Summer Vacation in the Backyard

Posted on June 3, 2003 by cmf

Summer Vacation in the Backyard

I have this week off from my Big Corporate job, and I’m having an old-fashioned summer vacation … it feels just like when school let out and you’d get to hang around the house for a few days doing nothing (we went to camp every summer for eight weeks, which was wonderful, so I never had enough time to get really bored with summer, a week or two at each end lying around the house reading books and eating popsicles was usually plenty for me). They finished my fence yesterday afternoon, and I am now free to hang out in my own backyard, in fact, I’m typing this from the table underneath one of my apple trees. It’s astonishing what a difference a little privacy makes … the fence was hardly up when, despite the racket from the air compressor, nail gun, and five people building a fence in my backyard, I began to feel myself really relax. I wish I was the sort of patient soul who could have put up with poor old bored Betty next door, but it’s incredibly nice to be able to hang out in my own yard without feeling like I’m the entertainment for the day.

So, as part of my vacation-at-home (which, considering what the fence cost, will probably be the first of many), I went out and bought a bunch of fun summer books, including three by Jamie Harrison who lives here in town. I’m not a mystery fan, but these are great fun … especially as Blue Deer, the town in which they are set, is a very thinly veiled version of Livingston. Plus, Jamie is both a fabulous gardener and a cook, so there’s food and plants and local gossip galore. They’ve been the perfect summer reading … check out the Current Reading section for links …

New Blue Bike

Posted on May 28, 2003 by cmf

New Blue Bike

I bought a blue bicycle for forty bucks yesterday — it’s perfect. A Schwinn Collegiate — a blue “girl’s” bike with a front handle brake, three speeds, a big wide bouncy seat, and a coaster break. It’s much like the bike that was so fatally wrong that I was taunted all through sixth grade, but now, as an adult, it’s perfect. What I wanted was a bike I could ride around town, and which was old enough that no one would ever ask me to go mountain biking on it (don’t like mountain biking. I’ve never seen the point of hauling a bike up a mountain in order to go screaming down — call me a nerd, but I like to walk. I like to look at flowers and pretend to identify birds).

This morning my brother came by to pick up the dogs for their morning walk down at Mayor’s landing, and I followed them on the bike. A perfect ten-minute ride through the cool early-morning streets of Livingston, yellow morning sunlight streaking through the trees that have only recently leafed out. The Yellowstone’s running at flood stage, so as we walked the dogs around the park we watched big logs go screaming downstream toward Big Timber. Then back on my perfect blue bicycle, back through the leafy morning streets with all the kids heading off for the last few days of school. A nice way to start the day.

The Perfect Yellow

Posted on May 12, 2003 by cmf

The Perfect Yellow

My living room is now the most perfect, Provencal, mustard yellow … actually the color is called “Golden Pollen.” Since this is an old house, there are beautiful old oak moldings and window trim in this room, moldings that remind me of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois (sadly torn down now, but it was really getting pretty unsafe), and against the yellow paint, they look even warmer and more lovely than they did before when the room was painted in 25-year-old flat off-white paint. And with a coat of fresh paint, the, shall we say, topographical element of my old plaster walls isn’t quite as noticeable. I like to think that the bumps and cracks and craters make it look old, European, Provencal or Tuscan … yeah, that’s the ticket.

But I forgot how horrible painting can be … it’s not like on Trading Spaces or Changing Rooms where they blithely walk in and start painting the walls, because on those shows they don’t seem to do any prep work at all. And let me say, the two days of prep work sucked. There is nothing creative or interesting about washing the ceiling and the walls with TSP. There is nothing creative or interesting about sanding down the many many cracks in the ceiling that you’ve spackled and getting horrible wallboard and joint compound dust in your eyes. What’s with that stuff? Forget the 100 feet of plastic I used to cover the whole room and seal it off from the other three rooms that constitute my house, I keep finding little pockets of wallboard and joint compound dust in odd places.

