We are all Christopher Columbus

Imagine
you
are
Christopher
Columbus
and
it
is
the
late
1400's.
You are preparing to set sail with your three ships and all of your crew. You are the lead and the one responsible for all of their welfare. What you know is that you are setting sail from Spain and the goal is to reach India. Most of the population, contrary to today's popular belief, know with some level of certainty that the Earth is round. Aristotle, way back in the third century BC has explained this to the world after observing an eclipse. Yet the belief in some circles still persists that the sailors would at some point fall off the planet into unknown oblivion. What if Columbus himself secretly harboured doubts about the roundness of the Earth? What if he would have had a tether to the dock in Spain on some mystical level, or a self imposed limit that "I will go this far but not any further" just in case? What if he had secretly thought they might all be wrong?

Imagine now you are a few miles from the New Continent but you cannot see it. You do not even know it is there. India's out there somewhere but your crew is anxious and worn out. You have secret moments of panic. What is out there? What do you do? What do you tell your crew?

We all know how the story ends. But I confess I have found myself in the shoes of Christopher Columbus for the greater portion of my life...only the stake was much higher than finding India, or a few unknown continents. My struggle was with God Himself. I was educated in religion quite thoroughly, from the time I was small straight through University and into my adult life through my own studies. And yet knowing all these things about religion still left a gaping hole. I harboured a fear somewhere deep inside that at my core I was an atheist. It was unthinkable and horrifying to finally acknowledge. It was not the thought of a non existent Afterlife that bothered me, it was much more profound than that. It was a bigger fear of losing all that was Good in the world as I had known it. These things that are Good, if you will, are our very own Markers- those things that bring you back into Belief that there is something Greater out there in the Universe. Seeing a living creature being born or going through the stages of death are two of these Markers that can serve to make you a Believer very quickly. Nature in all of its beauty is another. So are moments of Enlightenment between you and someone you love. But as much as I Knew, I could not shake the fear that I was deceiving myself. It was much easier to Believe than not Believe. Until I ran into a brick wall in the form of a four year old.

Death is hard. No two ways about it. Wren, who is now four, had to learn about death way before I was ready to have the conversation. We were faced with having to put one of our cats to sleep. I did not have the faintest idea how to explain this to such a young child. I did the unthinkable- I allowed her to be in the room as Gaston passed away. It may prove to be one of the best things I have ever done as a parent. It introduced very tough concepts into her world at an early age. Death. God. The Soul. Heaven. Permanence. Infinity. And there were very little worlds I could rely on to help me explain all of it to her. Over the past few years the topics have come up regularly. She is coming into full realization what the concept of imagination is and I knew this would be a struggle for her to reconcile with her view of what God, Heaven, and Afterlife are because she cannot "See" any of those. I kept saying to myself that if only I was not so limited by my words. And it was after thinking this a few dozen times that I had a moment of Enlightenment myself. It was not that I was a secret atheist... it was that I would not allow myself to acknowledge that a great part of my Faith I would never be able to put into words. I would never be able to rationalize it to anyone else, or myself for that matter. It was out of my Realm. It was God. It was all that was Good. A lot of it is beyond my scope- there, but I just cannot see it from where I stand.

Wren asked me tonight if God Himself comes to get you when you die. Minefield. I want to choose my words so carefully now that I realize how entangling they can be. I answered her in the only way I knew how- that it was a Surprise. A big one- perhaps the biggest one she will ever have. She is fully aware that parents sometimes die very young and leave small children behind, and this worries her. But she also knows that there is usually a natural progression where people grow old and die after raising their families. I explained it might be God, but there was also a very good chance it could be a Great Grandparent, Grandparent, or Daddy or myself. It all depended on the "when" part of the question. How do I know this I asked myself tonight? I just do. I know it enough to realize that I do not need the tether, real or imaginary, to guard me "just in case". Sometimes, like Columbus, you just have to set sail.

Note: The painting above is by Graeme Wilkinson. Acrylic on canvas.

Our Little House

We
spent
the
past
summer
reading
the
Little
House
series
of
books.

