211108 zen and firewood

Nov. 8

A cord of firewood was delivered last week and K stacked it over the next two days, "In case it rained", he said, though we had a tarp for that eventuality. Zen and the art of perfectly stacked firewood! We were supposed to leave the stacking for Tal to do, but when he came on Sunday, there was (were?) only the shavings to rake up. * (Does "zen and the art of" need a footnote?)

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We have achieved laundry!

You may remember that we have had no washer or dryer (more on that...) since we came here in December, 2020. I washed things by hand and hung them to dry. I did one run to a laundromat in Magog. (A very long way away!) Then my vaccine reaction (or whatever it is) hit and since July 20 things have just piled up. Once our plan to stay another year was settled we sprang for a washing machine. Then it didn't fit through the washroom door. Then our land agent and her father-in-law, a carpenter something, came and installed it. Then she showed me how to work the dryer, which I thought didn't. Work, that is.

So I have been washing and washing, and using the dryer, too, for some of it. Once we are caught up I won't use the dryer any more. The dryer's knobs are at the bottom and it has no proper top. At one point it even occurred to me that it was upside-down, but the brand name etc. are all the right way up. It must have sat on top of a washer and the top cover is since lost, perhaps. It would be quite typical for K and I to have a dryer that was upside down. We are that sort of people. We end up with other people's odd places and things. We had the electrician here to fix the kitchen and upstairs lights, which we have done without for eleven months (we just lived with it), but then the upstairs crashed again. There is a short at the breaker, which the agent figured out in a second, so we have to get the electrician back again.

I realized at some point in our life together that K and I are a bit challenged in some areas of home care. (I naïvely imagined, when we moved into #48 in Etobicoke, that we would finish the unfinished basement, replace the 1960s shag carpet on the stairs and paint the dusty-rose walls of the big bedroom, the list went on; but those things never happened.) We don't paint rooms if we can help it, as it is just so much work. Refinish an old cabinet? No way - it's tmw (too much work) Old cabinets have character and one doesn't fret about the children scratching them. But I have also realized that you can learn to get good at things if you do them a couple of times: they become less daunting. You get used to having to pick a colour for the paint, choose and installing curtain rods or blinds, returning to the hardware store seven times to get the right part, to exchange the wrong part, to get the thing you forgot, to exchange the wrong part again. So at this point I realize that we have to do things and we will get good at them. Do you think that our mothers and fathers were always so good at things? Or did they too have to learn on the fly? I know that my father came from a childhood of learning, mother too. A lot of what I know now I actually learned in my own childhood from my parents' example. I have had trouble, however, putting the knowledge to work. It seems that only in the last few years I have begun to do what I have long known the how of but not the why.

There was always so much going on. What was I doing all those years?

Grandma did not always keep a lovely house, dust weekly, have flowers and a dish of old-fashioned candy on the table; she didn't bake a cake and mend a coat in the afternoon. But wait, (Wait, but,) she did do all those things, some of the time, but she was also working full-time until just a few years ago. I am thinking of Fred Astair's dance partner, Ginger Rogers, of whom someone said, she is dancing backwards, in high heels! Grandma makes it look so easy now, with all those years of practice - in the line of fire, I was going to write, but it is a war expression, so - years of practice on the front lines, oh, same. (in the trenches... ) How about "through planting and harvest"? Years of practice through the planting and the harvest.

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I seem to get better by fits and starts. Last week there were several good days and then Friday I had a severe set-back. It's two steps forward and one step back, as it were. On the good days, and even today, though it's not a good day, I do too much; there is lots to do. Not a chore at all but a pleasure to get work done, the mud room tidy and ready for winter, the kitchen closet sorted out - a big, shelved place where we keep everything from tools and hardware supplies to linens, such as they are. The mosaics wait until I am better still. They require time spent sitting still, and concentration. They wait on the window shelves and table.

These blue and whites might be for the angel vase (at right). Not sure yet.

I did do one project recently. I wanted to see if a mosaic would be out-of-place in a permanent outdoor installation, so I took pieces to try out on the stump by the driveway.

(the stump)

It has become a dry-mounted work, without mastic or grout. The bird kept getting blown off the slanted top so I found it a sheltered place to live.

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K and I went for a walk together today, up the camp road. In such a short time all the leaves are gone. While we walked I told K about the dog who visited. This was the second dog we have met (except K was napping while dog B was here). We met dog A a couple of weeks ago, a one year old who is very smart and already well-trained, while dog B is ten and a perfect senior dog for a couple of senior humans! Dog B stole my heart when he came and stood at my side when it was time to go, as if to say, "I'll stay here." K says nothing. We went as far as Blackie's house which is the farthest I have been since being ill. I walked to the ridge twice last week, however, which is no farther it seems, to see the cattle pond and Fig's crossing: the little patch of stream where he liked to drink. It is where the "road" crosses the stream. This has not be driven over in several years but forms part of a two-track path that crosses the meadows and woods hereabouts, for use by tractor mostly.

The pond is too low to feed the stream, but the stream still gathers water from the small valley that it has formed through the woods. (The iron pipe is not a natural phenomenon.)

The Christmas fern stays green through the winter.

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The sun goes behind the ridge early now, but it was warm out and I sat on the porch, heard the coyote that seems to live (at least howl) near the farm, saw a falling star, and the crescent moon caught in the trees as it went behind the ridge.

Keep well. Winter is coming but so is the Solstice, and all the festivals then.

Mumma Yaga

* Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

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On the 29th, the sun came up in a mist.