A Week in my Old Room

This week I'm visiting Sandhill Farm, the community I helped start in 1974 and was a member of until last summer.

As it happens, I'm staying in my old room, which has now been converted to a sewing space, making it an interesting mix of the familiar and the strange. My welcome here has been warm, and I've enjoyed a number of conversations on the front porch (Sandhill's favorite fair weather hangout spot).

In addition to treading water with email (the flood of which never stops), my visit is a potpourri of my many familiar things:

o  Playing duplicate bridge
The first night I was back I drove into Kirksville and played in the regular Wed evening duplicate game. I hadn't played since I was last in town (early June), but card playing is a lot like riding a bicycle, and my partner and I finished in a tie for first.

o  Preparing my divorce paperwork
Thursday I spent the morning with Ma'ikwe, going over our no-fault DIY divorce settlement. We now have a notarized document that we've both signed and I'll drop it off at the Circuit Court on Wednesday when I go into our county seat to pick up a rental car for the next leg of my fall odyssey.

While we were able to work everything out with minimal hassle, I can't focus on the failure of our marriage without invoking a cloud of sadness.

o  Making frames for María's ritual prints
One of the first things María told me about when I moved into her and Joe's house in June was that she was planning a major ritual for her birthday, Oct 3. As part of her shamanic training she'll be conducting a doming ceremony, which will help protect her home from inappropriate spirits (I don't think alcohol counts), maintaining the house as a sanctuary.

An aspect of this is installing eight pieces of original art that draw upon different spiritual traditions, to be affixed according the eight cardinal points of the compass. She had the art in hand, but needed to have it framed. After volunteering on the spot to do that for her, I quickly realized that I had no idea where in Chapel Hill I was going to get access to the woodworking equipment that I'd need. Then it occurred to me that I could do the job at Sandhill, where everything I needed was in one place, and I was familiar with all the tools.

So here I am, making eight 10.5"x13.5" frames out of walnut. I started Wednesday with raw lumber that had been air dried, and have now planed it, ripped it, shaped it with a router, beveled it with a table saw, put in a rabbet joint with a table saw, cut a joining dado with a radial arm saw, and sanded the pieces. Tomorrow I'll start gluing up, so that I can get everything assembled and oiled in time to drive the finished products east with me this coming Wednesday.

Though I'll be working with a community in Colorado Springs on María's brithday, my spirit will be thoroughly commingled with all eight pieces of art.

o  Visiting friends
As you might imagine there are plenty of people in the tri-communities of Rutledge that it's a pleasure to see while I'm in town. I've already been over to DR twice and will go again tomorrow, mainly to participate in Men's Group, which meets every Sunday at 7:30 pm until we're done.

o  Making tomatillo salsa
Monday I have a date with Frankie (a new Sandhill member and former intern) to process three five-gallon buckets of tomatillos—all of which go into making salsa, using a recipe that I pioneered years ago working off the advice of a Latina intern we had one summer, who passed along the secret of her Grandma Gutierrez: roast everything.

As food processing used to be one of my main jobs at Sandhill, it'll be fun to be back in the kitchen putting a little of the summer into jars (a la Greg Brown's grandma).

o  Cleaning out the old FIC Trailer
Last, I'll be devoting most of Tuesday to walking through the old FIC trailer, sorting stuff to be recycled from stuff to be archived. On a space available basis, I'll load the car with archive materials to be dropped off at the Center for Communal Studies, which is located on the campus of the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville—which I'll be driving right by on my way to the Twin Oaks Communities Conference.

• • •

So it's being a week filled with conversation, memories, and good work. I even have time for a little reading.

Bedroom Archeology

At Thanksgiving I began a grand experiment: living in the same household as my wife. 

Though we've been married for six-and-a-half years, this is the first time we've attempted this version of communal living. While I know most people will respond, "Duh," this is a radical step for us, requiring that at least one of us (in this case, me) give up a home that means a great deal. With Sandhill's blessing, I'm taking a leave of absence to try this out. If it doesn't work, Ma'ikwe can revive her plans (from July) to divorce me and I can return to Sandhill.