Wren has adored the first four and we are saving the rest for Christmastime. Over the years I have stashed 1/4 scale dolls and accessories away in hopes of someday building a replica of the Little House home on the prairie. Finding things in this scale is quite difficult but I have found salesman's samples of household goods to work very well. Most are old, however I am always surprised to find that they arrive in good condition. Our plan is to gather all the items first- which may take years, and then build the house around the three rooms we complete. The original Little House had just a Keeping Room separated with a quilt for the parents sleeping area, a loft for the girls, and a lean to off the back of the house.


A lot of detail is given in the books about what the Ingalls had and did not have. Originally, I had planned to do a dollhouse a lot like that of Tasha Tudor's, but I feel now that there is a very valuable lesson to be learned from recreating the simplicity of a pioneer's life. It is a dual lesson in make-do along with a reality of how hard life was for people back then. Since we use wood stoves to heat our home, Wren is very familiar with the cast iron beauties, but learning that they also were responsible for heating all the Ingalls food and baking has been an eye opener for her.

The rope bed is not an unfamiliar concept as most of our beds have been on slats, one of them being a reproduction where the holes are visible where the ropes would have been. We used a sewing machine to make a burlap hemp tufted mattress, surely an extravagance in Laura and Mary's day as they would have most certainly slept on hay stuffed mattresses. A gingham sheet and handmade patchwork quilt provide the dolls with snug evenings. We have yet to find a sixteen inch Laura doll and hope to find one in blue. We will simply switch out the girls clothes to have Laura in red and Mary in blue, just like the books. These are the details that Wren picks up on. One of the neat things about our Mary is that she is wearing a simple bead necklace, just like the one the girls make for Carrie from the Indian beads they find with Pa when walking to the deserted Indian camp.

The girls have a pair of snowshoes and old wooden skis, both familiar concepts to Wren as we love winter sports. We sometimes snowshoe up the half mile to retrieve the mail at the road, and there are a lot of times that I would much rather shoe our way out than risk sliding off the road into the ravine or lake. Winter in the country can be a hair raising affair.
So our next book in the series is A Long Winter as we saved Farmer Boy for next summer. I think this will be a good story for the coming winter, as I do believe we are in for a long winter ourselves.

Handprints

I

have

wanted

to

do

this

project

for

a

while

now...

and

there

is

no

time

like

the

present.

There is something incredibly precious about little hands and little feet. I have wanted to document our children's' hands for some time now but did not want to do the traditional print in plaster. I also wanted to be able to show them how tiny they were in both the relation to each other and to us, their parents. We had fun doing simple paper outlines and had to rework them a few times to get them to nestle inside of one another. Then Wren picked out the embroidery colors for each of us, and an extra one for little brother or sister who is on the way. We stitched our outlines on to a hemp burlap and left the cloth in a painted embroidery hoop. The children liked to watch me stitch this up before bedtime- it was the same effect as knitting for them, calming and interesting to watch all at the same time. We will place the other little hand inside of Dane's sometime this Spring and then it will be complete. I have been using my 1960's sewing machine a little more as of late, but still find the method of hand stitching to be more soothing to the hands.

An Apple a Day

As

if

we

didn't

have

enough

to

contend

with

here

in

the

country...

Mother Nature has seen to it that we are being kept on our toes. What was a leisurely day a few weeks ago turned into an all out fiasco that had my six foot five husband and yours truly doing a jig dance of some sort while trying to catch a Brown Recluse before it sprinted into the plank flooring. My husband was lying on the couch and casually glanced toward the southeast window in the great room saying there was a spider web behind the curtain. I got up to examine the situation and knew immediately this was trouble. It was huge, tornado shaped, and disappeared into the hemp curtain. What was worse, it was just inches from our daughter's play kitchen. I motioned for some help and watched my husband's eyes grow big as he saw the full view of the structure. He pulled the curtain down from its place in one swoop because we weren't going to take any chances of this thing biting us as we fiddled with the web. Now the problem was coaxing it out, which was no problem at all as the thing sprinted immediately across the floor. I screamed scaring the tar out of both Wren and my husband. We threw the curtain back over the spider and my husband's size fourteen shoes called an end to the saga. The thought of that thing getting away was hair raising. I spent the next few hours looking for more webs. We found three on the back porch last week. I nabbed one in a beautiful Red Ware paper towel holder just this afternoon. I am over the spiders already. We have Wolf spiders the size of small rodents... this is the last thing I need. We began a quest to find a friend with Hedge Apples. We found a lucky owner and brought home a paper sack full. I was so reluctant to call an exterminator- I just hate the thought of chemicals. But I wondered about the Old Wives Tale of the Osage Orange. Would it really work? Well, let me tell you, after today's encounter in the paper towel holder, I dug into that paper bag faster than lightening. So I am about to find out. The fruits are hard and bumpy and it took a very large steak knife to do the job of getting one into six slices. They bleed a milky substance that is like glue, though they do not have a very pungent odor. If the scent can be described at all, it is like that of orange cleaning solution. The slices are resting happily in the tops of the windows on the main floor. We shall see how accurate the Old Wives really are. All I know is that if I have just a few more heart stopping encounters like the ones I have had recently, I am going to be sporting some Old Wives white hair! Just in time for Halloween...

