her able hands

We all landed at home around 5:30 Monday night and hit the lawns running (with mowers and wheelbarrows and for me, a pocket full of tissues). Chris knocked down the grass at our house with the ride-on and got so caught up in it that he forgot to go to his guitar lesson. Oops. Tyler used the push mower with the bagger attachment to cut the grass next door at Chris’ mother’s house. I had him fill the wheelbarrow, and I layered in loads of leaves that I raked out of the ivy beds at the edge of the woods. Oh, lordy the leaves were much too thick in there — suffocating the ivy and blanching the hosta shoots all the way to the tips, pure white. The whole edge line looks like a gourmet endive patch (if you ignore the rotting leaves and oh, crap, poison ivy that’s taking over).

I had to focus on the small acts of completion over and over again even though my attention kept wandering outward to the bigger picture. My mother in-law joined us in the back and I felt so overwhelmed with the need for care that is racing forward in her as her short-term memory simply disappears. I keep having the thought that I need to be here every day so I can help her with the property, but she could also pay for a lawn service (easily). I get the impression that she just doesn’t believe in paying someone to do work that family should do. Regardless of the fact that all of the members of her family work full-time and also have children and properties of their own to care for…and she doesn’t come out and say that, but she also doesn’t take action. It’s a generational thing maybe. I’m trying not to judge it. I mean, miles in her shoes and all that. I was raised in the time when the service industry blasted off, and while we rarely hire outside help because we’re DIY freaks, I also see it as a reasonable answer when we just can’t manage it on our own. We may have to call someone in for her, before the property falls into that defeated decline of decay and disrepair that happens when left unattended. It needs way more than mowing and we can barely handle that these days.

Anyway, so I took those wheelbarrow loads over to the lasagna bed I’m building along the back of the deck. It’s about 4 feet deep and now after last night’s work, about 16″ high. I’ll add some manure and then next week when we mow again, will do some more layers of grass and leaves to bring it up to 2 feet. I have one giant bale of peat moss left from last year, so will do a nice layer of that in between.

Each trip back for another load, she showed me a thick piece of glass she picked out of one of the garden beds (the soil is loaded with glass back there because 50+ years ago, it was used to dump trash. She showed me that piece of glass ten times as if it was a new discovery. I’m really worried that things are going to slide downhill with her faster and faster. I’m upset with myself when I feel the thread of resentment tightening around my heart. How can I let that go? I don’t know how to rise above my own needs to meet these massive needs of a woman I don’t have a very close relationship with and who only opens minimally to her grandchildren. To do it gracefully feels a herculean task. I blew it, but hard, when I helped her after the shoulder surgery. Just didn’t handle the intimacy at all well and let my annoyance at the brothers come out with sarcastic comments about sponge baths and well…it’s a damned good thing I didn’t want to be a nurse. I’m still so ashamed that I said what I said, so much so that I won’t repeat it here. I’m even more ashamed that I meant it. That I didn’t feel good about helping, that it felt like a burden and brought up tremendous fear in me. Jeesh. Being human means carrying such a huge load of bullshit around with you everywhere you go, you know?

I keep imagining the future and it’s me having to go daily to hand her the pills she takes and watching her swallow them — morning and evening. Right now she’s taking everything in the morning, and some are supposed to be nighttime only because they make you drowsy. I don’t want to be that person. I want her sons to step up and handle that (which they will, it’s just my imagination running willy-nilly because I feel overwhelmed and tapped out and helpless around the situation). Probably exacerbated by the fact that I don’t have much of a relationship with her or with any of Chris’ siblings. I resent that we don’t live close to my mother who is an involved grandparent and misses her grandchildren so much that I know it’s a constant ache for her (as it is for me). That I don’t get to raise my children with my sister and her sweet family nearby. That all feels so unfair on so many levels.

So I build garden beds and plant food to feed my family and try to stay in the moment. It’s so easy to project myself into some nightmare future. Not so easy to send myself out into a future that’s clear and bright and filled with meaningful work and intimate connections in the community. Not without seeing the difficulties. When did I become so negative? I think it settled into me more deeply when Chris’ dad got so sick and I was working so much and it felt like everything fell apart. And another whole year has gone by and we’re not much farther ahead and in some ways have slid back more than we even realized.

