How Long Will It Last?

How long will what last? The pandemic, the staying at home, the anxiety, fear, worry, anger? The arrival of sudden, piercing stabs of fear in the middle of a sleepless night? 

Household food supplies???

Long before the stay-at-home order came to Arizona (where we remain until confident of a safe return to northern Michigan), even before the nationwide toilet paper panic and frenzy, wise and forward-thinking authorities recommended that every household have a minimum of two weeks of food and necessities on hand, in case quarantine became necessary. So I shopped then and found everything we needed and felt we were well supplied. I even bought a two-pack of giant-size containers of antiseptic wipes, wondering if we could ever possibly need that many. Was I overreacting? Flour, yeast, canned tomatoes, pasta, canned milk, onions, soap, yada-yada-yada — all the things you’d need if you couldn’t get out of the house for two weeks. 

But hand sanitizer? I never buy that stuff, just soap. So when I returned to the store for hand sanitizer a week or two later, while other shoppers were panicking over shelves stripped bare of toilet paper and paper towels [actually, no one looked panicked at the Safeway in Willcox: that was literary hyperbole], I was stunned at the sight of an empty aisle where hand sanitizer and other such products used to be. On my next and I hope last trip, there was still none to be had. We are told to keep in the car and use it constantly, but the Artist and I are using those antiseptic wipes I thought I might not need. Not the kind made for hands, but the harsher cleaners intended for household use. Now even those are nowhere to be found for sale! How long will what we have left last?

I chickened out of going to the grocery store again last Friday, as planned, and made a new plan for Tuesday, when the dairy and egg supply would be restocked. And yes, on Tuesday the store had eggs, and I bought another container of yogurt so I’ll have starter to get back to making my own with raw milk from the feed store, but once again there was no hand sanitizer, no antiseptic wipes, and no yeast. I almost wept. I'd been so nervous about going at all, and then these empty, gaping shelves! I think of certain friends in Northport who have for years found it amusing to refer to our grocery store there, especially in winter when the summer people with their big bucks are not in residence, as "Moscow Market." Ha! Eat your words, guys! We always had everything we needed, didn't we?

Catching wild yeast from their air, on the other hand, is something I think I can manage, so before we run out of yeast, I will finally attempt to make sourdough starter. Old dog, new trick. I have read up on it and feel confident. 

But aren't these strange times when a trip to the grocery store or laundromat feels dangerous? How long will these feelings last?

We went to a different laundromat this week, a less frequented washateria with cheaper washers than our usual but busier, more crowded place (hence our avoidance) — sadly, also with dryers that have an insatiable appetite for quarters. But never mind! All I wanted to do was wash the clothes and get back to the cabin and hang them on our new clothesline. Finding almost all the machines in use when we arrived — very unusual! — and four people inside, we made ourselves comfortable in the car with books and cold water and snacks, in a quiet, shady spot, with a nice breeze filtering through the new leaves of a velvet ash tree, waiting for the coast to clear, as it eventually did. So it all worked out.

Still, we were relieved to be home again, even though a single clothesline and limited supply of clothespins meant that I spent the remainder of the day hanging up as many items at once as possible and whenever a few were dry, pulling those dry items off the line to make way for more. It really did take all afternoon, too, despite sun and a stiff breeze, and the last towels were still on the line when meatballs for dinner went into 
the oven.

Funny how one's perceptions change with changed circumstances. Familiar sights evoke new thoughts. These days when I’m out walking and see dried cow dung, I think, fuel. When we’re driving, wild rhubarb along the roadside says to me, food. Prickly pear still poses a question: how does one harvest and prepare that to eat? So far, however, we have not retreated that far back into the past.

I’m not exactly living the life of my grandmother’s, she who had to pump water to heat on the stove to do her laundry outdoors in washtubs. (One of those washtubs was my first “swimming pool” when I was a toddler.) She also milked her own cow and slaughtered her own chickens, and my grandfather had an enormous vegetable garden, huge raspberry patch, and their entire backyard was given over to growing fruit.

My mother on her parents' country "farmette"

My parents' first home in South Dakota

My mother, with indoor plumbing, had a wringer washer in the basement and lines both in the backyard (for summer) and in the basement (for winter). When my sisters and I were young, we had three apple trees, one pear tree, and a raspberry patch (that last, thanks to our grandfather who brought the canes from Ohio for us). My mother baked her own bread, put up homemade jam, and made her own perfect piecrust from scratch, so these days I’m kind of living my mother’s life — without the little children, but it’s still amazing how cooking and baking and cleaning have expanded to fill the days, now that we are staying at home.

And I ask myself, how long will these new habits last? As long as the pandemic or longer? When these times are “over,” and we can return to something resembling “normal life,” will we continue to bake our own bread and hang our laundry out in the sun?

Well, I routinely hang laundry on the line back in Michigan, though I do not bake bread in the busy months when I'm running a business fulltime and doing my share of keeping grass mowed around our old farmhouse and barns. Anyway, truthfully, I wonder more about other changes in our lives these days, too, the way we are considering and treating one another, not only within our households but in our communities and across the country and beyond. 