The next project is my office. I’ve picked a dark, raspberry magenta, which my brother thinks is awful but his Nice Girlfriend and I think will be swell. The ceiling and trim will be bright white, and I’m going to build bookcases for the back wall (2 tall, one short in the middle), and I ordered the tricky bits of the desk from Pottery Barn which I’ll top with a sheet of MDF, or perhaps a hollowcore door (which might be handy for running cords). The office is going to be tricky, as the walls are full of cracks and I have to build shelves in the closet, and the closet needs to be painted, and I need a new light fixture, and and and and and and … so I think I’ll have to hire some help. Of course, in a small town like this, hiring help tends to be seeing when my friend Robert, who is a brilliant fine art painter, but who is going through a rough patch because the economy sucks and no one is buying gorgeous oil-on-metal paintings, paintings that are just abstract enough that you can keep looking at them and looking at them, paintings so beautiful that if I didn’t really need a privacy fence for the south side of my property I would have bought one with the tiny bit of money that came through when Dreamworks renewed my movie option, but alas, I need a fence. But Robert is great fun, and needs some money, so I’ll wait and see what his schedule is like, and hire him to keep me company and paint my office a fabulous dark pink, a pink that will glow like the inside of a jewel box, a warm rich color for a cool northern room.

So last night, after pulling the masking tape off, and rolling up the plastic, and seeing how totally beautiful my room is, I had the Darling Brother (thanks for doing that second coat on the ceiling for me, I was running out of gas) and the Nice Girlfriend over for the usual Sunday night Family Dinner — roast chicken, potato gratin, and salad. The NG had another tough day with her Ex … and although we don’t want to violate the NG’s privacy over the internet, let’s just say any day your Ex comes in while you’re gone and takes the bed, well, it’s not a good day. So we had roast chicken, and a little wine, and sat in the living room and admired it, and all tried to look on the bright side. Her house is coming together, my house is coming together, she and the DB are coming together (downside, this makes the Ex so angry he takes the bed) but the upside is we all had a nice dinner, and sometimes a nice dinner in a pleasant room is enough.

It’s a year this week that I came out here and decided to go ahead with buying this house. A year ago this week that I took measurements and started dreaming that this might be possible. I never thought I’d have my own house. I never thought I’d have a room like this, where the furniture and the walls and the artwork all go together and don’t just look like they were assembled out of random parts. I never thought I’d find a nice town like this, where I can have both the quiet and solitude I need to get the work done, and good friends, a social life, a community. I am deeply deeply grateful.

Now, I have to stop obsessing about paint colors, and go back to the novel for another week.

Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2

Posted on April 20, 2003 by cmf

Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2

Yesterday I moved a dumptruck load of compost into my new raised beds. I do not recommend moving a dumptruck load of compost by oneself, especially if one is, as I am, a small-ish woman who is no longer the strong thing she was in her twenties. It was hard. It was really hard and I had to get it all done yesterday because had been dumped in such a way that it blocked open the big gate to the alley. The dogs were pretty good about it, but every once in a while, something interesting would happen out there and the puppy would overcome his fear of the Big Blue Tarp and dash out into the alley. Once there, he would become deaf, forget his own name, and I’d have to stop in mid-wheelbarrow-load to go fetch him.

So, by the time the Darling Brother returned from Bozeman, I was very cranky. I was deep in a nobody-loves-me-and-I-had-to-do-this-all-by-myself funk. The Darling Brother returned from Bozeman with a cute little white bakery box tied up with a pretty purple ribbon. Clearly the work of the Nice Girlfriend. Of course, I snapped at the D.B., who nonetheless did the last four or five wheelbarrow loads for me, and told me to go put the cake in the fridge. It was for Easter morning and the NG had spent quite a long time picking out just the right one. I put the cake in the fridge, we had a beer each on the comfy patio furniture, and between the beer and the late sunshine at 6:30 pm, and the fact that it was still a balmy 50 degrees, all was well once again.

