journal

I picked dinner, a two-quart salad, half lettuce, half spinach, a few beet greens. As I eat, a deer gallantly strides into my back yard. She grazes as she walks, nibbling on lawn-salad. It is dusk, and her coat glows, rusty against the tree-filled background. Craning my head to see around all the branches, it occurs to me that I need to trim back these trees. I need to be able to see out.

These were Albert’s trees. He planted hundreds of them, including a long row of evergreens by the road. When he planted those, he used the power lines overhead as his guide to keep them straight. As they grew up, someone asked him, “Why did you plant the trees under the power lines? They’re going to grow up and someone will have to either cut their tops off or move the line.”

Albert didn’t care. He said he wouldn’t be around when that happened.

He was right. Years after Albert died and his wife sold the house, my parents confronted the tree issue. Today, the trees stand tall, and the power line stretches underground.

My parents stopped over tonight, both of them, separately. My mother came over first—without calling—because my father was watching car races on television. My father came over because, I think, he missed us. So we sat in my living room, chatted about the scarcity of rope (I want to build a swing), about the peep house, about where I might find a wood cooking stove. (As it turns out, there’s one on my farm.)

I’m thinking about staying here, building a home, seeing if I can make a go of chicken farming with my five peeps. I still intend to travel, but I don’t think my ticket will be one-way. Perhaps Thailand for December, Central America again in February. Enough sunshine to keep me alive and warm, but not so much time away as to have to divest myself of the peeps, my kitty. (Whom no one seems to want, anyway.)

Kitty must have extrasensory powers, because she just looked up from an important task: cuddling with my new leather gloves. She holds them with her paws, smooshes her face into the cow hide, breathes in new-glove scent.

Living here has been far better than I could have imagined. I savor the peacefulness. Tonight it is cool; a slight breeze ruffles the leaves. Pheasants cluck in the distance, little finches flutter around the feeder in my tree. The doe has disappeared, but a pair of rabbits have taken her place. (They’re lucky I’m in a robe, and not feeling like turning them into soup.)

I positioned my bed under the window so that at night, I see stars before I dream. Beside the bed, on a plaster pedestal, sits my jasmine plant, and the blossoms open late at night, releasing their perfume. After years of neglect, my crystal vases are now filled--bouquets of peonies perch on the kitchen table, beside the bathtub, on the vanity in my bedroom. My orchids thrive here.

And so do I.

My days are filled with hard work. Some days I work from nine in the morning until ten at night, not at a desk, but in the yard, or in the garden, or in my home, building, fixing, sawing, nailing, painting. Last week I cut 2 by 6 boards for the frame of the peep patio. (Some people call it a “run,” but mine is a patio. On a related note, the peeps will also have a library.) All of the lumber I’m using is recycled, scrap wood that my father has saved over the years, piled into the barn on my little farm. The 2 by 6 boards I used to frame the house were from an old deck. The ones I’m using for the exterior, though, must be older. They actually measure 2 by 6. Nowadays, 2 by anything boards aren’t actually 2 by whatever. They’re 1 1/2 by something kind of close to what they’re supposed to be. I measured the boards I’m using. Most of them are a very generous two inches by six inches by sixteen feet.

I counted the boards in the barn, decided that I would have enough lumber to make the patio 14 feet long. From there, I used the Golden Section, which I recently read about. American Heritage defines it as “[a] ratio, observed esp. in the fine arts, between the two dimensions of a plane figure or the two divisions of a line such that the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two, a ratio of roughly three to five.” That doesn’t really make sense to me, so I’m glad Michael Pollan spelled it out in A Place of My Own. As noted there, the ratio, 1:1.618, isn’t observed just by the fine arts; it also shows up all over in nature, both “in the elevation of the Parthenon and the wings of a butterfly; in the façade of Notre-Dame and the spiral of a seashell.” Pollan isn’t sure, though, “whether to file the marvels of the Golden Section under Profound Truths of the Universe or Pot-Smokers’ Koans.” In the end, Pollan builds his cabin in the woods (for which the book is titled) using the ratio, which makes it both a profound truth and pot-smokers’ koan.