How long will we continue communicating with loved ones on our present, new, more frequent basis and, in addition, find time to reconnect with friends forgotten or neglected for years? How long will we keep up the habit of thanking family members, friends, and strangers for each kindness, large and small? How long will we remember to give thanks, each and every day, for each and every day we’re alive?

“You’re Up Early”

Laundry doesn’t do itself, so when the sky begins to lighten I’m up and making coffee, and soon towels are sloshing around in the washing machine, giving me time to check e-mail before hanging wet laundry outdoors on the line. If it rains? Towels will be softer when they eventually dry. No problemo.

Perhaps I need to apologize to all the friends and acquaintances and customers and strangers who have given or sent me links or books or mss. or DVDs in the last month. The truth is that I have not yet looked at, read, or watched all these undoubtedly fascinating offerings. Running my business and keeping my household fed and cleaned and garden watered and lawn mowed and dog exercised are top priority items. Other trump cards are e-mail with and publicity for and visits with and selling the books of scheduled guest authors. A commute to work on back roads (follow link to see more) is one way I recharge on busy days. That is one luxury I do not forego.

Less frequent are trips outside of Leelanau Township, but I made time Tuesday evening to go into Traverse City with David to meet friends from Walloon Lake who were picking up a new car. They were making the trip to TC, and it’s not nearly as far for us to TC as to Walloon Lake, so we seized the opportunity. On the way into town, I regaled David with tales of “old Saugatuck” from a book a friend had sent me. The old lumber mill town of Singapore, abandoned when the trees gave out and then buried by shifting sands so that not even a ghost town remains, was a new story to me. How about you? Did you ever hear of Singapore, Michigan? Then there was the art colony, which David remembered from his own teaching days in Paw Paw and Kalamazoo. If I’d wanted to get through more work, I could have been reading mss. or watching DVDs in the car on the way to town, but somehow – call me crazy! – it felt good to take the evening off and feel as if I were on vacation like all the rest of the world.

Wrapping Up in My Grandmother

...To the sensing body all phenomena are animate, actively soliciting the participation of our senses, or else withdrawing from our focus and repelling our involvement. Things disclose themselves to our immediate perception ... as styles of unfolding—not as finished chunks of matter given once and for all, but as dynamic ways of engaging the senses and modulating the body. Each thing, each phenomenon, has the power to reach us and influence us.....

- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

A rare find

Good, old-fashioned clothespin

On Wednesday afternoon (Bruce was minding the bookstore) we were visiting our favorite thrift shop close to home, where I was delighted to find a little plastic tub of old clothespins. ‘Clothes pegs,’ you could call them, each carved from a single piece of wood, some with a wire band and some without—but no springs and no way the single wooden piece could flip apart. In case you use only an indoor clothes-drying machine and haven’t followed the changes in clothesline technology, I will tell you that newer clothespins (all imported from China) are made of two pieces of wood held together with a spring. They are flimsy, and on the slightest excuse one of the wooden pieces will flip out and be lost forever in the weeds at the edge of the grass, the remaining bits useless. Hanging laundry outdoors is one of my summer morning meditations. These new/old clothespins will help keep me focused, so I was more than happy to carry them away.

An old quilted jacket tempted me. It wasn’t beautiful, in any stylish, modern sense, and it was sadly frayed, not only at the ends of the sleeves but pretty much all over. One would never dare put it in a washing machine (and it looked like it could use a washing, too).

Old handmade quilted jacket

“Why don’t you get it?” David urged. Sometimes he amazes me! The “Mussolini of Fashion” (as a friend called him long ago, hitting the nail directly on the head) encouraging me to buy an old, worn-out house jacket that my mother would never have looked at twice?

“Oh, it’s just silly,” I said with a reluctant sigh, trying to be sensible. “It’s practically falling apart.” I held it up more closely, feeling, being drawn by and trying to resist its silent Take-me-home plea. “But look at these little stitches! It’s all hand-stitched! Someone’s grandma made it, you just know.”

I thought of my own grandmother and remembered sitting in the backyard with her on the glider, pushing the long green metal seat back and forth with our feet on the ground while we used our hands to string beans. (Yes, Virginia, beans came with pretty tough strings in those days.) But my grandmother has been gone for well over 30 years, the old house gone long before that....

It was silly! Sensibly, I put the jacket back on the rack. Found an attractive ivory pullover. Much more reasonable--something I could actually wear in public!

Waiting for me out in the car, David asked, “You didn’t get it? Why not?” “Oh, it was just silly.” “You should get it if you want it.” “It was all hand-stitched!” I said again, as if arguing with myself. That was what kept coming back to me, that vision of patient, gnarled fingers taking stitch after tiny stitch, and then the old woman wearing the jacket for years and years. It had spoken to me. It wanted to go home with me. It needed a new home with someone who would see it for what it was.

Yes, of course! Can you doubt for a minute? (If you recognized the yellow chair already, you knew the end of the story right from the beginning.) “After all,” I told David, finding a way at last to rationalize the impulsive, emotional purchase, “it goes with the clothespins.”

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