For Shelter, the World

Ready for spring

After an amazingly mild winter here in the Pacific Northwest, the calendar hit April 1st, and the snowy weather arrived. Although at river level we only had flurries, there's a nice accumulation of snow up on the clifftops on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, and more predicted later this week.

Nonetheless, we intrepid gardeners are preparing for the local Community Garden's second year of operation.

I've got my crops planned - golden summer squash, zucchini, peppers of various kinds (hot and sweet), garlic, green onions, tomatoes, and later in the season, broccoli. This year I'm going to try growing some Yukon gold potatoes, too. Over the weekend, I went to the garden for the first time since last summer. It was like seeing an old friend again.

Here's my plot peeking around the side of the storage shed - weeded, turned and composted, and ready for planting.

Harvest

One day last April I stopped by the little country store on the highway to pick up the local weekly newspaper, and noticed a flyer announcing a new community garden. With the family farming DNA that I inherited from my Dad, something inside of me said, "that's for me!"  So I gave them a call, paid $15 for a ten by four foot plot, and began planning the garden layout. After I got back from my trip to Dallas in late May, I commenced planting my crops ... baby carrots, mesclun salad greens, golden zucchini (summer squash), tomatoes, sweet onions, fingerling eggplant, and several varieties of peppers.

This community garden is operated by a county agency and is located on the county fairgrounds in a south-facing area that gets full sun all day during the summer. At present, the garden is only operating from May through October. The growing season in the western Columbia Gorge is short, with relatively mild weather -- daytime temperatures were in the 60s and 70s through the end of June -- and I had no idea how my adventure in farming at the 44th parallel would turn out.

The community garden is located next to a creek that empties into the Columbia River a few hundred yards to the south, after passing under the state highway and BNSF railroad bridge. The cliffs in the background are on the Oregon side of the river. What a glorious setting for a garden.

Yep, I've been learning new ways to cook zucchini.

At the beginning of the summer, I planted a bunch of sweet "Candy" onions. They pretty much languished until the middle of September, when all of a sudden they began putting out green shoots.

Threads

Back in my twenties I taught myself how to crochet, but got away from it during my early-to-middle adult years. Five years ago this month, in January 2004, the daughter of a friend, who is now very involved in fiber arts as a vocation as well as a hobby, asked me to teach her how to crochet.

The experience was like getting back onto bicycle after years without riding, and automatically remembering how to do it, recalling why you took it up to begin with, and falling in love with it all over again. I love the feel of the movements involved in crocheting, as well as the texture of the yarn. I love seeing a tangible thing take shape from a single strand of yarn or thread, and the satisfaction of wearing something that I have created, or of giving it as a present to someone else and seeing them wear it.

During 2004 and 2005, I crocheted numerous items of warm and wooly apparel. At that point, I had begun preparing mentally for a geographical move, although I didn't know when it would happen. I didn't even know where. I had an interest in the Portland, Oregon area, but figured I'd travel there first, and then when the circumstances of my life allowed it, I'd make the move. I knew that wherever I ended up, it would be someplace where there was real winter weather. So as I sat in my house on the warm and muggy Mississippi Gulf Coast, crocheting away, I visualized myself sometime in the future, living in a cold climate and wearing the scarf or wrap I was making.

And here I am. As fortune and fate would have it, I had stored several of the finished pieces, along with a few items in progress, on the top shelf in a closet. They were among the few things I was able to salvage after Hurricane Katrina, since they were above the high water line.

This is a scarf I crocheted during early 2005, from a pattern I downloaded off the Internet. It's made with Coats & Clarks' TLC Essentials "Villa" variegated acrylic yarn, using an unusual "cross-stitch" crochet stitch. I have been wearing it a lot this winter and have gotten numerous comments, as well as questions about the stitch from other crocheters. It's a neat feeling to wear this scarf while I'm shoveling snow from my driveway here in the Pacific Northwest, and to remember where I was in my life at the time I was creating it, as well as what has happened in the interim.

Voice

I've been trying to remember where I got this windchime. I'm pretty sure it was given to me by a friend who was getting ready to have a garage sale, but I can't recall who it was. I do know that for the past several years, it hung on the front porch of my house in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Since the porch was screened in and we didn't have heavy winds very often there, except for passing thunderstorms, I rarely heard the chimes (couldn't even tell you what they sounded like), and for the last few years I lived there, I spent very little time on the porch.