If it’s good enough for Pollan’s architect, it’s good enough for my peeps. And so, the patio will be 14 by about 8 and a half feet. The ladies will have about 120 square feet of outdoor space, which equals 24 square feet per peep. I intend to plant some shrubs for future shade, some morning glories for instant shade, some greens for summer salads. And alfalfa. There’s some in the ditch, so I’ll just transplant it, offer them instant green protein.

Besides building a peep house and managing my garden (it measures a generous 32 by 40 feet), I keep busy with various other projects. Today I cut a new shelf for my bookshelves. I rearranged wall art upstairs, taking down some of the wildlifey stuff and putting up some pieces that don’t feature dogs or birds or deer.

The other day I baked bread, three loaves, multi-grain. While the dough raised, I headed outside to sunbathe. It was 90 that day, so the dough was happy in the garage, and I was happy on the lawn, stretched out on a towel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover nestled in the grass in front of me. (Oh, how I wouldn’t mind having the cheeky gamekeeper nestled before me.) I’d selected a corner of the yard that isn’t visible from the road. Thus, off came my top. We shall see how frequently google’s satellite images are updated.

My parents seem pleased with me being here; my mother loves having help with projects. Together, we tackled the kitchen, stripping wallpaper, priming the bare plywood beneath (gah!), texturing, and painting. Next we’ll do the dining room. I chose the paint color: Merlot. It will be convenient for all those times I spill on the wall.

I read here. In the last week, a novel, a play, and two non-fiction books (both by Michael Pollan). I’ve also read most of a very outdated Reader’s Digest book, an oblong tome lent to me by a neighbor, a book that tells you how to do everything. How to make cheese, how to build a log cabin, how to raise goats, how to forge nails. (To the latter headline, I answered with, “Don’t. They sell them at the hardware store.”)

I’ve spent the last half-year of blissful unemployment learning a lot of these tasks. Leatherworking? Done it. Raising chickens? Perfected, minus the dog incident. Cheesemaking? Let me show you a fine mozzarella. Did I tell you about my soap- and candle-making? I make lovely tapered candles, fine soap.

I was speaking with an acquaintance the other day, and he marveled at the recent change in my life. From corporate litigator to chicken farmer, gardener extraordinare. How? Why?

I spent four years in college, studying English, writing about poems and stories and novels. I spent two years in graduate school, researching and writing about linguistics and rhetoric. I spent one year teaching college composition, reading students’ essays about popular culture. I spent three years in law school, studying arcane rules, writing substanceless footnotes. And then I spent a year practicing law at a large firm. There, I sat at a desk in a room that had windows, but not ones that looked outside. If I turned around from my desk, my view changed from that of a blank wall to that of the dining room of the firm’s cafeteria. I watched as partners sat with other partners, eating uninspired food, seldom smiling, never laughing. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. I ate at my desk.

Besides attending social events (more aptly described as firm-sponsored booze-fests), I did little but research issues of law and write about them. Sometimes I reviewed documents. Document review is best described with a well-worn cliché: it’s like watching paint dry. Except that, as a lawyer, you look at each fleck of paint and ask yourself, “Relevant? Not relevant? Flag for further review?” It is the kind of work that makes being a checkout lady at Wal-Mart seem like an appealing career choice.

One might say that I was just dissatisfied with my particular work, that being at a big firm was alienating, that I would feel differently about practicing law were I to do something different. To which I say: “I am doing something different. Would you like to meet my chickens?”

This is Lola. And that little one is Edna. The two hawk-looking ones are Stella and Lolita. And the one that just fluttered up to your shoulder, that’s Rosie. She’s friendly.

A former boss (and current friend) described the work I left behind, saying that we’ve "slaughtered forests of trees to create inane but letter-perfect piles of paper regarding the history of squeeze-top bottles or whether directors took the right notes at a meeting or whether a hairdryer should have said ‘Warning - don't immerse in water’ instead of ‘Caution - don't immerse in water’ on page 17 of the instructions.” As such, he was wondering what I was producing these days. His actual words were more like, “Where’s the fucking writing?”

I was drinking tea when I read his email, sitting in my mother’s sun room, patio doors open, birds chirping, the scent of lilacs wafting in. I laughed, and then I smiled. And I wrote some kind of heartfelt response, to which I never received a reply.

