My mom had lots of shiny brites, but one that meant a lot to me, that I had saved for myself when she passed, was a striped one just like this. She hung some of her ornaments with thread including this particular one. As little children, my brother and I would spend hours twisting it up tight on its thread and then letting it go for it to twirl its beautiful colors ’round and ’round. So much so that, no matter how careful we were, we had worn off much of the flocking around its middle. Even as young adults we couldn’t resist giving it a spin, or two, my mother facilitating such shenanigans by placing it on a branch near the arm of the settee.
This last November I didn’t have the oompf to fill my living room shelves with my winter scene. On the Sunday or sometimes the Friday of Thanksgiving, on the shelves Dirt built into the living room, I spread and hang lace backdrops and carefully set out the farm, the cottage in the forest and the village, with a mile or two of tiny lights. I always leave it up through February, taking it down when I no longer am wishing for snowy frozen days. But this year, coming off a year of recovery from Dirt’s accident, I just didn’t have it together enough to do all that work, spending Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend with family was more important. When I came across this ornament as I decorated the Christmas tree, I decided to hang it in the shelves that usually hold the winter village but were now, on the eve of Christmas with snow falling outside, feeling regettably empty.
The much loved ornament was hanging there on January 14th, 10 p.m., when fire and smoke ruined my dear old house and earthly belongings.
The poor thing was so sooty, hardly recognizable, still, I saved it, knowing full well that the soot could never be removed from the flocked stripes without completely taking them off, that it was indeed forever ruined. I sat it in a box with a few other things I was hoping to save, things my heart is just not ready to let go of.
The living room has been one of the last rooms to be completely gutted. It is taking me seemingly forever to clear out the rooms, deciding what is beyond saving, and chucking things I find dear into the gaping mouth of the hugest dumpster ever. Blubbering over ruined one of a kind photos, blubbering over broken things or burnt things that can never be replaced. What I had initially laid out on January 16th as a week and a half job for me to do, drug out to a job of more than a month and a half instead. I originally intended to attack one room at a time, recording each item as I went, touch it once, as it went into a black waste sack for sailing into the dumpster or lovingly tucked into the “save, please” boxes. Instead, for one reason or another I bounced from room to room, working strong one day, to barely getting one thing decided and spending the rest of the time sobbing into my mask and beany on another day, to avoiding the smelly nasty wreck for a couple days at a time, or waiting for others, like the abatement crew, to do their thing.
I had abandoned my initial work in the living room for continued work on upstairs contents because the workers were going to need to go there after the kitchen and dining room were completely stripped including their interior walls. Well, that, along with complete sadness and being distracted by feeding an outside hotdog fire, put that room aside.
And then a head cold hit. Not to mention, we still have a farm to take care of and a temporary home and life to secure, you know Dear Reader the likes of: dealing with cooking, eating, milking cows, feeding pigs and chickens, dirty farm clothes care, and go-to-town clothes care, oh, and sleeping. These nearly two months have been a magnifying glass on why it seems I can never get to the final touches of a project in what I think is a timely fashion.
After the head cold slowed me down, the most recent news from our contractor further knocked me out. Bad enough that it went in six weeks from repairable to have to strip it of its walls inside and out, but now we heard the finally word once our contractor saw what lay beneath the burned walls. Our contractor cannot not see any possible way of saving the main structure of the house. We must tear it completely down. Phil, my husband, aka Dirt, figured this all along, as did a few others secretly, knowing what he knew of the old house’s ills before the fire, but Dirt stood back as others, the insurance adjuster and the contractor, thought they could save it.
All of this massive tear down, excavation, means we have to get big fat building permits and drawings and officially official stuff and incur now-unavoidable expenses where before we only needed this-or-that permits and inspections. With a smile on my face, and a cheerful, “okay, okay, we can do this” to our contractor and Dirt, in the privacy of my studio apartment and the chicken hoop the next day, the news sent me into paroxysms of weeping and despair. Six weeks of fighting off my “silly” nightmares of not having much of a house after all the insurance money is exhausted, only to have it come true. Fighting the desire to strangle the sound out of well meaning words that have come my way of late, the ones that pat me on the top of the head with “it’s hard, but hey, you get a new house!” As if the adult thing to do is embrace all the charred mess as some huge blessing, and to do so right now!, with the ash smudges still on my face and coughing up ugly looking lumps.
So the boxes on the floor, books and a few remaining decisions on the shelves in the living room remained until yesterday. In spite of the lingering sinus compaction, I finally felt good enough to buck up and finish so that I could begin to rip off the interior coverings of Sam Sorensson’s log cabin, proving to myself, and others, that there is a log cabin worth saving. Our living room for years now has been in the old cabin that the original homesteader, Sam Sorensson, built in the late 1800’s. There is a lot of history in my dear house. Some that is about to be torn down and carted away. In light of the new news, I am pleading that the cabin be restored, lifted and given a proper foundation.
When I went back into the living room yesterday, to get back on track, I found the box of saved items had been tipped over. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, and I began to pick up and inspect the contents, wondering again if this or that could be repaired, I came to the slow but horrible sweeping realization that not only was it true that one of a kind photos of my children did glue to the glass when it got hot, but that my childhood treasure I placed in the box had been broken to bits.
Though I cried and hollered and cried some more, and had a hard time focusing for a while, when Dirt arrived home he was amazed at all I accomplished.
Today I’m splitting my non-farm work time between exposing more walls in the cabin and digging the grape hole and preping a site for a storage shed… Oops, nope, I have material, sewing and knitting supplies that still need to be recorded and tossed in the dumpster. The dumpster needs to leave, eveyday that it sits here not being filled with things from my house it wastes money, though there are days I’m glad to pay a buck to not have to hurl my posessions into it, I might like to buy a spoon to stir my soup with. Tomorrow I’ll finish those other three jobs and begin to find homes for other dear-to-the-heart but too close to destruction/construction plants to go. But by Friday construction on a storage shed must begin. I’m still a farmer that needs access to her incubators and some sort of a inside work area.
Keep my nose to the grind stone Dear Reader. Unfortunately I haven’t solved the spam problem here on the blog so don’t try to comment here. Nor have I put my old emails on the new laptop.
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