a list

Today, I decided I want 3×2 raised  beds at my new house (which I am moving into at! count it: 12 days) so I went to a sawmill, bought two long pine boards, measured them, sawed them, and nailed them together. It was the most satisfying experience of my young life (okay, not quite, but still really great). Steve, my Zen Beekeeper friend, helped me. BUT I did build it alone. And going into a sawmill wearing pigtails is a very empowering experience. I highly recommend it.

DIY has inadvertently become a mantra this summer, not because I am incredibly handy, but because everyone around me is. The other day I went and collected sour apples from the tree down the road and slaved over four cans of my first slightly brown, mottled-looking Apple Sauce. They are not the glamorous beacons of pioneer capability that I would have liked to have produced, but I plunged into the task without a pressure cooker or tongs (or anyone wise around to give advice), so it was a miracle that the lids popped at all. Mercifully, at a going-away potluck I received canning tools and my canning adventures can only go uphill. In retrospect, I can say that this summer I have: learned to drive stick-shift, planted and taken care of my own vegetables, rock-climbed, milked various animals, herded pigs, harvested honey and used many mechanisms that go “whirrr!” and can cut off toes. I worked on farms and picked berries until my hands bled blue with juice and sweat…and then went directly to the gas station every week and used that money for gas (which, is a humbling trajectory). Also, I fell deeply in love with a baby goat. I did most of these things very badly (fallen in love with a goat excepted) but did, along the way, discover things I love doing. I’m already over-ambitiously plotting ways I can do more things for myself at school. Raised Lettuce Beds are my first start. Hopefully, Bonnie and Clyde, the doom-named herbs of last year, are not indicative of my independent growing skills.

And yes, I know that sustainability is a trendy word. But being here and watching the way people around me live, I’ve learned that trying to live in a more sustainable way requires sacrifice and isn’t easy, but that it is doable and can create a great deal of joy. Striving to accomplish things by your own hands, or the hands of your neighbor, is a good way to live. Next year, Susan and Franklin want to try to live completely off the land and not buy anything from the grocery store (adios, Ingalls!) and I’m already jealous of next year’s interns.

Miscellaneous:

+ I really like these rescued old photographs (credit: Miss Moss). Favorites: the kissing couple, rad girl on a pony and the couple pretending to fly. Also, the girl with the giant bow that is smirking. Don’t you just want to be friends with all of them?

+I probably should be apprehensive about admitting this, but throwing caution to the wind: I really like Vanessa Carleton’s new album. Like this song. She doesn’t want to anybody’s bride! That’s great! I’m not really sure what she does want, but I’ve still listened to this song…a lot.

+ Ever since I saw this one woman at yoga that had perfect mint-green toenails, I have been a goner for questionably bright toenail polish. I’m never going back, even when I’m an old woman and it is twice as tacky. Up next: this color. 

+ I can’t stop making (and eating) chocolate-zucchini dishes. The kitchen is exploding! No. More.

+As I type, a wren is making a nest above my head. It is the cutest, noisiest wren of them all. But really: how do birds make nests? It looks complicated. I’ve also been really stuck lately on how Dehumidifiers work. How can a machine suck moisture out of the air and turn it into water? How? These things keep me up at night.

+My sister Elisabeth has written a brave post all about our far-away past of the more Amish sensibility (nee, denim dresses). Finally, a good description of our pioneer childhood!! It almost makes our past look hip, which–though it was good–hip it was not. And Elisabeth is so right: who doesn’t love a good BBC Amish drama?

+Snacks of great authors (New York Times). F. Scott Fitzgerald liked canned apples and meat? Gross, but definitely something I needed to know.

+And while we’re at it, great authors and their typewriters (Lost). Hi, Hemingway in front of a dramatic cloud front!

We, the garden team, have striven hard to create Asheville’s very best tomatoes the past 7 weeks, pruning them, tying them, sanitizing ourselves every time we touch them and in general, guarding them like Henry V’s one male heir. And they are here! And they are perfect! Especially with salt and pepper. Zaina is coming in a few days, Jessica is back, Sarah is almost back and, by the swimming pond up the hill, there are new kittens. Could life really be any sweeter?

and here goes a long one

Here’s a bit more about where I live this summer: turn right at the mailboxes, up the long gravel driveway to that one tidy house surrounded by chickens and sunflowers. There are always swimming towels cloaking the porch railing and leftover tubs of potatoes blocking the door and a wooden bowl filled with very specific napkin rings: if you see any of these things, you’re in the right place. I live with four other adults, none of whom I had ever met before I moved in, but nine weeks later they are a family to me. We each have a night to make dinner and a list of chores, a (highly contested) system of dishwasher-loading and streaks of nightly card-playing. Whenever anyone tells a story or piece of information, it goes through the cycle at least 15 times before it dies out of the conversation, and when anyone does anything slightly out of character (“WHAT YOU AREN’T GOING SWIMMING WITH US? WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU GO?”) it is a shock to the house system. We do almost everything together. Last night, for example, Franklin and Susan decided it was time that Lindsay and I learned to drive stick shift, so we took the truck and car down to a farm road. Taylor and Kelley, not to be left out, hopped into the back and laughed at us (and when Chris, a farm intern down the road, got home he just brought a cold beer out and leaned against the mailbox as we drove down the road, the truck jerking violently and the smell of burnt tires wafting out). It’s a small town.