But I will NOT complain about working full-time. Especially in light of the fact that I am seriously contemplating changing to an even more full-time position in a restaurant. Oh, there is so much to reconcile in my mind. As I hauled loads to the garden bed and spread the materials out in thick layers, I weighed the pros and cons in my mind yet again. It would be amazing to be working to create a business model that builds relationships with local suppliers and brings wholesome foods to the community. Feeding people is one of my very favorite things in the world to do with my time. Could I actually make a viable living doing so?

Also, I love seeing the downtown improving and think our idea will add to the integrity and sustainability of the downtown businesses. Maybe help balance out the ridiculous number of tattoo parlors? I have always wanted to learn how to do a business plan, so I’m diving in right now and doing just that, so we have something on paper to work with as we talk to the venture capitalists and to property owners who are involved in the Main St. initiative.

Oh my Maude, the hours. I know the hours are going to be ungodly. I know this. Yet I’m drawn to it. I keep coming back to a very calm yes, again and again. I have not felt a strong no at all as I’ve explored the ideas, just questions of doubt arise and I write them down and look for practical responses. Can I work 80 hour weeks? No. How can I make sure that does not happen? Close Sunday and Monday, do only lunch and dinner, find good, solid help (we already have several people who are interested who we know have terrific work ethics and are flexible).

Here’s an interesting thing: Cheril went to a meeting at the University about connecting the KSU students with the Downtown Main St., building work relationships with kids in a way that will make them want to stay here in Kent after they finish school. There were a lot of great ideas on the table and it gives me hope that we could find good, reliable employees. The program will be set up so that it’s part of their degree and they will have to work with an adviser and will be screened for responsibility and reliability. Interesting things happening in town. If this is my home, which it apparently is, then I’d like to be more involved.

Meanwhile, I’m watching my neighbor go from 0 to 150 on his sandwich shop in just a couple of days. He got the keys last Monday and already has most of his distributors lined up, has the menu and logo nearly finished, lined Cheril and I up for cookies and cupcakes, and is working on line processes. He plans to open the doors to his sandwich shop on June 1 and I’m not going to be at all surprised to see it happen. Granted, it’s a turnkey operation for a sandwich shop, so he’s ahead of the game with equipment and setups. But it’s good to see this all in action, to see that he’s a guy who gets things done.

My work with the grass clippings sent me into sinus hell over the next couple of days and I stayed home from work yesterday so I could do the Neti Pot every hour, warm salt water washes through the sinus are beyond bizarre, but it seems to have worked. I broke a massive sweaty fever last night and this morning can breathe through my nose a good 50% better. During the day I did take care of a few tasks around here like trimming out the double-seedlings in my lettuce starts and feeding everything with liquid kelp fertilizer. Then I moved Lila’s play kitchen into the alcove in the living room where the piano used to sit (it’s in the dining room now) to make space for an extra table for cupcake making. In a few weeks I’m going to be a baking maniac. Hope my oven holds up for a few months — it’s been acting a little wonky and is 12 years old. If we have to replace it, I’m going to sacrifice a cabinet and put in something wider.

I have a giant leap I will need to make soon — whether into the abyss of the unknown life of a restaurant manger, or into a financially risky venture working from home. The latter feels less and less enticing the more I plot and plan this other possibility. Every day more is revealed and I let myself float along in the tugging current of this river of life. I can hear the rapids up ahead and my habit is to want to start to swim the other way, but I’ve done that too many times. I’m ready to see where life is truly leading me now so I’m just going to relax into it and let it carry me. I’m tired of fighting.

