Chicken Nostalgia

I dashed into the hardware store the other day, looking for niger seeds for my finches, and, this being Vermont and almost spring, I walked by a display of sugaring supplies. Next to them was a forty-pound bag of chicken feed, and the sight of that bag pierced me like a sword. 

It’s been six years now since I took my little flock to be killed, in preparation for our move to the retirement community where we now live. My hens were big, affable, butter-colored Buff Orpingtons, the golden retrievers of the chicken world. They were, as hens go, unflappable, and they made it through Vermont winters in their unheated chicken coop. They were not egg-laying machines, like those sad, nervous Leghorns favored by factory farmers. My hens’ egg production waxed and waned with the seasons, as God intended it to. 

On the other hand, they were composting machines, and my garden depended on them for its fertility. All year round, hunting for seeds, they scratched and shredded the layers of old hay that lined their coop, and deposited nitrogen-rich droppings into the mixture, which I periodically hauled to the garden to work its miracles. 

As thrifty as Depression-era housewives, my hens consumed every wormy apple and rotten tomato I threw into their yard. They even ate their own eggshells (after we’d eaten the eggs), thus recycling the calcium. I admired them for their usefulness, but I loved them for the eagerness with which they rushed out of the coop in the morning, for their cozy go-to-roost purrings in the evening, and because they knew and trusted me, and would let me sit with them in the sun while they pecked at the grass, and sometimes at my shoelaces. 

I have a long history with chickens, from the ones that my grandmother used let me feed when I was barely old enough to walk, to the live capons that she sent by train to Barcelona for our Christmas dinner, and the little lame chick that she sent to keep me company as I lay in bed recovering from measles. 

Now, as my autumn declines into winter, I would like nothing better than a couple of hens (you can’t have only one, because they get lonely) to comfort me. But as Vermontish and progressive as the community where I live is, chickens are not allowed. And so, whenever I run across a bag of feed in the hardware store, or drive past the “Chicks Are Here!” sign in front of the Tractor Supply every spring, I practice the art of letting go. I’ve read that this is important preparation for the ultimate divestiture, and makes it easier. 

I practice letting go of the idea of keeping hens, and of raising my own food, and of being who I was all those years ago. And in my mind I also practice letting go of Bisou, who is fine right now but who will be my last dog, and whom I’ll inevitably have to let go in another three or four years. 

On the other hand, carpe diem! we are told. Live in the moment! But how to do this while simultaneously practicing letting go is the emotional equivalent of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. The two things keep leaching into each other. No sooner do I enter fully into the joy of taking Bisou for a walk than I’m overwhelmed by the thought that someday we’ll be taking the last one. And I can only recapture the enjoyment of the walk if I firmly put out of my mind the inevitability of loss. 

It’s at moments like these that a couple of pasturing hens would come in handy, to turn my mind to dirt baths, grass, earthworms, compost, and the cycle of life.

My grandmother and I, feeding chickens

 

Masked in Winter

 As in early childhood, after a certain age the differences between the sexes become less pronounced. Seen from the back, men and women in their golden years are often indistinguishable. Baggy jeans and oversized t-shirts minimize differences in body proportions. Once-glorious heads of red, blond, and black hair have thinned and disappeared beneath a flood of white, and most women, weary of decades of blow-drying, have embraced the convenience of short hair. 

In the retirement community where I live this homogeneity has sometimes caused me embarrassment, such as the day when I caroled “Hi Dave!” to a fellow resident, only to realize too late that I was addressing a woman—and one I knew well, at that. 

The problem of figuring out who is who worsens in winter, when no one steps out the door without wearing a quilted, hooded coat, snow-worthy boots, mittens, a scarf, a hat (yes, under the hood), and sunglasses to protect from the glare. Add to this the blurring effect of snow, sleet, and freezing rain, and you can see why the merest stroll becomes a social challenge. Luckily the voice remains a fairly reliable gender give-away, so you can always shout “Hellooo!” into the gale, and listen for the answer. 

Now, in this pandemic winter, the mask and distancing mandates have made recognizing passers-by, let alone chatting with them, almost impossible. Even if something, such as a pink hat, hints at the gender of the person I am approaching, I still have no idea whether she is a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. So like most others I have adopted the non-committal but enthusiastic wave, which signals friendliness without presuming friendship. 

Often, however, the wavee feels obliged to respond with a remark of some sort. This, due to the combined effects of distance, mask, and wind, usually comes out something like “mwah-hee?” to which I, assuming that it is an allusion to the weather, usually answer “yes, isn’t it!” If she interprets this as meaning, “good to see you!” no harm done. 

If she has a dog, on the other hand, things go more smoothly. I am acquainted with almost all the dogs in the community, and although some have developed white muzzles, unlike humans they have retained their distinctive coat colors. I may not be sure of the name of the masked figure before me—Susan? Mary? Nancy?—but I know without a shadow of a doubt that her tiny terrier is Trixie.

So when I, out walking Bisou, meet Susan/Mary/Nancy with Trixie, we stop and, standing leash-distance apart while the dogs wag their tails and sniff each other, we too have a conversation of sorts, through our masks. “Waaa hm-hm!” she exclaims, arching her eyebrows behind her glasses. “Um woo!!” I respond, nodding emphatically. 

When the dogs have finished chatting, we wave good-bye and turn towards home—two dogs and their humans, each warmed by the chance to commune with a member of their species on this dark, lonely winter day.