But perhaps a better word besides family is community. These people are not related to me by blood and I have only known them for one season; there is nothing permanent about our arrangement: so for the present, they are my community, and that is a very rare and precious thing to have. There are four main people that I see when I first wake up and before I go to bed, but there is also Lindsay, the Week-Long intern, and Walker the Meat Farmer and Cameron his Homesteading Girlfriend and Blake the Townie, all the neighbors, and everyone else that comes through the house at a given moment. Living together, every flaw and quirk is noticed, and I am constantly humbled by the parts of myself that surface when living in an environment like this (but also when just…living). I talk too much when I get excited and interrupt other people,  I leave dishes under couches and put the granola top on wrong; when I plant seeds I am lazy and plant them crooked. I am needy; I am irritable. Also, it has recently come up for discussion that I apparently steal people’s plates when they aren’t finished and eat off them (note: I have no recollection of this).

But most of all, living within community has made me realize how little faith is a part of my daily life and how limited my definition of grace is.

The past few weeks I’ve been accidentally running into these conversations about faith. It certainly isn’t because I run towards them with my hands up in the air, because faith hasn’t felt like something I’ve openly gravitated toward this summer. It’s a good thing, as Megan says, that when I stop thinking about God, he doesn’t simply disappear. It shows how small my grasp of God is, that I think of him as if his existence depended on the amount of time I spend thinking of him (which is very little, compared to the amount of time I spend thinking about, for instance, what’s for dinner). Luckily, when I stop thinking about my Dad, he doesn’t just stop existing, and God, of course, is no different. He just is, whether or not I am small enough to comprehend Him.

As these conversations about God have happened,  I’ve found myself becoming so envious of my friend’s curiosity about the gospel. Curiosity is such a beautiful place to be in. Born, not just in the Bible Belt, but yee gad, into the Presbyterian Bible Belt; my parent’s bookshelf was never lacking in C.S Lewis, praying before a meal was as common as breathing and I can go into almost any church in North Carolina and play the six-degrees-0f-pastor-knowing and find a common denominator. Of course, this is also community and also beautiful, but it has also made things easy for me. I become not curious, I become not astonished by grace. Sometimes, I think it would be better to not believe in God at all, then to just go through the ordinary motions of my day as if God or faith or the big picture didn’t matter. Because it does; whether or not you believe it or don’t or haven’t connected all the dots. Any elemental belief I have in the universe ultimately affects the way I do, or don’t, choose to live my life. How easily I forget that!

The grace I give to and receive from my immediate community–for eleven more days!–matters. Susan talks a lot about being in community with land as well as people, and being in a garden every day for a summer, I begin to understand this. The Lord’s Acre is the most beautiful garden I have ever been in, but as Lindsay pointed out, the beauty of a community garden is that you have to remove your self-absorption from your efforts. The effort I extend to planting and taking care of things, ultimately comes out in a harvest, which isn’t intended for me. The food is for the food pantry, the moms that come into the garden; the welcome table. But even when I try to not be selfish or lazy in my gardening, any harvest, any really good-looking squash or row of beans, is an act of mercy. Agriculture is not an inherently natural act, and to receive anything from the ground is a gift. Grace does not mean that I will not mess up (and maybe leave my dishes under the couch again tomorrow, or mess up a friendship or do any of sinful things that come naturally to me) and to live under the shadow of that fear and guilt would be wrenching. But what I am learning that it does mean is that what and where and who I am given is an act of grace. And, as with the concept of a community garden, my trying to be better and plant rows of less crooked lettuce cannot be out of fear of punishment, but should be because what I’m doing is ultimately a gift and has some kind of result that affects the good environment around me. There is a certain understanding about grace, here, that had never quite clicked before I came: being here on earth is grace so therefore we should take care of it; being with others is grace so therefore we should take care of them. And that’s a whole new definition of sustainability, and community, to me.

signs & wonders

“I think of Bees like I think of a Canary in a Coal Mine: when the most fragile members of creation stop singing, the rest of ecology is in trouble. And the bees are definitely disappearing.” 

