Rural Dreams

Hero

I've been reading the papers a lot lately since my letter to the editor. I love them, the writing is not always so great, but they are so REAL.

There was a story recently about a barn fire. A police officer that was just pulling into the parking lot to end his shift got the call. He decided to go because he was nearby and thought that someone's life might be in danger and he knew he'd be able to get there before the fire department. It turned out to be a barn fire and the life in danger was that of a little girl's calf that was locked in a pen next to the barn. The girl's father asked the police officer to shoot the calf so that he wouldn't have such an agonizing death. The police officer thought that he could get the calf out and attempted to approach the gate or a part of a fence to kick an opening. Several times he was stopped by the intense heat and had to fall to the ground and bury his face and hands in the snow. The calf began to smoke. At one point he made contact with the fence but was not successful in opening it. Then the fire department arrived and were able to get closer with their fire gear and free the calf. The police officer had to go to the hospital with first degree burns. He said it felt like a sunburn. I keep imagining the other cops making fun of him at work the next day.

I have a lot to learn

about living in this kind of weather. I should have called for oil sooner. It's ridiculous that we ran out twice in a row. I've been patterning my behavior on last winter, which was freakishly warm, plus the past week with lows around zero burned up the oil a lot faster than the weeks before that with the lows in the teens. The man who came this morning at 7:30 with the regular oil delivery said that I can't expect same day delivery in this kind of weather - they're just too busy. How could I know, last year we always got same day delivery. The man who came last night to bring me emergency oil turned out to not be drunk, just tired, and clearly not accustomed to folks wanting oil at 2am. I had figured it must happen all the time, but apparently not. He told me that there were still oil trucks out at 5pm and if I had put my emergency call through then, he could have dispatched a truck to me. In my defense, I had told the answering service operator that I was going to run out of oil and she did not suggest any such thing.

Another thing is the condition of the snow removal in our "driveway". We did it ourselves with shovels and it is cleared enough (barely, we've had some intense mornings trying to get Steve's rear wheel drive truck out of the driveway) for our cars, but it was a very difficult obstacle course for the oil truck and the repair vans. I think it would be a real problem for a fire truck. And Steve and I still don't have snow tires. And I should have locked in a price for oil months ago (but I thought we were moving!!!), the price is $1.60 a gallon now.

I've been thinking lately about an early plan that we had to buy some land and live on it in a yurt. Last winter it might have worked, but this winter I'd be staying with relatives.

There's a little bit more to the story of last night. After we got the oil, the house never warmed up. The boiler would run briefly with long spans of time in between. I kept thinking that it had frozen up since it's an outside tank, but then it would cycle on to reassure me. I stayed up, online, for a while, waiting for it to warm up and went to bed at 4:30 finally, chilled to the bone. It was 50 degrees inside. I slept for about an hour and mostly laid in bed cold, trying to think of ways to have revenge on our old mortgage broker for ruining my life. When I got out of bed at 7am, it was 45 degrees inside. Thank goodness the oil delivery came right away and I asked the oil man to look at the boiler. The switch that controls the heat for upstairs was burned out and there was no heat up there. I tortured the emergency oil man for nothing. Aidan, slept until 8:45am and didn't know that anything had happened.

Tonight I took a long, scorching hot bath. I cooked myself like a lobster. It felt great.

Out of Oil, 1:30AM, -3deg

We ran out of oil again and I am sitting here waiting for the delivery right now. I'm pissed because I called the oil company at 8:30 in the morning and they never delivered. I called at 5 to 5 and they were already gone, I got their answering service which means I could only get an emergency 10 gallons so I lowered the thermostats and went out for pizza so I wouldn't have to use any hot water and hoped that I would make it through the night with 4 big blankets on top of us and all the animals in bed. If it had happened at 4 am I might have just tried to stick it out, but it's too early in the night, I'm afraid that the pipes will freeze. The guy who does the emergency delivery just called and there was a lot of dead air on the line. From the last time he came we had the impression that he wasn't the sharpest tack in the box but tonight he sounded drunk. It was like he couldn't believe that I wanted oil at this hour, but that's his job - I don't get it.