The Lament of the Hostess

Heaven knows, I am a compliant soul. My female condition, not to mention my Catholic girlhood, incline me towards obedience. So when, in this virusy era, residents of the community where I live are directed to wear a mask, stay out of stores and each other's houses, and keep a six foot distance from each other, I bow my head and strap on the mask, reject the shelter of a friendly roof in the rain, and keep both friend and foe a sword's distance away from my body.

When a visitor arrives, I carefully place our chairs eight feet apart on my front porch. We sit and strain to hear our muffled voices beneath our masks, guess at our hidden smiles, and peer into each other's eyes to discern the real meaning of what we think the other just said. Even in Vermont, it gets hot at this time of year, and as the hour passes my friend and I begin to sweat while our glasses fog up, and we hear the air conditioner's chilly hum in the forbidden indoors.

None of this is easy, but for me one of the hardest parts is not being able to offer her...anything. I'm not talking about a four-course dinner, or a smear of brie on a cracker, or a single roasted peanut. I'm not even allowed to give her a cup of coffee (iced and with a splash of cream would be lovely in this weather), or a glass of wine, or a drink of water. In order to swallow any of these things we would have to remove our masks and open our mouths, thereby shooting clouds of virus into the atmosphere.

I don't know why this particular restriction seems so hard, but as my friend and I sit mumbling into our facial coverings, I keep having to quell the urge to jump up and run inside and bring out something for us to share. I had no idea that the hostess instinct was so rooted in me, but there you have it.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this. There is something atavistic about the desire to offer food and drink to a visitor. Perhaps as she hands over a bowl of dip and a plate of crudités, the hostess's subconscious is saying "See? My hands are full of good things. I cannot attack you." And the guest's subconscious sighs: "Whew! I guess it's o.k. to relax."

Our fellow primates, the monkeys and apes, share food with their friends. My dogs Wolfie and Bisou used to share bones (well, Wolfie, who outweighed her by seventy pounds, used to let Bisou have his). And partaking of meals is at the center of countless religious rituals.

So yes, it's tough, and it feels inhuman not to be able to eat and drink with friends. This is why restaurants were among the first establishments to open in many states (restaurants and tattoo parlors, the latter pointing to the even more primitive urge to paint one's body), and people flocked to them. And many of those people are now paying a heavy price.

Which is why for now I'll keep my fridge door tightly closed when a friend comes over. Instead I will indulge in one pleasure that is still allowed and never gets old: complaining.

Leopard on Exhibit

I am one of those sleek, reasonably contented leopards that you see in modern, enlightened zoos.

I am not exactly caged in. My sleeping quarters are warm and comfortable. The outdoor exhibit comprises many acres of woods and fields over which I am free to roam. If I see another animal coming my way, I give it wide berth. We leopards are a solitary species. My range used to be much larger, though. I traveled regularly in search of food, and sometimes even went hundreds of miles to visit other leopards.

Every evening, my keepers leave food outside my door. We must never be in the same space, because I am a danger to them and they to me. But, like I said, I am reasonably contented. I don’t have to worry about poachers setting traps, or hyenas stealing my kills. And now that the public isn’t allowed to visit, I am not bothered by their inane comments about my spots.

I spend a lot of time grooming myself, getting rid of pollen and dead leaves, and hunting for ticks. I take naps. I force myself to chew my food thoroughly, to make mealtimes last longer. Every day I roar over the ether at other leopards I used to know, but their voices break up in the distance, and it’s hard to know what they’re saying. Occasionally I make marks on tree trunks with my claws.

I look at the sky. I smell the earth. I watch the sunset and wait for the keeper who brings the food. Did I say that I am reasonably contented? We leopards are a solitary species.*

*In case you find this confusing: the retirement community where I live has prudently closed the campus. No visitors may come in, no residents may go out.  

Bisou's TV Interview

I never knew she was such a publicity hound, but she sure did like the camera: https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Dog-walking-group-at-Wake-Robin-gets-more-seniors-outside-509741431.html

My Final Farm

Never more than a dozen hens for eggs, and two does for milk. A vegetable patch big enough for everything except potatoes and corn. Some apple trees, a plum, a pear, and half a dozen blueberry bushes. Given what else I was dealing with, my forays into micro-farming were insane, but at least I kept one principle firmly in mind: small is beautiful.

My adult life is marked by three separate ventures into self-sufficiency, all of them harking back to the  farm that kept my teenage mother and her family alive and fed during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. When she wasn't plunging into creeks in the middle of the night to escape from bombardments, my teenage mother drank goat's milk and ate home-grown rabbits and pigeons and chickens and eggs and grapes and almonds and olives and cabbages and kale. Meanwhile, in their elegant Barcelona apartment my father's family quietly starved for the three years the war lasted, filling their stomachs with water from the faucet every night so they could sleep.

I was born five years after the end of the bombs and the hunger, carrying in my DNA the conviction that when times got bad you could grow your own food and survive, or live an urban life and starve.

My husband and I bought our first house from an older Austrian woman who had probably had some of the same fear-and-hunger experiences as my parents, and had filled her acre and a half with an ambitious vegetable garden, 25 fruit trees, a berry patch, a chicken house. I, who had never grown so much as a tomato in my life, plunged into self-sufficiency like a nun into her vows. That was farm #1.

It was succeeded by #2, after I had to give up my career following a diagnosis of CFS. I was in survival mode and thought, well, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, the least I can do is try to grow some food.