A Wrinkle in Time

The
early
bird
has
begun
its
annual
color
change.




One of our trees begins to show its color so much earlier than the others. At first, we thought it was just a fluke that year, but each year it holds true to being the first to turn out its glory. Autumn is such a time for contemplation, and though it is still Summer, the weather here in the Ohio River Valley suggests otherwise. I have been under the weather myself the past month or so and my type pad has been quiet. I have not been in my kitchen nearly as much as usual, nor out in the garden. The past month has been one of gathering my children around me and enjoying time in our haven together. More on this later...
The changing leaves has me thinking almost daily about an event from my childhood. I cannot put the memory into exact context, and wonder at times if the memory is not a patchwork of many days that have lodged somewhere in the deep recess of my mind. We are no more than seven or perhaps eight, and there are two friends with me when we leave my house and trudge off through the backyard of my next door neighbour. Our destination is delivering something, maybe items from a school fundraiser, to the next neighborhood over. My two friends are just along for the stroll as they are not in my class. The neighboring yard is that of one of my best friends who is walking with me. There is the faint scent of leaves burning in the air, and also that difficult to explain aroma of leaf litter and mold that speaks to your senses about the beauty of nature. Our shoes drift through the reds, yellows, and browns of leaves newly fallen and their crunch is a sound that takes me back to school days even today. We hug the back corner of my friends log cabin home and come into our secret place. A place of packed earth floor and looping overhead trees, perhaps no larger than some one's living room but endlessly decorated with nooks and crannies that we could get lost for hours at a time in play. At night, this secret place was a spot you could just vanish into, your night tag friends passing within inches and never seeing you. But today we pass through and pop out into the next neighbor's back yard and make the short trek along the evergreens to the street of the next neighborhood. The two houses we are walking behind have a certain cottage feel and I always enjoyed looking at them. Both of our neighborhoods were true circles with perhaps forty or fifty houses around them. The people of these circles loved their gardens and in Autumn the remnants made for a beautiful setting. The house we are going to first is only a few houses down the circle. We walk up the drive which in memory is newly blacktopped, the smell of tar for some reason was quite pleasant. There is an entry porch with a rock formed wall to the right and a garden setting visible but private from the road to our left. The porch is inviting and I see slate tiles of many shades of gray underfoot. A dim light is on overhead as the dusk is coming earlier each day now. We ring the bell which goes resounding into the depths of the house. Footsteps come to the door and it is a lady in her midlife, not unlike most of our teachers at school. A warm smile and she bids us into the entry way through a wooden door and says she'll be right back after she retrieves her pocket book. The three of us say nothing- we are taking it in. The house is dark, not for lack of light, but in decoration, and it is the first time I realize dark can mean very comfortable. The smell of wood wax is in the air along with something coming from the kitchen which we can see from where we are standing. The kitchen has a lot of brick in which a huge range oven is encased and the casserole hidden somewhere inside. I notice a large collection of cookbooks and instantly recognize this woman as someone my Mother would like immensely. I associate rose hips and cloves and dried flowers with this brief visit, and copper pots, though I cannot guarantee any were there at all. The woman comes back with a check and we leave her the bag of goodies and promise to come back at Halloween. We left oddly satisfied walking along with a sense of the season. I remember nothing of the rest of those deliveries nor the homes we went to.
Why over thirty years later this visit seems lodged in my memory I have not the slightest idea. I recognize on some level that I found a kindred spirit to my own Mother who created a sense of home that has stayed with me. I also think this home in the next neighborhood over, in some ways, reminded me so much of my Mother's Aunt Florence's home in Zionsville, Indiana. This home had a large influence on both my Mother and myself, though I never realized it until much later in life. This visit has played about my mind the past month or so with odd frequency and I wonder if my friends remember this day the way that I do- or even remember it at all. What I know is that it has somehow played a role in my subconscious... and it is the memory which has made Autumn my favorite season of all.