Cold

The cold is stunning. Even the two winters that I spent in Chicago I don't think were ever this cold. Last Friday the temperature dropped to a low of -6. Mostly we've been staying in at night, but Aidan and I needed something from the grocery store that night. People were running from their cars to the store as if it were pouring rain. Wes isn't spending much time outside and the cat doesn't venture out at all. You feel so vulnerable in this weather, it would be so easy to freeze to death. I am comforted by the thought of all of the tick death that is surely going on. I even took Wes' tick collar off - and realized how much it had been inhibiting me from showing him affection.

I don't really mind the cold and am getting used to the temperature in the barn. I think having the heat set so low is actually keeping us a little healthier - the air is not so dry as it is in a thoroughly heated house. Hey, I have to look on the bright side, don't I?

Bernard Ruskin on MLK Day

This is an e-mail I got from a friend:

Hi friends,
I think this film on Bayard Rustin is worth seeing, and it especially timely as many of us will be in Washington on MLK weekend. If you're around on Monday night i recommend it. If you miss it and want to see it I can probably get you a copy, or if you would like to show it in your community or school. There is a wealth of information as well as contacts at www.rustin.org.
Peace and action,
Elspeth

The film "Brother Outsider: The life of Bayard Rustin" will be on PBS this Monday January 20th, Martin Luther King Day, at 10pm (or check local listings).

The film is an hour long documentary about Bayard Rustin - most known for organizing the March on Washington.

A Biography of Rustin by Walter Naegle:

A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence. Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested , imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely BROTHER OUTSIDER presents an hour-long documentary portrait intended for national PBS broadcast, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.

Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the1950s and 60s.Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbian and gay Americans, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in America. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans. In a nation still torn by racial hatred and violence, bigotry against homosexuals, and extraordinary divides between rich and poor, his eloquent voice is needed today.

In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest. Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin the man was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as anart collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New YorkCity trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the "lost prophet" of the civil rights movement.

We Did It!

I am as giddy as can be - the media is finally paying attention to the peace movement. Aidan and I were homebound yesterday - he even slept through the Hudson vigil, but in the early evening I went online to check news sites for information about the march yesterday and it was on the front page of every site I looked at. Aidan was sitting on my lap when I brought up CNN and I let out an "allright!" when I saw it and Aidan said, "we did it!" without even knowing what I was looking at. We just got back from the farm store where I saw that it is on the front page of the NEW YORK TIMES. Completely amazing. Of course the newspaper headcount and the organizer's headcount are wildly different, but the fact that it got that kind of mainstream media attention is a huge accomplisment. As we were driving home, Power to the People came on the radio. I know it was cold yesterday, every person who was there has my gratitude.

Letter to the Editor

There was an article on the front page of the Register Star recently with this headline: "Pizza Man 'terrorist' might walk" and the article that followed was the story of Ansar Mahmood, a Hudson man who is being illegally detained after being cleared of any terrorist connections. I thought the headline was alarmist, misleading and irresponsible and thought I should write a letter. I have these kinds of thoughts all the time but the letter never gets written. I sat on it for a week or so and then felt inspired one night when my laptop was open upstairs and I was supposed to be getting Aidan ready for bed. I e-mailed it that night and went to bed feeling like the whole thing was much too easy and my letter was probably just jettisoned out into the ether. Even if they did publish it, would I ever know since I don't have a subscription and only buy the paper sporadically?

Last Sunday Ansar Mahmood was on the front page of the paper again - I bought it and my letter was there. A few days later I got a phone call from someone asking if I was the person who had written the letter. I admitted that I was, a little afraid that I was about to get threatened - but it was someone thanking me - he said he wanted to write that letter himself but couldn't since he knows the person who wrote the headline. We spoke for a few minutes, it seems that the editor who wrote the headline is actually sympathetic to Mahmood's predicament and just wrote a stupid headline. Hmmm, stupid editor. He described himself as an old radical who is at the peace vigils in Hudson every weekend. We are regrettably not going to Washington this Saturday so I am going to head down to the vigil in Hudson and see if I can meet him. It was so great that he called me, it makes me feel a little more plugged into the community here.