Farm #3, my best-loved, was in Vermont, where we moved when my husband retired. Besides the usual goats and chickens and vegetable beds and apple trees  there were for-real woods where I could gather ramps in spring, and fields where the nearby farmer harvested for-real hay. I used to stand in the front field watching my goats gobble dandelions and think, am I really here? Is this really mine?

But farming even on a micro scale and CFS don't age well together, and one day I threw my hands up and declared that it was time to be realistic and responsible and move to a retirement community on the shores of Lake Champlain. Still in Vermont, still beautiful, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a farm.

I now live in a small cottage with all mod cons and never have to worry about dinner, which is served in the community center up the hill. But this hasn't extinguished my farming drive. My tiny enclosed porch has become farm #4, my final farm.

In it, on sunny afternoons, I sit with my dog Bisou and the cat Telemann. In a Japanese-style tub beside me Yin and Yang, the goldfish, lead seemingly contented lives, protected from Telemann by an electrified scat-mat. Pots of houseplants, the successors to my vegetable gardens, surround me: geraniums prompted into bloom by the light reflected off the snow, an ancient jade plant almost too heavy for me to lift, a Christmas cactus that my cat loves to chew. And, because I haven't given up on my dreams of self-sufficiency, a Meyer lemon tree and a Calamondin orange that gives enough fruit to make marmalade in case of an emergency.

Just outside the window are my substitute chickens.  Nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, finches gold-, purple-, and house-, and woodpeckers large and small eat the seeds and suet and drink at the four-season bird bath. Beneath the feeders, obese squirrels squabble over spilled seeds, and at sacred moments clever Reynard, my red fox, trots past on his slender black-stockinged feet.

Like A Tree Shedding Leaves

Soon the time will come when I can no longer play the recorder.  Well, maybe not soon, but the time will surely come, if I keep on living.  And it seems unfair and sad that, having finally found a way to enjoy playing music, away from the tensions and compulsions of my early experience with the violin, I have only another ten or at most fifteen years in which to do it.  

I went to a memorial the other day for a woman who had lived a life brimming with gardening,  dancing, and art.  She had excelled at all these things, but one by one she had had to give them up--first the gardening, then the dancing, then the art.  By the time I met her she could barely hold a conversation.  She kept shaking her head, apologizing, wanting me to know that she knew what was happening to her.   

How the old apologize!  For a while, in college, I played violin/piano sonatas with an old colleague of my father's.  After a lifetime spent in some exalted music circles, he was losing his grip.  He would forget our appointments, couldn't remember which piece we were playing, lost his place over and over.  And he apologized, and lamented, and insisted on telling me that he knew what was happening to him.  All his pride was focused on his awareness of his decline, on the one thing in the core of his being that was not affected by dementia, not diminished by his inability to find his place on the score or to remember what he had said two minutes ago.  He may have been losing his mind, but he clung fiercely to the awareness that he was losing it—and that was both his torment, and his only consolation.

On my therapy dog visits with Bisou, I watch the various ways in which my fellow Wake Robin residents deal with the myriad losses that age brings, and I feel an urgent need to build a large reserve of humility to see me through the coming years.  I had better make peace with the idea that I am not my writing, or my music, or my hair, or my ability to walk the dog or use the bathroom by myself.  Like a tree shedding leaves in the fall, I will probably live to see each of these abilities leave me, one by one.  How, I wonder, to find a way to do this well, to submit with grace, and to say, with deep acceptance:  yes, this is who I am now?

Bisou Loses Three Friends

During the ten minutes or so that it took my spouse and me to decide to move to Wake Robin, we asked the resident couple with whom we were having dinner if they could tell us one thing they did not like about the community.  The woman shook her head--she couldn't think of anything--but her husband said "Yes, there is one thing:  you make friends with people, and then they die."

Now, barely four months into her therapy dog practice in Linden, Wake Robin's nursing care facility, Bisou has lost some of her best friends.

On our weekly visits, not everyone reacts to Bisou with the same degree of enthusiasm.  Some people are too ill to do much more than give her a silent smile and a tentative pat.  Others are more interested in talking to Bisou's human retinue, especially to the young male staff member who accompanies us and on whom they dote with grandparently affection. 

But you can always tell the dog people.  Their faces light up as we come in the room and they pat their knees and invite Bisou up into their laps.  She looks into their eyes and they go into rhapsodies, telling her what a good girl she is, how smart, and what beautiful long red ears she has.  Then they tell her about the dogs they used to have.  Long-dead German Shepherds, Cocker Spaniels, Irish Setters, Labs, and Poodles big and small come back to life in these conversations, walking the kids home from school, retrieving pheasants, wolfing down a stolen box of cookies.... Bred to be a good sport, Bisou listens and lets herself be held.  When it's time to go she hops down and walks out of the room, nose to the ground, hoping for an errant crumb.  The dog lovers keep their eyes on her as she leaves.  "Look at that tail," they exclaim.  "It never stops!"

Over the last few weeks, three of Bisou's most affectionate admirers have died.  One week they were there, frail but dressed and sitting up, asking her for kisses, telling stories, oblivious to the red and gold hairs that she shed on their clothes.  And the next week they were gone, and the doors to their rooms, which used to be decorated with posters and photos and signs saying "Visitors Welcome!"  were closed.

