A Reason to Live
At 7:30 this morning, I made a batch of pumpkin donut holes that turned out like crap. I followed the recipe precisely but they still turned out gummy and almost tasteless. They aren’t even good enough to lure a raccoon into the live trap under the maple tree outside the kitchen window. I won’t be offended if the chicken turns her beak up at the one I tossed off the front porch. She’ll eat worms and grubs and bury her little face in the crumbly soil for a tick or two, but even she has a “never-gonna” list. I respect that.
The donut recipe was not on my long weekend’s long list of What I Am Going To Accomplish Before I Go Back To Work On Tuesday, drafted on my lunch hour last Thursday, and modified (read “inflated”) as Friday became Sunday afternoon became Monday at 3:00a.m. when it was too hot to sleep. In no particular order, here are the other non-donut tasks I set for myself to usher in the unofficial start to summer:
Clean out the studio.
Sort and downsize all the fabric in the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet on wheels in the corner of the room.
Move Aunt Louise’s armless and ornately carved oak chair (also on casters) from in front of the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet to the upstairs guestroom.
Make 60 face masks.
Bake six mini chocolate brownie bundt cakes.
Put the potatoes and onion sets in the ground just to the south of the cattle panel trellises I installed seven years ago.
Wash all the throw rugs in the house. All of them.
Finish a new blog about the backstories behind select items from my ongoing list of things I’m grateful for, started on February of 2015.
Make sun-blocking curtains for the west-facing living room windows out of old white cotton EMS blankets still miraculously white after retrieving them from the trash bin behind a local volunteer outpost.
Pull all the weeds along the ridge, especially the ones under the bird feeders where the kittens hide with their little faces looking hopefully upward.
Run a load of donations to the Goodwill four miles away.
Pick enough wild garlic mustard to make pesto, and then make pesto.
Clear the weeds in the old chicken run and reinforce the coop in readiness for a new small flock of layers.
You don’t see pumpkin donut holes anywhere on that list, do you? It just kept evolving as the weekend unfolded, and, undaunted, I pushed forward with such high hopes and a dreamy look on my face. It didn’t matter than I’m not thirty anymore (or forty, or fifty, or…well, let’s just stop there, shall we?) and I like sleeping past 5:00a.m. now, or that we still don’t have an outdoor spigot to hook up the garden hose and water the raised beds 60 yards away from the house (picture a series of 5-gallon buckets filled from the tap in the mudroom, then carried to the edges of the garden plot, emptied and refilled oh, maybe three times). I completely trusted that a recipe for baked donuts would equal or exceed in its outcome one requiring a vat of oil and much frying and transferring those little crispy spheres of pumpkin wonderfulness to the paper-toweled plate next to the stove. And then I’d wash the dough and cinnamon sugar from my fingertips and pin the pleats into those 60 face masks. All before lunch.
From the list above, I think I crossed off maybe three items. At this point, it doesn’t matter which ones they are, as the final hours of our long weekend evaporate, and Patrick and I flip a coin to decide who’s going to be chef this evening. I make pretty good oven-baked steak fries, seasoned with rosemary and garlic (the pantry curtains are closed indefinitely on any future donut escapades, thank goodness). We got a lot done, but scratch our heads at what, exactly, and how. Anything unfinished before the sun slips below the cottonwoods to the west will be waiting for us on our next long weekend. Plus all of their farm project friends. It never ends, ever.
Implied somewhere in that to-do list was a “once-and-for-all” clause that keeps getting run over by reality. Perhaps you know how this goes: once I empty that cabinet of all it’s fabric, reorganize it according to color and yardage and put it back in rainbow order, I’ll keep it that way, honest. I believe it with my whole soul, that the beautiful bare brown patch of soil that I just cleared of its weeds for an hour before breakfast will remain clear until sometime in late August. Then my curiosity pulls my attention down the hill to the creek where the old tire swing still dangles from the knob of a branch on the sycamore we affectionately call the “Old Man Tree” (its silhouette just after sundown looks like an old man bowing his head in deference to all at his feet. It’s touching and towering all at once), and I find a salamander or a stone speckled with flecks of quartz, and the weeds laugh behind my back as they regrow everything I just ripped from the ground eight weeks ago. Once-and-for-all is elusive at best, a myth I keep chasing, joined by its twin sisters Someday and Later. I continue to invite them to this party of a life we’re living here at Naked Acres, and they insist they’ll come, but they never do. Six years ago, I promised I wouldn’t buy anymore fabric, but do thrift store cotton shirts count? I was planning to make them into smart-looking throw pillows for the couch, all crisp in their blue-and-white stripes. I did get as far as disassembling them from their sleeves and collars (save the buttons because, well, just in case…) and then a friend showed me how to do bookbinding. Ahh well…we have enough throw pillows anyway. A writer can never have too many handmade journals.
The weekend I planned and the weekend I experienced aren’t miles apart, but neither are they holding hands. Living in an old farmhouse on a land-locked rectangle of paradise has taught us to be more adaptable than I would have thought possible. Our best-laid plans, with or without mice and men, often fall beneath the weight of what’s more important and right in front of us. Heavy rains rearrange the shape of the creek, stalwart trees lay themselves down at the behest of a dry hurricane wind in September, we uncover a neglected set of raised garden beds we built during a long-ago Memorial Day weekend and decide to give them another life. The list changes, the agenda turns an unexpected corner, and—thank God for our curiosity—we turn with it, setting our shoulders to a new wheel of skills promised, harvests hoped for, and recipes untried. The laundry still gets hung on the line and Aunt Louise’s ornately carved oak chair will eventually make it up the stairs to it’s new place in front of the window with a view of the seven rescued arbovitaes we planted back in March (see? “Someday” actually came for those little trees; they sat in pots on the porch for most of the winter).
With each season that arrives on our doorstep, we’ve learned a tiny sliver more about setting our sights without being too attached to them. It’s not about simply being flexible. It’s about a more deeply-set surrender to a rhythm that brings the birds to the feeders when the sun has just crested the eastern horizon, a power that pushes burdock through the clay-rich soil and pulls the creek waters over and around the exposed roots of an osage orange tree. When we signed the mortgage, we agreed to notice these things and tend to them when they needed us.
If we never do anything else but that, we can fall asleep knowing a solid purpose to our lives.
Donuts are optional.