European Perspective

Time Europe has a poll on its website that asks which country is the biggest threat to world peace: Iraq, N. Korea or the USA. 75% of respondants as of a moment ago said...

Well, just go look for yourself.

via Ming's Metalogue, a very interesting blog.

Crunchy Snow

The forecast has snow for five of the next seven days and I am understanding the logic of having many different words for snow. I am repeatedly having to explain to Aidan that some snow is no good for snowballs and snowmen. We had a thaw day yesterday that turned the winter wonderland dirty and loosened the unbelievable icicles that were on almost every house. Last night we got just a sprinkling of icy snow which did a nice job of freshening things up and today it is cold and sunny and when Aidan and I came home from his playgroup today we crunched around outside quite a bit. It was so nice to be in the sunshine, even if we were all covered up. Aidan is the one who insisted on going out and I am glad he did, He walked all over for about an hour, sometimes just falling down intentionally and lying on the snow. He's sleeping now.

The path going up the hill leads to the compost pile. The snow drifts almost up to my knees in some places along that path. We wanted the pile away from the house in case of stink but maybe we needed a snow plan. The chicken coop is up there and I have been glad that there are no chickens in it. Steve and I were talking about what we would do if we had chickens up there in this weather. I have no idea how cold hardy they are. Steve said we'd just bring them inside the barn.

The icicles are pretty today but a couple of days ago they were mindblowing, reaching almost to the ground.

Our kitchen sink drain.

Here is a wide composite picture of the snow on the field next to the barn. I wanted to capture the web of footprints on it and I thought I could with the bright sun today but it didn't work out so well. There is another interesting thing here though - there are these depressions emerging in the snow, and in some places there is no snow at all, there is water and even when the temperature is 19 degrees with a windchill of 10, the water doesn't freeze. I never saw water down in this field before, it seems that with all of the precipitation, the groundwater is rising.

24 Hour Karma

I did a crazy thing the day before yesterday. When I came home and told Steve, he told me I was grounded.

I was driving to the grocery store in Hudson and these two people ran out into the road and waved me down. To say that it is very snowy here would be an understatement and I thought they had an accident or something. It turned out to be two men and they wanted a ride to the train station. They hardly spoke any English. I nervously, stupidly seriously said, "you're not going to kill me are you?" and I was thinking, if they kill me everyone will say I was an idiot. The younger man just closed the door. I don't think he understood me, just could tell that I didn't say yes, and stepped away from the car. I waved for them too get in and an older man got in. It turned out the younger man wasn't coming, just his father. I indicated to him that he didn't have to sit on the baby seat and started toward Hudson. I tried to make conversation, "don't you have a car?" He says yes he has a pick-up truck. Where is it? He just says train station. Maybe it got snowed in there... I'll never know. I asked him his name and he says something that sounds like why-oo-ay and says he is Korean. I was still nervous he was going to club me over the head; maybe I should have let him in the front seat. It was a slow, slippery drive down Warren Street, Hudson's antiques center, covered in the gorgeous snow with no place to put it all. We made it to the train station - I didn't get whacked. He offered me money. I said no no no. I wanted to say, thank you for letting me do something nice for you without murdering me but I didn't think he'd understand. Maybe he was just as nervous as I was.