Bees are wonders. I like them.

But, according to my friend Steve who is a beekeeper, they’re also a sharp ecological warning sign; the canary in the coal mine that dies first because of what it is exposed to. The other day, I was lucky enough to get to sit down and talk to him about his thoughts on bees and plants and people and the relationship between all three. It was supposed to be an oral interview but the tape messed up (grr!). Still, it was a fascinating conversation (Steve is convinced of the connection between pesticides and disappearing bee populations) and I was so glad to be educated, even just a tiny bit in it. I really want to watch this documentary about bees.

And as if in direct response to my baby-fever, the Nannying Babies (all six of them today) were all out of sorts and #4 become totally unraveled after his plea for his 5th snack of the afternoon was turned down. He yelled for two hours. Back to being young and fancy free!

PS: I get to get up early and milk GOATS tomorrow! Goats, goats, goats. I might sneak one back to Chapel Hill with me.

PPS: a little bit obsessed with Ray LaMontagne’s new album.

(picture from the garden)

part 2: baby fever

I have a confession to make: I get baby fever. Like, real bad.

This, of course, is old news. It shouldn’t have to be a confession, but then again, I’m not even 21 (but-two-more-months-and-I-will!) and that is not exacccctly the kind of thing you say on a first date (okay, or second, or third) or around a circle of  my more ambitious pre-med women friends, or even around real mothers. But I think it to myself. Of course, I’m not going to go have a baby. Don’t worry. I guess my life list is pretty flexible, but I’m not about to go off and settle down in a cabin and have 3 sets of twins like I had planned to when I was 9 (this, before I had wrapped my mind around the entire strange concept of where babies exit the womb, and how gosh darn painful that must be. It still blows my mind to think about it, so I try not to).

But I will say this: sometimes I do want that. Especially this summer, where my world revolves around nurturing things. Here is how it goes: I get up in the morning, and go to the garden and say good-morning to the lavender, baby beets and tangled beans. I’m in the garden for about 4 hours, and then I go cook vegetables and walk over the hill to go nanny two adorable 4-year olds and two adorable 1-year olds (and depending on the day, add two 6-year olds to the mix) for another 4 hours. They’re the kind of kids I want to have some day: overalls and dress-up clothes stained with dirt, happy to play with nothing but sticks and kittens, independent but still content to rock with me in the hammock while the sun changes the sky. At night, I water more plants and then go take my tea out to the cows and baby foals in the pasture and say goodnight. On Friday mornings, I get to hang out with even more kids when they come for the kid garden class, and run squealing through the bean tunnel and crush herbs together, trying to decide what everything smells like. It’s such fun.

Naturally, in this environment, I have those moments where I think I want to be like these low-key moms who carry their babies around in slings and make soap. Babies. Right now. Forget college! Forget grad school! Forget a husband! And then, I remember that I read way too many hip mom blogs on a daily basis (no, really: way too many) and mothering is not all soap-making and baby slings. Someday, I do want that. But first I want to be in college. And I mean, really be in college. I want to be present, and involved, and curious. And I want to live abroad for awhile, too. Maybe teach abroad like my sister, maybe do that whole Peace Corps thing. I want to be with my best friends, and challenge myself and learn all the names of the trees and be around wise people. I want to get my MFA. I want to find things to write about that matter, in a way that matters. I want to live in the country, and farm more, and get bigger muscles and the kind of confidence that comes from waking up early and knowing how to identify cow diseases (I can’t name any cow diseases now, but a girl can dream). And I want to live in the city, too, and work hard and learn the subway system and be with passionate people who love God and care about the world. I want to be a Doula at some point and actually understand the mechanics of, the whole baby exiting the womb thing. Obviously, like everyone else, I want to work for NPR. And maybe, sometime in there, find someone I really love and get married. See? There’s lot’s left to do.

Beginning my 20’s the clock does turn on a bit more for that desire to take care of things, and I’ve learned to reconcile to that facet of being a woman instead of fighting it. I know this isn’t the same for everyone: I have friends who don’t ever want to have children, and that’s okay, too, because that’s just another calling out of many. But for me, this summer, the nurturing just comes with a desire to be a better woman and take care of the things that I have right now: my body, my friends, whatever ailing potted plants I tote around with me. Nurturing can mean many things besides baby fever, although that happens to be on my mind right now.