Puffy Eyes

"Mama,

please

sing

Jackie

Paper

for

us."

We have a ritual that if after our night time story, the children still have trouble falling asleep, I sing lullabies to them. Wren often chooses the songs in a small whisper, and more often than not, Puff the Magic Dragon is close to the top of the list. I grew up with this song sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I had it on a 33 and played it till I knew the lyrics by heart. Still, some thirty years later, it still chokes me up. It used to be that I could get all the way to the part where Jackie Paper grows up without my voice catching. But now that I have had Dane, it takes a lot less time to falter my voice. Wren loves this song so much. On some level, she understands it to be a right of passage. She knows that it is both happy and sad and wonders at how singing a song can make her Mama tear up so easily. Still, I sing it whenever she asks. But it always leaves me feeling a bit sad, especially now that I have my own Jackie Paper. If you haven't heard the song in a while, or perhaps never heard it the whole way through, here it is in written form. Sing it with someone you love.

"Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal puff,

And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

Oh Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail

Jackie kept a lookout perched on puffs gigantic tail,

Noble kings and princes would bow wheneer they came,

Pirate ships would lower their flag when Puff roared out his name.

Oh! Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.

One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,

Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.

Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave,

So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave.

Oh! Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea

And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee."

I have often thought about writing another happier verse to end this song, but it some ways it would miss the whole point of the song, wouldn't it? Our little ones grow up before our very eyes and this is what the songs authors, Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow, beg us not to miss. But... it is still so difficult to leave Puff in that cave all alone. I always hope another little boy comes along.

Rescue Remedy

Being
that
my
husband
is
a
skilled
antiques
restorer,
all
manner
of
chairs
and
such
arrive
at
our
house.
It's difficult to pass up a deal, more like a steal, when you are around furniture so often. We receive all kinds of calls about antiques restoration and end up going on a lot of "go-sees" to see if we can be of help. Often times, we are able to pick up things at good prices while we're out and about on these calls, and sometimes the odd item just leaps into our truck from the curb. These little chairs we picked up in Florida for a song. But someone had done that ever popular late eighties silk stripe dining fabric upholstery and it had been sitting there ever since. The seats were in pretty bad shape, and at first glance so were the wood finishes. But often times, all it takes is a gentle cleaning and wax to bring back the luster. It goes without saying, never refinish a piece that you do not know the value of. If it's old and/ or rare you will plummet the value by taking away the old finish. This presents a problem when you really wish to have a painted finish or different stain, but it really is best to leave well enough alone when it comes to woods. My husband is called in for repairs, great and small, and all the work is done with care to add value, not take it away.

These chairs just needed a good cleaning and simple Williamsville wax. I shed the old fabric, replacing it with a more homespun look to match our Saltbox style house in creams, eggplants, and reds. This is in part my summer education of soft restoration. I am diligently learning the trade of seat upholstery, wing chair upholstery, couch upholstery, shaker tape seating, and rush work- God help me on the last.
My Father in Law is a wonderful craftsman and at one time a skilled rush worker. It is like a bicycle, he can still do it, but he says it takes a great deal of painstaking time.


Here are the old and new versions side by side right before I get ready to tear into the second chair. These will go happily in our dining room as extra seating right next to our Windsors. I like things to compliment each other and a house put together over time never matches exactly. Next I am tackling a set of four ladder back chairs that have been in our family for ages. Their old torn rush seats are being replaced with Shaker fabric taping in evergreen hues. I cannot wait for them to come back into everyday use.