Butterfly on the Wall

It's on.

So...yeah. 

I had a big long ranty post drafted and then my Love woke up and I unloaded a bunch of stuff on him.  And it helped.

So, forget that.

Photoshop.  Quilt.  Drawing.  It begins this week.

Oh, and we got snow.

 

Abby hates snow.  It is cold on her feet-zehs.

 

Winter treat

I took these pictures this morning, and I love them.

It is supposed to snow here tomorrow--4 to 8 inches, they say--and I am happy.  We didn't get diddly-squat the last time that the entire rest of the world got snow and I feel very cheated.  Cold weather is pointless without snow as far as I'm concerned.  And this time, I am prepared.  I paid attention!  Only because someone else clued me in, but whatever.  I knew an entire day before the flakes started falling and I am prepared.

Prepared = have lots of good food.  

Assuming the power doesn't go out. 

Otherwise, it will suck.

But if everything goes smoothly, we have red wine and soup (lentil and cauliflower with homegrown kale and squash--mmmmmm), and tomorrow I will roast venison with locally grown Hayman sweet potatoes and make whole wheat bread and orange cardamom pound cake and coffee.  And we will do nothing but watch movies and EAT.  And maybe some other stuff.  You know.  To keep warm.

Bring it.

Happy anxious

So, I’m beginning to feel sort of like I did before I moved back home four years ago, when I was absolutely miserable and anxious and scared and calling my mom to sob into the telephone almost every. single. morning.  

Because of that, whenever Abby hears me so much as sigh loudly, she slinks out of the room as quietly and as low to the floor as she can.  I traumatized my dog and now she hides if she thinks I am crying.  Nice. 

This time though?  Happy anxious.  Not miserable, not weeping.  Just again, extremely short of breath, and full of boundless puppy energy in a flitting-from-one-thing-to-another sort of way, in spite of the copious amounts of red wine and “comfort food” I am shoveling down my pie hole eating which is not working and which is actually kind of making me feel sick.  (Red wine, fried eggs and pumpkin flan.  Awesome.)

So, happy anxious.  Though I do still panic about money from time to time and get paranoid that my Love resents me for being such a deadbeat, which he insists is not the case, though he does wish I would clean more since, you know, I’m home all the time.

But I knew this would happen.  Knew that, like Beowulf and Odysseus and Frodo, I’d have to take my own particular hero’s journey to face the dragons of my fears and what not.  (And my Love expects me to clean.  I’m here, every day, bravely facing my personal fires of Mount Doom and he thinks I should be scrubbing the toilet.  Pffff.  Whatever.)

So aside from the cleaning this is exactly where I had hoped that I would be and it has only taken me, what, 8 ½ months?  Yes, it took me that long to let go and allow myself to be here, on the threshold of productively doing What I Want and Making It Happen.

Clearly, to fully purge the Anxious, I will have to do some more letting go and will need more time at home. 

I’m thinking 5 years ought to do it.

Chicken Excursion

When we first got our chickens we let them wander on their own.  Unfortunately, they usually wound up in the horse barns, so the landowners finally asked us to fence them in because they were worried about chicken poop contaminating their horses' food supply. 

The chickens don’t seem to mind as their yard is plenty big for the five of them, but this time of year there is very little happening there in the way of green. Since the weather was very spring-like today I let them out to rearrange my garden beds for a bit and they were thrilled to destroy them scratch in some new territory.

The handsome man up there is our only rooster and I adore him.  We got him at a local livestock swap for $7, which I thought was a deal, but my Love was annoyed to be paying money for a rooster, especially since we weren't even planning to eat him.  Luckily, nostalgia won out.  Apparently the rooster’s coloring is what they call "jiro" in Cuba and this was his beloved grandfather’s favorite.  Of course, they only pay attention to roosters down there because of cock fighting, but we won't get into that. 

Anyway, our boy's name is actually Barack because this was back during the presidential race.  My Love suggested Obama because the bird was so cool and collected just like the President during the debates, but I voted for Barack because that sounded more like a chicken sound.  Right?  ba-RACK!  Right?

But it feels somehow wrong to call him either of those things so I usually just address him as Little Wooster Man.  I know, way to emasculate.  But he is rather dainty, and as he always ends up following the hens around like a purse-carrying husband in a shopping mall, I think it fits.

Our ducks, Lucy and Ricky, didn't quite know what to think of the company, all up in their space.  They are such dorks. 

The chickens ignored them, as usual, and got right to work slurping up our hard-won earthworms.  When we first started gardening on this site the squigglies were few and far between, but four years of soil amendments have lured them in.  They're still like gold to me, though, and watching the chickens suck them up like feathered vacuum cleaners made me call time.

Recess is over, chickens.

 

Circle of Life, Ring of Death

A cute little gray mouse skittered across the stove last night as my Love and I were heaping up our plates for dinner.  I squealed, not because I’m afraid of mice—I think they are adorable and cute and it’s not their fault that they poop all over my forks and dishes and cabinets (not that that is acceptable, by the way)—but because it startled me.  They are so quick!