But for now, I want to just enjoy a summer spent being able to take care of things and not think about anything else. It’s a gift to have the opportunity to. I was talking to Leah, a campus minister at Warren Wilson the other day, and rambling on about college and anxieties and a list for the semester. “Hey Sarah.” she interrupted. “Where are your feet?” I looked down. “Uhh, in the garden.” and she smiled, that Warren-Wilson-Campus-Minister-smile. “EXACTLY.”  And it was a good reminder, about baby-fever, but also for when I begin day-dreaming about the 100,000 other things I want to do before I die. It’s a good reminder to not let my mind drift off to the scent of other countries and GPAs and grad school lists. Because she’s right. My feet, at least for 4 more weeks, are here. And that’s where they’ll stay.

part one: dog fever

And how are Summer Dogs #3 and #4, you may ask?

I know you’ve been dying to know.

To put it in Dr. Seuss language, they are as different as different can be. I’m house-sitting both for the month. Summer Dog #3 is small, vivacious, young and charming (where my bias toward her begins) whereas Summer Dog #4 is large, depressed old and un-charming (where my bias against her begins). I would like to say that I am an impartial dog-sitter with love for all creatures, great and small, depressed and otherwise, but I’m not. Summer Dog #4, despite having a charming country life, does not know how to handle attention and, when given any, yelps with birthing sounds and shoves her bear-like body against you in a kind of passive attack. True, Summer Dog #3 has been a bit of a hassle to watch: she earnestly believes the world (nee, Fairview) is her oyster and wanders from farm to farm, relative to relative, and unfortunately, gated community to gated community, which is why I came back to find a ticket from the sheriff on my door. Whoops. I decided the natural decision was just to take her everywhere (garden, home, nannying, fun) with me, which I did all last week, except that she gets terribly car sick every ride and throws up over everything. At first, I innocently thought that the suggestion was to roll the windows down, except that she jumped out the window while I was driving and I did not reclaim her until Walker called me to say she was out, and I had to go meekly to the farm and have 4 farmers watch me and laugh while I ran around trying to catch her. A leash, I thought, a leash will solve all my problems and a neighbor kindly gave me one. At the garden, Summer Dog #3 remained quiet and docile where I had tied her to a picnic table while some potential banking-donors toured the garden, but only because she was quietly snipping her way out of it toward freedom, and the corn patch (also, she eats my clothes). Despite these major character flaws, I really love this dog. She lets me pick her up, and licks my face, and greets me joyfully every morning, the terrors of car rides all but forgotten.

Both dogs have this in common, however: they both turn into horrible ogres when I feed them, attacking each other and me and the unfortunate puppy chow I was ignorant enough to bring into their lives.

But I still want a dog.

I was a bit grumpy this weekend (note: I really DO get grumpy) and have decided that it was all because I got up after 8 both days. My five previous roommates (respectively, Elisabeth, Emily, Allie, Kim and Maggie) might be doubtful of this supposition, but after the first 10 minutes, I am a much happier person for getting up early. My solution: get up at 5:45 every day and go running. Skeptical? Just watch, now that my unrealistic expectations are on the internet. After all, there’s way too much to look forward to in a week: getting to be in the garden every day, green beans, vegetable painting with 4-year olds,  barfing dogs, cooking, swimming, berry cobblers, playing with babies every afternoon, rabbit farm, weeding, Sarah D. in town and then, a lake weekend with my favorite family members, LILY and KATIE Skolrood (okay, also their parents…and my parents…and my sisters…and brothers…but mostly just the babies).

Thanks for indulging me in dog stories, world.

Things I’m glad about this week: 

+ Mountain kids. Nothing makes me happier than playing with them, which I get to do often, with my babysitting calender. Here’s the important thing: I’m going to birth some someday. Too much information? Sorry, but I am.

+Grace is back from the other side of the world, still working hard and still writing inspirational blog posts, meaning I don’t have to read The New York Times if I don’t want to, because she’s intelligent and will cover the highlights. I want her to come to the mountains, and I can’t wait to hit Chapel Hill together; studying late nights at the library and doing henna and climbing things and making peach cobbler together (this, anyways, is how I blindly idealize the next phase in college life).

+ Lavender (see above). I stick it in my car every day (which still does little to disguise the potent smell of Summer Dog #3, who throws up in my car every time we go for a ride. gross) and I go visit every morning when I walk around the garden with my coffee. Pretty.

+Sarah Morris’s beautiful emails.

+Reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It’s mesmerizing. Despite my long history of extremely sub-par science grades, I love reading about science, and especially space. It’s just one of those things (much like, Tina Fey) that I could read anywhere and everywhere: on the metro, in traffic, late at night on the sleeping porch when I should be asleep. And I want to know more about space, which is why I’m going between this and Asia’s old astronomy textbook for summer reading. Nerdy?

+ Elisabeth and Pocho came to visit this week (file under: sisters just get better after marriage) and I talked to Lily on the phone yesterday and SHE SAID MY NAME. Also, I get to see Julia and Emily this week which is super exciting because they are both two women I look up to tremendously.