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Thank you all for your encouraging words and for pointing out bits and pieces that I just might be glossing over. I spent quite a lot of time yesterday talking with several people, including Cheril, and writing down a list of my requirements and of what I’m looking for the next big adventure in my life to entail. When I got home I sat down with my neighbor for a bit and told him this:

We’re interested, but don’t like the space. We also feel that in order to open strong and memorably, we would want to have the menu focus on a few things and do them really well, and then leave room to add in other experimental items over time. We want as much organic as possible and to find a way into that niche. We recognize that it will be very challenging to develop a franchise using locally produced food, but still want to make that at least a tiny corner of the plan, where a monthly special uses a local, seasonal food item.

If he wants to do the sub shop in conjunction with the organic foods, we feel that’s just a marketing nightmare (healthy, whole foods and uh…submarine sandwiches!) and we’re not philosophically down with that. We’re two women in our forties who have worked hard to make other people wealthy over the years. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re ready to dive into work that is meaningful for us, and will be much more willing to put extra time into a project that aligns with our values.

I also said I’d done quite a lot of asking around (thanks Becca!) and using my own restaurant experience and my own fuzzy logic, I knew for a fact that his goal of opening his doors in three weeks (or his revised four) is absolutely unrealistic and way optimistic and is a recipe for disaster. And that his idea to have us hand over a menu and he take care of getting it all set up and just have us start when the store opens is crazy because we are the ones who know the food and would need to set up the line process, figure out the timing on everything and then train the staff to do what we do and to do it even better.

So if that’s his plan, he’ll need to find somebody else to help him with that, but we will joyfully provide him with cupcakes and cookies via our SugarBuzz home catering gig (our business cards arrived yesterday).

So it turns out he had a difficult afternoon with the man who owns the building, trying to iron out a lease that has quite a lot wrong with it. He’s having second thoughts and took in all I had to say and more. He said he loves our ideas but doesn’t know enough about the market and wants to do more research to see what the numbers are for health food restaurants. He also said that several other people have mentioned that it’s a bad location (a strip plaza with zero personality and a lease that states you can’t do anything to the outside of the building to make your store stand out from the others). He said “If I look for a place in downtown on Main St., would you be interested? If I found that space and turned you two loose in it to run with your ideas?”

Uh…yes. Yes, we would be very interested in a project like that.

So he went off to thinkthinkthink, and I went home to stop thinking and worrying about it for the night. And that felt so bloody good. It only took two days to go from white hot excitement to really seeing what is true for me. Phew.

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I’ve got nothing. Camera still sitting in bag with uncharged battery. The three photos I took last week came out too dark because it was so close to dusk and in the back yard. Things are moving fast around here and I’m sitting with a huge life-changing decision for probably one more day and then I have to give an answer. Yes, I’ll stop working here and come to work there, as long as it’s not a drop in pay—but understanding that I’ll likely be working more at least in the beginning. Or no, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing for a little while longer.

See, my neighbor is starting a small restaurant in an old sub shop, a turnkey operation, and he’s looking for someone to help manage it. Two someone’s actually (Cheril and I are in talks and both weighing the load against our lives to see if we can carry it comfortably). It’s daunting because the desired goal for startup is fast (3 weeks!) and we have some requirements for what we are willing to put our energies into: healthy food (at least half vegetarian, fresh, seasonal/local on the menu, organic whenever possible, sustainable waste management and meaningful interaction with the community — beyond mere profit.

Those are all things much easier to do with a restaurant but his idea is to use this space as a testing ground and to build a blueprint that can be franchised. That’s a major challenge implementing even half of our philosophical requirements, but he seems to think we can make it work. We have to make our decision today and if its yes begin immediately working on a simple menu.

I’m at 99% yes even though I have some reservations about certain details. I think this will be an incredible opportunity for me to learn how to and how not to do things in preparation for me starting my own kitchen garden catering business in the future.

My biggest question this morning? Can I deal with likely having even less time to work in my gardens this year? And if that’s my most pressing concern, well, I suppose I’m ready to move on.

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One of the most magical things about blogging all these years is the amazing people who have come into my life. People I would have not had the opportunity to meet otherwise because they live in other regions of the country and the world. I’ve also made connections with some remarkable folks who live just about right in my own back yard, but just far enough away and traveling in a different enough circle that we likely would not have crossed paths.

