ingrid

My uncle is making a nice new daybed/filing cabinet/reading nook/bookcase for us.  It is spurring all sorts of organization that is badly needed.

My life, okay–my personality–is problematic.  I am very sentimental.  I have a hard time letting time slip away from me, so I cling to all sorts of reminders of the past.  I went to move boxes around and noticed that I had two huge cardboard boxes labelled “memories”.  That seemed like one box too many, so I sat down and attempted to pull things out to recycle right there and then.  That was last month.  I spent most of that work session reading, laughing, and crying, clinging to cards with clever notes from deceased family members, precious reflections from friends during a time in life when WE ACTUALLY SAT DOWN AND WROTE REAL LETTERS TO EACH OTHER.  I couldn’t get rid of anything.  How could I get rid of the letter from a friend coming out to his parents and telling me how surprised he was that they still loved him?  How could I get rid of a letter telling about a friend’s new life in a new country with a new man she loved?  She was shocked to find love.  She was astounded to be learning how to communicate.  How could I toss my sisters’ early stories of the excitement of new relationships, especially when those boys they told me about are now my family?  It is all too precious.  I couldn’t toss any of it.  Finally I decided that I could recycle cards with just a signature (not good enough!), letters from people who I absolutely do not see anymore, and silly things that I wrote that are not immediately, apparently special.

A few things that I realized during this exercise:

• I have more friend than I ever though.   Many many people have loved me (*and hopefully still do!).  I think back on times when I felt lonely or sad in high school, and I am a bit in wonder of how I could have felt this with such a huge outpouring of support from all these friends.  I read back on these letters and see, “Oh, you’re so great!”  ”I love you so much!”  ”You are such a great friend!”, and yet, I don’t remember feeling that way.  I don’t know what my excuse was.  I guess I was a teenager.
• My siblings are so wonderful.  I have three of the most loving, clever, devoted sisters that a girl could have.  Throughout the span of my life, these women have been tied so strongly to me, and in their letters I see how, especially when I was off adventuring, they were continuing to reach out to hold on tightly to our sister-bond.  I have three sisters, so you would think that one could be a dud– but no.  They are all fantastic.  Lucky, lucky, lucky I tell you.
• Woa.  I was popular with the boys!  It makes me laugh at how transparent all these “friendly” letters are now (including the ones from my husband).  Why was I so dumb?!  Opportunities missed, I tell you!  Actually, I was very fortunate to have good male friends all the way through high school and into college.  These are charming, smart boys.  Their letters make me smile and hope that Zephyr can one day be somewhat like them.
• Thank you aunts and uncles who cared about me.  I have letters and cards spanning 20 years from aunts and uncles just showing that they were interested in my life.  That is important to get this sort of support outside of your own parents.  I hope to be a good aunt and god mother too.
• And yes, my parents were/are excellent.

Okay, now to ponder: do  you keep letters you “earned” (for drama & band!) even if you don’t have a letterman sweater to put them on?

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Once a month I get a little, well, shall we say, insane.  I like to think of myself as a pretty easy-going person.  I like to be flexible.  I like to take it easy.  On the other hand I am, well, a little insane, so occasionally this side also manifests itself.  Usually it manifests in a helpful, but frantic way.  I will stay up late organizing a room, doing an art project, scrubbing the house on my hands and knees.  At these times my priorities just get completely skewed.  One thing becomes all-encompassing.  Case in point:  our couch.

Our couch had gotten gross over the last 13 years.  Kirstin told me not to buy it; “It’s not a washable fabric,” she said.  I didn’t listen to her.  How can a fabric not be washable?  We bought it anyway.  Since then it has faded, gotten stains, and then gotten new stains every time we tried to clean it with water.  What kind of couch can not be cleaned with water?!  That is ridiculous.  Anyway, it has slowly come to look uglier and uglier.

