A Smattering of Pictures

Thank you for your sweet comments after my tour-around-the-farm post. It doesn't seem like a farm most of the time. It feels like 4 acres that require lots of mowing. Maybe someday we'll figure out what to do with it.

Adam and I dashed over to the North Carolina mountains to see our youngest girl in college.

We decided to stay in a KOA campground. Did you know how cheap they are? Goodness!

I was glad to find a cabin during peak leaf-color season.
Julia gave us a tour around her very favorite place on campus, the Printmaking classroom.

She loves this discipline and works in this studio on the weekends.

We toodled around Asheville for the day with Julia and her best friend, and enjoyed a visit to a super-cool tea shop, Dobra Tea, where you sit on little round pillows on the floor and ring a bell for service.

Adam and I viewed this as a mini-vacation too. On the road, we found a park in Greensboro and stopped for a lunch picnic. Much nicer than fast food.

I wanted to share a few pictures from a copy of The Wind in the Willows I ordered lately, illustrated by Tasha Tudor - what a lovely combo!

The wintry adventure to Badger's home is my favorite part of the book.

This past week Adam made the prettiest veggie plate for dinner -- simple, delicious.

his homemade ciabatta, spinach, potatoes, fried okra and squash

I have a few fun photos of our grandson Isaac from a recent trip to West Virginia he took with his delightful parents to see family up there.

Do you have time for one more thing? Here are a few cards I painted before the trip. I think I'll paint lots of seasonal wreaths. They're so fun!

The Mother of Saul

Because I was a virgin girl of ten

The men from across the River Jordan

Spared me and my friends. The rest, murdered --

My mother, father and all my brothers.

We were taken to Gibeah; the blood

Of murdered women whispered up to us

From the ground. We were given to soldiers

Who were twenty and thirty years older

Than us. And we became wives and mothers.

No one remembers me, the wife of Kish.

No one remembers me, mother of Saul.

I am a virgin of Jabesh-Gilead.

On the day I died they hung my grandsons

And great-grandsons, little boys though they were,

In that wretched city I was taken to.

We girls, ever caught up in the fury

of the foolish vows made by foolish men.

Copyright by the author

Oct. 13, 2019

Outdoors!

I was so whiny in my last post, I hope I didn't drive everyone away! No more whining!

a $5 wreath from the hospice thrift store

As Henny Penny noted, the weather is cool, the light is slanted, the outdoors are beckoning us, and we must go out to see what autumn is offering this year. I took along my tea (herbal, from my herb bed, with a neighbor's honey).

My chickens:

Two chicks drinking:

The orchard where they wander and nibble:

The pasture in morning light:

The pasture dog. She loves to run.

The tall pine tree. It figures in a little picture book I still need to paint a cover for:

The garden is long gone to sleep for the end of the year. Its fence was blown over during Dorian and it's thick with weeds.

We'll be rethinking our garden next year. The okra has slowed at last. Sweet potatoes will be dug soon.

Speaking of Dorian, she ripped some roofing off a neighbor's pole barn.

North of us, the big farm. Our terrain is flat as a flitter!

We'll have a burn pile soon. At last we've had rain.

Ned, patrolling his domain.

The fence between the orchard and the pasture is covered each year in grapevine that (sadly) doesn't get enough light (thanks to the pecan trees) to bear any grapes. The fence is sagging with its weight.

Today I get to stay home! I'll paint a little, run errands with the hubby, do a little laundry, practice piano,  and perhaps do a little editing. I'm listening to Christmas music, another old LP.

It's nice to have a slow day without commitments elsewhere, isn't it?

A Place of Simplicity

A friend described life out here in "the county" as a simple life, which it is. It's more peaceful and slow that city life. I'm thankful for that. But even rural life can become busy and hurried if we're not careful. I find my autumn filling up with so many responsibilities and activities that it's hard to remember what a quiet, cool, still autumn day is meant to feel like. I want one of those.

Adam put a vapor barrier, sleepers, joists, and OSB subfloor in the little building.

 I started painting the OSB. It's a rough surface, but paint is what it's getting. Adam will built a short knee-wall around the base of all the walls to enclose the electrical wiring and outlet boxes.