It isn't easy to walk with Bisou past those newly closed doors.  But I'm grateful that I have her to keep me from taking comfort in the veil of secrecy with which our culture surrounds the end of life.  I know that the pleasure that our visits bring to the residents of Linden is only a small and momentary thing.  But while we're there, Bisou sitting on a narrow lap, me kneeling on the floor and trying to keep her from sliding off, we are fully invested in the moment which, in the end, is all that the resident in her wheelchair, Bisou with her wagging tail, and I really have.

Some Advice On Downsizing

Last spring at about this time I was in the throes of preparing to move to Wake Robin. It was the downsizing of a lifetime, the move before the final move to that tiny house that awaits us all--you know, the one where there’s no room to even stand up, not that we will want to stand up then.

Over three months, a constant torrent of stuff streamed out of our house--forty-eight boxes of books, some wooden spoons, a pressure cooker, my graduate school notebooks, a coin collection, the cheese press my husband made for me....  The books went to the library sale;  the pressure cooker and the coin collection went to the auction;  and I gave away the cheese press.  The grad school notebooks I guiltily jettisoned into the rental dumpster that decorated our yard.

Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I feel qualified to pass on the following advice to those of you who are contemplating a similar move or are simply feeling trapped by too much stuff:

Don't give yourself a lot of time.  It’s going to be agony no matter how you do it, so take a deep breath and rip off the band-aid in one swift yank.

Remember that you are not your possessions.  More than that, your dearly departed--your mother who gave you that vase, the friend who painted that picture--are not that vase, or that picture.  They are not even IN the vase or the picture.  They are in your memories, and in your heart.  It's o.k. to let go of the things they left behind.

Don’t foist your treasures on your descendants.  It’s not their fault that on your wedding day you received seven silver nut dishes for which you have no use or space.  It’s not their fault that in a moment of madness you spent half your rent money on that oak Victorian desk.  They have no space for the desk, and they are too busy to polish silver.  Possibly they have never liked the dishes or the desk.  Taste in furnishings is not necessarily transmitted in the DNA.  Don’t take it personally.

If you decide to sell things, don’t expect to get for them anything near their real value, let alone the sentimental worth that they have accumulated for you over the years.  In this day of cheap goods, we are all drowning in material possessions.  Selling your things for a pittance, or giving them away, is the price you pay to have them disappear from your life, and it's a small price for the relief you will feel.

Trust me when I say that most objects, once you let them go, you will never miss.  You may never even remember them.  You think you’ll never be the same without your blue glass canning jars?  Go ahead and wrap them in newspaper, put them in a box from the liquor store and send them to the auction.  Once they’re out the door, if you ever think of them again it will be with the same serene fondness with which you now recall that boy you loved so desperately in high school, and the broken heart you thought would never mend.

(Sorry for the weird formatting--I can't seem to be able to fix it.)

Leaving The House

Lake Champlain is frozen over, and for all I know, frozen solid as well.  But in these sub-zero mornings, if there is no wind and the sun is out, the dogs and I go for a cabin-fever abatement stroll. The walk is short, but the preparation takes forever.

First I put the invisible fence collars on Wolfie and Bisou and let them out into the back yard to relieve themselves.  Because I don't completely trust the invisible fence (would the dogs stay within  if, say, a catamount showed up?), and because I don't want them to bark at some hardy Wake Robin resident snow-shoeing by, I always go out with them, but not until I've put on an old parka of my husband's, and rubber boots. 

Back inside, I take off the parka and the boots, and exchange the dogs' invisible fence collars for their regular collars and leashes.  This causes Bisou to twirl and gyrate with glee, and to launch mock attacks at Wolfie's head, which in turn make him yodel and howl.

While this is going on, I put on an extra sweater and gather my hat, scarf, and gloves.  I slather some tingly lip balm on my lips.  I put on my long winter coat and reach down to start the zipper, which gets stuck.  Why is it, I wonder, that we can put a man on the moon but are forced to struggle with zippers all winter long? 

Next I get Bisou's little coat, and plead with her to be still so we can, sometime before the next storm hits, go for our walk.  I put her legs through the arm holes and start the zipper up the back, only it too gets stuck.  Why is it that we can put a man...etc.

I put on my winter boots, the made-in-China-of-man-made materials ones that I can slip into without having to tie laces, a great time-saver these days.  Then I get Bisou's four little boots, and call her.  But she's still leaping circles around Wolfie and now her leash has gotten tangled with his, so I go and separate them.

The sight of her boots ratchets up her excitement, and I struggle to thrust her floppy feet into the stiff, narrow boots.  The boot instructions say to tie the velcro straps tightly around the leg, but I always worry about cutting off her circulation.  As a result, she often casts a shoe during walks, and  with the wind blowing straight off the North Pole, I have to get both dogs to STAND STILL for crying out loud, take off my gloves, and put the shoe back on.

We are now ready for our walk.  But wait--are the emergency  poop bags in my right pocket, the house key in the left?  I should probably put on yak-traks, too, in case of ice, but I can't bear the idea of putting on one more thing, so I don't.

Outside the cold is...invigorating.  The locals are calling this an "old-fashioned Vermont winter."  We flatlanders console ourselves thinking what havoc it's wreaking on the tick population.  The Wake Robin sugaring brigade, of which my spouse is a novice member, is gearing up for action, checking the sap lines for squirrel damage.  Spring, they hope, will come again this year.

The dogs and I trudge along slowly--me, because I'm looking out for black ice;  Wolfie, because of his pathetic lameness;  and Bisou because of her boots, which force her to fling her legs sideways and use lots more energy than she normally would (this is a good thing).  But when I take my eyes off the pavement and look up at the sky, for the first time in forever I feel the warmth of the sun on my face.

