I accidentally left my laptop power cord in West Virginia, so I've been off-line (mostly) for a few days. I don't like doing much internet business on my phone ... squinting at the tiny screen ... typing with one finger. My thoughtful, techy son sent me a new cord!
On the drive home I remembered to photograph this unusual home on hwy. 60. It's shaped like a tea pot! (I love driving the back roads instead of interstates.)
Bo Beau missed me.
Adam taste-tested (with the dogs) lots of diet frozen meals while I was gone. (I know ... ugh!) If you want to know what the dogs thought of them, here's the video:
He made me yummy dinners when I returned home.
Anna gave me a good idea yesterday. She mentioned that she makes "no-bake fudgies" as a single serving, in a cup. She does it in the microwave, but we don't have a microwave, so I made mine in a little saucepan. It was wonderful!
Here's how: Heat 1/4 cup milk. Add 2 tsp. sugar and 1 tsp. cocoa powder until well mixed and warm. Add about 2 Tbsp of peanut butter and a little butter, and stir until melted in. Then add old-fashioned oats. (Oh goodness, I don't know how much. Until it looks like a lot, but you want the oats to cook and soften a bit in the milk mixture over low heat, so don't add too much). Allow to rest on low heat until oats are softened, put in a cup and eat with a spoon. It's not like you can mess this one up :) My mother received the most amazing Christmas card. I was so enamored with it that she allowed me to bring it home. Here's a short video I made showing how it looks:
I hope it works for you. If not, here are some still shots:
It's a tri-fold card.
I wanted to paint a card like that. It's a silliness. It will take me hours to finish it, and it's just one card, and there's no good way to print/copy it. But it's such a cool idea! I couldn't resist. I'm not quite done selecting all the book titles I want on mine.
The original card is made by Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University in the UK. That's the latest from me. It's good to be home.
I used to be attracted to old houses, but lately I think my interest has degenerated into creepy old houses. A while back I shared this photo with you.
Today we searched for another house I'd noticed. On the way we saw this house.
And this house too.
And just when we'd given up hope finding the house I wanted, tucked back off the road at an angle among tall pine trees ....
There it was.
(I want to incorporate this house into a children's adventure story I've just started.)
We hunted and were surprised to find the house closer to our house than I remembered. Isn't it strange?
People here lift their houses up on stilts after a bad hurricane. The insurance companies give them the money, and they're required to lift the house in order to keep it insured. This isn't an old house. When I walked up I could tell -- it was being built, and was flooded and damaged in a big storm, and they lifted it. But they must've run out of money or something, because then work stopped, and it remains a strange, creepy, weathered monstrosity, elevated among the tree tops.
Our county is scattered with little cemeteries. This one is in Hobucken, a village often quite soggy. Its elevation is 3 feet above sea level. After heavy rain, its cemetery looks like this.
This gives me pause, as I consider the caskets 6 feet under. How wet are they? We drove over the ICW bridge. It's strange to find such an impressive structure, out in the back boonies of nowhere.
We think that's a Coast Guard station on the left.
But for boaters and shrimpers, it's not nowhere. That long, wide body of water is what cruising boaters call "The Ditch."
So much for our adventures today. I sold at the farmer's market this morning, although no farmers per se showed up. It sprinkled twice, and then about 11:00 it gully-washed, a true deluge. I hurriedly stuffed everything in the van to keep it dry, shoved my tent, table, and chair in the back, and wrung out my skirt (attention: White Skirt Club members!!) before climbing into the driver's seat (where I'd unfortunately left the window down). I came home, dried off, and took a nap :)
When my brother's house burned down, he cleared the lot and began construction of a tiny house. 96 squ. feet, using the outside dimensions. Very tiny house!
It can be loaded on a flat-bed truck and moved.
You may well wonder why he has a sheet hanging in front of the opening. (I've discovered that, mysterious as Mark's housekeeping ways are to others, he always has a perfectly logical reason why he does (or doesn't do) what he does (or doesn't do). In this instance, the sheet protects the very pretty door from the effect of direct sunlight. See?
He built in nice ventilation around the tops of the walls.
See the handy shelf, plus an electrical box up there? I'll explain those later.
It's well insulated. In the West Virginia mountains, many people don't need A/C.
Because he's a handyman, one wall is adorned with all manner of tools, and please note the row of electrical boxes hanging on pegs down there. Mark likes doing electrical work, and he's a fan of having more outlets than you could need. We counted; he'll have 13 in this little room/house.
When the bed is down, the shelf and outlet (above) are useful up there. But the bed can be raised, allowing room beneath it for sitting comfortably in a chair. Here, Mark shows us how it's done:
Attach a bungee strap:
Secure it with a strong board:
You can barely see below the bed a chair, table, lamp, etc.
On the other end of the room will be a large glass window, giving lots of natural light and lovely views.
Well ... maybe not now. That view is of the half-burnt outhouse. But hopefully someday (we don't know when) and somewhere (we don't know where), Mark will be able to move this little house to a place with a better view. It could just be a good shed, or if need-be, it could be his home. He built it all himself, by hand, without plans.