A couple years ago it seemed that maybe now that we were in a new house, the time for a new couch had come.  Brad then helpfully pointed out that we definitely should NOT get a new couch while we have snot-nosed kids around.  We already do not allow food to be eaten in the living room, but it seems that the primary problem with couch cleanliness really is mucus.  They run around the room with snot hanging off their faces and then plunge said snottiness right into the comfortable cushions on the couch.  Each cushion was smeared with whitish-yellow snot stains, and as I mentioned before, these don’t seem to clean up.  (If you are thinking, “Why don’t you wipe their noses?” then you obviously do not have kids, so I will leave you to continue to think that you can wipe noses to keep them free of snot.  I don’t know where you got this idea, but it is fallacious.  Snot is the alpha and omega.  Around children, you can not find a place where it is not.)

I started hating our couch.  I started just looking at it and obsessing about how ugly it was, how impossible to clean, how distractingly awful and college-flop-housey it looked.

Last night, round about 8:30pm, I was suddenly and totally obsessed with fixing the couch… right then.  I pulled on my shoes and headed off to the store to find good old RIT dye.  My plan?  Wash the cushions, dye the covers, and then paint the couch.

I did it.  I put the clean covers (you know, the un-washable ones?) in the washing machine, then dunked them in a hot sink full of dye.  I wrung them out by hand and then ran them through another wash to rinse them.  Meanwhile, I took hot dye and sponged it over the sun-faded bottom of the couch.  It looked questionable at midnight.  This was either brilliant or really stupid, I thought.

I knew that I couldn’t run the rest of the cushion covers through the drier.  They would certainly shrink.  I had to let them dry overnight.

Things that are dark blue look pretty good while wet, but I was unsure how they would turn out in the light of day.

Turns out, it is all pretty good.  There was significant shrinkage, but nothing that a few pillows can’t hide.  And the blue looks a lot better.  It isn’t perfect, but it is enough to pull a couple more years out of the couch.  And it doesn’t look gross anymore, so that is an improvement.

All in all, a success, I say.

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I am writing this halfway underneath a plastic drop cloth.  Our house is being foamed, and as some of the surfaces are sloped ceilings, they have to foam from the inside instead of the outside.  Let me tell you what I mean.

First our house had hardie planks pried off at about the 4 ft and 8 ft levels.  Then holes were drilled in the old siding.

What they are trying to do is to drop this crazy, expanding foam down into each of the cavities.  Apparently, judging from the way the owner of the company runs in and out of the house looking at our window frames, it is a sort of stressful operation.  If walls are not completely tight, foam will seep over through the holes and into your living room.  I guess that is not ideal.

This foam is amazing stuff.  Unlike “Great Stuff” which I sometimes wonder about its greatness, this stuff is made of nitrogen.  It doesn’t off-gas, (it actually doesn’t smell at all), it has a 5.1 R value, and it cleans up with water.  The guy said that my chickens could try to eat it and would still be fine.  It is messy though, and our house looks crazy.

Hmmm.  Foam on little wing.

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Our house is a hard-working lady.  She is from 1906, and let me tell you, sort of shows her age.

When we first moved in here, the house looked like this:

Then we replaced the door, ripped out the single-pane broken windows, tore off the LP siding and it looked like this:

Next, we had hardie plank put up (6 inch, 2 inch lap, smooth!), and it looked like this:

Finally, we had it painted purple.  Fabulous Grape actually.  It looked like this:

Now any normal person would say, “Hey, you might want to INSULATE THE WALLS while you are at all that ripping apart and doing over.”  Maybe someone did say that.  Did we listen?  Oh no.  We are just now having insulation blown into tiny little holes that very dedicated and frustrated men are drilling on the outside of our house.  They actually aren’t frustrated with the drilling; they are frustrated trying to pry up planks of hardie plank without breaking it.  The stuff is like flint: tough from the outside but liable to snap into shards of… I don’t know, what is this crap made of…cement?  Anyway, it doesn’t bend well which means that it definitely doesn’t “pry” well.  It is a laborious job and they have to treat our stupid siding with kid gloves.

Why didn’t we do this earlier?  We wanted to “save money”.  Ha!  I’ll write a check to that one!  If I actually saved money all the times that I tried to save money, I would not be spending so much money wishing I hadn’t tried to save money!  (Unravel that one for me please.)

