Homeward Found

Hello, friend! Thank you for joining me here.

When I woke up in our new (old) farmhouse for the first time, it was shocking. We had arrived quite late and extremely tired with our five year old in tow the night before, and besides blowing up mattresses and finding our toothbrushes, I don’t remember much. But as the sun rose, so did I, alone for a little while in the quiet to survey the new scene. I was…underwhelmed.

Now listen, I really do love my husband. He is funny and kind and smart and—omg, he is so messy!!! Left on his own at the farmhouse for several months, knee deep in construction, demolition, and mostly solo dirty work, he lived in a way that worked for him. The man had no water for about three of those weeks, bless him, and he had gotten a lot of work done despite not being an experienced general contractor himself, nor hiring one (see: global pandemic). So, I really, really did not want to judge. But my friend, it was bad. The downstairs rooms were completely filled with tools, dozens of boxes he’d already brought out, random construction materials, piles of paperwork, clothing/linens/toiletries sort of grouped together, but seeping everywhere. Almost nothing had been put into the room where it was supposed to live. There was little open floor space, nowhere for our child to play, and certainly no room for the massive amount of stuff hurdling our way on a semi truck (see my previous post, ‘Moved’). And, it was dirty. Not just sawdust and guy grime dirty: the dirt from years of neglect. Other people’s dirt—which is always so much creepier.

Outside, David had arranged for two “Bagsters,” which are large, green, heavy duty nylon bags that you can fill up and have hauled away, kind of like soft sided mini-dumpsters. They were set right near the driveway, convenient for disposing of junk coming out of the house and outbuildings, but painfully visible to anyone who entered our property. I can say with deep conviction that I am not a person who ever expected to have an old toilet on their lawn, and yet there it was. I walked around to the front of the house and the flowers and weeds were almost as tall as I was. I saw the chipped and peeling paint on the ancient clapboard. I had a moment in which I wondered what the hell we had just done.

Once I recovered a little from my dismay, I remembered that, when completely overwhelmed--something I often am, to be honest-- if I started working on one small aspect of the problem, it would help the panic subside. I decided I needed to see floor in order to literally ground myself. I figured the first priority was to clear an area for our daughter to play. That gave me a plan to hold onto and something to do about the problem. By the time she got up, there was a dedicated corner that had been swept, scrubbed, and outfitted with all the toys I could easily unpack from the car. Before noon, we ordered two outdoor Smart Box storage units to be delivered the next day. They would add to the yard yuck-factor, but we would have to put some things in storage in order to fit all that was coming. Even though this house was bigger than our previous home, it lacked both the basement and attic storage we had relied on in the past. I spent the day moving things around, cleaning everything I could, and (eventually) feeling more hopeful.

You know how your eyes have to adjust to the dark? Mine have to adjust to chaos. When I see disorder, I get anxious and have an extreme urge to either tame it via manic organization or an atomic bomb. However, once I have tackled basic cleanliness and created a mild order, I get more used to the clutter. I can live with it—if I have to. This always ceases the moment anyone else comes over, sadly. Suddenly my eyes become new again, and all I can see is the bad stuff I had somehow accepted, and I am absolutely certain they see it all, too. I am always mortified and usually apologize to the new arrival repeatedly, even if it’s just the gas man or a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s like a switch gets flipped in my brain, and I become the outsider, judging my own surroundings all over again with a hyper-critical eye, like some crazed, domestic ‘Goundhog Day’ loop. I wish I wasn’t that way because it makes me feel a little nuts, but it does always motivate me into action. In those first days on the farm, after some thorough disinfecting, my eyes slowly got used to the strange combination of chaos and charm in our new home/construction zone, and I started to notice some other things, too.

At the end of that first day of dirty work, I was ready to go to bed early. The master bedroom doesn’t have outlets yet, just a pull-chain overhead light. I had not turned that on, so when I went upstairs, it was almost dark. I turned into our room and straight ahead of me, out the bare double windows, was the most glorious sunset. Across the road is a state park, with no buildings nor other houses in site. We chose our room because it’s the first one at the top of the staircase, and David likes being there to protect Finley as sort of a first line of defense thing. Also, it has a full sized closet. But the room is narrow and the doors and windows chop up the wall space in a strange way for furniture placement. I’d been regretting our room designations silently all day, missing our old Master and pouting a bit about the differences. But, when I stood still in the doorway looking out the windows, and I saw how they presented the bright salmon sky like a framed fantasy of heaven, all the criticism left me. Standing in the glow, it became our ever after room. And so it went. Each day was a reckoning and a romance with rural life.

One of the biggest differences between living on a farm and living in a bedroom community of NYC is the wildlife. Our seven acres are filled with bunnies, deer, hummingbirds, butterflies, fuzzy bees, wasps, mosquitoes, red squirrels, mice, bats, and many other critters. David had a snake slither across his foot while standing on the dirt between the bathroom floor joists, and he came face to face with a groundhog in the kitchen crawl space. Our plumber, while installing new copper piping underneath the dining room, screamed when a large, dead rat fell on his back. Thank goodness I was not present for any of those encounters!! We worked with a pest control company to keep said creatures out of the house, but everyone keeps telling me it will be an ongoing struggle. It is hard for someone who has never really lived in the country to understand this. Where I come from, you have an uninvited animal in the house, you take care of the problem, period. Folks here see it on a sliding scale. I can keep trying to bang a square peg into a round hole, or I can try to adjust my expectations. That seems to be a BIG lesson here. I do not want anything living inside except for people, and eventually a cat. In the days I’ve been here, there have been 3 frogs in the basement, one skittering mouse, and a small family of shrews caught in a trap by the washing machine. If only they *could* be tamed…

