In The Company Of Solitude

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”

~Paul Tillich

I grew up as a farm girl.  Not so much in the sense that we raised a lot of animals and it really wasn't a "working" farm by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely in the country without the sound of a busy street nearby or street lights to light up the night.  I remember several times growing up when I would have friends over for the night and they would find themselves  freaked out by the lack of noise in the middle of a dark Minnesota night. 

Then I moved to the city to go to school and lived their for five years before being able to escape once again to a very tiny country farmhouse in the absolute middle of no where.  Unfortunately, I was entirely too busy finishing school to really enjoy that stay.  After school was finished, it was back to living in town as we started to raise our kids and pay off school loans.  A total of nine years of living in the thick of things - street lights, 24 hour stores a few blocks away, sirens going off, neighbors coming home late, dogs barking at all hours.....you sort of take it all in and block it all out at the same time. 

Finally, the move here.  Almost a mile to our nearest neighbor, no streetlights, no cars going by, no sirens, only quiet.  At night, only stars for as far as the imagination cares to fly out into the universe.  I very distinctly remember a moment a few days after moving out here when I stood on the front stoop holding our baby daughter in my arms and watching my two older children, then ages 5 and 3 run down the hill at breakneck pace, their short stubby legs going as fast as they could. I looked down at the baby in my arms for only a second and suddenly my two older children had disappeared from sight.  I felt my heart stop in that moment of sheer, pure panic that can only come to a mother whose children are suddenly no where to be found. All the typical thoughts of kidnapping, attacks by wild dogs, and falling in old wells raced through my brain.  It, thankfully, was only a moment before I realized that the only reason I couldn't find them was because the short apple tree had called to them to climb her leafy, apple heavy branches and they were just up in the first crook of the tree, happily hidden beneath all her leaves.  It was at that moment that I realized I had become "city-fied" and had become like one of my freaked out friends that felt both terribly exposed and totally alone all at the same time.  

Living on a farm takes a little getting used to, but thankfully, nature is a very patient teacher.

Instead of the street lights to light your way, nature shows you a magnificent sky on a clear winter night that takes your breath away.  You realize that, if you had to you could also navigate by the stars as so many other people have had to do for thousands of years because Polaris is always where it should be.  Suddenly the constellations and the stories behind them become worth knowing as they provide a sort of comfort while outside at night.  The moon's large smiling face becomes a dear friend's that you enjoy seeing every 28 days and time measures out from full moon to full moon when your very blood seems to rise more with the tide of it.  In the summer the fireflies light up the early evening and make the world appear as a shimmering diamond, and generally are used as a sign to the kids that it is time to head in for the night....right after they have caught (and released) a few of them.

Instead of the convenience stores and sirens you have your garden and your farm dog.  At first these seem woefully inadequate to the task at hand, but then after working in the garden all day you are really too tired to notice the dog keeping the masked bandit raccoons away.

Instead of sirens and noisy neighbors,  there is the chirping of industrious birds whose whole conversation lets you know the moment spring arrives because of the cacophony outside the window.  The frogs chime in at night with their low "bur -up, burr-up"  which roughly translates to "this mud is fine!"  The crickets keep track of time and the temperature as the summer heats up.  All these sounds are infinitely more agreeable than those of crowded humanity....unless, of course, one of the aforementioned crickets finds his way into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

Instead of many houses, there is only the one - yours.  This house is old, it has its secrets and protects its past well, but that doesn't mean that it isn't open to the warmth and life of a new family.  There are, after all, always more secrets to protect- like the time capsule that we put together with our story and our current information and tucked it away in a wall that we built. I have always had a thing for old houses.  They seem so wise somehow, they have seen so much and stood storms that have driven lesser houses into the ground, but they are alive and take some getting used to.  The floor boards that creek and squeak as you walk across them and always seem so much louder in the middle of the night , the door hinges that haven't seen any grease in decades and let you know just who is coming and going whether it is an angry teenager or a seven pound cat.  There is often a shifting of the entire frame of the house when the wind is strong enough, or when the pressure drops suddenly just before a big storm.  The basement breathes with its rock wall lungs.....cool, moist air breathed in during the summer and warm, dry air exhaled during the winter, and in between her many rock spaces she houses any number of very small neighbors that I have come to not only respect, but admire in many ways as they are extremely efficient in keeping many other creepy crawlies away.

The longer I have been here, the more I revel in the quiet and the solitude.  I would rather spend a day communing with the bees in my garden then most people I know.  I have come to count the animals and insects around me as my nearest neighbors and suddenly my world is very full indeed of beings to talk with when the need arises, and the best part is that they don't immediately consider me an idiot for expressing my views, whatever they may be.

I believe that, for many people, it is more of a comfort to live in town and have a network of humanity close at hand, but it often masks how much we really do rely on nature and the world around us to survive.  There really isn't any less nature in town - there are still all the same microbes in the soil, the same insects in the air, and many of the same animals that scurry around the neighborhoods at night, but it is easier to put that out of the mind in a town or city.  My daughter has often admitted to being afraid of the dark - more precisely - afraid of going outside after dark - which, for most kids is understandable.  The dark, for me, has become such a part of what I know that even the shadowy shapes that I see moving along beside me now are nothing much to be feared....especially when they answer to the name of Vincent, Tink and Frank - a few of the farm's cats.  And as to the occasional raccoon and possum that happen to stumble onto the same path- as I have explained to my daughter- they are as much afraid of us as we are of them.