 I have a long way to go on the painting, and I'll have to shift the furniture over to the painted part so I can do the other side.

I'm reading this utterly delightful book by Rosemary Verey, renowned British gardener.

 I want more of her books. She has that easy, sparky, intelligent style that I love. Here's a fun paragraph to give you a taste:

 At last, the days are cool. At last, the leaves are turning.

 My four chicks are doing well. I suspect I have 2 roos and 2 hens.

 Here's my big roo. I call him Boss. He has not attacked me yet, although he views my skirt with the red trim on the bottom with great suspicion. Last time I wore it in there, he tried to stomp at it and peck it. The skirt hem did not respond.

 We had a funeral at our church last week. I thought the casket spray was so beautiful for autumn.

 Adam has been faithfully coming to the farmer's market with me since the summer. I'm so thankful! This past weekend was Oriental's Ol' Front Porch Music Festival. Sales were brisk and these two fellows welcomed customers!

 A cool set of wheels pulled up to Buddy's fish shack across the street.

 I'm painting pumpkin cards.

 Today a friend and I took an outing to New Bern, which is, by all accounts, a wonderfully historical city with an unusually large downtown district of old homes, considering its size. We took a little tour of 1st Presbyterian Church, now 202 years old. What a lovely old sanctuary!

 This is a Fisk organ, very beautiful.

 My days fill up one by one, and I find I have less and less time to wander around the pasture and stare at the dying of the year, watch the sky for trails of geese, gaze out my window while I paint, or breathe in the cool air blowing through our open doors. I feel I am on the run, doing, doing.

Adam made a delicious dinner tonight.

Tomorrow is Prayer Shawl Ministry, followed by another new piano student. If you don't see me here, dear friends, please know I'm still reading your blogs when I can and enjoying them, and looking forward to that simpler rural life -- the rich, empty days and time for languid creative thought. Some day.

The Trail of Human Debris

Like many of you, I spend lots of brain time pondering family relationships. I suppose they're no more complicated and heart-breaking now than they were a century ago. Perhaps medical science tells us more now about the health risks of relationship stress, about how stress wreaks havoc on our bodies. We know this. A child's death, a failed marriage, the death of a spouse -- these things can send a person into the grave.

Some stress is unavoidable, but in families we study the situations that develop and often wonder if and how they could have been avoided. Then we wonder what could have been done differently -- how mistakes were made that caused the trauma and resulting stress, and wonder why people behave the way they do. As we watch our loved ones suffer, we can't help but ponder these things.

Is it right to ask who is at fault, when broken relationships cause stress and then lead to ill health? Sometimes, perhaps. In families, there are decades of competing narratives. Family members take sides. They stop talking to each other. This is just more fall-out from the initial actions, but this fall-out keeps the stress and trauma going.

So how can you tell who is at fault, if anyone? I don't ask this for the sake of blaming, although plenty of blame is often slathered about, in family conflict. I ask it for the sake of safety. If there's someone in your extended family who is dangerous, shouldn't you know? For your sake, the sake of your kids, the sake of your own health? But with competing narratives about fault and blame, and people taking sides, how can you know who is dangerous and who is a victim?

I look for a trail of human debris. I examine the parties and ask myself, "Who has left a trail of human debris, of broken relationships and pain, behind him or her, often for a lifetime?" This is a useful question. It's a question you can't answer accurately without knowing all the parties, talking extensively with them, and being close to the situation. So observers on the outside of the family usually cannot know the answer to this question as well as family members do. There are secrets, uncomfortable facts, that families don't tell outsiders. In fact, if you're a family outsider, and you think you know lots of private facts that support one side of the conflict narrative, you're probably being manipulated. If you haven't, at some point, talked honestly with both parties, then you can't speak knowledgeably about it. You don't know the complexity.

A trail of human debris -- what does it look like? Perhaps a series of failed marriages or romantic attachments, decades of friends offended and lost, many estranged children or estranged siblings, parents/grandparents, even a person who moves often and picks up new friends and alliances and then drops them. Equally important is examining family members for the opposite trait: a history of loving relationships. If a family member has a long history of good friends, good relationships with most siblings, parents, grandparents, a spouse, or children, then it's unlikely that this one situation in which they're being attacked or vilified, is an accurate depiction of their character.