No sooner did we recover from the tryptophan overload of Turkey Day than we plowed into the archeological site that has been my bedroom at Sandhill for the last 20 years. Fortunately Ma'ikwe had set aside the week to mainly support me in the transition and the reorganization of Moon Lodge (her house at Dancing Rabbit where we now live), and she played a strong role in keeping me on task, and helped me sort things into four piles: a) move; b) give away; c) store; and d) trash.

While I'm only half done (there are at least two full days ahead), we've mostly cleaned out the closet, and have moved both the bed and desk. In the process I've already found two long-lost things that I knew were in the room but couldn't figure out where I'd placed them, and had lost hope of ever seeing again. It was like an early Christmas!

The first thing was a pair of small diameter rifflers with which I intended to sharpen the blade of our Univex grinder for shredding horseradish (which is incredibly hard on equipment, not just your nose). I figured the blades are expensive and it couldn't hurt to try sharpening what we had instead of springing for a new blade—but that theory only works if you don't lose the rifflers! I'd ordered them five years ago and couldn't recall where I'd put them to save my soul. It turned out they were in a bowl on my desk (underneath scads of insulated coffee sleeves) still safely inside their factory packaging. Whew!

The second miracle was coming across a box of butchering equipment (carefully sealed with packing tape and clearly labeled in my handwriting) alongside my desk (in an area I rarely venture to look at). It included a blade and grater plates for our meat grinder, a homemade locust pushing block (with a diameter barely smaller than the inside of the feed throat on the grinder), sausage casings, and a stuffing funnel. I'd been looking three years for that lot, and it was fortuitous to come across it right after cutting up three deer, most of which was destined to become burger.

While most of what I discovered was old and familiar, there were plenty of clothes I've never worn and have no idea how they got into my closet. Ma'ikwe was good about pushing me to let go of most of it. Often I'd touch something and it would trigger a story about its origin. Pretty quickly, Ma'ikwe figured out that she didn't need to pay attention to what I was saying; she could just nod occasionally as I went through the grieving process.

Sleeping in the Bed You Made
It was powerful sleeping for the last time with Ma'ikwe in the bed I'd made 38 years ago, from locally cut white oak. It was the bed in which both of my kids were conceived and holds a lot of positive juju for me. We disassembled it the next morning and put it back together at Moon Lodge—only to discover that Ma'ikwe's mattress was bigger than mine and didn't fit between the posts at the end of the bed. Oops! So, after a few deep breaths, I sawed off the posts and we were able to sleep there that night: my bed and Ma'ikwe's mattress, symbolic of the union of our lives.

Almost as important as the bed was moving my desk into Ma'ikwe's living room, so that I'd have a workplace that was reliably mine (heretofore it had been my laptop atop my lap in a chair near the wood stove). Ma'ikwe likes to bivouac on her couch, with her papers spread round her. I prefer a desk (or table) and now we're side by side, with easy sight lines of each other. Something of a his-and-hers living room.

While we've already hauled about six boxes of books over, there are at least that many still to go. Plus, we've hardly made a dent in my piles of paperwork, including a four-drawer filing cabinet. I'm seriously toying with shipping a bunch of the FIC material off to an archive facility (at the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville IN), rather than continue to haul it with me wherever I go. It's time to divest!

We managed without too much strain to shoehorn my clothes into the dresser and closet space that Ma'ikwe freed up for me, we folded my modest cooking supplies into Moon Lodge's spacious kitchen, and we were even able to find a home for my best-in-county eclectic liquor collection (through the judicious use of the loft space above the bathroom). But I have no idea where all those books are going to go, even after we build three more rows of shelves along the south wall of the guest room.

The Ties that Bind
Last week, as part of the new world order, we had a conversation about the division of Moon Lodge domestic chores that included the two of us, plus Jibran, Ma'ikwe's 16-year-old son. Jibran is seriously thinking of trying to enter college next fall to study philosophy, which could mean that the next 8-9 months are his last as a regular fixture in our domestic scene. Before he departs, I have a personal agenda to get Jibran's skill set beefed up to the point where he can: a) consistently start a fire in the wood stove; b) cook a basic meal without burning the food or telling us how incompetent he is; and c) tie basic knots (I figure if you master the square knot, clove hitch, bowline, and tautline hitch, you can handle 99% of the situations where knowing the right knot can save your ass). All of these things will, I believe, make a bigger difference in his life than being about to explain nuances in epistemology. He'll just have to trust me on that.