When I was in school, we studied space. What is space (no, not the kind of space where astronauts go)? What defines space? How do we make a space? Space has always meant to me something spacious. No boundaries. Infinite. And, of course, since we are in school to learn, I learned and came to really enjoy the term and theory of space. Space, it turns out, can be anything we want it to be.

In our discussions, we talked about boundaries. Boundaries help to define a space. As a child, did you ever have a special, secret hiding place where you could go to hide from Mom if she was cross with you, or your pesky older sister who always wanted to boss you around and tell Mom when you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing? For me, it was in the closed off room where the toilet was in our main hall bath. I could close the door, and lay on the floor and no one knew were I was. Only if someone came to use the bathroom did anyone find me. I loved being able to remove myself from the confines of my family, who of course, didn’t understand me and wanted me to do their bidding (especially that sister). I had my special, private space where it felt good while I was there.

When I was grown, and had my own children, my girls made their secret spaces from overturned lawn furniture covered with beach towels and old sheets that I kept as painting drop cloths. They would hide under there all day and scoff when I asked them to deconstruct at dusk. I’d acquiesce knowing that all of the construction would commence again once breakfast was over the next morning. I also didn’t mind because I knew it really chapped the one neighbor who served on the board of our neighborhood covenants adherence committee. He’d circulate the neighborhood on foot each Saturday morning, clip board in hand, scrawling notes at almost every house, then give his report each month at our board meeting. Since I was the association president so he took great glee in presenting anything suspect that took place on my turf. I just replied that I’d take his notes under advisement and remind him that temporary structures were permissible for up to 72 hours per the rules. But I digress….

Our secret spaces can be temporary to serve a purpose, or just for whimsy. Late one night, I discovered a defined space that I had created when I was doing some reading for school. We had a three way sectional sofa in our living room. The chaise portion of it was my allotted space and I kept a brass pole lamp with a tent shaped shade beside me for reading. One night I had gone to the kitchen to refill my teapot, and when I was returning, I noticed that just the brass tent shaped shade created an angled ray of light that illuminated a small space on the chaise. – a little tent shape of light, if you will. No other lights were on in the room. That was my special, almost sacred, place of reading that I really hadn’t planned, but the results resonated with me. I tucked myself back in under the knitted throw with a fresh pot of tea and commenced reading, warm in the thought that this space of respite that I’d unknowingly created with a inexpensive brass floor lamp was my retreat.

More recently, I have been thinking about developing the acre of land that surrounds my house out here in the country, I look to garden magazines quite a lot for inspiration. The last few years, the outdoor rooms are a constant and I have a much deeper appreciation for them and how meaningful they can be.

We’ve just completed repainting the shutters and the two porches on our old farmhouse. I’ve edited out some of the wicker furniture that I had piled out here and been more thoughtful about what will go out here. Some of the old wicker I’ve placed out in a stand of trees not far from the larger front porch. After I moved it out there one day, the clouds started to thicken and I could feel the ions in the air at the same time the humidity rose. I was still cleaning up from painting when the sprinkles of rain started to fall. The wicker under the canopy of trees was nearby so I took refuge in a chair and watched the rain just beyond the tree limbs and sat there with the dogs. Nary a drop hit any of us. I realized that this too was an outdoor room, bounded by fir trees with a dirt carpet and a tree branch ceiling. I noticed some old bricks in the dirt that were burnt black on one side. It appeared there could have been a fire pit of sorts there at one time. Seems others have enjoyed the subtle boundaries of that space in the past.

After the weather cleared, I was even more inspired to see what could be done on the front porch to “room-ify” it. The remaining wicker, errant tables and found objects became a new layout from what was there before. More thought was given to where things went and how they worked together. A wonderful hinged screen with little candleholders landed on a maple table that we picked up for five bucks at a local tag sale. A tabletop tiki torch was filled with the mosquito repellant fuel and sat on another table.

Tonight, after a weekend of running around, I decided to light up the candles and the tiki torch and see how my outside room felt. It was dusk as I began, and now it is pitch dark, save for the flickers of the torch and candles. Once again, using only light, there has been produced a delightful room….a very special place created with not much. And, it happens to be outdoors.

Winter

Having grown up in southern California, winter was something I watched in movies. As a child, I felt somehow cheated that we spent Thanksgiving in shorts and sandals. I yearned to wear woolen cable knit sweaters with tweed skirts. The trees in our neighborhood never turned colors. The only way I knew it was fall was the fact that Daylight Savings ended and it got dark a little earlier. That, and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” was on television again. I love that program.

At age 25, moving to the green Pacific Northwest gave me at least a taste of some change of season. There, though, it rained nine months a year and you got three months of pretty damn nice. A stellar day was one where you’d hear “wow, the mountain is out” (Mt. Rainier) from everyone you encountered. I got to wear the woolens but the seasons numbered two – rain and kinda rain with a touch of sun. The main difference between fall, winter and spring was that Daylight Savings came and went so that it got dark at different times. The weather didn’t change though. You really looked forward to summer there.