The next day, yesterday, we spent the day with Jes and Lee. We've made sort of a routine of going over to Lee's house for dinner on occasional Sunday nights - Aidan loves their daughters, Bella and Althea. Jes and I took a trip to a nearby farm store for some fresh bread for dinner. We went sans kids, left them with the dads and got ourselves pizza slices and sodas along with the bread. Jes saw a man and his son there that she knows, it's not really surprising, she always seems to know people wherever I go with her. Our next stop was going to be the supermarket in Hillsdale for beer and there is really no direct way to get there. I volunteered a back way. We were enjoying our freedom and I know Jes likes to take back roads. It's rare that I know of one that she's not familiar with. Only a couple of minutes after we'd turned off the main road, I caught some ice and slid into a snow bank. It was a slow, heavy collision with Jes' side of the car. I tried forward and reverse. Four-wheel drive be damned, two tires on the right side were not touching anything. There was a sharp drop off the road that had been hidden by the snow. There was a car behind us that had come to a stop. When we got out of the car we found that it was the man that Jes had said hello to at the farm store. He offered to give us a ride back to Lee's house, which was a bit out of the way for him, and we gratefully accepted and climbed into his mini-van with his son and their Golden Retriever.

When we got back to Lee's house and reported on our mishap, Lee immediately got a tow cable to go and pull it out with his Chevy Tahoe, a vehicle that I have occasionally derided in my mind as a gas guzzling behemoth. The more I told Lee that I didn't think they'd be able to get the car out, the more determined he became. Jes and I had some more nice conversation over white russians and meal preparations. I had told Jes earlier about the hitchhiker. She made me feel much better by telling me that she would have done the exact same thing and been nervous the whole time - that she had picked up a female hitchhiker once who subsequently looked up her phone number and harassed her for months. Anyway, we both attributed our luck with having her friend right behind us to hitchhiker karma. About an hour later Steve and Lee came back successful and with a case of beer. I have a new appreciation for the Chevy Tahoe (though still no patience for the common suburban/urban supersized SUV).

It seems that the only damage to my car is a bent rim. It's making my tire leak slowly - I can drive it in a pinch, but it needs to be fixed. I'm waiting for our mechanic to see if he can get a rim from a junkyard. The car is an '89 - there should be plenty in the junkyard. Just before the accident, Jes and I were singing the car's praises and I was showing Jes the odometer - it has over 200,000 miles on it.

In retrospect I need snow tires. I had that thought before several times while driving, I should have thought of it before I decided to take the scenic route.

Now if you made it through that whole story here's some pictures as a reward.

Wes has always collected deer remains but since deer rifle season (December) they have gotten fresher and more abundant. There are several legs like this one sticking up out of the snow around the barn. I guess the hunters cut them off and leave them behind. A couple of mornings ago, Wes showed up with an entire meaty ribcage, about a third the size of him. It wasn't frozen and was extremely bloody so it was probably recent road kill.

I don't know if I've ever posted pics of the outside of the barn, here it is in the snow with some fabulous icicles.

Here's a very big, very poor quality picture of Aidan's open-mouthed smile. My mom smiles like this in her baby pictures.

And here's a little pic of Aidan, Steve and Wes shoveling snow. Aidan likes to help with his big beach shovel.

New Year's Revelations

I've been thinking about resolutions this year and I realized that I feel very satisfied with the past year and I made no resolutions last year. On New Year's eve we were packing a 16 foot moving truck and actually moving on New Year's Day. It's kind of cool making a transition like that at the traditional time for reflection on the past year, not to mention the empty roads on January 1st morning being ideal for the amateur moving truck driver.

So the things that I did this year that I feel very good about are blogging, yoga and quilting -- in that order, too. All for fun and none for profit. I had not a single paying web design client this year. This was my exquisite luxury, having some money in the bank for the first and perhaps only time in my life.

This blog has satisfied the perennial failed resolution of starting a journal. But there's a hitch: the thing that motivates me to write in it is that I know that peope read it, including my family, but the fact that friends and family read it means that I can only write about very public kinds of things. There have been times that I have just stopped writing because I wanted to write about more personal things. I was thinking about bagging this blog altogether in the new year when I got an e-mail from a complete stranger saying that he enjoyed my blog and was adding it to his list of "people blogging places". I hadn't really thought of what I was doing that way but I can see that it is. So that little bit of flattery from a single person makes me feel pretty good about continuing with this - and I am just going to think of it that way, as a blog about place. I'll start a new blog to appease my other blog cravings. I'd like something that is a little more like a private journal - something my son can read when I am dead. Or even my grandkids if I am so lucky. Something with memories and dreams. And I might ask some HipMama kind of people that I sort of know but will probably never meet to read it so that I continue to have that motivation to write.