+Last, but not least, I’m glad I danced with James Franco this week (duh: OF COURSE I’M GLAD). I recognized him immediately when he was standing behind us in line to get contra tickets, because he was wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap in a place where everyone either looks like they’re either a pirate or a pioneer. Luke and David rolled their eyes and yapped scornfully about giddy teenage girls and I pretended to totally be on Team Apathetic, but J.F is the hottest and hippest of them all. I have had a movie-star crush on him since I was 16. Of course, I had to try to dance with him, and of course, I think I bordered between Giddy and Very Giddy. Noteworthy Facts: he already had a partner, I got to twirl around with him anyway, he is not very light on his feet, it is endearing, he carries a disposable camera around and takes pictures at rakish angles and he is not quite as lean as portrayed in the talkies. But he has a great smile.

how to stay happy and (sort of) popular in a traffic jam

For the record, I like driving…which is why driving eight hours to go visit Sarah for the 4^th of July didn’t seem like an overkill. The ride up was easy: I brought a bag of peaches and sang radio songs from Tennessee to Maryland. The trip was great. The ride back, not so much. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but it was awful (I just watch 127 Hours with Taylor and Kelley last week and spent half the time behind a pillow: I feel hesitant at using the word “awful” too liberally). The first fifteen minutes of the drive were fine, but then somewhere up the road on I-66 someone’s hay bales caught on fire and the highway shut down. I moved 3.7 miles in four hours. In 90 degrees. My car does not have air conditioning. It was hot.

However, to put this in perspective, while Sarah and I were walking around downtown, we met a man named Tony. I wanted coffee and every shop was closed for the holiday, so I stopped him to ask. He was sitting on his bike in rolled-up orange pants with a small laptop propped up on his bicycle, a rolling picture of the kind of cosmopolitan who knew where to look for available caffeine. Like any decent person, Tony obliged our query by recommending coffee shops, map questing them, calling them on his computer to see if they were open, and then offering to walk with us till we found one.

Unlike most guys named Tony, he wasn’t creepy, just a young guy in orange pants who had an hour to kill. He had just started a non-profit for middle-schoolers, researched soil at the USDA and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, offering us a personalized caffeine tour and important questions like “You can go anywhere in the world for a month: where would you go? Why?” Sarah and I decided that from then on we would call any unsolicited bouts of spontaneous optimism “Tony” (sometimes, we like to make up secret language words, and then I go put them on the internet and they’re not secret anymore), as in “Gee, I had such a Tony day!” or “Oh come on, you only live once, let’s be Tony!”. We ended up watching the fireworks on the National Mall with Tony and his other soil-researching friends, Matt and Roman, who were smoking hot (okay, Matt was smoking hot—Roman might have been, but it was difficult to tell underneath the biker gear, helmet and oversized goggles he was wearing the whole time). The fireworks were beautiful. They wanted us to come bike riding around the city with them, but Sarah and I forgot to bring our bikes with us on the metro and they hadn’t thought to bring two extra bikes–how silly! So, in honor of The Handsome Soil Researcher, here is my sunny-side up (I mean..Tony-side up, ha ha… never-mind, that’s creepy) reflections on how to become happy and (sort of) popular in the middle of a 4-hour traffic jam:

1. Keep your mind open to music options. My car does not have many music options: aside from 3 good CDS which I am moderately sick of, I only have a CD of all techno remixes that I must have made at some point of very low judgment in my life. I found a CD in the trunk of my car entitled: Phillips Rock Mix 2008. I don’t know who Phillip is and was thus leery of his rock mix, so I waited until Hour 3 to put it in. Judgement deferred! Aside from the first few Jason Mraz songs—who, despite the fact that I once sat next to a very nice British woman who shared with me that he had changed her life and she now got to go to all his concerts for free, I’m not too keen to listen too more than once—the mix was golden. It saved the day, and now I will no longer be skeptical of mystery rock mixes (brief list of things with mystery origin/potential conversation starters in my car: 20 cans of dog chow, Phillips Rock Mix 2008, Parenting the Bipolar Child).
2. Be a female. I don’t mean to say that I was encountering Maryland’s finest men by sitting beside them in stand-still traffic, but I have never been hit on that much, even in a foreign country. A rough tally: X amount of creepy stares, 11 lingering waves and 4 window pick-up lines, usually started by “So, North Carolina, huh?” (which is not near as good a line as one last week, when a man rolled up beside my car to comment on the missing C in myCarolina sticker “University of Arolina, never heard of that one! Ha ha ha! Well, personally I’m a CLEMSON man, don’t hold that against me, but, blah blah…”).
3. Read a book by Tina Fey. Once I turned my car off and got sick of NPR’s spotlight broadcast on summer golf, I decided that there was no better way to seize the moment than to read Bossypants, thus accomplishing two things I didn’t know were on my bucket list, but that I have now crossed off: reading Bossypants aloud on the metro and reading Bossypants in traffic. When I read the part about her honeymoon and the chapter with the Sarah Palin sketch, I about died laughing. Because I was having so much fun reading, I accidentally made many friends–mostly older married couples, who pointed and laughed and gave encouraging Tina Fey thumbs up. Because the people who are most likely to give thumbs up to Tina Fey are also most likely to listen to NPR and were probably also bored by the golf broadcast, I felt we had a lot in common. Like, we shared something really special.
4. Eat a grape every .04 miles. Only applicable if you have grapes with you.