So this morning I made a pot of tea and opened the little cake box. It was the most adorable little yellow layer cake you’ve ever seen. It has candied violets and mint leaves on it. It has little tiny rosettes. It tasted very good. It was a very nice little cake, and like all cakes, went a long way to lifting spirits. Everybody likes cake.

Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues

Posted on April 14, 2003 by cmf

Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues

My darling brother has a new girlfriend, and of course, when you are no longer young, new relationships tend to come with some baggage. The Nice Girlfriend had a tough day yesterday, her baggage was all noisy with her about the fact that she’s moving on in life, and she was a little blue. She’s also renovating her house, and domestic disarray never helps when feeling blue. Plus, the brother has a cold, and was a little low himself. So late in the afternoon they came over and we sat on the new, comfy outdoor furniture, looking at the beautiful-if-still-empty raised beds, and had a restorative cocktail. Meanwhile, I’d roasted a chicken and some potatoes, and steamed some of the gorgeous big artichokes that have flooded our local market. We sat in the backyard for a while, then came in and ate artichokes, and chicken, and potatoes and salad, with a nice bottle of wine left over from the fiesta the other night, and everything was just a little better. When people are feeling a little blue, there’s nothing like a roasted chicken — so easy (poke holes in lemon, stuff in cavity with some garlic, rub outside with olive oil, salt, pepper and paprika or ancho chili powder, roast at 400 for an hour to an hour and a half). A nice dinner in my yellow kitchen and the world feels slightly less wobbly on its axis.

What is there to say?

Posted on March 17, 2003 by cmf

What is there to say? Be prepared for the focus here to get smaller, small to the count of my fifty-by-one-forty foot lot. I am going into nearly full news blackout mode, because I just can’t even begin to formulate a way to deal with this madman president and his end-time cronies who actually seem to want a war. I really thought we’d avoid this — perhaps it’s my tendency toward optimism, but somehow I though that millions of people marching in the streets all across the globe might make some impact on this president. But I’m now convinced that he’s such an elitist bastard that he sees all the opposition as proof of his own righteousness. Now let’s hope he doesn’t declare martial law and call off the 2004 elections. Now let’s hope the Democrats perhaps awake from their slumber and do something.

In the meantime, LivingSmall will concern itself with building a garden, growing flowers and vegetables, and the reading and writing of books.

On the garden front, the fabulous local hardware store, Kenyon Noble delivered the wood for my raised beds this morning. Delivered it for free, mind you, unlike a certain big box hardware store that has opened in Bozeman. Delivered by a cheerful man who assured me that he dug through all the 2″x12′”x12′ boards to find me nice straight ones that weren’t split. So, this weekend I’ll be building my slightly elaborate raised bed kitchen garden, with some help from the brother. I’m trying very hard not to be seduced by the warm weather. It isn’t spring yet. We’ll still have more hard freezes. This weekend I also pruned the remaining two apple trees, which was enormously satisfying as I got to both lop off enormous limbs with my handy little hacksaw, and got to climb the tree to do it. Other garden chores included moving rocks to dismantle the rock garden I built on New Years Day (changed my mind about that one), built a low stone wall/pile from the stones, and put up lots of wire fencing to begin training the dogs about which parts of the yard are garden, and which are yard. That is going to be an ongoing task, I’m afraid. They currently seem to think the dormant perennial bed is the place they should poop.

And today’s excitement is the arrival of my propagation heat mats … I hung the hand-me-down shop lights in the basement this weekend, and I now have two very nice 3′x4′ surfaces on which to start propagating seeds. Also another surface of the same size (old metal utility shelving units that were in the garage in California) that I’ve made into a sort of gardening desk. I’ve got all the books down there, and the calendar, and the notebook in which I’m trying to keep track of what happens when. It feels kind of like Ranger Rick science … like when I was a little kid with my microscope and chemistry set doing “experiments”. Although my degrees are all in English, I was a real science wannabe, and did a considerable amount of environmental biology as an undergrad. So I want to start building some data on my little corner of the universe. That is, of course, if our president doesn’t start WW3 and bring us all to nuclear (nuc-u-lar) destruction.

