The Biggest Mess

 

                I knocked over half a quart of deep yellow paint this morning. It was a moderate mess—the paint was thick and I had just washed the floor, so I was able to scoop quite a bit back into the can before washing it all up. There have been worse messes—the day the coffee pot exploded all over the kitchen; the dropped half gallon of salad dressing in the walk in fridge at the grocery store where I worked after college; the quart of primer that exploded all over my bookshelves, leaving my books still marked 30 years later. But the biggest mess I have ever seen was the cauliflower cheese soup at Ceres on winter afternoon.

                I was carrying a 2 gallon metal insert of just heated soup over to the steam table. It was the middle of lunch. The counter was packed. There was bread all neatly packed for delivery under the racks. People were hungry; they liked the soup; they wanted more.  I slipped. The soup went up into the air and came down…everywhere. It was all over the floor. It went up the walls and the glass of the big fridge. It splashed onto the phone. It covered the neatly packed bread. It dribbled onto the counter. The floor became a skating rink in the middle of the lunch rush. I grabbed the dustpan to begin to scoop up soup, slipped, and the dustpan flew over the counter and landed in…someone’s soup. She was not amused; it took all of Chris The Boy’s considerable charms to settle her down with a new bowl, extra bread, and desert. The chaos was worse than the day a mouse decided to visit the front of the store and Jeffery announced its existence, loudly, to one and all.  

                We did get it cleaned up and the bread went out on schedule. But cauliflower cheese soup, because of its texture, its scent, and its slightly oily constancy, created the biggest mess I have ever seen.

                What was yours?

 

Enough

 

I burned the stollen. I blame it on the school district, who, in their infinite wisdom, and despite considerable feedback this year AND the last time they made the same bad decision, kept us in school until December 22^nd.  Students were dropping off like flies—sick, tired, leaving early for planned vacations and rescheduled flights as the weather turned bad and everyone tried to get somewhere while they could. “Why are you here?” I asked one miserable looking junior on the last day. “I didn’t want to miss anything,” he said. “”Why are you?” “There are no subs,” I replied, equally miserable with peak cold and a slowly fading sinus/ear infection.  “I was praying for an ice storm.” He nodded. The ice storm came the next day, when we were already out of school.

It has been that kind of December—nothing catastrophic, but just off. The Winter Lights on our arch and fence shorted out because I did not fix the duct tape that kept the rain out this summer, when it was dry. I was late with the cards and struggled to find an idea that stayed positive. I was just a little sick for weeks before I finally broke down and went for antibiotics, so I miscounted the number of eggs I needed to do all of the Yule baking, and was baking the stollen on Christmas morning, when I was tired and unfocused. I (wisely) decided against attempting anything complicated for dinner and we had leftover latkes instead.

When I realized that the fence’s lights were out for the duration of the rains—which could be months in the Willamette Valley—I found the small strand I bought for a night bike ride a few weeks ago. A dozen of us decorated our bikes and cruised around our neighborhood, waving at cars and dog walkers. They are battery operated and remarkably bright and cheery. I wrapped them around the wreath we have hanging on the front porch and turned them on. It’s not perfect—they will not guide someone through our yard on a dark evening—but they will do. Some years, a small strand of lights might just be…enough.

 

Goal Setting: Winter hikes

 

     

           Every year, at the Solstice, Mark and I review the past and set our intentions for the coming cycle of the sun, usually on our walks through Finley Wildlife Refuge in the rain. Some years, we have lofty goals to change the world (Mark, at one point, wanted to learn three more languages), but, other years, they focus more on our daily lives. In 2004, I bought a black hard cover spiral notebook and took notes on all of our walks, forcing us out into the natural world every Sunday that winter, to look closely at the changing seasons. These notes led to long lists of wildflower blooms as well as close observations of moss and lichens and grounded us in the Pacific Northwest as our home bioregion.  It may have been our best goal setting ever.

                I want to revisit this goal in the coming year. Although we regularly walk around town for our daily lives—work, groceries, meetings, library visits-- we have not moved off pavement as much as we would like in the past few years. So, this is my goal for the year: off pavement every Sunday, somewhere between four and ten miles of trails, mostly local. And I am announcing it publicly, in case you all wish to hold us more accountable--or join in.

Chicken Tractor

 

The garden is quiet these days. There is a lot of pruning waiting to happen—hedges and trees--  and a few more leaves to rake onto beds, but, for the most part, if I don’t get out there, it will wait. The only thing that has to happen regularly is moving the coop, which is a chicken tractor.

When we first designed our gardens, I found a book on our co-op’s lending library shelf: The Chicken Tractor. The basic idea was a moveable chicken coop that would shift from garden bed to garden bed over the course of a year. Because we live in the Pacific Northwest, where we can garden all year round, this was a great idea. We proceeded to build out our garden beds four feet wide by ten feet long, and overbuilt the first coop as a four by five by five foot square with plywood sides. It weighed a ton. It did, however, sit neatly on the garden bed frame. We learned our lesson, and, when we rebuilt the coop five years later, the design—from Mother Earth News—was a much lighter A frame, still sized to sit on the bed. When there are two chickens, they root around on half of the bed and we slide the coop over after two weeks, then, two weeks later, move it to another bed. When there are more than two, we fence the entire bed off and let them at it for a month.  If I pay attention, we can rotate through all of the beds between late September and late May.