But then, thank goodness, the traffic cleared away at 6:30. We all blazed like stallions, or something, into the golden sunlight, speeding away until an hour later another mystery traffic jam (hay bales again?) popped up in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. By this time, my ETA was 3AM and my good father told me I needed to get a hotel room or else. Driving around rural Virginia late at night trying to find a place of lodging (side note: I can’t explain why, but I think it’s hilarious that the signs for hotels are listed under “lodging” on highway signs) can be challenging, so I was relieved when I saw a sign for “The Natural Bridge Hotel”. Cool, I thought, a hotel next to a natural bridge; how unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, as soon as I pulled off the interstate I encountered a dimly lit gas station and a looming Natural Bridge Haunted House! sign. I don’t get spooked very easily, but I did when I drove miles down the road to find a large, colonial-style hotel in the middle of a field. It kind of looked like Pemberly, except next to a natural bridge and a haunted house, so I got back on the road and drove until I found a Budget Motel—which didn’t look like Pemberly—fell asleep, and woke up at 5 to drive to the Swannanoa Music Festival to babysit and work my other job at a rabbit farm.

And still, there’s something very romantic about cradling black gas-station coffee and driving through the Tennessee Mountains, with nothing but cornflowers and mist and tractor trailers to keep you company. It was worth it. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival was wonderful, I got to see Evangeline for a little bit and Sarah is my best friend, and seeing her is always worth it—her, of course, and Tony.

I was filling up on gas today, and brought a container to fill up with more gas. I have a pretty strong aversion to gas stations because I always end up looking stupid (That time I forgot there was a ledger to pop open the gas door and was standing there prying it open with my credit card? And remember how the manager had to come out and open it for me, and how he patted my cheek–yes, my cheek–with pity, and I couldn’t blame him? Or that time I didn’t close the gas-door and drove off without the lid? Remember some of those times?). I guess that avoidance is why I ended up running out of gas this morning, had to pump it in from a tank, and then go get more. Crouched over the container trying to unscrew it, a guy of the more manly persuasion sidled up. “You–you want some help there?” Yes. He unscrewed it, easy as butter. “I mean, you look like a strong girl there, but I used to work at a rock company, you know? I hope you weren’t offended by the offer, cause I’m sure you’re real strong, it’s just that…” “No, no, I really couldn’t get the lid off. Thank you!”

He nodded, and drove off, but then paused the car a minute later. “I mean, I hope you don’t think that I think women are lesser or anything, that wasn’t what I was trying to say, I consider women strong and equals and all that…”

“Really, it was great. Thank you.”

I guess I have the look about me, of the feminist who doesn’t need any help screwing off her gas lid, thank you very much. Thing is…I do.

I wish I had more important things to tell you, but these are the kind of things that make my day.

Other things that made my day (and also, cringe badly): earlier in the summer, I sent out an email on The Lord’s Acre list serve, offering my services over the summer. Oh, you know–house sitting, babysitting, yard work, pet sitting; the stuff that makes money, since I don’t have any. Susan told me to write something a little more personal, since it was going to board members and friends of the garden. Unfortunately, I already have a problem when it comes to being over-zealous with self-bios: people don’t need a cheerful description of your majors, hometown and gratitude for life if they want you to feed their dogs. But that’s what I always end up writing. This is over-zealous, I thought after I sent the email out.

Today, I got an email that began: “Hi Sarah, I saw your ad in the Fairview Town Crier looking for work…” I stopped right there: Town Crier? Upon inspection of the July issue of the town paper I saw that, in fact, someone had kindly–and without my knowing–sent my work query into the paper and it was now occupying a lengthy corner of the paper. A whole paragraph ALL about myself, my hometown is, yadda yadda, American Studies, yadda yadda, I love kids, blah blah. Really, Sarah? Now every time I go out, I blush at all the unnecessary details of my life that are printed for all to read.