When I went back to salvage my house after the hurricane, this windchime was therefore not exactly at the top of my list of things to look for. One day, as we were leaving, on the spur of the moment I asked the person who was helping me that day to reach up and grab the windchime (it had been above the water line.) It traveled cross-country on the back floor of my car, underneath a portion of my salvaged CD collection (the Christmas CDs I was listening to on the way).

After I got settled in to my cottage by the creek, the windchime made its way to my new back porch, which is what I use as the main entrance. Everyday, when I go in and out of my house, the chimes are there to greet me. Among the wonderful discoveries I've made here is how breezy it is in the springtime where I'm living, between the Coastal mountain range and the Cascades, about an hour east of the Pacific Ocean. So the windchime is tinkling constantly nowadays, and I can hear it from wherever I am in the house. It's actually got a sweet, mellow, alto voice. Very peaceful, very reassuring, very much alive and vibrant.

Craving

I want a shrimp and oyster po-boy so bad.

Kujichagulia

One of the blogs I read, by a fellow Katrina survivor from New Orleans, reminded me that Kwanzaa started yesterday. Although the Seven Principles celebrated during Kwanzaa are addressed to the African-American experience, upon re-reading them from my post-Katrina viewpoint, they can be seen as a statement of living for all human beings.

The principle for the second day of Kwanzaa is Kujichagulia: "To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves."

I can relate to what Ray has to say about this principle:

Well, this seems easy enough; "seems" is the operative word. I suppose most of us would like to think we are defined by ourselves, but I can recognize in my own life that in many ways I am defined by where I live, the people with whom I associate (and those I don't), and in many ways my thinking is determined by external sources -- the news and local online forums, all my years of religious exposures, and so forth. Even the media and advertising presumes to speak for me.

BUT... while I am evaluating my life post-Katrina, I am coming face to face with things that just are not true; some things never were true about me, and other things have become no-longer-true in m post-Katrina life.

I noticed today while I was talking with a realtor, laying the groundwork for a move, that the kind of place I was describing to her was not the "normal" type of dwelling normally sought these days. I told her, "I specifically do NOT want a dishwasher, microwave, or garage. Those things are a waste of money and not at all related to the way I live my life." Hmmm.... so why should I put up with a fancy-dancy kitchen full of appliances that I wouldn't personally use, at the expense of giving up valuable storage space for building a pantry to store home-canned fresh produce??? Makes no sense.

I want my life (and, by extension, my home) to be defined by ME ... and not to have ME being defined by my home or other externals.

Now that I'm getting ready to have my own home again, and having to basically start over from scratch -- new furniture, pots and pans, plates and eating utensils, appliances, bathroom supplies, home office supplies, clothing, etc. -- I am very aware that I don't want to rush around, acquiring a lot of things and complicating my life in ways that it doesn't need to be complicated. I said quite a while back that I wanted my life to be portable; able to change direction on a dime and live more simply and flexibly. Now that I've made a big cross-country move, I'm not planning on any major moves for a while, but the desire for simplicity is still there. Knowing exactly what I own, consciously choosing ownership, being able to easily find each item when it's needed, and knowing what purpose it serves in my life.

Because, in a way, I'm starting over, I get to define myself anew and create the physical manifestation of that definition. Consciously creating my life, in other words. I think I'm going to have fun with this.

Let me say, however, that I'm not quite ready to give up having laundry equipment.

Stuff

Since I've been looking to make a cross-country move for the past year, I'd already started letting go of possessions (mostly giving them to local charities or to acquaintances.) I've had this deep desire for my life to be portable. Able to change direction on a dime and move when I have to, without having to carry a lot of things or consider how I'm going to take them with me. To live more simply.

Americans have so much stuff. We build big houses to accommodate all of our things and buy SUVs so we can carry it around with us. We acquire things, and then keep shoving what we have to the back of our shelves and closets to make room for more things. I expect that if you asked most folks to list all of their possessions, they couldn't do it. I don't think we generally realize how much energy it requires (physically and psychically) to maintain the things we own.