I say this only as a normal person with the usual closet bursting with extended family conflicts spanning several generations and reaching across half the country. There are very few methods to evaluate these painful situations, and "not doing anything" is often not a good option. I find myself confused and baffled by people's behavior whom I thought I knew! Nobody's account of the situation(s) agrees. How can I assess? Should I just bury my head in the sand and ignore the train wreck going on around me? What about family members who have not buried their heads in the sand, who have become deeply involved, trying to help, and are themselves wrecked and battered by the conflict that won't end -- whose health takes a nosedive? Do I also ignore them? I can't do that.

I look for a trail, a pattern, a lifetime of relationship behavior. And although it's not a perfect evaluative tool, it helps a lot. I don't use it for blame, and certainly not for any type of revenge or hard feelings, but simply for clarity going forward, and so I can anticipate future damage, future stress, future health risks. As one in that middle generation in a family, this is a weight I feel. And even those who leave this horrifying trail of human debris need help and support. They need to change their relational habits and stop hurting those around them -- they need friends. But that role will almost certainly be taken up by someone not in the family they have just left in a bloody heap. 

We should always, always forgive. Always try to move on. Always be kind and patient. And do our best not to keep a list of past offenses that we pull out and mull over, keeping the pain alive. That's so hard! Peace is our goal, peace with others and peace with ourselves. Sometimes peace looks like a close, intimate, loving bond. But sometimes peace with a trail-of-debris person looks like distance, and distance is the only position that produces peace. Sometimes distance is the only place where forgiveness can happen.

If you're the rare and lucky person with no conflict in your extended family (does that person even exist? Anyone? Anyone?), be thankful. Be aware you're unusual. And above all don't be judgmental of those around you who are being blasted and leveled by family conflict, and who are struggling to get back on their feet and correctly evaluate their loved ones who have thrown a bomb into the close family unit. It's hard to manage that private devastation with a smiling public face. Let's all be easy on each other and remember -- from the outside, it's hard to know what's going on.

Digging Out the Little House

We have a small concrete-block building across the yard that serves as an occasional extra bedroom. It's 15 x 15 feet square. It was the first thing we cleaned up and redid when we bought this property. You can look back on it here.
The last time anybody slept in that building was the weekend of Anna's wedding, 15 months ago. I knew that it was really, really filthy. I didn't want to think about it. But Julia is making noises about bringing friends home for fall break, and I told Adam we needed to inspect the building before anybody even thought about staying over there.
 Well ...

Termites have been working. The floor joists are rotten. The floor is giving way. Time to rip it all out. First we had to empty the building of furniture.

 It's hot and dry now, and all this furniture is benefiting from a good airing.

 I'd found some scary-looking poop in the building, poop I was afraid had come from some snake. I told Adam we might have a snake infestation. (That's my phobia showing.) Thankfully, this proved to be not so! All he found under the floor was old pecan shells. That means squirrels.

 So many pieces of wood with severe termite damage:

 The termite tunnels ran all the way up the walls. Ugh.

This afternoon he pulled all that subfloor out and then pulled out all the 8x8 joists. That's hard work in 93 degree weather!

Adam plans to take the 4x4 posts from the garden that he used for the tomato trellising, and use them for new joists. (My tomato plans for next summer have totally changed, so this is fine with me.) But before putting in a new floor, he's treated the ground underneath to kill the termites. He'd previously treated the perimeter of the building, but now he's treated the ground under it.

In addition to this little project, we have lots going on at church, lots going on in our family, lots going on with work and hobbies. Illness, travel, funerals, festivals, painting, census work, singing, piano, mowing, and on and on. Today I just added two more piano students! Yay!

I'll feel better when that little building is clean and tight again. Someday, wouldn't it be lovely if it had a screened-in porch wrapping around it, a little bathroom and kitchenette? Somewhere somebody could live simply? It's a thought.