In other news, the attic insulation is done, the new furnace is in, the wall insulation should finish up in a couple days, and I am feeling WARMER!  It is an interesting sensation because it is not so much that I am warm as that I am not noticing being cold.  Unfortunately, I also feel like I can not get enough fresh air, like I am oxygen deprived.  I have often felt this way in hotels and places with newer construction.  I think I am not accustomed to all the drafts being sealed up.  I am sure I will get used to this in a couple days.  I feel like someone really needs to open a window around here!

I’ll put up pictures in the next couple days of what our house looks like now.  It looks like…. someone attacked it and ripped boards off it here and there.  Poor old lady.

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One of the hardest things about living in the city is just getting rid of things properly.

A lot of things have changed drastically about my life in the last few years.  First of all, I have these kids and people in their misguided kindness want to give them cheap, plastic crap.  Plastic is truly an amazing invention, and there are wonderful uses for this miracle invention.  Unfortunately, those wonderful inventions usually do not come from the Dollar Store or have “MADE IN CHINA” written on the bottom of them.  This stuff flows into my life at an alarming rate, especially considering that I don’t buy any of it.  It is prizes at school, presents from kid friends, stuff strangers give my children in stores because they were particularly cute that day.  The end result is all the same though.  I trip over it, pull it out of Inez’s mouth, pick it up from the yard or the bathroom floor one too many times and it is banned to the Salvation Army box.  Once there, I must covertly smuggle it out of the house and trundle it into the trunk of the car.  It has to be in a box WITH a lid on it, not viewable by child eyes, as the minute they see it they wail, “But I LOOOOOOVE this!”.  Love my ass.  I just found it in the toilet.

Once in the box, in the trunk of the car, the job is still not done.  First of all, my husband is fighting me every step of the way because he doesn’t want stuff in the trunk.  He takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out….  Once it goes in, I really need to get to a donation site quickly to make sure that it doesn’t end up in the front foyer again, but this is hard considering my daily schedule.  I also have to get the box to the proper donation site without kids looking in or seeing a donation receiving person looking in.  ”But I loooooooved that!” will ensue if this rule is breached, and even worse, the person receiving the donation has been known to take out the PIECE of GOD DAMN PLASTIC and give it back to my child!

Second thing that is hard about city living is living without a farm truck.  I don’t have one.  I don’t know anyone who has one.  Every other week we have a 33 gallon container of yard debris that we can put out, but moving into a largely unkempt house on an unkempt lot, there has been a ton of weeding and pruning and yard work to execute.  There is bamboo, which is a plant from the devil.  You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows,  you…. anyway, I think you understand.  Throughout the last few years, I have created way more than 33 gallons every other week of yard debris.  I compost, (two different bins!), I cut it up, I mulch as much as I can, but still I have too much and no way to haul it away.  When it does start to overwhelm the yard, I can rent a pick up ($35 for 3 hours), and haul the stuff to a yard debris place (between $10 and $20 a load).  If I got a babysitter while doing this job, that is $11 an hour.  As you can imagine, it adds up and it wasn’t much fun in the first place.

The third thing that is hard to get rid of is just plain old wood waste.  It isn’t legal to fire up a big old bon fire like we used to do in Sheridan.  Around here you have to haul stuff away to a specific facility (see above).  Currently I am trying to get rid of our old chicken coop.  Rather than sawzall it up and hope that my Dad would haul it off when he comes to visit, I thought I would Craigslist it for free.  Poor choice.  Although I found a taker, and waited for her all day, she never showed up.  It turned out she didn’t have a pick up.  So the old coop sits in my front yard, waiting for a taker… hopefully with an F-10.

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See this guy?  He’s a shepherd I was asked to make for my church’s religion class.  He is a painted wood cut out, and I think the goal is that he will someday have a whole flock of sheep that kids can move around and play with.  I was happy to do him, especially as I had seen the guy they had before.  He was nice enough, but far too white for a dude hanging out in the middle east in the sun all day.  And he had sport socks which sort of offended me.  My secret vendetta as an artist of religious themed works is to make everyone black or at least clearly Arabic.  Jesus-as-blonde-frat-boy does not work for me.  I fight whitey, and I have a whole host of paints to prove it.