Perhaps my life here is too idyllic, too filled with reading and writing and peep-house constructing. Another friend wrote and said that he hopes life is as good as I describe in my writing.

Which makes me wonder: Do people not believe me? Do they think this is an elaborate ruse? Am I Blanche DuBois, telling grand tales about the plantation?

I re-read my posts, asked myself if I’ve left things out. I haven’t written about the wind, about the terrible gusts that tear across the prairies. I haven’t bitched about mowing. (Except to my mother, who earns my ire every time I discover a newly-mown acre or two, wide swaths of unused, unseen land which she insists on keeping neatly trimmed.)

I’ve left out the smells of the barn, wild, musty smells accompanying piles of poo that seem too large to have been created by four-legged creatures. I’ve left out my compost pile, which smells, quite unfortunately, of civic cat. Rotten ones, no less. I’ve left out the mosquitoes, their relentless and un-sexy attempts to get in my pants, my shirt, my hat.

But I’ve also left out the big sky, the way the horizon seems to have broadened here. I’ve haven’t mentioned the pristine silence that envelops me at night. The moon, how I get to watch her fatten, then slim down. Thunderstorms. Laundry on the line. Writing letters, by hand, in the morning. Sweet-smelling sawdust. The way leather gloves conform to your hand. Open-window baths in the evening, often by candlelight, nearly always with a glass of wine. Yogurt, creamy and delicious, which I make every couple weeks. Coffee with my mother, outside, as we watch the peeps peck at bugs.

I’ve left out how good it feels to be exhausted at night. Not just my mind, tired of inane lawyerly issues, questions about poison pills (which aren’t as interesting as they sound) or expert witness testimony. But my body, drained of energy. My wrist, aching from hammering. My back, knotted up by working with knotted wood. My legs, tired. Just tired.

I sleep well. And in the morning, I am well. My body is tanned, my muscles are taut, my mind is sound. I’m eager to do a bit of geometry, to design the rafters for the peep patio. I’m anxious to build a spot for the rest of my books. I look forward to the days ahead, to the work that awaits me.

Which is, I admit, something I seldom (perhaps never) felt as a lawyer.

Some critical theorists argue that nothing is real, that reality is merely a construct. Perhaps this is so. But still, real-ness must be a continuum. Some things are more real than others. Some work is more real than other work. And this: this work is far more real than what I did a year ago.

At the end of the day as a lawyer, I could point to my bank statement, and say, “There! I made X dollars.”

Here, at the end of the day, I can point to my chickens, to their home, still under construction. To shelves of books, to a neatly mown lawn, to beds of flowers, to a garden filled with salads and meals to come. This, this is meaningful work. (My bank account stays largely the same. Interest flows in; my meager expenses filter out.)

I have no cellular phone, no bills for cable or internet. I grow much of what I eat. Today I studied a book on weeds, trying to learn what edible greens grow here in the wild. My peep-house will be spacious, well-insulated, and will cost $35. That’s for the solar light, a handful of 4 inch wood screws, a star-shaped drill bit. Everything else was in the barn.

And, yes, it takes hard work. Perhaps half of my construction time is really deconstruction time, time spent hammering and prying six-inch nails out of hard wood. Ripping apart barn debris. “What was this?” I wonder. “A fence?”

In the end, the peep-house will be, like Michael Pollan’s woodland hut, a place of my own, a place for the peeps—and I—to enjoy. Unlike Pollan’s hut, though, the separate components of my place will each have a history, a story to tell. The framing, from a fence and from my sister’s deck. The siding, from a wall in my grandparents’ basement. The door, from my favorite room in the house my dad grew up in, the house in which I played as a child.

Without my intervention, the peeps would be elsewhere, on someone else’s farm. The construction materials would still be in the barn, in a pile, adorned with monstrous piles of poo. Framed, as it is, in 2 by 6 wood, my peep house is more than an idea: it is a thing, a new part of the world. Not permanent. But certainly hard to deconstruct.

Here I have found a place to think. To write. Or, if I choose, to not think, and to not write. Here I am free, free to live, free to work, free—blissfully free—to not work, if I so choose.