Tag: Life
This renovation project has been a huge learning curve for me
While I had once considered architecture as a career, I’m surprised how little I know about what makes a home work or, through the eyes of my coconspirators in this venture, how much a few imaginative strokes can transform an existing structure. Not all of them are budget-busters for folks in the lower half of the income bell curve, either.
It’s a long way from my ingrained tastes shaped by the clean 20th century lines of the Bauhaus school of design as well as my admired Shaker and Zen aesthetics. Historic New England home styles have come as a more recent appreciation along the lines of an “This Old House” public television series dimension. Still, after owning a traditional New Englander described in many of the earlier blog posts here, I had jokingly promised myself that the next house would be concrete, glass, and steel – nothing that would rot or need maintenance. At least, with the move to Eastport, it wasn’t in the pine box I had once jokingly expected at the end of my Dover sojourn.
At least I’m no longer left with a state of anxiety each time a nor’easter barrels our way. Despite all the asphalt shingles on the sidewalks and streets I had found after each of those, fortunately most of ours stayed in place. As we’ve since discovered, the biggest wonder was that our roof itself had withstood so much for so long in its condition.
But I’ve also been haunted by an “This Old House” series that followed a renovation of a Nantucket Island home, if I recall right, and the way it overran budget and led to its sale shortly afterward.
You would have thought we would have had our plan down pat long before the renovations began. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t.
I mean, with three years of looking for a contractor, there was lots of time for planning. Except that we kept it in the nebulous dream stage rather than some hard decisions.
And then, once we found one, we had hoped to have the entire roof component buttoned up before last winter but had to settle on getting the back half done first and then tackling the front come springtime, as you’ve seen in these weekly posts. So here we are, more than a year later.
We’ve made some mistakes, of course. We spent money on CAD specifications in a design done through a local lumberyard only to find out what our contractor needed wasn’t what we thought he was looking for. Looking back, I’m not sure they could have delivered, considering what we were really facing and then revised as we went..
And the wood stove’s metal chimney didn’t have to go up next to the brick chimney, meaning that it had more bending than was necessary. Oops. At least it draws the smoke well.
On the other hand, much of the rest has been pretty straight-forward.
We even know that it will never, ever, really be finished.
Some final shots for the year in my writing life
Sometimes my own writing goes beyond anything I can explain. For instance:
- My Kinisi here at the Barn? Prompts, yes, if you want.
- But firing them into full blast?
- Much less igniting a conflagration?
- We do what we can, each one on the edge.
- I keep shooting what I think are some good ones at you, hoping someone will take it the next step.
Meanwhile, over the years:
- I’ve attempted to walk in the Light daily, though fallen far short.
- Ridden the uprising Spirit.
- Found silent meditation crucial to writing poetry.
- Uncovered 12 generations of my Hodgson ancestors.
- Returned unknowingly to the faith of those ancestors.
- Survived a shrinking profession to reach retirement.
- Sought an incandescent language.
- Still need a champion.
- Never taught creative writing.
- Found literary writing can resemble prayer.
- Am perhaps best known for my Mixmaster approach to poetry and fiction. Or maybe it was my radical history of Dover along with uncovering an alternative Christianity in the Quaker metaphors of Light and Seed
- Prefer a religion that relies on questions more than answers
- Think we’re confused enough, already.
- Store bath towels in a basket.
- Wear reading glasses, more and more.
- Have become uncomfortable around smokers.
- Had hoped to reclaim my social activist witness, after years of journalistic neutrality.
Remember, you can find my works in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain them.
Things I hate about Christmas
- House cleaning. It won’t stay that way long, no matter how hard we try.
- The frenetic schedule. Nothing else gets done in the month.
- Parking lots. Really packed parking lots. And all of the accompanying traffic.
- Retail music. Really! You can’t escape it.
- Nobody’s that happy. Or relentlessly chipper. And don’t try to goad me into it. Or guilt me, either.
- Cardboard boxes. Stacks of empty ones take up too much space, there’s rarely one that fits your need, and then all the wrapped ones soon won’t be, meaning trash to haul out.
- Pine needles everywhere from all the garlands around the house. They really start dropping overnight.
- Piles of dirty dishes. We do eat well, though.
- Waiting for everyone to get up on Christmas morning. Unless I’m really asleep.
- Having to wait for the cookies to finally become fair game.
Technically, most of this is actually Advent. The real 12 Days of Christmas are another matter, something I’ve thoroughly come to appreciate.
Our winters from the perspective of neighboring St. Croix Island
The French learned some harsh lessons in their attempt to establish their first North American settlement on a small island perhaps ten miles north of where I know live.
“It was difficult to know this country without having wintered there; for on arriving in summer everything is very pleasant on account of the woods, the beautiful landscapes, and the fine fishing for the many kinds of fish we found there,” Samuel Champlain wrote. “There are six months of winter in that country.”
I’ve previously contended that New England has a five- or six-month winter, so that passage offers me some confirmation.