My Love, however?  Does not think that mice are cute.  And there is absolutely no excuse for pooping on his cutlery.  Once inside his house, sweet little gray mouse is The Enemy and must be destroyed.

It is a book another blog post entirely about my childhood, introversion, sensitivity and overly developed sense of empathy for animals and how children’s books aggravated a natural proclivity to personalize animals, to consider them at least equal to people and often prefer them more.  I enjoy watching and interacting with them, I respect them and their habits and definitely gain a sense of peace from their presence.

Growing up on a farm, especially in circumstances of near poverty as my Love did, perhaps tends to leave one with a different perspective.  At eight years old he was hunting songbirds with his slingshot, which his grandmother would fry up for him when he got home.  From that point until he left Cuba at age 19, he learned how to slaughter and butcher anything else the family ate: fish, duck, chicken, rabbit, goat, sheep, pig.  He is still an avid hunter though only for food, not for bragging or mounting.

This has been hard for me to reconcile with the knowledge that he also enjoys animals in his way, which is similar to mine.  But for him, there is another level that I am only just beginning to understand.  Living with, eating and killing animals gives him a sense of connection, both to a way of life and to life itself. 

Of which death is an inherent and inescapable part.

I’m beginning to sense that all of my previous interactions with animal death have been an effort to keep the reconciliation of my own death out of my consciousness.  The few times in my 37 years that I have come into contact with death, I have always averted my eyes, literally and emotionally.  But living in closer proximity with both nature and farm (and with my Love) has forced me to look, even when I didn’t want to. 

Like the time I went to feed the chickens and found one of my sweet red hens with a baby mouse clutched in her beak.  I only figured out what it was because it let out a shrill, terrified squeak as she bludgeoned it to death on the ground.  It was over so quickly that before I could process what I had just witnessed, I watched, shocked, horrified, and dumbfounded as the hen paraded her fresh, limp morsel around the yard, growling to keep the other hens away.  (Yes, chickens growl, in their own way.  It is very disconcerting.)

Or the time when I was walking my dog around the small pond at the back of the property where a flock of bufflehead ducks had settled in for the winter, and my presence caused them to fly up making it oh so easy for a peregrine falcon that had been perched nearby to nail one of those precious little ducks midair.  Shocked and horrified (again) I watched the falcon tear that duck to pieces, thinking maybe there was something I could do to help the duck and knowing full well that there was absolutely nothing that I could—or even should—do.  The falcon eats meat.  If not this duck, then another or the falcon dies. 

The hens don’t have this excuse.  They’re just opportunists.  Now I think, don’t turn your back on a chicken.  I’ve seen their dark side.

 

Do not turn your back on a chicken

Sometimes I fear that my heart is hardening.  The me that accepts things like this as “the cycle of life” is a completely foreign being.  Most of the time though, I welcome the change.  It feels more realistic and I think that the shift, though mightily uncomfortable, is ultimately a good thing.  I began eating meat again 5 years ago, but I’m only just beginning to comprehend my professed reason for 11 years of vegetarianism—if I can’t kill it (or at least face its death) then I don’t feel justified in eating it.

I was startled again this morning when, while drinking my tea in the quiet, I heard the snap of the mousetrap.  When he gets up, my Love will empty the trap and confirm for me that the mouse’s death was quick and painless, and I will hope that he is not fibbing for my sake. 

I won’t look. 

Ode (sort of) to Tea

Also, tea? 

My favorite food-related item in the whole world.  Above red wine and chocolate and fresh basil and chèvre, all of which I adore and will do shameless things to obtain.  And as they are commonly available items, this does not say much about me.

But tea?

Without The Tea, my day is incomplete, doomed, in which I wander around mumbling “Wha…?” because I can no longer understand language and this parallel non-tea universe that I am in is not pretty.  It is dark and cold and devoid of meaning.

Please don’t make me go there.

I also love teapots because they are the source of tea and therefore make me happy.  I do not fancy myself a collector of things because I don’t like having unused stuff around.  Purge mode began shortly before the divorce several years ago, and has since become a way of life.  But I do have a soft spot for teapots.  Not the whimsical ones that are shaped like country cottages or elephants or Spongebob Squarepants or whatever.  And nothing overly floral or frilly, either.  Small is good—the two to four cup size is best as it is usually just me and sometimes Mom partaking.  I’d totally do tea parties if I had cool friends or teddy bears, but oh well.

So here are my babies:

 

Denby, which my ex-husband got for me when he went to England and I didn’t.  Had he not brought me back an honest-to-goodness English teapot from England, we would have been divorced much earlier.

Royal Winton which I got at the flea market and am afraid to use because it emits a strange odor when I put the water in, no matter how many times I use it.

 

Japanese, from a pottery shop in Kyoto, which I use for green tea only.