“Wow, Sarah,” Kelley said when she saw. “Bold advertisement in the paper!”

Oops.  Oh well, I guess it was effective because I have another house-sitting job. Besides: one of the cover stories this month was about a missing cat. Hopefully I wasn’t stealing a lot of otherwise valuable print space.

……………..

So hot this week: mint-green nail polish, peaches, deck tennis, sleeping porches, harvesting carrots and riding horses with Jessica (and by that, I mean for the first time, ever, even in my middle school “Mom just let me brush a horse!” years). Kelley taught me how to talk in a Russian accent, I cut bamboo and made a tee-pee bean trellis, hired myself out to pick berries for long, sticky hours in the sun. Blake brought wine to the sleeping porches and we watched fireflies (and terrible, awful romantic comedies), I spent early mornings wrapped in a jean jacket and cuddling Summer Dog on the way to the garden. The Okra grew another foot and an entire pack of teenage Boy Scouts that looked like Elves showed up to the Contra dance, thus supplying me with an endless stream of eager, graceless suitors as awkward as I am. It’s been a good week.

that’s the way the cornbread crumbles

Nothing gets me quite like a weathered female folk singer. Maybe it’s my inner worked-in-a-diner-serving-cheap-coffee-all-my-hard-knocks-life-always-carry-a-whiskey-flask-with-me-56 year-old-blonde, but I feel such a pure, totally misapplied sort of empathy when I listen to those kind of women croon. Patty Griffin never fails to knock me off my feet (Making Pies, anyone?) with unadulterated sorrow, and Gillian Welch, coming out with her fifth recording, The Harrow and the Harvest, does the job just as well…but instead of just knocking me off my feet, she takes my heart and rubs it in the dirt for a little while and then informs me that my husband of eight years has recently left me and then…okay, maybe not that bad. But there are as many sad as as blithe seasons in The Harrow and the Harvest, and I really love that emotional range. The way that Gillian Welch deftly turns every over lyric makes the album well worth the 8-year wait since her last album, Soul’s Journey in 2003. NPR (naturally) streams the entire album here. It’s well worth temporary melancholy, because it is a seasoned kind of melancholy, rich in both melody and wisdom. Favorite lyrics so far:

“When a brother laid down in the cold Kentucky ground/that’s the way that it goes, that’s the way that it goes/everybody’s buying little baby clothes, that’s the way it is/ though there was a time when all of us were friends….”

“Now you’re gonna need a friend/That’s the way the cornbread crumbles/That’s the way the whole thing ends.”

“Come on you Asheville boys/turn up your old-time noise/kick til the dust comes through the cracks in the floor.”

(I can relate to that last lyric, in a blindly optimistic sort of way. My contra-dancing-friend David, (who I accidentally went on a five-hour hike with the other day) asked me what Fairview was like. “Well, one thing you need to know about Fairview is that it is composed primarily of hip good-looking farm boys who unfortunately all have good-looking hip farm girlfriends who all cross-stitch and know how to milk a cow and probably have a PhD.” “Interesting.” he said. “I didn’t know that was the distinguishing trademark.” I nodded. “Little-known secret.”)

Even though he isn’t a weathered female folk singer–a forgivable sin, I guess–I’ve also been going through a big Sam Amidon kick. His music has been appropriate, this week, for any time in which I’m not in the mood to listen to sad southern blues sung by a female singer, and instead want to hear sad midwestern blues sung by a male singer. You know, switch things up. Sam Amidon came to UNC last September and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been too because he is as much a storyteller as he is a singer; as much a folklorist as a realist. In particular, I’ve been listening to Head over Heels and his cover of R. Kelly’s Relief. 

“What a relief to know that, there’s an angel in the sky/love is still alive!”

*Picture taken by Jessica Kennedy for the oral history/photo-pairing project we are endeavoring to do, somewhat blindly. Fingers crossed, more to come! Isn’t it pretty?

**PPS: Edit, Abby is right. Sam Amidon doesn’t write his songs, he covers them. But he does sing them pretty damn well!

***PPPS: Edit, Evangeline requests that (at the risk of sounding “all Asheville mountain flowery”) I note that aforemtioned friendship with said contra-dancing-friend David did not, in fact, originate in the middle of a balance and swing, but instead gathered around in Evangeline’s dorm room. Because Evangeline brings people together, you know?

restlessness, and running.

Today was the perfect Saturday. Except that it didn’t really have people in it.