During the last couple of years, my intention has been to physically touch everything that was in my house and make the conscious decision whether it was to stay or go. Even so, for the past few months prior to the hurricane, I still had the feeling of being tied down by my possessions.

I guess I don't have that problem anymore.

Even after the hurricane, I'm still in the process of letting go. I will not be keeping all of the few things I was able to rescue from my house after Katrina. During the first few days after the storm, while I was still in shock knowing that I had probably lost everything, even so I felt lighter, freer, and I have heard some other Katrina survivors say the same thing. The last bit of heaviness has been in going back to the destruction and doing the salvage work, as well as the work I am doing here in Baton Rouge, cleaning up my few remaining possessions and deciding what to do with them.

I thought about not going back to see my house at all, but that didn't feel quite right. Maybe needing some closure; it was like having one foot in one world (the past? the old paradigm?) and the other foot in another world (the future? the new paradigm?)

What I want is to have the things (I guess I could expand this to include people, places, and circumstances) that serve me, and for me to relate to them on that basis in healthy ways, instead of with attachment, addiction, or fear.

Little things

On Day 51, I wore earrings for the first time since the weekend before Katrina. I had been "adornment-less" for a month and a half.

In the rush to leave ahead of the storm, prioritizing what to take in the little time I had to do so, I couldn't bear to choose which of my jewelry to take and which to leave, so I left it all. I wasn't even wearing any. No earrings, no rings, no nothing. (In retrospect, I could have just dumped the contents of my jewelry armoire into a paper bag, but the adrenaline rush had started at that point, and I had gone into life-saving mode.)

When I found out that the storm surge had gone through my house, I resigned myself to having lost it all, knowing that the jewelry probably had been strewn all over the house by the floodwater, and it would be hard to find in the mud.

Wonder of wonders ... it turns out that when the bed became waterborne, the mattress and box springs floated over and pinned the jewelry armoire against the wall. Consequently, as the water receded and everything settled to the floor, the armoire stayed upright. I had a smaller jewelry box that was on top of my dresser, which for some reason likewise did not fall over. So I have almost all of my jewelry intact. Some of it didn't even get wet, although the innards of the armoire and jewelry box were getting moldy.

It took a while to get everything cleaned up (hydrogen peroxide is a wonderful thing). Yesterday, I wore my favorite pair of earrings. Call me vain, but it does make a difference. Subtle, but it's there.

The Soul of a Survivor

After working in my house today, right before sunset I drove up Beach Boulevard in Waveland, from Nicholson Avenue north toward Bay St. Louis. How many times can you say it's devastating before it gets to be a cliché?

On one of the beachfront lots, there is a FEMA trailer (most of which are campers, not full-size mobile homes) standing on the foundation of what used to be a residence. I am familiar with all of the homes along the beach, having driven up and down the beach road countless times, but it was impossible to tell which house used to be where the trailer is now. The landmarks are all gone. The owners have removed a lot of the debris and cleaned up the area around the trailer. The automatic sprinkler was turned on, watering the little bit of lawn visible in all of the gray and brown.

I have noticed the gracefulness and good humor with which the Katrina survivors on the Gulf Coast are handling their circumstances. Every day, observing myself and others, I learn more about the depth and strength and magnificence of the human spirit.

When I saw that lawn sprinkler, I thought of something else I've observed. I had just talked to a friend who lost her house and pretty much everything she owned, and almost lost her life. One of the first things she did after reaching safety was to go shopping for a new handbag. She was criticized by people (not survivors themselves) who thought she shouldn't be acting so "frivolously" at such a serious time.

But when my friend shows me the purple teddy bear propped up in one corner of her FEMA trailer, or when people decorate the outside of their trailers with twinkly white Christmas lights, or water their lawn even though there is no house, I see something really important happening, just as important as taking care of the practical business of cleaning up, making decisions, and rebuilding. We are feeding our souls.

I remember the afternoon I spent while in Dallas during weeks 2 and 3, at Half Price Books on Preston Road. I was still recovering from adrenal exhaustion at that point and had very little energy, but my urge to reconnect with something I love, that gives me joy, that feeds more than just my mind or body, was so strong. Looking back, I think I started coming back to myself during that afternoon, surrounded by all of those books.