Most of my art is sort of like this shepherd in that it walks out the door fairly soon after being created.  I don’t know what it is about the things I make— they don’t stick around.  I think some of it is that I am just not very motivated so I need people to ask me for stuff (like shepherds) in order to get myself organized enough to create something.  Maybe some of it is that what I make is really just not that useful!  I am okay with admitting that.  Not a lot of people need wooden shepherds or hand puppets of married couples.  And I have come to accept that NO ONE needs green tomato pickles.  (I broke open a jar of those that I canned in late September.  Sort of spicy and slimy.  Not super great.  Sorry if I gave them to you for Christmas.  You have permission to compost them.)

One day I will be gone and my kids will cast about the room for something that I made, trying to prove that their mom was an artist of sorts.  Meanwhile, my creations will be tucked away in some box somewhere, having forgotten their inception but retaining a lovely amount of pigment.

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About a month ago I was asked to speak at church for the fourth Sunday of Advent– today.  Our church has a tradition of having a mother speak on this day as it is the reading where Mary rushes off to see Elizabeth.  The child in Elizabeth’s womb “leaps for joy” and Elizabeth prophecies the place of Jesus in the new society that is to come.  It is a cool thing to be asked.

At first I was honored, then stressed out, terrified, and gradually worked around to confident.  I worked very hard on this piece.  I mean, I ACTUALLY practiced it!

And it went really well.  I felt pretty good about it.  I got a lot of support and positive feed back, so I am flying high on that one.  Here is the text if you are interested!  I cut the second and third paragraphs for time, but I am including them here because I was sad to see them go.

Fourth Sunday Reflection

So here we are in Advent, waiting for Christ and our song is (sung) “We’re waiting for Jesus like Mary”.

On the way to church one day I was bemoaning the task of putting together this reflection to my husband Brad. “What could I possibly have to say about patience or waiting? I’m not a patient person.” “Yeah,” he said, “You are not exactly what I would call serene!”. And then laughed!

“I am too serene!” I wanted to yell. In close relationships, sometimes we offer what we think is this amazingly forthright confession, only to be met by exactly what we don’t want to hear. I didn’t want him to agree with me. I wanted him to tell me how wonderful I am. But I am not a patient person. I am mostly okay with this because for the most part people confuse my impatience with effectiveness, but really at the heart of it all, I want what is not here yet.

Brad and I have three children, Francis who is 6, Zephyr is 3, and Inez is 1. I am a high school language arts teacher by trade, but I am home caring for children right now and sometimes all the waiting and trying to be patient feels like it is killing me. I am sick of doing all the same chores over and over again. I am impatient for the kids to grow up, to need less from me. I am impatient for Inez to quit screaming during church. I would like Zephyr to take his fingers out of his mouth for 2 seconds. And I am sick to death of diapers, diapers, diapers. Older parents say to me, “Oh it goes so fast!” and “Cherish this time!”. I know that they are right, but it is hard for me to muster spirit for their words, maybe because I am exhausted and have diapers to wash.

Pregnancy has always been such a powerful image of waiting, but despite experiencing three pregnancies, I never got much better at waiting. With number 1, I didn’t understand what was happening to me, by number 2, I was eager to be tougher than I was with Francis’s birth. With Inez, the last one, I just wanted it to get over with. That was about month 5.

I’m not good at waiting, but I do understand longing. My pregnancies did help me understand that sort of deep, physical and spiritual longing that comes from some mysterious place inside you, a passionate place, where love and pain are all mixed up together, where you feel something and gasp for breath at how much it hurts. I’ll add here that I don’t think you need to experience pregnancy to know this. We think of this as our heart aching, but why do we hurt in our core like this when our feelings are born in our brain? It is mysterious.

All my children were born in birth centers with midwives. The midwifery model recommends that a laboring woman stay at home as long as possible where she might labor in her own comfortable setting. For me, this was always at night. As I am unwilling to accept comfort when there are things to be done, I was up walking the streets in the dark trying to get my labor to speed up. This is what I sang as I walked: (This is as serene as you are going to get me, so enjoy it). “As the deer longs for running streams, so I long, so I long, so I long for you”. I longed for these babies, these mysterious miracles, these loves of my life.

