammock as human and will often come quite close. You might be thumped from a nap, and look up to see that a cat-bird has landed on the suspension chain and he's drawn a bead on you with his curious eye. You are close enough to see without optical aids and admire the rusty patch of feathers under his tail when he flies . He or she, they look alike.

Mostly there is the liquid light of the day illuminating layer upon layer of the green leaves alive and overarching you.

I swing like a baby in a cradle. I dream and think about my dreams. The garden, the fields, the clouds soak into me and I let them live behind my eyes. Sun sparks through gaps between leaves and bless me in my vulnerability.

This is the holiday that fills me up to the brim and makes sense of all the mowing, pruning, mulching I will do over the summer. This is the day where I can watch blue birds swoop down for food and back to feed their babies in a rhythm that will remind me to be gentle when I mow around their home. Today I might see the fox with her twins.

Face-off With May

Red may be the color of danger and sacrifice, but green is the color of aggression. Green wants to live. It is our sanctuary, our breath, and we will all be buried under it some day.

I hate spring. That’s an unpopular position and I don’t really know anyone who shares it with me.

April is beautiful enough. The greening grass, the trees with their first blush of red are lovely if you didn’t know what they were all up to. But eventually you understand that each bud is a little fist-faced birth pushing toward life. Everything’s sap is rising but mine. And just maintaining the view, keeping the long driveway passable, battling the invasive exotics and ousting poison ivy from the most traveled pathways, is overwhelming to me in scope. There is a new crop of borer bees in the soffit every spring and I must deal with them or they will be thumping me in the head and making pumice out of the porch ceiling until it one day falls on my head.

Weeds in the garden and a winter’s worth of windfall sticks and limbs have to be pulled or picked and heaved away. There is the issue of nursing along a 20-year-old much abused lawn tractor and encouraging it to take on another season of rampant growth and radically uneven terrain. If it can, I can, I think to myself.

Bless its heart, it started right off this year. The slogan ‘nothing runs like a Deere’ is the only advertising hyperbole that I’ve ever found true. I did rather impress myself with a starting technique that requires a great deal of positive energy and at least five of my two hands. There is a short somewhere in the wires behind the ignition switch so sometimes you turn the key and nothing happens. In that event you have to open the hood and gently move the wires with your left hand while turning the key with the right. While the motor is trying to turn over, you have to also move the choke forward all the way then back down, let it rest 5 seconds then turn the key and move the choke forward again until the engine catches and then quickly pull it back down to running position. Oh, and for the first start in the spring, to give yourself the best odds of success, you have to spray carburetor dryer into the top at exactly the same time as you turn the key, jiggle the wires, move the choke. It sounds impossible and it almost is, so I feel gloriously competent, and grateful, when it works. This year it worked.

I cranked up the compressor and put air in the tires, blew off the mower deck, then rode like an Indian princess being carried aloft by her servants in procession to her wedding. First stop was the front porch to do the spring tune-up. I’m an American. When we’re up against great odds, we love our machines.

I’m a nature loving, tree hugging American. I love the birds, raccoons, ground hogs, foxes, bunnies, possums and chipmunks that share this hill with me. I love the view from the house. And the green inferno that wants to rise like a tidal wave to block my view of the horizon must be subdued. It was reluctantly that I made friends with the tractor and things like brush killer and rodent poison. But I can't allow rodents, snakes or bugs in the house. I've tried it. It doesn't work. And I want to see out.

Since the 70’s I’ve made a lot of compromises. Every truce is uneasy. The assaults of nature on all my boundaries are blessed. And I, armed only with an old tractor and some hand tools, face-off with May, with about as much chance as Don Quixote had against the windmill giants; my expectations about as realistic. Fussy May with its pastels, its pollen ridden air and its unbridled passion-riddled growth is the giantess. I’m just one sneezing little woman, with an old lawn tractor, a pair of nippers, and an electric weed whacker. I can’t hope to win. I know which side will truly draw the blood. Deep down, I must have been born for war.

A Matter of Layers and Depths

When I wake up in the summer bedroom I see back-lit red geraniums, their deep green leaves like paws stretching up. I see a panorama of tree tops and hillside and other too aggressive green growing things that I try not to think about before my second cup of coffee.

My husband and I cobbled the bones of this house together in two summers. We used cinder blocks and stuff we could buy for practically nothing at auctions or cut down out of the woods. If a house can have a soul, this one does.

Maybe a building can earn a soul by sheltering its inhabitants kindly in spite of disasters, or maybe it has to be blessed from the beginning. Maybe being conceived and built by amateurs and having taken shape very slowly in response to what nature was already doing so well, it grew an indefinable essence in excess of it’s architecture and accoutrement. If you were to name it’s style you might call it Neo-Tudor Hacienda, or Villa Mother Earth News or Ode to the Perpetually Unfinished. I’ll bet in the years I’ve been here at least 50 people have walked in the door and said, “If you ever decide to sell this place, call me.” They didn’t know what it was about the place that they loved. There is a philosophy behind it’s creation but I’ve neither examined nor wavered from in all these years.

Where is the value in this home that I and others respond to? The view is both far reaching and private, but not all that unusual for this area. Having virtually no disposable income, I’ve not been able to finish either interior or exterior and just basic maintenance is a question of fits and starts and the cause of frequent despair. I suspect my home’s value to me and others is a matter of layers and depth and I love it the way you might just adore a homely man or woman whose intelligence and empathy captivate your desire.

I am in the grips of a long term affair with a piece of real-estate. Light and gravity and weather have aged us both and encouraged me to ponder the mysteries of beauty and wealth, in other words ‘value.’ My battles here have created, as much as expressed, my aesthetics and my ethics of ownership and sense of who I am and who I will be when I’m done here.

I nearly fell over my work boots backing up the hill.

“Here?” he asked.

“No, not quite. A little higher.”

“Here?” he called from below, moving toward me through honeysuckle as I backed up. We were getting further and further from the road-side building site his practical nature was opting for. I’d been backing up hill for 20 minutes.

“Here,” I said.

He caught up with me and turned to look.“You’re sure?” he asked. But we both knew the answer. That was the late 1978.

Here I am in 2008. For three decades I’ve been in this spot. For 25 years I’ve been the sole human observer. Here I have come to feel awe for the interplay of nature, entropy, vision and weather. Though I don't yet know exactly what that means, it is through this blog that I intend to examine it.