Rural Dreams

Eulogy

My father in law, John F. Collins, passed away at 2:30 this morning after a short bout with cancer that was diagnosed only the day after Father's Day.

Yesterday was his wedding anniversary. He was a romantic family man who had never ever taken off his wedding ring since his wedding day. The hospital asked the family to remove it this morning.

When I first met my husband, we went out for a friendly dinner that wasn't really supposed to be a date. I had no friends at the time and was very lonely and just wanted someone to eat Indian food with me. Steve had never had Indian food but said he was game. All I knew about him was that he was a drummer and a painter and from Long Island. I thought that he must be sort of a knucklehead. Over dinner, he told me about his family and about his father, who was an English professor and an expert in ecclesiastical Latin and Greek. I will always be grateful for the chink that this cut into my prejudices, allowing me to see Steve in a more truthful light.

Steve's family is creative with the English language, and his father was known to his nine children and their spouses as "Deed". He was brilliant with language and could tell you the etymology of any word, often offering up really juicy ones unsolicited. Puns were abundant and a huge part of his sense of humor. He was a singer and sang with a choir in New York at Carnegie Hall on a regular basis. He loved opera as well as world music and would play them both eccentricly loud in the living room. He was also interested in fonts and type, having had made a Greek font out of necessity. He spent a lot of time at his computer tweaking pixels on fonts.

I have often been confounded by what I saw in Deed as a contradiction between the intellectual life and the religous life. He was a devoted Catholic, but I came to learn that he was no sheep and had, what I think, are very sophisticated ideas about the church and spirituality and the Bible. I have learned that there are Catholics who don't necessarily agree with everything the church says or does, but still claim Catholicism as their own, identifying with its teachings in ways that make sense to them, and protesting against things that don't, much the way that I might identify as an American while still disagreeing with things that my country does. Forgive me if this seems obvious and rather dense on my part, but it is quite distant from my own experience of religion. I have tremendous respect for Deed's spiritual life and ideas, though I don't think that I will ever have the intellectual basis to understand them completely.

Deed was a tall, thin, handsome man with white hair and a white beard. I think that perhaps his hair was always white. I know that in the sixties and seventies it was longer and he looked like a wild man, or Ted Kaczynski. He had a gentle demeanor and although I can tell from his family's accounts that he could be fearsome when they were children, I have never known him to be that way. He had gorgeous hands with long fingers and in the past couple of weeks, when saying hello or goodbye, he would just raise his hand with two fingers raised in that gesture you see in Jesus paintings. It was the most loving thing he could do, as he could not be hugged or kissed.

He is already, and will continue to be, sorely missed.

Flies

We are overcome with flies here in the Barn. It's been going on for weeks, but seems to have gotten much worse in the past week or so. The flies wake us up every morning.

At first we thought it was because we leave the doors open and there are no screens, so we started keeping them shut. This didn't seem to help and makes the barn dark. I would still walk into the kitchen area, kill 6 flies, think I had gotten them all, come back a half hour later to twelve flies. I spend a significant part of my day with the flyswatter in my hand.

Preparing food is a new art. Everything is covered unless I am standing right over it. I use cloth napkins and tupperware lids. If I am making dinner, the counter looks like it is strewn with napkins.

I read a thread on Mamatron about someone who found "worms" in her unwashed dishes in her kitchen sink. She was so embarassed that she posted anonamously. Several people responded that they were probably maggots and to not be embarrassed, that it has happened to the best of us. She wasn't the first person to have let dishes sit in her sink for two days. I immediately got up and took out the compost bowl that had been sitting on our counter for two days. We'd been washing the dishes and wiping the counters religiously, but that compost bowl had been neglected.

At first I tried not to let Aidan see me killing the flies. I am murderous when I am fly killing and I just didn't want to teach my son to be murderous. I spend too much time doing it to hide it from him though, and if I thought that maybe he wasn't picking up on what I was doing, I realized that I was mistaken when he pointed one out to me as I was hunting for them in the kitchen...my innocent boy an accomplice.

Steve made a quick trip to the grocery store last night and came home with a second flyswatter. We could now kill flies together. By the time we went to bed last night, I had some hope that we had gotten all of them. I actually woke up this morning, rolled over and whispered to Steve, "no flies". I was wrong. I had just woken up before them. But there were fewer, and I still had a lot of hope.

We had to take my car into the shop this morning, and when I got back with Aidan, there were a ton of flies in the kitchen - and then in the dining area - and in the laundry area. I was swatting for several minutes before I realized that the back door had been left completely wide open the whole time we had been gone - like we live in a barn or something.

Cleaning Out The Camera

Outside our back door. I love the hanging laundry and the juniper tree next to the vacant chicken coop has a striking shape. In the winter, the sun rises right behind this tree. We once saw a moon rise behind it.
I found this praying mantis inside the house, sitting on the kettle on the wood stove. I love praying mantises, though I am a little alarmed that such a large insect could get into the house.
A view through the back door.
Aidan took these:truck, mama, yard and car, and tricycle.

Progress

I spoke to a mortgage broker for an hour today. Although the conversation did NOT end with any kind of pre-approval numbers, I feel really good about it. This guy spent a lot of time with me, trying to understand every aspect of our situation, and helping me to formulate a plan of action. I need plans of action.

I told him about the land and how much it is, how much we can put down, and that we would like to get a construction loan. He didn't tell me that the scenario was too difficult - he really listened to what we want. I am so grateful for that.

The trouble with our credit comes down to Steve not having a long enough and positive enough credit history. I do have a long and positive (enough) history but I don't work, and haven't since Aidan was born. So each of us has this big deficiency as far as lenders are concerned. So here's the plan: the owner finances the land for us after we put down a sizable deposit. Steve's name is on the loan and all of our on-time payments, and six months to a year from now, we can use that to show a history of paying the debt. By then our credit scores will also be higher. We can use our equity in the land as the down payment on a construction mortgage.