As that winter dragged on, however, more than half of the men and boys developed what Champlain called a “mal de la terre,” or “land sickness” – scurvy, a disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency. It was common among sailors stuck on ships for months at a time, and many captains knew to keep citrus fruits on board, or beverages made from evergreen tree needles. During the European Age of Sail between 1500 and 1800, it was assumed that half of all crews would die of scurvy.
It wasn’t pretty.
“Their teeth barely held in place, and could be removed with the fingers without causing pain,” Champlain wrote of the horrific suffering the settlers endured over the winter of 1604-1605. “This excess flesh was often cut away, which caused them to bleed extensively from the mouth.”
Eat your apples and oranges and grapefruit, then, as well as lemons and limes.
Time to kick back and enjoy all the comforts of home
This Christmas is shaping up to be picture-perfect. Well, make that better than in previous years. Nobody will be sleeping on mattresses on the floor, as has usually been the case when the rest of the family or guests show up. But the still not remodeled kitchen lacks a full-size oven and, glory be, a dishwasher. Living here feels much less like we’re camping.
By taking the back wall up and turning the two small dormers in front into one long “dustpan” dormer, we gained more than 320 square feet of additional space in addition the parts where I’m now able to walk around fully upright. The two back bedrooms allow much more than a bed and dresser. Even though we still don’t have a second bathroom and laundry area, these are First World problems. Welcome to the 21st century, you old house, with your two centuries-plus already behind you.
You’ve earned some much overdue tender care.
You’ve really become part of the family.
Religion turns off readers, and yet …
That’s an advice given to authors, though it’s something I cannot avoid in my own novels and even poetry. Where else can we fully address the deepest values we hold?
Politics doesn’t seem to be working that way, for sure.
Is science fiction the best we can do for now when it comes to grappling with philosophical issues?
Still, I’ve dug in, ranging from the spirituality of yoga and Buddhism in Zen and Tibetan traditions to Quaker and Mennonite Christianity to Greek Orthodoxy as well as Indigenous strands.
I tackle this most directly in Light Seed Truth, an ebook that includes four earlier booklets investigating the revolutionary impact early Quakers found in applying the metaphors of Light, Seed, and Truth. To that I add examples of the power of metaphor in modern secular society, just for balance.
My goal is to raise readers’ awareness and sensitivity rather than convert anyway to a particular faith.
With religion, I want to hear how faith is experienced by different individuals, rather than what they speculate they should be experiencing.
The best mystics I’ve known have surprisingly practical and humorous.
~*~
You can find it and more in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.
Sounding so dated now
RETAIL THERAPY: used books or classical/jazz/folk CDs.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOTEL? To date, Omni, Providence, Rhode Island. Yes, over Boston, Chicago, and New York.
I’LL KNOW I HAVE IT MADE WHEN: I can rent a cottage by the sea or a mountain lake. Or I have grandchildren.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT PROJECT? Creating an author’s website and blog.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO INVITE TO DINNER? My agent or publisher. If only I had one.
UPCOMING: Retirement.
That ‘X’ in Xmas isn’t what most folks think
Considering that X is also the Roman numeral for ten, here goes this week’s Tendrils.
- X, or Chi, is the first letter in Greek for Christ. Thus, using it as shorthand for the Yule holiday has nothing to do with striking Christ out of holiday celebrations.
- Applied to the English word Christmas, the use dates from the 1500s. Elsewhere, the use of ‘X’ for Christ goes back to at least the fourth century.
- It did take me a while in doing genealogy research of the 1600s to realize that Xpher was the name Christopher.
- Only half of Americans attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Day.
- The holiday was widely ignored in Colonial America. For that matter, the first session of the U.S. Congress was held on December 25, 1789. It wasn’t until 1870 that Christmas was proclaimed a federal holiday.
- Turkey is edging out ham as the centerpiece of the Christmas dinner in America. It’s even a big day for cranberry, perhaps surpassing Thanksgiving. Swan and peacock were earlier favorites, though I’m not sure where.
- The Rockefeller Center tree started out small. The first one, in 1931, was undecorated. Two years later, one appeared with lights. Each year afterward saw a bigger tree, culminating in the familiar giant that boasts more than 50,000 LED lights.
- Christmas caroling was originally mostly drunken men going door to door and making a nuisance of themselves. And then the unemployed poor took over with their begging bowls.
- The oldest Santa parade in the U.S. is in Peoria, Illinois, dating from 1888. Apparently, it’s played well there.
- The original Christmas pudding was a soup made of raisins and wine.
Notes from a Yule tree search in the woods
The tree the kid wants ain’t natchural! At least not the ones we’ve cut from the wild.
What we find in the woods are typically lopsided, with the growth mostly to one side. And they tend to be more open than full, which can have its own appeal when it comes to adding ornaments.
Not that she perceives that on her arrival from the metropolis.
She’s always been challenging and demanding.
Jnana's Red Barn 