I understand longing. I can long, and adore, and want change all at the same time. I love my life, my church, my community, but I long for change. I want justice, I want women’s ordination, I want people to stop calling other people “illegal”, I want gay and lesbian couples to have their relationships acknowledged and affirmed by the larger community. In a pregnancy, we know the waiting will all be over after 9 months. Waiting for justice might take a long time though. What are we suppose to do as we wait?

I like this Mary from our Gospel today. She is impatient too. I can just imagine her with her robes hiked up around her knees, her hair and veil flying behind her, rushing as fast as she can over the hills to her cousin Elizabeth’s house. She is out of breath, she is excited, she is bursting with information and can’t wait to hear what Elizabeth might know. Before she can do anything more than call out at the door, Elizabeth shoots up and calls out mightily, “Blessed are you among women! Look at what is happening to us! It is truly wonderful!”.

And it is wonderful. Mary and Elizabeth are not just excited about babies. Yes babies are exciting, but I think what they are excited about is change, is hope. Elizabeth is old and yet she is bearing a child. Mary has been told that her child will rock the foundations of society. Change is coming. The messiah is coming. I imagine that some of you women out there in your 60s and 70s might not consider it much of a favor if you were told by an angel that you were pregnant. “Oh please God no!”, but maybe we can think of this more as a deep symbol for all of us, childbearing or no. Pregnancy in this “old” woman is the ultimate sign of hopefulness. What seemed impossible is not. What seemed too late was not. What seems un-reparable in our human relationships is not without hope.

We long for Christ. We long for peace, for justice, for change. We are impatient. We want to hike up our skirts and run over the hills seeking out our dearest friends and family members to say, “Look what is happening in our world! Look what joy!”. There is value in being patient, but maybe there is value in being hopeful, in letting our longing let us make possible in Christ Jesus what did not seem possible before. Here is the question: can we make our longing manifest in action?

At Advent, we are all pregnant. Close your eyes, wrap your arms around your belly. This is where something wonderful that you long for is growing. Is it peace? Is it healing in your family, in your body, in your human relationships? Sing with me: “As the deer longs for running streams, so I long, so I long, so I long for you”.

What do you need to do to bring it to birth?

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I don’t know what else to say…

I am done with my classes.  I feel a little dazed, but I suppose I am smarter?

It’s a relief.  I think I will live.

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I know it has been a long time.  Believe it or not, I am nearly done with ONE of my two classes.  Right on target.  I was going to give myself all of October and here we are with a week to spare!

Even though I have not been writing here, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything.  That is, I am mostly working on my classes, but I have managed to squeeze in some fun little projects here and there.  Here is an update:

I canned.  A lot.

The kids love tomato soup, and as I felt sort of weird about the amount of soup boxes we go through and I grew a LOAD of tomatoes this year, I thought I would try canning it.  My mother in law hooked me up with a new pressure cooker and good directions and I kicked out these puppies.

I don’t want to be a braggart, but damn this stuff is good.  It really is awesome.  My complaint about tomato soup from the stores is always that it is too salty, even the reduced stuff.  Mine is perfectly tangy, tastes like real tomatoes and has these lovely little chunks in it.  Now if we don’t get botulism, all is well.

My friend Lindsey worked (like a galley slave) one Friday helping me make applesauce.  We made a ton of it.  It is pretty lovely too.

Here is the complete list of canned stuff this summer:

• 14 pints strawberry jam
• 6 pints raspberry jam
• 22 quarts applesauce
• 14 quarts pears
• 8 pints pear chutney
• 5 half pints pear plum chutney
• 24 pints tomato soup
• 7 pints blueberry syrup/jam

I had a funny experience with the blueberry syrup.  This whole canning thing is pretty new to me and I am just making whatever I can get my hands on for free or think we might use.  A few weekends ago, my mother in law, preserving goddess, serves us some blueberry syrup with our pancakes.  ”It didn’t turn out” she said.  She had tried to make blueberry jam.  She then said that she didn’t know why but her blueberry jam never turns out.  I loved the stuff just the runny way it was.  Of course, I go home and try to make blueberry syrup, but it sets up all firm… like jam.  Shoot.  Maybe she will trade with me?