Temptation strikes at LivingSmall:

Posted on February 24, 2003 by cmf

Temptation strikes at LivingSmall: On Sunday, I clean my house. My brother takes the dogs for the day, and I clean, then go to whatever movie the Danforth Film Festival is showing in the afternoon. It’s not a very big house, about 1000 square feet, so it’s no gargantuan task, but I have hardwood floors throughout, and two dogs who during the midweek thaw tracked in big globs of mud from the plowed field in my backyard that will eventually be a vegetable garden. I did a little mid-week spot mopping, but by the time I got around to real cleaning, there were actual drifts of dirt in the corners.

My usual process is to vacuum everything, including the couple of kilms I have in my office and the living room, then pull up the rugs and vacuum underneath them, then mop. Here’s where I almost fell off the LivingSmall wagon this week. Suddenly, looking at my house I was overcome with dreams of the Hoover FloorMate . I went online and read some reviews at epinions, where users wrote glowingly of the ease of use, of the way their Hoover FloorMates glided across hardwood floors, scrubbing, mopping, squeegee-ing up the water. I read about the trigger feature where, when one encounters say, a muddy footprint, one squeezes the trigger and the machine, the wonderous machine gives the spot a little extra juice and like magic! the muddy footprint disappears. I spent a couple of hours entranced by this dream. I came home from breakfast (sorry dogs, no walk when the temp is below zero) and came this close to walking over to the hardware store on Main Street, a mere 2 blocks away and plopping down one hundred and sixty nine dollars for the promise of effortless cleaning.

And then I remembered the EasyBake Oven. I remembered the weeks before Christmas when I fantasized about how great my life would be if only I had an EasyBake Oven. And I remember my disapointment when I discovered that the guts of the EasyBake oven was a light bulb. It wasn’t magical. It wasn’t wonderful. I used it a couple of times and then, tired of the rubbery little cakes that didn’t taste like anything, it got stuffed in the back of the closet.

Even in my Sunday morning dreamy state, even looking at floors I really didn’t want to spend two hours cleaning properly, even besotted by visions of the Hoover FloorMate, I knew that buying another machine was not the answer. I knew, deep in my heart, that the Hoover FloorMate violates the tenets of living small on several fronts: it’s specialized, it’s another machine, and worst of all, it requires special fluids. Anything that requires one to use manufacturer-specific fluids must be avoided. Standing in my kitchen, fighting the temptation to run two blocks over to the Ace Hardware store where this magical machine was calling its siren call to me, I thought of special fluids and remained strong.

I came to my senses. I got over it. I have a perfectly good vacuum cleaner. I have a bucket and a couple of different mops. I vacuumed. I pulled up the rugs. I mopped with a little Murphy’s Oil Soap in a bucket of hot water. The sunlight came through the windows and turned my douglas fir floors a lovely honey yellow. The house smelled good. It was clean. I went to the movies one hundred and sixty-nine dollars less poor than I would have been had I succumbed to the seduction, the oh-so-professional seduction of the American advertising machine.

Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism:

Posted on February 20, 2003 by cmf

Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis, much as Plath had those last months while living in London and writing Ariel.

