We suck at taking a break

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Keely

Anything but rest! We’ve had a full house all week with Roma (a dog) and Mark (a human) staying here. They hit it off and went exploring together.

Actually, everybody got to go on that adventure. We hiked up behind the house and found the most miniscule frog in the pond at the top of the ridge. We also noticed the helicopters for the first time. They have been conspicuously present this week, flying low over the St. Francis river.

Yesterday we went with Ian for a hike along a section of the Trail of Tears in Village Creek State Park. The part that we were on was a portion of the Memphis to Little Rock road, which was built to facilitate forced Indian relocation. Until yesterday, I had not appreciated the premeditated nature of the ethnic cleansing that took place here. The loop hike was only a little over two miles and the terrain was moderate. Mark and I are both a little sick, so the short hike was exactly enough. The trail along the ridge, where the road had been, resembles the cut that our own gravel road is now in, suggesting that our road was indeed created by wagons, maybe as a route for settlers on their way west, as our landlady has described.

We’ve accomplished a great deal around the house this week. The porch swing is now the same, dark blue as the door, and we built and painted a corner shelf for the kitchen today. The gents planted root veggies this morning while I drew up plans for our construction project. When Mark and I were roommates, we built a shelf together for our dorm room. It was a first attempt, and it looks it, though Sean and I still use it for tools. Last spring, Sean and I built a fairly nice kitchen shelf for our spices and cookbooks, and now the three of us have teamed up into a shelf-building dream team. The result is easily the nicest shelf I’ve ever had a hand in making.

The new shelf is the one on the left! It’s super exciting because we don’t have to keep our potatoes on the floor anymore!

Mark shot a gun for the first time today, and he’s already a far better shot than I am, though not as good as Sean. Sean has made three ice cream flavors so far, in addition to the perpetual flow of delicious gourmet meals.

We went out to bring in the laundry at about 9:30 and heard a rustling in the brush. Sean shined the super-powered flashlight into the woods and spotted an armadillo! We chased it through the woods to the mouth of its burrow, where it stood, twitching its cute little ears, long enough for us to get a good look. Tomorrow, we intend to get set up for some new additions to the menagerie. With a little luck, we’ll be bringing home three little pigs sometime before the end of this week.

Country Living Challenges: Laundry

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Keely

We moved from Waters Road with a washer and dryer. This house didn’t come with laundry machines, and we couldn’t imagine carting our clothes to and from Marianna (which actually seems to have a laundromat) so we purchased ours from our old housemates. There isn’t exactly a laundry closet with a convenient water hookup. In fact, running water is exclusively found at the back of the house and in the tiny kitchen and bathroom. We set up our washer and dryer on the screened in porch, which worked out fine since the washer leaked.
Pros: the laundry area didn’t clutter up our house with dirty laundry and loud noises, and the leaky washer wasn’t a big issue because the back porch floods when it rains anyway. What’s one more flood?
Cons: doing laundry when it’s really cold or windy outside is a real bummer and sometimes the washer freezes so we can’t do laundry at all. Because of constant flooding, our back porch is pretty icky. It isn’t a nice place to be.

This winter, the washer froze solid and then completely crapped out, spilling water constantly. I’ve done laundry at friends’ houses for weeks, once in the middle of a St. Patrick’s day party. Sean and I make a lot of laundry because school is dirty and so is gardening when you get home. It’s been a pain. Sean Pulsfort, that heroic amateur handyman, got the washer fixed up yesterday, and it works better now than it ever has.
It’s a breezy, sunny day, so I put our clothesline to work. Sean and I try to line dry our laundry whenever we can. It’s a free, solar powered alternative to an expensive electrical draw. In the winter, I usually go for the dryer, so I haven’t line dried anything since fall. I had to detangle the clothesline from the fallen limb that had crushed it, along with our chicken fence, during an ice storm, and tie it back up, but it was worth it: we actually have more line space now than we did with the old arrangement.

I love line-drying. It makes me feel righteous, yes, but it’s more than that: I like the fresh smell and stiffness of line-dried clothing; I like folding my laundry into the basket as it comes off the line and dusting off the seeds and spiders that have caught on the seams; I like walking up and down the line, looking for a match for a single sock; I like the colors and the movement in the corner of my eye, and I like feeling the sunshine teasing out a smile while I do a usually tedious job.