And here are our tomatoes.  Yes, there are more of them.  Maybe I will have fresh tomatoes until December, but I am not convinced.  For now, we have to duck these in the kitchen, which is goofy.  It will make the room seem so big when they are gone!

I had a rough day with the kids today, and instead of my first instinct which was to put them in front of a movie, we pulled out the art supplies and made a royal mess.  It was exactly what I needed.  We made these fun skulls for Dia de los Muertos, and most thrilling to the kids, we got everything hung up and looking awesome by the time Brad got home from work.  He was suitably enthusiastic and the kids were super happy.  In addition to the skulls we made today there is

• pumpkin by Zephyr from preschool,
• candle holders from Mexico from Kendall
• mariachi skeletons in paper mache by Brad (!)
• precious paper skeletons from Italy that my parents carried back
• Virgen de Guadalupe candle
• Good Shepherd holy cards
• Sacred Heart metal pendant
• crucifix
• a picture of my cousin Maria who is dancing in heaven.  She liked Latin American culture, so I know she would like to be part of this scene.  And all my canning stuff was from her, so I have been thinking about her a lot lately.

And the front door:

Zephyr’s skulls are so funny!  HE did the one on top and the one on the lower right with blue eyes (it looks sort of like a decrepit lizard).  I took these pictures in the dark, and I know that was not a fantastic idea, but hey, the kids are asleep, so it IS dark.  I don’t see an alternative really.

I’ll post again soon.  Maybe I will include a picture of my chickens.  They are all molting and look awful.  I think they are cold as they are barely coming out of the henhouse!

Good thoughts!  Happy October!

6 Comments | In: Awesome!, food, projects, urban farming | | #

I felt accomplished this year that I had such a successful summer garden.  It is still sort of successful, if those 13 tomato plants ever decide to ripen.  They are ripening, just not all at once like I imagined.  It is somewhat inconvenient as I intended to can those tomatoes.  I’m not going to be able to can one at a time though.  Ripen, ripen, ripen!

The weather is weird around here.  The season is changing.  The mornings are cold, but then midway through the day, you are sweating in your wool socks.  I put on a sweater, take off the sweater, contemplate turning the furnace on but then see that it is still 67 degrees.  Fall is here, but it is sauntering in.  We’re having showers in the morning, heavy clouds and then bursts of sun.

In the garden, the snow peas and beets gave way to lettuce, chard, and cauliflower.  We’ll see what makes it.  The napa cabbage is looking troubled.  I see that maybe I do have slugs after all.  If you can believe it, I have seen very few slugs on our property here in Portland.  I don’t actually think that is a good thing.  I think the soil is just so dry and poor that it doesn’t support egg growth.  So even though I don’t miss the suckers, I do sort of mourn their absence.  I think our soil sucks so much that even the slugs don’t like it, but anywhere I put down chicken manure, straw, leaves and mulch there are now signs of tiny little slugs.  That’s okay.  There is enough to share for now.

And what is this?  Peeking around the side of a tomato plant, these buggers looked me in the eye.  Begone deadly nightshade!  I love that it has “deadly” in its name.  Makes you think, “Now wait, should I eat this?”.  I think I should have deadly in my name.

I had an ill-fated couple weeks for all things coffee and tea.  Just when the weather changed and I wanted more of both, I broke my coffee pot (knocked it on the sink), broke the spout of my teapot (dropped it while washing it), and suffered the loss of my milk frother (Zephyr swept it off the counter and then imbedded a piece in his foot for good measure).  Sigh.  Ill-fated.  This tea pot was so cute and useful.  Brad’s aunt gave it to me along with this excellent little tea cozy.  I couldn’t part with it,even though the spout is broken down the back in a quite irreparable way.  You can’t see the break from the front, especially with the plant in it.  I’m going to keep it on the front porch to announce my priorities to the world.  I planted a corsican mint in it.

Yes, at the big purple house, things are indeed growing well.

7 Comments | In: My super freakin' cute kids, food, projects, urban farming | | #