Jennifer, The Baklava Queen is one such almost neighbor, and I’ve enjoyed some lovely email exchanges with her about blog posts, local grain mills, baking and gardening. I’m so happy she took time to write a post on her own blog as a contribution to the Able Hands Photo Project.

“…the philosophy behind the project (at least for me) has a connection to how I approach cooking and preserving food and sharing it with others. Work has so often become a nasty four-letter word for many of us, but there is so much that we do with our hands to make life easier for others or to create beauty or simply to do what we each feel is needful in our own lives. Work can and should be a joy and full of meaning, and that’s what I try to practice in my kitchen as well in other aspects of my life.”

I love this. Check out her link in the quote, which is to another of her posts about the time it takes to make and eat local foods and fresh meals daily. Reading that has me thinking about my role as the keeper of the kitchen and how that has changed for me over the years from one of exclusion to inclusion. I used to hate having anyone in the kitchen with me. I couldn’t think straight or focus on my work, so I would shoo everyone out to play while I worked. But then I would get so spiteful and annoyed at the lack of help and at the sound and sight of the rest of my people off having fun while I toiled away in the kitchen.

Gawd, I was so bitter all the time. I still get that way sometimes, because everyone else has something just as pressing to do as getting food on the table. I sometimes resent the fact that I’m the only one who does any planning for meals — something that has to happen daily, and can get a little boring and uninspired. And sometimes, I just don’t feel like it. Sometimes I’d so much rather sit and read blogs or a good book. But those are pizza nights.

I have learned that if anyone’s hanging around in the kitchen while I cook, they’re fair game, but I’m struggling with the dichotomy between my two kids and the way they regard work. Lila is happiest if she’s given a task to help with and gets so frustrated if we forget to include her in our work unless she’s off playing with a friend. If there are mushrooms to chop for dinner, she’s my girl working the paring knife with precision. If Ty’s the only one around? It’s hardly worth the heavy sighs and leaking air. Ty is a teenager and I don’t know if I need say anything else about that. But I see other teenagers with much stronger work ethics and I wonder if I dropped the ball somewhere along the line with him. I think I did. I think we all did, the grown ups in his life. I think we have all handed much too much to him. While we don’t do that anymore, we missed the opportunity big time during his formative years.

I think when he was Lila’s age, I made every effort to distract him with play or entertainment so I could get my work done quickly, efficiently and without having more mess to clean up in the end. I didn’t know how to deal with “mistakes” he might have made. I wanted things to be as close to perfect as possible. I’m pretty sure that the subtext my lovely young man has absorbed is “why bother? It’ll never be good enough anyway.”

If he saw me working, it was seldom joyfully. More than likely he picked up my frustration and my hurriedness. I know we’re supposed to improve with age, maturity and experience, and I have. I have much more patience this time around (not perfect, but greatly improved). These two kids have very different temperaments and proclivities. But they also have had two very different mothers, and obviously two very different fathers.

I try now with Tyler to talk about my work in a meaningful way, as if chasing behind the damage done, trying to gently, inconspicuously show him how good work can be. How important it is to balance the work and play, to not allow the need for entertainment to take us away from caring for and shaping our homes and our world into a better place. I tell him why I cook the way I do, why I grow food and preserve it, why I write. Why I clean the bathrooms and mop the kitchen floor every now and again (so our feet don’t stick to it and hold us in place so we can be devoured by the ants attracted to the sticky film from the constant cupcake baking frenzy). But it’s difficult and I worry he’s not getting it, or that he’s getting it much too late so that it’s just words bouncing off and him seeing me do my thing and he’s thinking, well good, so let her work. I’m going back to my game.

But I keep at it. Remind him to do his chores. Invite him to help me with projects. There’s always work to be done and opportunity to talk about it.

So how do you think about the work you do?

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If you’re on flickr, I hope join the Able Hands Photo Project Pool and share your photos of hands at work, rest and play.

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This is the new playground, set up in the spot where the rickety old death-trap once stood. You can see him just slouching over there in the yard all sad and rejected and looking even more dangerous than before now that the new kid’s in town.