Some time ago I was talking with a friend and asked how she managed to fill a summer alone. “Well.” she paused. “I like being alone.” I registered this for about five second, and then wrote the advice off as: N/A. I like people. I like being around them as much as I can. According to my Myer’s Brigg personality type (…ENFP…) I get energy from being with people, and when I am not among others, I start to question myself. A summer spent alone seemed the equilavent of decaf coffee: nice enough, but lacking in any of the real energy or entertainment that comes with a caffeinated drink. But then, somehow, I ended up in a little wood house on the side of a mountain that most people, including me, get lost trying to get to. This little house is surronded by the most amazingly vibrant and intimate community I’ve ever expereinced and is filled with four people I adore. Still, I have a whole lot of alone time. A heck of a whole lot.

Grace was the one person really in my day, although spending time with her these days means typing words into a computer screen. I woke up at 7:30 because I’ve discovered I love getting up early (note: subject to change. please do not hold me to said discovery) and sat outside and drank coffee and waited for the morning to roll in. But then! Grace was signed onto skype from some little street internet cafe in India. Although Grace is my bosom skype friend, she is also the most frustratingly enigmatic person to talk to from afar. A typical conversation goes like this: Sarah: “So, how’s life?” Grace: “I asked you first.” Sarah: “Wait, no…I really think I asked you first.” Grace: “Please tell me how your life is.” Sarah: “Okay, well, I’m really into Kale right now. Blah, blah, dirt, blah, blah, vegetables.” Grace pauses for a few minute and makes some witty jokes about Kale and avoids all inquiries, until finally I brace myself for her telling me that she married an Indian Moto Taxi driver and isn’t coming to college. But then she starts typing “Wellll I’ve been riding between different dangerous trains the past few days, made friends with some more hot British/New Zealand/attractive nationality, and then rode Camels to the Pakistani border.”

Oh. Well, I guess that’s better than not returning to the States.

After talking to G and spending some quality time with the plants watering, I decided it was time for a run. Usually I run very slowly on trails, but today I chose a nearby road and ran between: narrow churches, wide graveyards, miles of pin-striped corn, more Beware of Dog signs than I could count, a horse that might have been a unicorn, lonely gas-stations, gangly sunflowers and crows calling loudly to eachother from across the cast-iron belly of the valley. When I got back I was pleasantly suprised to see I’d run a little over 9 miles. Of course, that wouldn’t have happened except that (A) I was alone all day and (B) I impulsively decided that a good way to celebrate my 21st birthday would be to run a half-marathon with Megan Deluca in September. Because I have flirted my whole life with attempts at trying to be a runner, I usually announce every few months that I’m training for a half-marathon, ha-ha, and never actually do one. But this time, I hope, is different because I actually made myself register for it. And because I have no money to waste, it seems I’m bound to Valle Crucis on September 17th, rain or shine.

Reason (C) that I started running again: I am in the middle of reading Born To Run by Christopher McDougall. If one day in a perfect world I get to be the perfect kind of journalist, I’d like to be the kind of exemplorary writer that McDougall is (sans the endurance athlete part). Somehow, he manages to start with a fairly unexhilirating subject (himself: middle-aged man gets running injury) and twist it into a heart-racing chronicle about a few western endurance athletes who end up in the desert racing an ancient marathoning Mexian tribe, with a few very deep digs at Nike and Dean Karnazes thrown in. It was great. I loved it. The man knows how to start with a subject and make a plot, and I have been glued to the couch, inspired, all week. Reason (D) is that I live with Climber Kelley. Climber Kelley is probably my best friend in Fairview and loves, among other things, her dog, farming and hanging upside down from steep rocks. She also runs a lot, much faster than me, and motivates me every day to move and then, keep moving, and then move some more.

Reason (E) is Summer Dog #1 and Summer Dog #2. There are few things in the world better than a good dog, except maybe, running with a good dog. I’m lucky this summer to be able to do just that.

Afterwards, I decided that it would be a good idea to walk out my soreness by hiking barefoot to the top of the mountain. I don’t actually know if my feet were ever especially pretty to begin with, but they are definitely not pretty now. Nonetheless, hiking without shoes has become one of my favorite small rewards of the summer: the top of the mountain is less than 2 miles away, and you get to scramble up ropes toward it, pushing your feet into moss and soil softer than a blanket. The overlook at the top takes in miles and miles and miles of trees and mountains, all this greenness, and I think, if I all I did for the rest of my life was just hike to this one place…I’d be a very happy girl.

And so, when my parents came to visit me the other week and (after getting lost going up the drive) asked me skeptically “Don’t you get restless being all the way up there?” because they know I am an ENFP and don’t like to be alone for a single second: I could honestly say, yes, I do get restless, but I find sweet salve for that restlessness. And for the first time in my life, being alone doesn’t make me lonely: instead it just gives me more energy, and in turn, more peace because I am content with myself. What could be a better discovery than that?