Baking is one of those things that tends to sort cooks into categories, because in order to be a good baker, you have to be able to really follow the directions. I’m an okay baker — I have a couple of standbys — simple fruit tarts, a fluffy yellow sponge cake filled with fresh fruit and iced with whipped cream that I cribbed from Dom Deluise’s fabulous cookbook: Eat This…It’ll Make You Feel Better:…. But even that cake, a cake so good I’ve had strange men look up at potlucks and say “who made this, I want to marry her,” belies my essential inability to follow a recipe with exactitude. Dom’s sainted mother, whose recipe this is, uses canned peaches with heavy syrup, and sliced almonds; I like defrosted frozen raspberries and mint leaves, and sometimes I put custard in the middle like Dom’s mom, sometimes I don’t. Real bakers don’t improvise like this. Real bakers weigh the flour. Real bakers actually take the knife and level off the flour in the measuring cup. My brother is a real baker, and has wowed Christmas crowds with stunning renditions of Jacques Pepin’s Paris Brest. In high school, we could always tell when my beautiful cousin Dede was having trouble with food again because she’d start baking, turning out exquisite cakes that she wouldn’t dream of eating. Me, I’m a sloppier cook — which is why I bake bread. Bread is forgiving of improvisation, even the sourdough bread I’ve been experimenting with the past couple of months. There were a few brick-like loaves, and the round loaves keep coming out too flat, but for the most part, it’s all bread. Nice clean wholesome bread made with sourdough starter, locally grown and milled wheat, and a little salt.

So what does any of this have to do with Plath? Nothing I guess, except that it struck me as I read Moses’ essay about her own baking, and its relationship to the inevitable tension between writing and family life (“As I neared the end, my husband and two children were getting used to my conspicuous absence, or my thousand-mile stare when I was physically present … My five-year-old was sometimes heard muttering in the hallway, ‘Mommy’s behind the door.’”), I became sad for Plath, sad for Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, sad for all those women who lived in a world where baking and intellectual activity, where home life and poetry were considered mutually exclusive. I remember my own terror, my own worries that if I got married, had kids, had a domestic life, I’d never be a writer — and this was thirty years after Plath, Sexton, Rich, Lessing. Despite my fears, I was living in a world where this juggling act was at least possible. How much more difficult must it have been for them? The continual juggling between family life and intellectual life?

Salon ran an excerpt from Wintering, and it looks interesting. I seem to keep blogging about books I haven’t read yet, and neglecting the ones I have read.I’m not sure what that’s all about — as I work my way through the pile I’ll try to reoprt back more regularly.

Living Small in my Small Town

Posted on February 18, 2003 by cmf

Living Small in my Small Town I’ve been home since Friday night and I’m only now beginning to recover enough to even think about adding to the blog. Five days in San Jose was simply draining … aside from the work things, which are too boring to blog about, just being around all those people, all that traffic, just the feeling of being in public for five days absolutely wore me out. Getting home was a trial, since there had been fog or snow or something in Salt Lake City that morning, which, since Salt Lake is the Delta hub, screwed up all the Delta flights. I flew from San Jose to Salt Lake sitting beside a nice man whose pregnant wife had gone off to the hospital that morning, and he was worried and trying to get back to Colorado Springs. Funny how sometimes travelling just seems like such a bad idea, how we get so used to the fact that we can cross the country in four or five hours that we forget that sometimes you just can’t get from here to there. (I hope he got home and everything was okay with the baby.) I got back to Bozeman just in time for another fun drive over the pass through heavy sleet and trucks in the ditch. I finally got back to town, and stopped in for what was left of happy hour at the Bar and Grill. There was my brother, my friends Scott and Jennifer, and the usual Friday evening characters (the nice lady who talks way too much about nothing, the talented cabinetmaker who drinks and becomes unreliable after about four in the afternoon). Glen the bartender made me a nice big gin and tonic and just knowing that people had been discussing the fact that the pass must be bad because it was taking me over an hour to get back from Bozeman made me feel happy, and home. I was back in my small town, where I’m known, where I’m not just one more anonymous person. That’s why I moved here, why I wanted a smaller life, a life small enough that I could know its contours.

Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins.