Twenty years later, I moved to Eastern Washington State. Wow…now we are talking weather! You got four very distinct seasons. A bonus was that we got all the clues to the changes that were coming. We moved here in August of that year and the temperature was a balmy 95. I was so excited. Heat, heat and some more heat. I hadn’t had such delicious heat since San Diego in September and October when the Santa Ana conditions arose and we’d have such a heat wave that we’d get sent home from school. The new Spokane heat was great. The day after we arrived, I was sitting on the back deck, reclining in a deck lounge chair in the full sun. My daughters came outside and asked just what on earth was I doing!? I replied that I was warming up my bone marrow. Twenty years in Seattle kept it just under the level of warm so I needed to get it back to normal. It felt delicious!

Some five years later, however, we felt the pinch of living in town. Our next-door neighbor was a bit too neighborly – and close. We started looking for a place on the outskirts of town that had a little bit of land for the dog to run but close enough in for a comfortable commute. One Sunday morning, I hit the Internet real estate ads while I sipped my morning coffee. Just before that, my next-door neighbor greeted me warmly while I tied my poor little dog to her 30-foot lead in the backyard for her morning constitutional. “How’s the coffee?” he asked, wrapped in his brown plaid bathrobe. I was in my pajamas sporting Flock of Seagulls hair and not really up for neighborly chitchat. I mumbled something unintelligible his way, trying not to meet his eye. I am not neighborly in the morning. In fact, I’m not anything in the morning except grumpy – just ask my husband. That was it, I was hitting the real estate ads and finding us somewhere, anywhere, where my next door neighbor was at least 500 feet away. A quick six weeks later we were the proud owners of four happy acres of rural living, complete with a ramshackle farmhouse and outbuildings on a dirt road and the closest neighbors were a quarter mile away. Hooray!

Back to winter. We are beginning our fourth winter here in the country. Christmas is a few days away. For the second year in a row, we’ve had record snow. Looks like I’ve got me some weather! When it snows, it pours. Last winter brought us to our knees. We had no idea how to deal with the complexities of a severe winter. It meant losing a carport,and power to the outbuildings, when the snow became too heavy to stay on the garage roof. We literally shoveled our way to the horse and goat barns to get to the animals to tend to them. We fought ice, snow, torn out electric horse fencing that you can’t put off until Saturday. New Year’s morning of 2008 – from 5:00 till about 8:00 a.m. was spent trying to fix it and get the horses back into the fenced area. That was my first sunrise that I witnessed since moving here. It was beautiful, however, as the sun rose without a cloud in the sky and with all of the snow it was breathtaking. Trouble was, I had no breath left to take. Mark was at work and I got to fix all of this alone.

While we lived in town, our winter sensitivity was tied to transportation. If it did snow, would the roads be plowed by the time we had to leave for work? Mark usually leaves at 4 am so often he would have to just push ahead and get out of the drive and thankfully, most of his way to work was down hill so he could get there. By the time I left for work, our street was plowed. We lived on a semi-arterial that was a bus route, so we got level B city plowing service. We were usually done by 6 am. Once in awhile, we were inconvenienced, but that was it. The dog would go out for just long enough to take care of business, but she stayed inside most of the time anyway.

Out here, in the country, it’s a whole different deal. All four seasons are in your face out here. There is no subtlety in any way. There is more of everything and it hits you one-way or the other. Today, we shoveled our 100-foot driveway so that we could get both the car and the truck out of the driveway to the dirt road. We are fortunate out here also in that we live on a school bus route so we do get plowed with some frequency on school days. Once the holiday hits, though, we’re on our own. Thankfully, we have neighbors with tractors and big-ass farm equipment that pick up the slack when the county doesn’t find us.

This year, we’ve come to find that even with the 40 plus inches of snow we got in two days, we are better able to deal with it. We know what’s coming and how to plan ahead. We broke the shoveling into two days. We know more snow is coming tomorrow, so we went into town today to get our last minute Christmas shopping done while the roads were in better shape. We were given snowshoes by Courtney, our eldest daughter who works at REI, and utilized these to tamp down the snow into habit-trails to the garage, goat and horse barns, which made shoveling much easier. I would walk in front of Mark in my snowshoes and start a trail for him so he wouldn’t sink down into hip high snow. We now use these trails in the snow to get around our four acres. We keep the water troughs full and check on the electric fencing for spots where the horses might break out in search of a way into the barn to enjoy the hay-buffet.

The winter out here does have its subtleties however. When we have finished our chores and preparations for winter living, we do stop and take notice of what is happening out here. In town, everything is covered in hard surfaces. The streets, driveways, sidewalks, buildings and porches are all we have to see around us. We found once we moved out here though, we can’t tell if it is raining or not. There are no reflective surfaces on which to see the water. We have to stick a head or hand out the door to feel for wetness, or listen for the sound of the rain. Sometimes at night, we can see the rain falling in the reflection of the vapor light that is affixed to the front of our garage. Otherwise, we peer out our windows into darkness. No neighbors’ homes to light our way or illuminate the streetscape. No street lights either, for that matter. We see nothing. We also hear nothing. When snow is on the ground and it has become somewhat frozen, we can hear the horses tromping around in their paddock, waiting for dinner.