The roof is interesting. It's a sturdy metal roof. Right now, I think he only has one-half of it attached. The two halves will fold down on top of each other (like 2 playing cards, being shuffled), to keep the pitch low while moving the house. But once in place, they're designed with hinges so they can be raised and form a nice, steep pitch, allowing more space inside and better air movement.
So there's the Very Little House. Good work, Mark!
Yes, fellow Americans, we know that the English have big, beautiful houses, and we must admit we are jealous. On this side of the pond we have Biltmore, and a few notable domiciles in New England, and that's about it. Nobody tours stately 250-year-old homes in the Midwest, although we wish we could! What's with this British love of the rambling 40-room Georgian manor in Wiltshire?
Now I ask you -- how easy would it be to write a cool children's story in that setting?
Which leads me to the point of this post (in case you were wondering): Isn't it interesting how the English write children's stories set in big old country houses? Just think:
1) C.S. Lewis put four siblings in an old rambling country house during WWII with Professor Digory Kirke.
2) Lucy Boston, about whom I've written before (here and here), puts her boy Tolly into an ancient home, adds some magic and time travel and a few bad characters, and creates a lovely children's classic series.
Lucy Boston's actual spooky old house in Cambridgeshire
3) This past week, our dear fellow-blogger Kezzie (from England) introduced me to yet another such series, John Masefield's Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights. I spent a few days watching all the episodes of the TV adaptation of The Box of Delights on youtube. It was delightful! It was made in the 1980s when the BBC didn't have lots of cash, and the special effects are more akin to Dr. Who with Tom Baker than Star Wars, but I just loved it. The boy Kay Harker (as you would expect) goes home for Christmas vacation from boarding school to his guardian's home -- a big, stately manor in the country -- and from there experiences the usual good guys and bad guys, time travel, magic and mayhem, a handful of friends for company, and a narrow escape from danger in the end. Perfect!
That's three. One would be an anomaly; two a coincidence; three a pattern.
Why do the English like to use their old crumbling mansions as settings for children's stories? What in the English psyche tends this way? Do they dream as children of going for a vacation to such a creepy old place? Is The Old Rural Mansion somehow entrenched in the English mind as a place of childhood delights? I wish I knew! I confess to jealousy; I wish I'd grown up in a land where such houses were there for the looking-at around each hedgerow bend. I wish my grandma lived in a dank, mammoth residence with fourteen fireplaces for warmth and we spent each Christmas there. How would my inner child be different if that were true?
Seekings House, the setting for "The Box of Delights"
For me, setting comes first when I write. I must know where something is happening before I can see who is there and what they'll do. Oh for settings like England's! We have delightful places in the states too, but I love old houses most particularly, and I find myself rather stymied in creating realistic locations for stories in my mind. One must write what one knows, and sadly I don't personally know any big old drafty (draughty?) homes with secret passages, servants' quarters, a nursery in the eaves, and a tunnel to the garden.
One exception is a home my uncle's family lived in when I was a child. It was in rural Virginia, an historic home with a boxwood garden in the rear. It was called Federal Hill, and I had to inquire of a cousin where it's located. (There are quite a few "Federal Hill"s in Virginia.) When I look into it more, perhaps I'll share about this house because I did have a lovely time there, and I was the perfect age (maybe 4th grade?) for adventures and hide-and-seek in the garden. Maybe our American settings aren't so boring after all? One can hope.
I think I'll put my Little Pom girl here again, just because she makes me happy to see her. It must be time to paint again.
Yesterday, Adam and I drove back to Statesville for a few hours to clean some more stuff out of the house. It was a discouraging day for me. An empty house is a sad thing when you've left it; it's a fun thing when you're moving in. Philip was there for two weeks alone, with no furniture but an air mattress, a microwave, a lawn chair and a fan. There were dirty dishes, crumbs, trash, tall weeds and encroaching ivy, lots of junk that we couldn't take away. Adam and I crammed as much as we could in the back of the van, and drove back. It was hard to say goodbye.
We have such good memories from that house, in spite of the difficult five years in Statesville. As I swept the floor, I could almost hear the singing, the dogs barking, the conversations while cooking, the fun movies in the living room, jokes at the dining room table, the crackling of the fires in winter, the quiet breathing at night. I hate saying goodbye to a place that has held all those precious moments in our family's life.
It's hard to lose a house; we've never done that before. Hard not to be able to pay the mortgage, not to be able to mow the grass and keep it pretty, or to sell it to a new, excited owner. I feel we are deserting her, disappointing her. (If you love houses too, maybe you understand.) It feels like failure, all of it feels like failure. I don't mean to whine, but I want to say things that some people are afraid to say these days, but which are happening to many, many people. One consequence of this horrible economy will be empty homes with no one to live in them, and more tragically, families with no homes to live in. Estimates are uncertain, but some say that we've added as many as one million homeless people to our population during this recession. How thankful I am that we have family who will take us in! And more than that, loving family with plenty of room and gracious hearts. Not everyone is so blessed.