Bonus pictures of chickens! Freckles is sitting on eggs right now, so keep your fingers crossed for chick photos in three weeks!

The Blue Door

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Keely

Spring is the right time to paint your door blue. I worked on things today that might have felt frivolous in the summer or fall: I cleared the poison ivy from a long-neglected rose bush, cut and arranged three kinds of daffodil, and painted my front door. I napped in the sunshine with my belly to the sky and I walked through the pasture to the house next door.

The daffodils still come up in the spring along each straight edge of a long-gone path to the steps. Who lived here once? This house and ours are close together by country standards, and similar in design. In the present, our nearest neighbors are a mile on either side, but this house is the last ghost of something of a neighborhood. The occupants must have been friends or kin to the Lyles, the original owners of our place. Did they work in each other’s gardens and picnic in the pasture together? Did they borrow this and that and forget to return it and eventually forget who it belonged to to begin with? Did they fight and feud and make up? Did their kids play together in the woods? There are stories in the short, pretty walk across the pasture.

Spring is a season of thresholds. Everything is on its way to being something else, and everyone is on the road. A couple of friends rolled in late on Monday night and were gone in the morning like the last frost. We have other guests right now too, though these are less welcome.

The ladybugs sound like a heavy rain, smacking their bodies against the windowpanes to reach the sun. They drown themselves in our tea and crawl up our legs at night. Sean claims he pulled one out of his pocket at school the other day. They get into our towels, and, when I got out of the shower this afternoon, I accidentally crushed one against my body and choked on its sharp odor. I think we’re going to try vacuuming them up and letting them go in the garden.
The garden, too, is on its way to being something else. It’s in that phase just before everything springs out of the ground in spades. The lettuce is growing slow now, but it’s eager, and the more it grows the faster it will become. Plants are wonderfully exponential.

When Sean got home from school, we gardened. He tilled while I raked, and we each took a turn mulching the aisles with straw. I planted cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower starts from the feed store, and we tucked in a row of onions together.

screen door swings the breeze
halfway through this blue doorway
laughing with goosebumps

Spring Saturday

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Keely

I’ve been wanting to paint the front door since we moved in. It’s going to be blue for luck.

Sean made bacon, eggs and cornmeal pancakes for breakfast while I worked on the door. The smell of bacon frying made me smile. Spring is really here: I worked all morning with the front door open and a chill breeze blowing dust out of the corners of the ceiling; there are flowers coming up under the tree where we slaughtered Pinkie last fall, and the hennies are laying five eggs a day. We can’t keep up with production, so if you’re an Arkansan, we’re selling homestead eggs for $3 a dozen. All proceeds go to chicken feed.

Smells: bacon frying, rosemary oil snapping out of dry twigs as I cut away the dead, lemongrass and rot, fresh mint lingering on my hands from pulling out dead stalks and discovering new beneath; exhaust from the tiller as it roared and pulled. We planted coneflowers, hollyhocks and bachelor’s buttons. Lettuce and peas are sprouting now, and the quince is flowering.

There are a thousand
things I should do
buttons to button
not frilled with blue
practical things
in a practical queue
things without ruches
in that coneflower hue
but despite all the things
that I really must do
there’s nothing I’d rather
than plant flowers with you

Snow Day

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Keely

The plastic blew off of our garden in the night. Poor baby greens are under an inch of ice. Goodbye, spring salad.

As predicted, the daffodils were hit hard by the ice storm. They’re beautiful as they are now, a lesson in impermanence and a study in fragility.

We went for a hike in the woods this morning. Our house was cold, and we knew we’d have to leave the country until our power is back on, so we decided to take advantage of the day off and spend some time out in the woods. We don’t get to enjoy our back yard often, and during the last ice storm, we had to settle for driving through the sparkling forest on our way to and from school. It was painful, spending our days indoors and watching the sun set behind the frozen tree sculptures all week. By Saturday, the ice was gone.
Sean and I bundled up in long underwear and layers of sweaters and jackets. I put on two pairs of socks to wear under my sneakers. We don’t really have winter attire here in Arkansas.

The yellow dock leaves were frozen so solid that when we kicked them, they shattered. The ice in the trees tinkled like crystal.

The grass was frozen solid, and the hill was slick. There was a huge part of me that didn’t believe that we’d actually get the sleds to move. I sat on a saucer, not expecting much, and then suddenly I was bumping down the hill, crackling the ice and shredding my gloves on the frozen grass.