 

Lil’ Blue, an earthenware Chatsford which was a closeout buy from one of my favorite tea companies.  The lid doesn’t fit quite right but I don’t care because she is a bright, zingy, happy blue. (You can see my reflection in Lil' Blue's belly, but don't look because I'm not wearing a bra.)

 

And finally,

 

Hall, my everyday 1 and 1 ½ cup teapots.

 

So here I am, bumming in mismatched sweats, unshowered (yet) and drinking from a wedding china teacup.  Wedding china from the first marriage.  And its here and I adore it and I’m not going to not use it, I don’t care about my track record with breaking (several) pieces of my grandmother’s Blue Willow.  I say, enjoy it!  To pieces, even. 

 

Abby bides her time, waiting for a bite of muffin.

I don't want to finish the work post right now

I've been thinking more about the blog lately.

I’m a little all over the place with this thing.  There is no real theme or direction yet, but I keep thinking I need one. 

Although I do know what I’m not.

I’m not a mommy blogger (GAH! Scary. Though if I could be as cool as Chrissy I might consider procreating), a foodie blogger (don’t do recipes), a farmgirl blogger (no farm), nor a photo blogger (I don’t even know how to operate all the stuff on my camera yet.)

I don’t have a niche. 

My Love and I watched Julie & Julia the other night.  She had a theme for her blog.  A plan, a framework.  I have no such clarity. 

I started the blog to give structure and accountability to what I wanted to do. 

Which is, what, exactly?

Clearly, I need both of those things, because the first thing I wanted to do was figure out what I wanted to do.

But I also did it for the community aspect, though I can totally relate to something Crazy Aunt Purl said about when she started looking at knitting blogs and thinking she could write about knitting, but the more she looked at knitting blogs the more she noticed that everyone else was adorable and perfect and making adorable, perfect things.  In terms of the artsy/crafty (and learning some stuff in those areas is supposed to be one of my goals here) I can relate because I follow a few a/c blogs and they just whip out beautiful things so easily, it shames me.  So she said that she decided to just write what was on her mind. 

Maybe I'll go with that, too and not worry about "niche."

Because also, I don’t like just lurking all the time, and though I technically don’t need a blog to comment, it seems like the decent thing to do.   Commenting without a link back so that people can learn about you, too, seems as one dimensional as having a conversation in the physical world with nothing but a disembodied voice.

But maybe not.  I talk to nobody in particular all the time, which is probably weirder.  Although it makes the blog thing—writing to nobody in particular about the minutiae of my life—a natural next step for me.  Blogging is the electronic and socially acceptable version of what I do all the time.  Blogging is considered normal whereas talking to noone?  Maybe not so much.  Get caught blogging and you’re like, “Yeah, so?” but get caught carrying on a one-sided conversation with an invisible Viggo Mortensen in your kitchen, and well, that’s a little awkward.   

 

Not that that has happened.   

 

I’ve never gotten caught.

 

So that shall be the focus.  An intro to me, as if you don’t know me.  Which you don’t.  But now you just can’t wait, right?

The batshit crazy, it burns.  

A word about work, Part 1

As I have mentioned, I am unemployed.  

And while I would like to find a job, there really is not much going around here.  This is a rural area, with hordes of other experienced and talented people looking, too.   

In order to fill the gaping hole on my resume and appear virtuous, I am volunteering at the local library two days a week.  I enjoy the people and the work, and have the field earmarked as a possible future direction for employment.  So it is work experience as well as something to prove that I wasn’t just sitting home all day eating ice cream and watching TV.  We don’t have cable so that’s not really an option, but you can’t put any of that on the resume anyway:  

Work History

Public Library, Volunteer.  Shelved books, assisted patrons, did not just sit on my ass and collect unemployment.  

Although we do have Netflix and have put to good use their awesome instant viewing thingy which caused me to get obsessed with The Tudors and have frequent naughty thoughts about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.  (Yes, your Grace . . . oh, YES!)    Actually, I’ve been having those ever since Velvet Goldmine.  But I digress.   

My point is I would truly like to have money coming in, but more on my own terms.  All my life I have taken jobs because they were available, with no conscious thought about whether they were suitable for me.  And then wondered why I felt so empty.  Wondered why I began having the “Sunday blues” (quite common according to my psychiatrist at the time) and why I had sunk into a depression so deep as to need a psychiatrist.

With a career path that made me miserable, about $12,000 in credit card debt, and my personal life in a shambles, it was like I was holding onto a rope, desperately grasping the still woven pieces as it quickly unraveled right behind my white-knuckled hands.  My anxiety reached a crescendo and I knew that I would soon run out of rope.  In a full-fledged panic and hoping that any other track would be better than the one I was on, I ran back to my hometown, taking a part-time job I thought would be fun and which was a departure from anything I’d done previously.  Departure, yes, but I utterly failed to find the fun. 

I quickly changed ropes, getting another job only to find it, too, unraveling along with any shred of self-confidence I had left.  I was no closer to my plan of having some space to stop, catch my breath and reevaluate where I was headed.