We moved the coop this afternoon. The ladies were thrilled to be let out for a bit. They ran, flapped, and flew over to the rabbit hutch to root around in the fallen straw. We cleared the way, lifted the coop, and moved it over two beds, then re-fenced it, leaving a space for the ladies to move in when it grows dim and dusky.  I turned over the old bed so that the straw and leaves, mixed with poop, had more surface area with the soil underneath, disturbing several fat earthworms in the process. Sometimes Aussie will come over to “help” with the soil turning and eat the worms, but, today, she was jostling for straw and missed out.

This combination of chicken, straw, composted in place old veggies, and leaves keeps our beds full of organic matter year after year. We have not had to purchase “fertile mix,” which is half compost, for 15 years, at least.  The soil tilth is lovely and rich. The garden is lush all summer long and I can save the compost Mark generates from the piles of trimmings in the far back corner for all of the beds that are not tractored by the chickens. And, even when a chicken is too old to lay an egg, she is still contributing to the household economy.

Early Winter

 

              We are fermenting in our kitchen. Yesterday, I had sourdough bread rising, beet and apple kvass to be sampled, beet and horseradish kvass chopped and resting on the top of the fridge, and two jars of cabbage chopped, massaged with salt, and packed full, then pressed down with the glass fermentation weights.  We started with sauerkraut right before the pandemic and I was convinced that the live bacteria kept us healthy all spring that year. When yeast was scarce, we started a sourdough culture because I always wondered about wild yeasts in the air of my kitchen. Now, along with kombucha and yogurt, the live yeasts are wildly multiplying, usually on top of the fridge.

 

                When the heat was out for two weeks, we returned to our old habit of closing the curtains at night to keep in the heat. Mark wandered around for several days, pointing the covid pruchased forehead thermometer at everything he found—the wall, the cat, himself….one day, he hit the window with the curtains open followed by the window with the curtains closed. Four degrees difference! “Hey,” he called out, “that is significant!” Now, when I am late coming home, he closes the curtains himself. The room feels more cozy, especially with the heat back on.

 

                In winter, our bedroom is cold. I shut the heating vent into the room and hang a heavy curtain over the door.  We open the window by our heads every night. The cat loves it; she curls up on my pillow, right over my head, sucking in the heat radiating off of me and loving the cool air on her full fur coat. We snug down under a heavy pile of blankets, lots of layers so that we can adjust to a warm spell moving in with the rains.  I sleep better on these  long cold  nights than any other time of year, like a bear hibernating in a den.

 

The Furnace is Down, Still.

                 Our furnace has not been functional for 12 days and we are pretty sure it will be off until after the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s chilly in here.

                On the positive side, we have small old house—there are doors to the bedrooms and bathroom that we have shut so that we are only heating the living room with some overflow into the kitchen. Years ago, we insulated the ceiling, floor, and walls, and replaced the storm windows so our house is much tighter than most—my New England training came to the fore as we planned for energy efficiency. I pull the curtains closed at night. We don’t have a modern, open floor plan with vaulted ceilings. It’s easier to heat with the space heater. The bedroom is in the 40s, but we burrow under the blankets and its fine. I’ve had some experience with cold houses.

                One winter, the landlord paid for the heat in our duplex, but added a surcharge to the rent if it exceeded a certain cost; heating oil was skyrocketing that winter and he needed a plan. We wandered around wrapped in old shawls and my baby blanket all winter. No surcharge. A few years later, I moved into an apartment with a full tank of heating oil free from the last tenant. The winter’s goal quickly became—make it last. We did. Lots of movies from bed. Weeks of fleece jackets in the house. Mornings spent snuggling up to the bakery oven at work to warm up. Even now, I keep the heat down in the house and put on a sweater. When I am gone, Mark nudges it up a few degrees. He calls me an Ice Princess. I call him a wimp.

                We count our blessings here, coming into Thanksgiving. We are not living in a tent using a dangerous propane heater. We are healthy and our bodies have adjusted to cooler temperatures (ok, mine does better than Mark’s). We can afford to repair—or replace—our furnace when the parts finally arrive.  We have soft wool hats. We are not trying to work from home; we both have jobs with decent heat all day. We have gone for long walks on these sunny afternoons to warm up and the world is lovely this cold and bright November. We are thankful.

 

November Silence

     

November 11^th—Veteran’s Day—has always been a quiet break in my life.  In college, it was the time to catch up on back reading. As a teacher, it is a time to catch up on silence. This year was no exception. Mark went to work, leaving me alone in the house, a rare occurrence since the pandemic began and he moved his office into the basement. The morning was sunny, but chilly, with rain clouds on the western horizon. I headed outside right after breakfast. The cat followed.

For the next three hours, I puttered around the yard with trimmers and a wheelbarrow, cutting back perennials and piling  the leaves in the front beds, spreading compost, and  and generally tidying up.  Kayli sat in the neighbor’s driveway and washed, hoping for a college boy to stop and worship her. No one did.  When I moved around back she gave up,  wandered after me, and climbed up on the roof of the garage, one of her favorite spots. I took out the last two tomato plants and raked leaves, moved some plants into the greenhouse and rearranged them, and dumped the compost bin into the back hoop. The rabbit ate fallen jujube fruits and the chickens carried on their usual conversations about wanting to be let out. The clouds gathered and, just as I finished, cold rain began to fall. I propped up the wheelbarrow, coaxed the cat off of the fence, and fled inside.

Even though the furnace is out, the house is cozy. The yellow walls glow against grey light outside. There was an excellent bit of left-over casserole for lunch with the latest National Geographic article on a new museum in Egypt. After lunch,   I made a second cup of tea and moved into the living room, where the cat had discovered the space heater. Perfect. Rain outside. Juncos discovering the seed I had just spread on the ladder in front of the window. Blanket, tea, couch, cat, book inside.  We spent the second half of the day in companionable silence.