Bedroom Marmalade

After forty-six years and nine months of daily meal preparations, when we arrived in Wake Robin last June I turned my back on cooking without a second thought.  Good bye, cheese from my goats' milk, omelettes from my hens' eggs,  pesto from my kale.  No matter that our cottage has a fully equipped kitchen, my cooking days are done.

As we prepared for the move, I got rid of much that was dear to my heart, but I couldn't bear to part with my four potted citrus trees.  They survived the move and continued to bloom and set fruit in front of the cottage until the weather turned cold and they had to come indoors.  And then my problems began.

Wanting to recreate a Mediterranean climate for the little darlings, I found them the brightest spot in the house, which happens inconveniently to be in the bedroom, right next to our bed, which is also where Wolfie and Bisou sleep.  (If I get up during the night I have to watch to avoid stepping on a sleeping dog and bumping my head against a Meyer lemon.)  But despite this prime location the trees went into a decline and started dropping leaves. 

I got them a lamp with a big fluorescent bulb that I kept on whenever we weren't trying to sleep, but the leaves kept falling--and there is no more discouraging sound that the sigh of an indoor plant's leaf dropping in the night.  I started misting the trees with water twice a day, then every time I went into the bedroom.  Eventually I plugged in a humidifier and kept it going round the clock.  But the leaves continued to fall.

It took me weeks to realize that the weird web-like filaments on the leaves and stems might have something to do with the trees' misery:  spider mites!  This, coming hard on the heels of my sarcoptic mite episode, was a bit much.  But I went to work with home-made remedies and persistence, and eventually the mites disappeared.

By then, however, the Page orange had dropped all its baby fruits.  The larger of the two Meyer lemons kept its fruit but retained exactly four leaves (if a tree can look like it has mange, that one does).  The small Meyer lemon did only slightly better.  But the stalwart Calamondin orange kept on blooming, and setting and ripening fruit as if this were Valencia rather than Vermont.  By January, its crop of cheerful, grape-sized oranges was ready to pick.

Unfortunately, Calamondins are bitter as gall.  Some people use them as decorations for meat dishes, in lieu of kumquats.  But the only way to make them palatable is to turn them into marmalade.

I had never made marmalade in my life, and was tormented by visions of imperfectly sterilized jars leading to death from botulism.  In reality, it turned out to be quite simple, the only fiddly part being the slicing and seeding of the tiny fruits.  When this was done, I boiled them in water for fifteen minutes, refrigerated the mixture overnight, then added an unconscionable amount of sugar and heated it to 220F.  Finally I poured it into four clean little jars and bunged them in the fridge, thus averting botulism.

The results were terrific:  an ideal marriage of yin and yang, bitter and sweet.  And a feast for the eyes as well, each small jar a translucent carnelian gem.

Since it contains as much sugar as it does citrus, my bedroom marmalade does not qualify as health food.  But a little goes a long way, and a scant teaspoonful of the stuff can brighten a generous slice of buttered toast, and my entire morning.

As for that mangy Meyer lemon, yesterday I saw a barely-there bit of green poking out of one of its dead-looking stems--a new leaf!  The season of resurrection is at hand.

Neurons Firing Overtime

I could have danced all night...

Well, not really.  After an hour or so of trying to remember long-forgotten steps--twinkles and grapevines and promenades--I was pretty well done in.  It had been a couple of decades since I'd last put on my suede-soled shoes and fox trotted or jitterbugged, and I am not the dancer I once was.  But it's good to be a dancer again.

Last Friday at Wake Robin we inaugurated what we hope will be a long string of ballroom dances.  There were round tables with white cloths, a sizable wood floor, and music by Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.  About twenty of us showed up--more women than men, as is always the case where moving to music is expected.  For some, those big band sounds were the music that their parents danced and fell in love to.  For others, it was the music of their high school days. 

If a couple of years ago you had shown me a video of last Friday's scene, with me in it, I would have been incredulous.  Possibly dismayed.  Even frightened.  What, me, in a retirement community, in the company of people some of whom are less than fleet of foot? 

Like many Americans, I had bought into the superstition that old age is somehow contagious, and that the only way to keep ourselves young is to pretend that we will go on as we are forever.  How ignorant I was of the many meanings and faces of aging, of its relative and unpredictable nature, of its inevitability and its gifts.

About Friday night, you really had to be there.  There were ardent jitterbuggers, serene waltzers.  There were women dancing with women, and people dancing with people who were using walkers and canes.  At one point I asked a white-haired man who had just finished doing a competent waltz to dance with me.

"I would like to very much,"  he said.  "But I'm tired.  It happens when you're ninety-eight."  So we sat together and watched the dancers.

I've heard that dancing activates the neurons in the pleasure centers of the brain, and that watching people dance has the same effect.  Whether on the floor or off it, pleasure neurons were firing overtime at Wake Robin Friday night.

After an hour or so of steady dancing, we'd all had enough.  As my husband, who was in charge of the tech end of things, turned off various switches and I went to fetch our coats prior to stepping out into yet another sub-zero gale, I smiled at the various things the dancers had left behind--a single  glove, a bottle of red wine, a woolly scarf.  The lost-and-found department at Wake Robin does a brisk business.

It wasn't until we got back to the cottage that I realized I'd left my water bottle behind.