Another adjustment has been our access to water. We have a well on the property and an old pump house. The previous owner had only a tiny water heater—about the size of a beer keg— under the kitchen sink. So, one of the first things we installed was a larger heater in the basement. We knew we would also probably need all new plumbing, and that was confirmed when it was discovered that not only were the pipes corroded in spots, but some were actually made of lead. When David began to demo the tiny downstairs bathroom, the water was turned off with hopes of it being only a few days of inconvenience. When the plumber showed up, it turned out that David needed to add to the joist work before they could go forward. He had done a lot of work on the floor already, but it wasn’t enough. The good news was we had a great plumber, the bad news was he was very busy. So, once David finished the necessary work, he had to wait for an available appointment. That is how it came to be that David was basically camping for three weeks. Other than sleeping inside, he used his Boy Scout ingenuity to figure out everything else. Thank goodness for the pump house! There’s a literal hand pump out there with fresh well water to use. By filling empty plastic jugs and setting them out in the sun all day, he could bathe in the evening by dousing himself with the warm-ish water and Dr Bonner’s Castile soap. He washed dishes in a large tub out there, too. As for the toilet situation? I will just say there was cat litter involved and leave it at that. Major ewwww. Do you know how grateful I am that he was here for all that and I wasn’t? Anytime I felt sorry for myself back in Maplewood, parenting and packing during the pandemic (see my previous post, “Covid Cocoon”), I reminded myself it could be worse. My reality had no relationship to Fresh Step, so I shut my mouth and forged ahead.

When my daughter and I did arrive at the farm, there was a working toilet and a (slightly too small) bathroom sink. Hooray!! There was no shower and no kitchen sink. Boo!! We all bathed thoroughly at the hotel on the way to Minnesota, but I knew it would likely be our blow-up kiddie pool for a tub in the first weeks. On the third night, when we were just getting a routine going, there was a dramatic thunderstorm. We lost power for about six hours, which would have been no big deal, except that our well pump died. It was already on it’s last leg, but when the power came back on, the pump did not. We woke up happy to have electricity, until we realized that our hard won partial bathroom was now dormant. It was Saturday. Hard to get parts on the weekend. We managed to get the well company to come out late in the day, but they confirmed that we would need to replace the pump and that could not happen until Monday at the earliest. And just for fun, Monday was also the day the movers would arrive and unload! We sent our daughter to stay with grandparents on Sunday morning. We filled the water jugs at the fire house to pour into the back of the toilet to flush when needed. We used up a lot of our trusty Covid hand sanitizer. And on Monday, along with all our boxes and furniture, we welcomed an expensive, but working, new well pump to the property. It felt heavenly to wash my hands in that teeny bathroom sink again. Another lesson: if something isn’t exactly perfect, try having nothing. It makes you grateful very fast. Later in the week, I was almost giddy when the famed plumber showed up to install a utility sink in the future kitchen construction site. I wonder if the 100 pound, porcelain glazed farmhouse sink I ordered from Italy will make me as happy when it is installed eventually? Ok, I know it will, but I’ll never forget the joy of water flowing into the big, plastic tub on legs so I could do dishes inside.

Funny enough, the bathing thing has turned out to be a highlight. I’d forgotten that one of the demo’d items from the downstairs bathroom was an old, cast iron tub. It’s not full size, but sort of 3/4, I’d guess? Well, David had it upended on the back patio when we arrived. It occurred to me that we could just fill it up with water and bathe outside. We moved mid-August and it was still warm. David propped the thing up on boards so it would drain properly and we used the stopper from our glorious new utility sink. One of the best moments I’ve had since we moved was reclining in that tub, filled with hot water boiled on the old stove (currently sitting in the dining room), holding an icy cocktail and listening to Moondance play on my phone. The sky was cornflower blue with cotton candy clouds. The tall wildflowers swayed on one side of me, and the chipped, soft blue boards of the house stood comfortingly on the other. I could hear birds singing between Van Morrison’s slow refrains, and it was some kind of beautiful.

I am not a “happy” camper. I do not like bugs, mess, dirt, nor things I can’t control. But as I face all of this, I am expanding my definition of what happy can feel like. I’ve spent a few moments in these past weeks in tears of disappointment and overwhelm, yes. I’ve let out several horror movie worthy screams in the sudden presence of critters, large and small. But I have also discovered truly unexpected pleasures. My eyes are adjusting, I guess. They are seeing beneath the surface of things. Though I will always seek to create and find visual beauty in my life, there is also a beauty that is found in the in-between. Not really visible, not even tactile. Unseen, unfelt, but somehow understood. On the inside of moments, gently present, there for you when the rest falls away. Like the tiny birdcalls amidst "...the stars up above in your eyes." I have to get pretty still inside to find it, and even then it doesn’t last long. I wonder if that is the space that expands to hold you when you die? The peace outside of time, the world right next to now. I can’t explain it more clearly, because it’s new to me. The life inside my mind has been too loud most of the time to sense this other reality long enough to name it. But it feels like it’s been there all along, waiting for me to come home.