We both feel really good about this. We might even be able to build a small cottage on the land in the meanwhile to live in so that we don't have to pay rent. We were seriously considering living in a yurt when we first came up here, but now we figure we could probably built a little yurt sized thing for a lot less money. Even if this land gets sold to someone else, we know where we stand with a mortgage and that is a huge comfort to me.

I did NOT make progress overcoming my fears, becoming a braver, more passionately alive person this week. I cheezed out. I blame the $100 fee for the class. Or my radiator springing a big leak and almost overheating my car today. Okay, it really had nothing to do with my radiator - that happend well after I had procrastinated my way out of signing up for the class - but it did give me some satisfaction. I wouldn't have been able to get to the class anyway. It's true. Really.

Acting Class

There is an acting class this Saturday called "The Neutral Mask" at the wellness center where I go to yoga classes. I have been seeing this class for months and wanting to go. Being in my yoga clothes and then being all limber and warmed up after yoga class puts me in that acting class frame of mind. Acting school was my first introduction to yoga. However, this week, I have been getting all panicky at the thought of it. When I went to yoga on Tuesday, I was thinking about it on my way there and I could feel my throat and chest getting all tight. I felt fragile all class, like I could just burst into tears. The REALLY silly thing is that it is a MASK workshop. I mean, what could be safer than that?

Good Neighbor

This weekend, while Aidan and I were at a birthday party (if you ask Aidan what he did that day he says, "I ate cake"), Steve looked at some properties. There was a 2 acre plot in a good area with a foundation, well and septic already there. My immediate reaction was - I hate that - buying someone's unfinished project. This wouldn't be the first piece of land that we had looked at like that. It makes me feel restricted by the size and location of the foundation. I acknowledge that I might just lack vision, so we went to look at it when Steve got home from work last night. It is in a really nice area, dirt road, the town I want to be in... but the property itself was not exciting. It was uninviting and steep, with very little usable land as far as I could see. I thought that we could look into getting a building loan because it could be a very affordable scenario, since the most expensive building elements were already in place.

On our way back we stopped at another property that Steve hadn't explored, but just driven by. He had said that he liked it. I had looked at it once before and thought that it looked rocky. It was all flat, so we grabbed Aidan and started to walk a bit on it. It felt much nicer than the first property. We couldn't remember the details about it. It hadn't really been our destination.

Two minutes into our walk, Steve saw an old man coming toward us. We approaced him, a little nervous that we were going to get yelled at for tresspassing or something. He was thin with white hair and a white beard. He wore a wide brimmed hat, clean clothes with a watchface tied to a beltloop. He knew where the property boundaries were and was happy to show us, after he showed us the mint 1929 Ford that he had just bought. He asked Aidan if he wanted to drive it and lifted the cover off and opened the door for him. I asked him his name. He said Williams.

Mr. Williams property is across a poorly maintained town road from the property. He siad that he lived there, but all I could see were old cars with these dome shaped shelters over them. He explained that he lived in that shack whose roofline you could see peeking over one of the domes. He built it in 1947. All it has is a phone.

He showed us the property boundaries for the land we were looking at. He even knew exactly where the survey stakes were. He pointed out a swampy part. I told him that the realtors are very clever and call that a "pond site". He explained that the land was farmed at one time and the tractors had made the ridge that formed one of the boundaries. The land was much more than we had expected. When we got home we looked at the listing and found that it is 6 acres. We loved Mr. Williams and talked about how most people would find his shack and pile of cars to be a liability. We felt like his presence there was like a personal invitation to us.

Now, how to afford it.

Lymes Disease

We know two people who have gotten lymes disease so far this year. Will and Val's kids had take home xeroxed games and puzzles on their last day of school that featured ticks and facts about Lyme disease. This year, Columbia County gained the distinction of having the highest lymes disease rate in the country.

Our animals' vet here has a holistic practice and publishes a newsletter. I've gotten it twice so far and both times it has had articles about ticks and lymes disease. An interesting quote:

The actual signs of lymes disease are created by an "overzealous" immune response to the organism. One might question the logic of a vaccine stimulating the immune system to prevent a disease that is created by an "overzealous" response.

and

A study done in Connecticut...reported that 95% had been exposed to the organism. When they went back and looked at how many of these dogs had been sick with symptoms of the disease and treated for lymes that number was only about 5%!... The question that should be asked is "what is wrong with the 5% of dogs that get sick from the organism wheras most dogs show natural exposure and no disease?"

I can't help but wonder if the same thing should be asked about people. Are some people exposed to the virus and don't get the disease? I know that lymes tests have a high false positive rate.

And another thing: I think that if I was from Lyme Connecticut, I wouldn't be too happy about having this disease named after my town. That's got to suck.

Montauk

We are just back from spending 9 days in Montauk, Long Island. Steve's mom rents a house there every summer for a week or two. Steve has 8 siblings and on any given day there were between 14 and 18 people staying in the 3 bedroom (1 bathroom) house. All that intimacy takes a couple of days to get used to, but it is really a lot of fun. It helps that Steve's family is pretty wonderful. Coming back to the barn, I really miss being around all of those people. It makes you get dressed in the morning. It's like being in college - and it makes me think about living in community. I have such a longing for that. I went through community withdrawl after I left college and I am feeling a little bit of that right now after leaving Montauk.

The charm of this barn has really worn off. I love being in the country, but it is driving me crazy to not be able to dig in and make this place my own. It has a lot of serious deficiencies. Someday I will list them, but for now I am going to get off of the computer.