Bulletin From Sabbatical

As the winter solstice came and went I found my resistance to posting on this blog, which had been growing through the summer and fall, impossible to overcome.  I'd been writing here for seven years,  and my blogging well had run dry.  It was time to let it replenish. 

We spent ten years in a house with a recalcitrant water well, and I learned the hard way to pay attention to its moods and its periodic needs for rest and recuperation.  No matter how high the pile of dirty laundry, if the water level was low there was nothing to do but wait for it to slowly rise again.

So after New Year's I decided to give myself a sabbatical.

It's not just the seven years of posting that finally got to me.  Our move to Wake Robin last summer, followed by my daughter's cancer diagnosis, had discombobulated me at a deeper level than I realized.  Thankfully, my daughter is doing very well, which means that we are slowly beginning to breathe again.  The move to Wake Robin feels like the right decision, but it has made a radical change in how we live, and that brings with it its own quandaries and dilemmas.

Why is it, for example, that now that I no longer keep chickens or grow vegetables or cook or shop for groceries (or post on my blog) I seem to have less time than ever?  Maybe it's because the chickens and the gardening, etc. have been replaced by other stuff that I cannot resist, such as:

--A surprisingly demanding yoga class twice a week
--Weekly visits with Bisou to the residents of Wake Robin's nursing facility
--Daily recorder practice, and duets with my recorder buddies once or twice weekly
--Dinner with fellow residents three or four times a week (optional, but fun)
--Daily dog walks (not optional)
--Daily walks to the community center for meals and classes (2/3 mile round trip) often in a sub-zero gale
--English country dancing once a week
--Ditto ballroom dancing...

For a former hermit, let alone a hermit with CFS, this is a major shift in activity level.  You should know that, compared with my fellow residents, who hike, snowshoe, ski, garden, maintain the community trails, sing, serve on committees, make maple syrup (locally known as "sugaring"), and practically run the place, I am the very soul of sloth.  But one does what one can.

Sometimes, when things get quiet, I hear a faraway tinkling, as of water falling drop by drop into the depths of my writing well.  There's not enough to run a load of laundry yet, but there may well be by sugaring time.

Dying To Shop

For most of the last decade I've been in shopping withdrawal.  Along with the woods, the cow-dotted meadows, and the pastoral quiet of our former place in rural Vermont came an almost total absence of stores.

And in my heart I believed that this was a good thing.  It kept us from buying things that had been manufactured under dubious conditions in the far reaches of the planet and that we didn't need in the first place. It forced us to focus on our souls instead of on our stuff.

The availability of everything I could ever want on the internet kept this withdrawal from being absolute, of course.  But as far as actually seeing, touching, and smelling material goods for sale, I was as isolated as a hermit in her desert cave.  Occasionally this lack of stores got annoying, such as the time I had to drive forty-five minutes--albeit through a gorgeous snow-shrouded landscape--to buy a spool of brown thread.  And whenever we left home and ventured into civilization, a casual drive past a strip mall would have me slavering with the desire to buy something, anything.

Now I live around the corner from Vermont's ultra-cool shopping mecca.  The little market three minutes from our cottage carries four brands of Spanish olive oil, one of them from my mother's village in Catalonia, and goat cheeses from at least a dozen local farms.  There are furniture stores overflowing with exquisite pieces made by Vermont woodworkers from Vermont wood, and  boutiques selling clothes woven by Vermont weavers from the wool of Vermont sheep.  There are stores that cater to the enlightened pet owner and kitchen stores that make even me want to cook.

So I have been doing a lot of slavering, but mostly in vain.

If, for example, I go into the market for some breakfast yogurt, I have to ignore the olive oils and the cheeses and the racks of locally-baked breads bristling with grains.  For there is only so much even I can eat, and every day of the year Wake Robin provides us with a lovely, nutritious meal, and the oils would go rancid and the cheeses moldy and the bread stale in our pantry if I succumbed to my urges and brought them home.

I also have to give the furniture stores, the boutiques and the kitchen stores a miss.  Having just pressed one of my daughters into taking my husband's grandmother's wedding china, what am I doing even looking at noodle bowls from Japan?  We have given away, sold, or thrown out eighty percent of our belongings in order to fit into this cottage.  I'd better do a thorough examination of conscience before I bring even a salt shaker into our tiny space.

Maybe I could buy some clothes?  Clothes don't take up a lot of room, especially if they are made of silk.  But we all know where cheap silk comes from, and what those brilliant dyes are doing to rivers across the globe.  Besides, I have clothes hanging in my closet that are a couple of decades old and still perfectly wearable.  So buying clothes isn't a good way to assuage my shopping urges.

I suspect there isn't one.  Maybe what I need is to start meditating again, sitting on the floor and breathing, focusing on my soul, etc.  As it happens, my meditation cushion, which dates from sometime in the 90s, is looking scruffy.  There is bound to be a meditation store nearby....

The Dog of Thresholds

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a class of gods, called liminal deities, who specialized in thresholds.  These gods kept watch over people as they went in and out of rooms, moved house, or set off on ships into the unknown.

In our cottage, instead of a god of thresholds, we have a dog of thresholds.  Whenever I go from the den into the living room, from the living room into the porch, or from the dining area into the kitchen, my black German Shepherd Wolfie is there, sprawled across the threshold, protecting it. 