Nature speaks quietly but if we allow ourselves to hear it, to work with it, and to understand that we are also a part of it....suddenly we are no longer alone in our solitude, but surrounded by friends that are all entwined in the wonder and travail of the earth.

This Old House

I have undertaken a project. I don't do this too often in this house because I am definitely no expert.....Keith is. He handles the house projects and I handle any of the medical emergencies that arise with the pets. Seems like a fair trade. I have a tendency to be a little impatient with getting things done so I don't take the proper time or care, not to mention the fact that I rarely use the correct tool for actually doing something. I have found that flat screwdrivers can be used for just about everything from opening a paint can top to fishing out toast from a toaster (provided it is unplugged and the toast is no longer on fire)

That said, I took on this job. It started by painting the room while Keith was away. I did it as a surprise for him while he was gone working at my brother's house for a week. I did it while he was away (and called it a surprise) because he would have hovered and fretted over whether or not I cleaned the brushes out well enough after I was finished with them. This sort of "hovering and fretting" drives me absolutely nuts and is part of what prevents me from taking on other jobs. So, I did it while he was out of town.

Problem was, the paint job looked too good when I was done.....it made the floor look terrible. I mean, before when the wall was bad at least the floor looked the part, but now there was such a difference that it just would have killed me to move the stuff in there with the floor looking that bad. So, after Keith came home and had a chance to inspect the room and declare the paint job "good" and also verify that his brushes were in fact clean enough, he agreed that the floor needed something.

I have always favored the idea of refinishing the floors. This is an old house - 101 years to be exact, but the floors upstairs are pine.....wide plank, pine floors and Keith was generally in favor of just painting them again and calling it good. I volunteered to do the work - "I'll sand and stain them" I offered - that was only fair right? And so it began and Keith was nice enough to get me a new sander and set me up with the proper tools which is a very good thing or I would still be at it with a single piece of 20 grit and a flat screwdriver.

At first it was just a job, one of countless projects to be done on this house before it is technically habitable. I figure we will get it completed about the time that the kids all grow up and move away, much like my own parents did. Slowly, the layers of paint came off and the wood emerged and slowly it dawned on me how old this house really is. The smell of old wood is not something that can be easily explained. I realized what it was when I walked into the room to work one day and was suddenly transported back to my grandparent's attic in their South Dakota farm house which was also made of old wood. One hundred and one years ago.....1909 - before my grandparents were born, this house was finished by Meyer's construction, as evidenced by the name of the builders and the date that was found on one of the beams in the attic....that is a long time to imagine. No motorized vehicles, no television, no e-mail, no electricity....old.

I wonder who the people were that built the house. They were probably in their twenties or thirties. Did they have families? Where are those families now? As I was cleaning out cracks in the floor that have now dried and split enough to allow entrance to necklace beads and crayons and other small child paraphernalia, I would come across the head of a nail that had been hammered in generations ago.

Where will I be in 100 years? Will I have left anything of any lasting importance behind when I go, like these men did? Will there someday be someone who is refinishing this same floor and wondering who the last person was to sand and stain it? It is a humbling thought to think that I may not leave anything of any real importance in this world. But then again, I am leaving my children to it and, with any luck, my grandchildren.

As with any tedious job, this one moves slowly, but I feel as though I know each board individually. Which led me to another realization. I was moving some of the trim boards around one day and I managed to get a wicked splinter in the outside edge of my foot.

Have you ever attempted to take a splinter out of the outside edge of your foot? It requires some amount of Cirque du Soleli maneuvers. But as I was fishing the splinter out, it dawned on me that this wood was probably two hundred years old! The wood that would have made up that room had to have grown for quite a while prior to being harvested, dried and cut for flooring. Two hundred years! 1809! Shortly after we gained independence from England, before the war of 1812. The forests that made this floor was likely standing during the time of my great, great grandparents and before all the Native Americans had even left the area.

Now, I realize it isn't Pompei. It hasn't been around for thousands of years, but even something as old as this floor, in the Midwest is encouraging - maybe things we build really can stand the test of time, weather the storms, and still be useful. I know there are many that like "new", but unfortunately, in today's age that also tends to equate with "fast" and I have yet to see a new fast house stand up to any serious time. I am also a big fan of natural materials....wood and stone. The "new" vinyl siding that the previous owner slapped up fast sometime in the 80s is now completely ruined, but the wood that we uncovered under part of it was just fine.....needed some paint, but otherwise fine. It had been there for almost 80 years with the same rain and sun that the vinyl had been exposed to and failed to stand up to.

I understand the new and improved mentality, but have yet to actually find anything "improved" upon in most cases. I see most people living in subdivisions where all the houses essentially look the same - all have the big garage out front and some variation of "greige" color, ....where is the originality? Where is the individualism? Where is the craftsmanship? I understand that most of the houses built in the early 1900s were also very similar, but they took their time, used excellent materials, and, I will let you in on a little secret that I have learned while living with an architect that has also done construction work, the older houses are cheaper AND better built! Yep, most people don't want to live in the "old" section of town, but would rather have the "new" house in the new subdivision. It is entirely possible that in 60 years, chances are very good that the "new" house will have been razed to the ground and rebuilt due to some design or construction flaw at least once, while the old house will still be standing.

So, I applaud the men that built this house (and the man that continues to build this house), their time, their skill, and their patience. I think of them often and can only hope that the next few owners of the house walk into this particular room and marvel, if only briefly, at the floor and all the work that it must have taken to make it look so nice.