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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My burst of wild productivity last week came to a screeching halt mid-week when I started to feel the effects of the insanely productive pollen-makers in the area. My throat got scratchy and my head filled up with a puffy, thick cloud of green-smelling vapor. I went from thinking Oh, joyous spring, how I love you and your winter-rescuing ways! — to — Oh, spring! Kiss my ass and die you poison-generating bastard of the earth! Within two days it moved into my chest and has settled there with a deep, barking cough and a garbagy, green expectorating that has me thinking maybe a visit to the Dr. is in order.

Meanwhile, the potatoes wait impatiently on the piano bench.

Maybe tonight after work. I tried yesterday but just walking around the yard left me wheezing like an 85 year-old asthmatic. We went down to the old house to deal with a few things and I brought along my digging fork so I could raid the garlic patch that I knew would have re-seeded after my shoddy harvests the last two years. There wasn’t quite as much as I thought there’d be, but the grass has grown up around it pretty thick, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

While there, I also dug up the 3 beautiful ferns that Debra let me gank from her gorgeous property a few years ago. I had stuck them in a terrible spot in the northeast corner of the garden and they were knee-deep in standing water, but the fiddleheads are breaking the surface of the root clump. I’m hopeful they’ll be thrilled to find a new home in our little wood lot here in Kent with its shady, rich soil and plenty of other shade-loving plants around to talk to. Yes. I think they talk to one another. What of it?

We’ll probably head down again next weekend to take care of a few more things in preparation of either the sale or the rent-to-own situation that’s hopefully imminent. Two offers on the table, and we’re just weighing the loss (either way we end up eating a large chunk of change and having to float a loan to finish paying the mortgage on a house we don’t live in, good times!)

So next weekend I’ll dig up some more perennials out of the front bed, and some more comfrey which has taken over the little back kitchen garden. I also saw some Dame’s Rocket that I’d like to move over here, and I think I’d like to populate the edge line of the woods with some wild garlic mustard, which for some reason doesn’t seem to grow here. It makes great spring greens for salad and soup, and I hear it’s a nice pesto, too.

I’ll also make another stop at the farm stand, where I bought 5 lbs. of freshly picked asparagus yesterday. Oh my. Just look at this.

They had a massive shallow pan with at least 100, 1 lb. bunches standing in an inch of water. It had just been picked that morning and the cuts on the bottom where they had snapped them off were still raw. I couldn’t believe they were selling it for $2.99 a bunch. The smaller farm stand closer to me had them last year for $5 a bunch. I’m definitely going back to buy more, but will enjoy the hell out of the 5 lbs. I bought for this week, starting with green garlic linguini with Romano cheese and grilled asparagus for supper.

It smelled like heaven (or Little Italy) in my house and even out in the yard while the garlic simmered in butter. You can sort of see the last hunk of local Amish butter in the background there sitting on the wax paper. I’d already used close to an entire stick, but then figured why bother saving back just a couple of tablespoons of the last of the 2 lb. roll? I threw it into the pan and cackled as my arteries hardened just watching it melt. Hello, Paula Deen!

Excellent spring meal. And bonus, there’s leftovers so guess what I’m having for lunch?

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Brain full of thinkythoughts. Sitting with the possibilities. Knowing that the near future holds new work for me — work with food and people and growing. As I said to Lisa B-K today: I need to decide which side of the relationship I want to be on…the growing and selling, the buying, cooking and serving?

So frost advisory tonight, which I’m letting myself feel happy about because just maybe global warming isn’t happening quite as fast as it surely seems like it’s happening. I know, I’m fooling myself. But end of April for last frost is better than last year, which was two weeks earlier. Lila helped me to spread bedsheets over the raised beds and the m-shaped lasagna bed full of tender sprouts of chard, kale, collards, spinach, arugula, carrots, radish, and turnips. Hopefully the peas and fava beans can withstand a little frost, because I didn’t cover those.

No photos. Battery dead (but charging) and brain too full to think about it. Thanks for your patience. I know it’s boring around here lately.

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Where the frack did that weekend go? My body is so bone tired I can hardly type right now and am thinking that the cup of coffee I have in front of me isn’t nearly strong enough.

We never had any of that predicted rain over the weekend, just a few sprinkles and then nothing but sunshine and warm breezes. I mostly stayed off of the computer and focused on work outside, balanced with a bit of laundry (hung out to dry), some salad assembly, and a bit of seedling transplanting. I haven’t once picked up my camera, so the promised photos don’t exist. Ah well. Here’s what I did knock down over the past two days:

• Raked out beds around the house and weeded out the overgrown alpine strawberries and heal-all that’s taking over (love my scuffle hoe). Visited the wood mulch pile from last year’s visit with the wood chipper about 50 times with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The pile is about twenty times bigger than in the photo on that post, minus 50 loads. Oh, my aching body.

• Yoga class. Again, with the ow.

• Mowed and mulched lasagna beds with grass clippings, and started the new lasagna bed along the driveway that I’ll add a layer of topsoil to next month.

• That’s because I got $80 worth of manure dumped last night. One by the driveway for that bed (shared with neighbors) and the other by the gardens next door at the in-laws’ house. I shoveled a lot of that last night, too. Have I mentioned my sore torso? My aching shoulders? My hands that feel like they got stepped on?

• Raked out ivy along side of driveway (not all of it, just about 300′ of the 200′ bed) for more lasagna bed materials.

• Transplanted Bee Balm and Rudbeckia into a little bed I made a year ago with rabbit bedding, right behind the playground set.

• Dug out a bunch of overgrown bedding plants in the front, some of which became compost, and some transplanted to bare spots. This to make room for fruit trees, which I should order this week.

• Planted a dozen fingerling potatoes and thought about doing more, but the manure hadn’t been delivered yet and the beds next door really could use a good run with the rototiller (which I’ll have to borrow). Plus, I promised a friend I’d dry some violets for her, so I need to run over there and dig those up first.

It felt so good to see the property looking cared for after such a long winter, and to feel the earth under my feet, a shovel in my hands. The kids played and I shoveled and raked and dug. I let my thoughts wander but kept bringing them back to my body, to my breath.

I know I did more than that, but that’s all I have time for. Now I need to wake up the kids and get us all out the door. Tyler won’t be riding his bike this morning because it’s raining and cold. It’s meant to drop down to 31º and snow tonight. Hard to believe that when it was in the 80s on Friday, but okay. Spring in the Northeast/Midwest is never predictable.

Monday. Back to it, eh?

Tonight I play catchup on my freelance work.

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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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