In the course of defending our various thresholds, Wolfie may well cause an accident.  He is quite a long dog, and there is no way for us to squeeze past his recumbent form, so we have to step over him, which is fine unless we're in a hurry or carrying something or not paying attention.  But he is so devoted to guarding thresholds that I have to believe that he knows what he's doing, and we need to accept the risk of stumbling over him. 

If the Greeks and Romans considered liminal deities essential, why should we assume that we have outgrown our need for them?  Can it be mere coincidence that Wolfie has taken to threshold sprawling just as we have moved to a new house and embarked on a new way of life at Wake Robin?

There is a second deity in the house:  Bisou, the goddess of sofas and cozy chairs, whose function is to keep the spot from which I have just gotten up from getting cold.  True to her Cavalier genes, she is also the goddess of laps, preventing me from floating upwards like a balloon and banging my head against the ceiling.  She is as uncompromising about this as Wolfie is about lying across thresholds, so again I have to believe that Bisou is on a divinely ordained mission to keep me grounded in the most literal sense.

The life change we have just been through--downsizing and embarking on what some call "a cruise on the river Styx"--has been a transition to boggle most minds.  But anchored to my reading chair by a snoozing Bisou, and with Wolfie guarding the nearest threshold, there's little for me to complain about.

How I Survived the Move

From the first conversation about how maybe it was time to leave the house on the hill, it only took us five months to move into our cottage in Wake Robin, near Lake Champlain.  Some people take years to complete the process of choosing and then moving to a retirement community, but we said, "Why prolong the agony?  Let's get it over with."

This was my husband's and my fourteenth move since the Summer of Love of 1967, and you'd think that all that practice would have made us into pros, but this was by far the hardest move of all.  Since we were swapping a 2400 square-foot house with ten closets plus attic, basement, and outbuildings, for a 1400 square-foot cottage with four closets, we had to get rid of most of our stuff.

You will be surprised to hear that during this period I was not my sweet unflappable self.  In fact the combined anxieties about disposing of truckloads of belongings, and getting it all done in time for the move turned me into a sort of emotional porcupine.

And when, weary and guilt-ridden after a day of packing and sorting and flinging quills at my spouse, I tried to take a break, the chaos around me made it hard to relax.  Unclassifiable objects mocked me from half-filled boxes;  the dogs, anxious and bored, followed me panting from room to room;  and there was no comfortable place to sit. At the rate I was going, when we finally arrived in Wake Robin I would have to go not into independent living, but into skilled nursing.

That was when the universe sent me the inspiration to  re-read War and Peace.  For $.99 Tolstoy's masterpiece wafted into my Kindle and wafted me away from my chaotic Vermont homestead and into 19th century Russia.

I quickly realized that, in the decades since I'd first read the book, either Tolstoy had become a much better writer or I had become a better reader.  My jaw fell open at the masterful characterizations--Natasha's childish arms;  Pierre's spectacles;  Princess Mary's timidity.  My preference for the characters had changed as well.  In my twenties I had had eyes only for the intense, handsome Prince Andre, but now it was plump Pierre's soul that captivated me.  And those battle scenes that had bored me almost to death I now found fascinating--in part because they confirmed my suspicion that there is no "art of war," just a lot of noise and confusion and sheer dumb luck, or lack of it.

The day the movers came, I hardly noticed, so immersed was I in the battle of Borodino.  And Napoleon's retreat from Russia got me through the first hectic twenty-four hours at the cottage.  But the best part of this second reading of War and Peace was being able to take refuge in Tolstoy's voice, which remained the same, both powerful and serene, throughout my travails.  For the last week in the old house, that voice was the only constant in my life, and every time I dove into the book I thought, "does Tolstoy know, wherever he is, how grateful I feel?"

Despite my porcupine impersonations--or perhaps because of them--the move went without a hitch.  In fact, when the movers first arrived, the driver went through the house with me--up to the top floor and down to the basement, out to the garage and the old milking room--and as he passed the piles of neatly packed and labeled boxes he whistled and said, "boy, you've really got things under control here!"  It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Here We Are

I finally found my drawing tools, so I made a picture of our cottage:

Legend:
1.  The Adirondacks
2.  Lake Champlain (visible only in winter)
3.  Weird little gingko
4.  My portable citrus orchard
5.  Grassy knoll mowed weekly by angels in human form

As you can see, my Vermont is still quite green...

Ta-Ta For Now

I guess I'll never be one of those heroic bloggers who manage to post every day no matter what is going on in their lives.

What is going on in my life right now is our impending move to a cottage at Wake Robin, a retirement community just south of Burlington, a stone's throw from Lake Champlain.

When I first envisaged this move, I thought I could keep up posting at least once a week, but I'm not  managing even that.  And it's not as if I don't have plenty to write about.  In fact, it's probably  the overabundance of topics that, as much as the sorting and packing, has kept me from posting.

Nothing prompts intensive soul searching like having to hold in your hands and make a decision about every single object in your house.  Some day I may write about all that has been going through my mind this winter and spring.  Paradoxically, this shedding of an old life and jumping into a new one requires the recklessness and optimism of youth, not to mention its energy.
But at present all I can think about is trolling liquor stores for empty cardboard boxes, keeping an eye on my dwindling stock of packing tape, and getting rid of the horrible odor that remains on my hands after a day wearing disposable gloves (I can't decide which I can tolerate better, to have my hands grimy with newsprint or smelling of rubber.)

So for now I'll go away from these pages, to return sometime in June when we're settled in our tiny abode in the northern reaches of my green Vermont.  I'm sure I'll have a couple of stories to tell.