The dearth of winter is keenly felt out here. The season of death is profound. The only change seems to be the rise and fall of the level of snow. The stillness wraps around me until all I am aware of is my breath. Sometimes I can feel my pulse in my ears. There is nothing else for my ears to hear. Nothing moves in my line of sight. No birds flitting about. A car comes by, but it’s so rare, we are usually inside the house and don’t hear it. Even the animals are very quiet. If they move, they move slowly and deliberately. Even the horses have carved out a trail in the snow. It takes them to the side of the barn, their water tank, and back into their stalls in the barn. There is a circle shaped trail in the paddock that they use to see us come and go since we are the purveyors of hay. The nubs of winter grass are four feet down and they aren’t equipped to dig for them. They wait for us to bring their sustenance. They seem to crave us while we are in the barn as much as we crave their attention too. We try to stay there with them as long as we can, but today it was –20 degrees so we didn’t stay long. They want to visit with us, but they drop their heads down to their piles of hay instead. We reach through the rails of their stalls to rub their necks to get some contact with them while they eat. They enjoy that but they continue to eat as if we weren’t there. Hopefully, it will warm up a bit and we can jump on them and have our first ride in the snow. We are looking forward to some of the fun that winter brings to offset all of the work.

I’ve never been a person who loves spring, but since I’ve been out here, I’ve found it to be almost my favorite season. I can’t put it ahead of my delightfully hot summers, and I am enjoying very much the quiet time of rest that winter brings, but I will delight in the changes that creep our way here on the farm in the coming months. Tonight is the longest night of the year. That means that tomorrow night will be just a teeniest bit shorter…and so on…and so on. The changes will come and I can’t wait.

Pedalpants

Pedalpants

Those of us who are able to remember the inception of the Beatles will also remember pants called ‘pedal pushers.’ Nowadays they are called ‘crop pants.’ They are tapered down the leg a bit and terminate mid-calf. Their intent was to be worn while riding a bike. A regular pair of ladies slacks, or pants, could be sucked into the chain. We even wore dresses back then “in the day,” which could also be caught up in the chain so these shorter pants were a practical alternative. They were popular just to wear around in the warmer summer months just for fun if one needed something a bit more substantial than shorts.

There is evidence a-plenty that while I was a tot, I was a big fan of the pedal pushers. Mine featured thin decorative piping at the hemline of the pants, with extra lengths to tie into demure little bows for additional decorative enhancement. Me being me, I was into function, not form, and these little extra lengths of decoration just hung loose, were never tied into the little bows and added to the movement of the pants as I skipped, ran, pedaled, somersaulted and leap-frogged my way through my summer activities.

This evidence is comprised of numerous photos taken of me while undertaking these activities. My dad was in charge of photographically documenting our travels and activities (and yes, there are boxes and boxes of vacation slides). Some of these photos were posed and some, the best ones, were taken while engaged in the antics of my day. Often, antics, as opposed to activities, was the norm for my day as I seemed to always be into something that I was not supposed to be doing. Dad was at the ready with his 35 mm camera to document these episodes for posterity, or evidence of wrongdoing, depending on the level of antic-ness.

I seemed to be wearing pedal pushers in most of these photos. The posed, holiday photos were the exception. For those, I was washed up, curled up and seen in some frothy Dotted Swiss concoction that matched my older sister’s frock that Mom had designed and sewn for us. My sister was a little miss princess who posed with her hands folded beautifully in her lap and gazed adoringly at the camera. I was standing there, itching, and ready to be removed of the organza and little white gloves as soon as church was over and I was back in the car. Scrubby tee shirts and my beloved pedal pushers replaced my Easter and Christmas finery none too soon.

When searching for an online moniker decades later, I had a little photo of me on my desk that visually summed up my antic ridden lifestyle and attitude, no doubt captured when my Dad said “hey, give me a smile for the camera.” I would have nothing to do with that, and responded with my usual snotty attitude complete with the tongue sticking out for the world to see. I was wearing the de-rigueur pedal pushers in this photo. I was inspired to use a variation of the term as a way of expressing the inner child in me (who no doubt is still in need of a spanking). This is the story behind the name of Pedalpants that I have selected for myself in the invisible world of the Internet. I was especially happy that Google has no return when the term is searched online. It is mine, and mine alone. It expresses my devil-may-care attitude mixed with the summer breeziness and casual mode of dress that was, and still is, my favorite.

Blogs seem to be a narcissist’s dream come true. Just like those who Rant and Rave on Craigslist, they feel the need to bless the world with their opinions, they are right and everyone else is wrong. This ain’t one of those.

This won’t be a linear ledger of life. It will ramble based upon subjects, stuff I feel like writing. When I figure out how to do it, the subjects will be listed in the column on the right.

Enjoy, read what you want and ignore the rest. Comments are most welcome. That way I know you were here.