Posted on January 28, 2003 by cmf

Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as you can, and never come back (if you can get away with it). I have always been an instinctive feminist, wanting a life out there, not wanting to get stuck in the house with kids and sticky surfaces to wipe. The core image of domestic life in my head was my Aunt Lynn, standing at her kitchen sink, staring blankly out the window and secretly drinking herself to death while we all swirled around her, while she shooed us out the door with a popsicle so she could go back to standing there, staring and hopeless. All I knew was that wasn’t going to be me. I was out of there. I was going to have a free and adventurous life.

And yet. A few years ago, when I moved back to the Bay Area after finishing my PhD, I was not in great shape. My free and adventurous life had left me at 34 with a mountain of student loan debt, and unpublished novel manuscript that none of my thesis advisors even liked. I had mananged to finish my degree, but I was looking at a very bleak academic job market, where as an unpublished novelist, without the long list of requisite publications, well, the prospects were pretty grim for finding anything other than an adjunct position. Frankly, I thought I’d failed. Totally failed. Hence, I figured it was time to try something new, time to just find a “real job” and get on with my life. So my brother and I agreed to be roommates. Neither of us could afford a place on our own, and we’ve always been close, so we thought we’d give it a shot. And little by little I discovered that I liked domestic life. I liked making a home. Of course, it was a little odd that I was making a home with my brother and not a boyfreind or husband, but on the other hand, since neither of us had ever really had a home, not since our parents divorced when we were quite young, we figured that an unconventional but pleasant home was better than no home. I discovered I had a talent for it, that keeping a house didn’t have to be a task that was so overwhelming that you might, as my mother too often did, take to your bed in a satin bathrobe. I discovered that you could devise a system, pay the bills, do the shopping, cook dinner at night. That in doing these things one could create a place that was safe and welcoming, a place you could come home to and feel relief and happiness walking in the door. A place you could rely on to be the same today as it was yesterday. That having a home makes taking other kinds of risks possible, that it gives you the emotional space to perhaps sit down and think about what kind of life you’d like to create for yourself. I eventually picked up a second job, teaching in the Creative Writing Program at St. Mary’s, which was a great experience, and which allowed me to stockpile a little money. That, combined with the fact that I had also managed to find a corporate job at Cisco Systems and they were willing to let me telecommute full time, well, for the first time ever, I discovered I had the ability to choose what I wanted to do next. For the first time ever, I wasn’t running away from something. It’s been a year this week that I first came up here and saw my little house, saw that although the living room had horrible green carpet, it also had great light through the southern windows, that although it needed a roof, and wiring, my little house hadn’t ever been remodeled, so at least I wouldn’t have to pull out a lot of bad 1970′s cabinetry. It was a blank slate, but it turned out to be my blank slate.

A year later, I’m in my little house. I never thought I’d own my own home. For most of last year, while I was trying to pull this deal together, there were times I thought I’d never get this deal done. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s a safe and welcoming home. People like coming over for dinner. I’m planning the garden. And yet amidst my little tiny domestic island, I found myself last night, in the basement doing laundry while watching the news. There’s all this terrifying talk of war, we have this ridiculous President and his henchmen who represent all that is wrong with our culture, and I find that all I can do is iron my nice clean napkins that have just come out of the dryer. Ironing napkins somehow seems to sum up how far I’ve come in some odd way. First of all, cloth napkins are an essential element of Living Small — paper napkins are both wasteful and aesthetically horrible. Cloth napkins do cost a little bit, especially if, like me, you have a weakness for Williams Sonoma French prints, but over the long run, since you use them over and over, they make more sense. And ironing the napkins is both easy and incredibly satisfying. They’re square. They come out so nice. And in the face of this madness, madness over which I have no control at all (I’ve written the letters, I’ve made the phone calls), all I can really do is to try to create this space. This space that makes sense. This space where I can have people over and we can at least discuss our horror, our opposition. That maybe a nice dinner, an ironed napkin, can help create the kind of space where we can shore one another up during this terrifing time, where we can plan the resistance.

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Category Archives: domestic life