Now that we've been in the barn for a full year I can say that the winter is my favorite season here. We spend most of our time now upstairs which is a completely beautiful space. I remember how thrilled we were when we first moved in here, lying in the king sized bed that the landlord gave us and looking up at the beams and the ceiling 20 feet beyond them. The bare oak tree in front of the house arches in a way that aligns with the arch in the palladian window, off-center enough to be continually interesting to my eye. The snow and the moonlight and even the darkness that come into this space are a treasure. I have thought many times that I will miss the darkness at the in-town house that we are trying to buy. The winter has also been the only time I have felt comfortable being affectionate with our pets and venturing into the woods behind the house. In warmer weather the ticks are a huge deterrent. That said, it's much too expensive rent-wise and heat-wise and we are trying to somehow make this our last month here. Steve does not share even my limited enchantment with the barn and is continually infuriated by it's shoddy construction and impracticalities.

And some recollections of the past year:

Aidan wasn't talking at all when we moved in and now we have real conversations. He ate in a high chair and now eats at the table. He often gets his own food out of the fridge. He plays imaginatively instead of mechanically. We hunt monsters and mice and he builds things with Steve.

We got the coolest cat. She is super affectionate to all of us, even the child that occasionally abuses her. She fetches things and brings them back to you and drops them at your feet, which makes her much cooler than my dog.

When we first moved in I was continually scared Wes, our dog, would get hit by a car. He almost did a couple of times the first couple of months, I would hear a honk and see him standing in the middle of the road like he owned it. I thanked god EVERY TIME he came inside that he was still alive. Now I hardly think about it at all and if he died at least I would know that he had a total blast running free and peeing everywhere and finding dead things to chew on for a whole year.

We had this vague idea that we were moving into a sort of luxurious place before we got here and the truth of the barn slowly revealed itself: ants coming up through the cracks in the cement floor in the winter, no electrical outlet for a clothes dryer, the kitchen sink and the washing maching drain right outside the house instead of into the septic - we were always worried they would freeze up and the sink finally did as we were preparing food the night before Thanksgiving. All of the fixtures are second hand: the sink and tub drip, the woodstoves have a host of problems and the oven hasn't worked for months. In the whole 3800 square feet there is only one window that opens and not a single door with a screen. The tongue and groove flooring upstairs has been top nailed and the nails pop up dangerously when the weather changes. Two of the three doors barely function. One, we no longer use, the other is our front door and Steve has done a lot of doctoring on it since the wind blew it open once in the middle of the night.

My yoga class has become a wonderful rejuvenating routine for me. I feel glowey afterwards and I like my teacher very much. She even asked me to substitute teach for her once! (I declined as it would be a total sham) I've been very consistent with it with the exception of two points of crisis in the year. I'd like to get to a point where I feel confident in doing it on my own. I'm not there yet and that's okay. I used to go to the class at a holistic center that was a house on a hill in Austerlitz. In the summer, we did yoga outside on the porch sometimes. One day we saw a fox come along and casually make its way across the lawn very close to us and then into tall grass. Only the teacher and I saw it, I whispered, "is that a cat?" - not really thinking it looked like a cat but not believing that it could be a fox.

Our quest for home has been long and winding. If you had told me last year where we would be with it right now I think I would be terribly disappointed. I AM terribly disappointed - but also the year has been a huge reality check. I can't believe we won't be living in the country, but after everything we've been through I'll just be so happy to have a place of our own, even if it is full of compromises. I think if someone had just said to us a year ago, "you can't afford to do this, why don't you just do a house in town for now so that you have something" I couldn't have swallowed it. I think I needed to go through this whole year to get to where we are now. Steve probably could have made the leap in the beginning. I'm the stubborn one.

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO READS THIS! It means a lot to me.