You know that phrase, NIMBY (not in my backyard) that people toss around in regards to building that they don’t want to look at, or high tension wires, or landfills, or nuclear power plants? When we decided to buy this house, we had to consciously let go of a bit of NIMBY-tude. I mean because we moved from acreage to city and gave up the view of many trees and open sky to look at the back of a McMiniMansion type home. The houses aren’t very attractive and are the first thing you notice when you go in our backyard, especially when the leaves are off the trees. Of course, if that house ever sells, those poor people have to look at our toy-littered, trash-day furniture covered back yard. But if they have little kids, they’ll be happy enough to let go of their own NIMBY attitude because my backyard has become the epicenter for fun and adventure in the neighborhood, as well as for growth and renewal. I’ve been walking around for days, giggling like a little girl and shouting, “Yes, please! Bring it to my backyard!”

You can sort of see the open land behind us, to the left of that house. That’s the west edge of the five acres that are going to be turned into a gated senior village. There’s no way to stop that plan now (and it looks like a fairly sane plan), but other things are swirling around in the atmosphere here. Big things, but smaller than my initial ideas, more manageable scale things, more of a scale that I can take my time, learn and then expand. I don’t mean to be cryptic, I’m just not supposed to talk details with anyone until it’s finalized. But I do think it’s safe for me to say that if it goes through the way it sounds like it will, (I’m told it’s 99% a done deal), I’m going to have a half acre of open land on which to plant and teach and hopefully make some dollars. Half an acre of open, sunny land, in sight of my own home.

Needless to say, I’m trying not to count my chickens and all that, but I do think the last two weeks have been a trip in the river of life, and for once I have completely surrendered to the current. I’ve asked many questions, stated what I want, listened to stories and advice, taken action where it felt right, and otherwise waited and envisioned this scenario (or one very close to it) with all of me, in every free moment. New people have come into my life, people who might turn out to be excellent partners in whatever this venture turns into. Other people who might need my help in a part time, paid capacity. Things are lining up to make it possible for me to be at home.

I feel like magic has been going on under the surface of that river where I can’t see it, but I can feel it gently move me in new directions. Sometimes it’s so scary to feel that tug out in to the middle where the water moves faster and my instinct is to start paddling for shore. But then I remind myself that shore isn’t working anymore. That living in the relative safety of the shallows is making me sick and unhappy. That I’m ready. I’m ready to live my life and earn my living in a meaningful way.

The guy who wants to do a land contract for the house contacted Chris yesterday and they hammered out the terms. Chris goes to see Titus, The Octogenarian Barrister today to get the contract drawn up. They want to move in two weeks from now. We’ll be holding the mortgage for three more years, but they’ll be paying most of it this year, a little more next, and then full the third year. See what I’m talking about?

Also, I attended the second (my first) Akron E4S (Entrepreneurs for Sustainability) event last night. The topic was building a sustainable local food network and industry, and was very well attended. I met beekeepers, CSA owners, landscape designers, writers, large scale farmers, two guys who are starting a distribution program to get local food from the grower to restaurants, the man who runs the Countryside Conservancy, people who work from grant foundations, a woman who manages a Cleveland farmers’ market and is starting a beautiful new glossy magazine on local foods, a chef who uses a lot of locally grown food, and many, many more. My head hurt when I got home, from the hundreds of ideas ringing in the space between my ears.

I forgot how much I hate driving at night, and a forty minute ride on the highway that’s mostly under construction, with my head pounding and my night blindess made for a stressful journey back to Kent, and I slept like a coma patient last night. My dreams were all about organic food, interesting people, writing about gardening and farming and the people who make it all happen, and feeling connected and successful and alive. My headache is gone this morning, and the sun is shining. So we’re meant to get some snow on Sunday…okay, it’s April in Ohio. That’s not a big surprise. My tomatoes and peppers are almost all up, the broccoli and brussels sprouts need transplanted this weekend, and I need to get another half dozen flats of culinary herbs and medicinal herbs started.

Onward into the season!

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