The Nightmare Driveway

Our house is on the market now, and yesterday I was looking at the listing sheet from when we bought it almost ten years ago.  We must have had pretty good x-ray vision, to see past the oppressive 1980s wallpaper to the plain straightforward bones of the house.  And there was no need for x-ray vision on the view, which was, and has remained, lovely.

On the old listing sheet my husband and I had made short-hand notes to help us remember the house when we were back in Maryland deciding which place to buy.   A scribble in my handwriting reads, "close to farm with Belgian draft horses!!!"  below which my husband added, "long, nightmare gravel driveway."

That driveway gave us much pause.  We had heard stories about mythic Vermont winters, and we imagined ourselves marooned for months on top of our hill, barred from all contact with civilization by our nightmare driveway.

In the end, the view and the Belgians won the day, and we bought the house. 

The view never lost its appeal.  Even now, as I write surrounded by packing boxes, the view out of our tall windows makes me wonder what I ever did to deserve it.

On the other hand, the Belgians--a stallion, a mare and a gelding--remained something I have driven past year after year, admiring their creamy manes and their gold-brown coats, and their habit in bug season of standing nose-to-tail and acting as reciprocal fly swatters.  But I never met the horses personally, never asked their owner's permission to stand by the fence and draw those big heads, dinner-plate hooves, arched necks, curvy rumps.  I never even met the owners.

Surprisingly, the nightmare driveway turned out to be a breeze.  We had the bottom bit  regraded to avoid slithering out in icy weather, and after that, thanks to our conscientious "driveway guy," neither in the depths of winter nor in the worst of mud season were we prevented access to civilization.

The problem turned out to be the absence of civilization, which, ironically, is what I had craved when I decided to move here.  Reluctantly, I have come to admit during the last lonely decade on this hilltop that human contact is as important to me as sunsets and sunrises and birdsong and silent, snow-covered woods.

In our next move, I'm planning to remedy this issue.  In a place that offers over forty-five interest groups, from bee-keeping and maple sugaring to fiber arts--not to mention nearby Burlington and the University of Vermont--there is bound to be a tribe that will welcome me.

But I'm not counting on anything.  A nightmare of one kind or another is sure to appear.  It won't be the driveway this time, because it is short and will be maintained by the community, and it probably won't be lack of human contact.   But no matter how hard I try to anticipate every possible eventuality, something will pop up that I didn't expect. 

Maybe, instead of spending my energies planning and preparing, I would do better to practice breathing deeply, staying flexible, and giving up the comical illusion that I'm in control.

My Portable Orchard

Maybe it's because they are person-sized and their outspread branches look like arms reaching out, but ever since I planted them four years ago, I've grown attached to my apple trees.  They almost seem more like people than plants.  Year-round they stand bravely around the patio, first veiled in flowers, then covered with leaves, studded with fruit in the fall and alternately sleeping and shivering--like me--in winter.

I will hate to leave them behind when we move.  Sure, there will be room in our new micro-garden for an apple tree or two, but they won't be these trees, whom I planted and nursed and fussed over from infancy to their present lovely maturity.

Fortunately, I'll be able to take my stalwart Giuseppina, the potted fig tree (see last post), with me.  But that is not all.

The tiny potted Meyer Lemon that I bought last year gave birth to six outsize lemons that I soaked in vodka and a simple syrup to make a lovely limoncello.  This, and the glossy deep-green leaves, and the fragrance that made my head swim every time I walked by, turned me into a citrus grower of sorts.

I was in Albany on a freezing January day when, going into a nursery for a shot of plant energy, I found a Page Orange tree that had been trained to have an upright trunk and a rounded canopy, just like the ones in Versailles.  I promptly bought it--it was the only one in the store--and brought it home, where it perfumed our sunny porch.  Then its blooms faded and were replaced with multitudes of baby Page Oranges (actually a hybrid between a tangelo and a tangerine) that I mist and murmur to every day.

The next time I was in Albany--how could I not--I stopped by the same nursery, and found a Calamondin Orange. I had had one of these before.  Its scented blooms were succeeded by dozens of tiny bitter fruits that I didn't know what to do with.  But that was before the internet, which has many ingenious uses for Calamondin Oranges.  So I brought the little tree home.

Meanwhile, the Meyer Lemon, which I had pruned to within an inch of its life in the hopes of making it look less like a bush and more like a tree, recovered and started putting out blooms.  But all this was happening indoors, and my experience last year taught me that, although the plant may bloom and set fruit abundantly in the house, only the flowers that are fertilized outdoors tend to make it to harvest. 

I wanted to make more limoncello--lots of limoncello, in fact--but a single tree might not yield enough fruit at one time to make a significant batch.  So I ordered another tree, online.  It is on its way as I write. 

I am doing all this, mind you, while simultaneously carrying out a draconian purging of our worldly belongings.  It is a testimony to my spouse's saintliness that he has not objected to this paradoxical behavior on my part.  True, the citrus trees will spend the summer outside.  But the minute the temperature goes anywhere near freezing, probably around the beginning of October, those four trees will come into our wee cottage, there to be misted and watered and given special lights and get in our way until April or possibly May.

What can I say?  I can no longer keep goats or raise chickens or grow vegetables.  But I have to farm something, and I will pour as much love and attention on those potted citrus trees and on the fig Giuseppina as I did on Lizzy and Emma--the goats--and the hens and the eggplants, the peppers and the apple trees.