by Amy Minato
Simplicity
Because we can fit exactly one percent of our personal items in our 150-square-foot cabins, we are finally clearing out the barn and sending a caravan to charity. The main house is roughly 1,200 square feet, but we can’t put many personal items in there.
Many of our things have been in boxes in the barn all winter, attesting to the fact that we don’t really need them. The motto here is: if you want to clear out your possessions, move into a place the size of a walk-in freezer. This goes against current trends.
The average U.S. family size shrinks while house sizes grow. People then feel compelled to buy more stuff to fill up the space, stuff that requires either time or money to care for and store.
Sara, Rita, and I agree to have a clothes swap. Traditionally, at such an event, women ravage like wild bulls through each other’s things and what you come up with, if it’s not too badly torn from the struggle, you get to keep. However, since the three of us wear sizes about as similar as the three bears, the best we could do was admire each other’s taste and tell about our lives.
“Gramma knit this for me.”
“My first boyfriend gave me this sweater. He had blue eyes and a brain the size of a spit-ball.”
“I got this skirt from a market in China. The old woman selling it was smaller than a child, wizened as bark.”
As our stories unravel, I begin to comprehend the attraction of quilting. The way women save scraps of clothing from their lives, remembering the dance they wore that dress in, which child wore that sleeper, the shy cousin who gave them that shirt. How they take these scraps and create art that provides warmth for their families. How, with this skill, nothing is lost, only passed on.
In this same spirit we three women share our stories and pass along to our community in the form of clothing those bits of our lives that have perched awhile on our bodies, and sung to us.
Mud
“Let’s do a mud bath!” Natalie suggests. “I hear it’s good for your skin,” she adds, in a more serious tone. I gaze across the table full of seed packets at Natalie’s eight-year-old skin, gleaming with every possible variation of the word fresh, and agree.
“Yes, it’s absolutely vital for every woman, darling,” I respond. “Anyway, it sounds like a gas.”
So we wait for a warm day when everyone else has gone to town, pick out a secluded place, and start digging. After we’ve dug a bathtub-sized hole, we carry buckets full of warm water from the kitchen and pour it in. When the consistency becomes that of brownie dough, sticky and pliant, it’s ready.
We find a spot sheltered from the road and strip in the sun. “I hope no one’s bird watching,” Natalie giggles.
“If they are,” I say, “we’ll stump ’em. Let’s see. One bare-breasted ruby crown and a long-legged mud flapper. Lifers!”
We slide in and cover every spot of flesh with ooze, even squish it into our hair, singing, wallowing, painting ourselves chocolate. It feels sexy; it feels like what e.e. cummings described as “mud-luscious.”
A car going by slows down, so we slink farther in until it seems as if only our white eyeballs are showing, along with some clumped-up hair. This, of course, makes us laugh so hard we slip getting out. Once in the hot air, the mud dries quickly and cracks with every move. “Ouch,” I say, “Youch.” Natalie agrees, because grinning is starting to make our faces hurt. We hurry home like two sleek otters or two large earthworms or two muddy rakes, to rinse off.
Afterwards we exaggerate about how glowing the other’s skin seems, and how soft! Fussing and clucking, all the while remembering why we really did it, for the slither and spank, the daring, the togetherness, the warm muskiness, of our earthen baptism.
Loyalties
My cat presents me with a moral dilemma. The more dedicated I become to preserving native plant and animal life, the harder it becomes to ignore the disastrous effect pets can have on them. Cats especially, decimate bird populations. Whether or not you feed or bell them, cats tend to be undeterred predators. Keeping them inside is the only solution, an unacceptable one in our case.
After a single day locked in my one-room cabin, Quixote is ballistic. I return from a walk to find yarn strung in knots around the room in a giant blue web that takes an hour to untie. Clearly, the call of the wild beckons. I bring tuna and catnip, try to pet Quixote but he skulks off, scowling at me with low brows and piercing green eyes. My cat is not a meower, but his silent glance is feline eloquence enough. Reluctantly, I leave the window open again.
Each morning this week, I wake to a scrub jay’s scold. Investigation reveals Quixote hunched patiently below a low limb on which the raucous jay perches. Clearly, he is the object of her wrath. My cat tilts a bemused head, passively accepting the scratchy shower of “yaaks.” Of course animals eat each other, that’s natural, but domestic animals have an unfair advantage. They don’t need to kill for food, and introduced species can harm native ones.
Western scrub jays are important to the ecosystem. They groom mule deer by eating parasites off their fur while the deer stand patiently still. Rainbow Valley is oak country. Unlike jays in pinyon pine country, where seed-getting requires finer bills, Western scrub jays here have stout, slightly hooked bills to hammer open the acorns and rip off the shell. They will hide acorns, and if another jay is watching, dig them up and bury them somewhere else. Acorns that they don’t dig up may grow into oaks. Mutualism.
Scrub jays are also smart and bold. This one, obviously, has a thing about my cat.
One morning the scolding stops. Dreading the reason, I look out the cabin window. A pile of blue feathers colors the grass below the infamous limb. Quixote’s number is up.
A friend, recently divorced and needing cuddles, happily takes Quixote in. She has a good-sized house, a yard full of ubiquitous starlings, and an advanced degree in cat psychology. She feeds Quixote fresh fish and milk daily, buys toys for him, and lets him sleep under the covers with her. Clearly, a match made in heaven. When I visit, he looks fat and placid, and turns his head aside.
I miss my intelligent companion who could jump on roofs and open doors, his luminous eyes watching me from the foot of the bed, and even his magnanimous way of shuffling all the neighbor cats in to feast at his food dish. Quixote earned his name as a kitten, from his noble scuffs with my socks and dinner napkins. Everything became a gallant battle, and I, even at that low point in my life, his Dulcinea.
But the finches and nuthatches are back in the meadow. The birdbath brims with feathered flips and flutterings. Seed scatters from the crowded feeder. The wildlife has approved of the move.
Sometimes I wonder about the brave jay who brought attention to the cause. Maybe there are martyrs in the bird world?
I keep a blue feather above the door, stroke it for help with hard decisions.
Resourcefulness
The bathroom door swings loose so I braid cordage from rushes to create a latch. This takes all morning and gives my fingers a rash, but hey, it adds character to our home, and I learned something.
Being a gazillion miles from anywhere (okay, twenty miles from the nearest town, but I’m dedicated to driving as little as possible) makes me clever with the resources available (be they old shoes, tree sap, bike tires, river rock). Wild mint leaves make tea, flowers adorn salads, syrup replaces sugar. I rig up a ladder with an old log, a fence from strewn branches; chairs hold up a clothesline, a broom arises from grass.
Two flat stones bookend my library, which rests on a plank I found in the barn. Clothes hang from a twisted branch nailed across the back wall. A basket adorns the front door, made from the pliant, but invasive, English ivy, with a teasel pet comb inside. Teasel was brought west as a tool for teasing wool before spinning it.
Gradually labels break down—socks transcend their lowly status and make startling headbands, scarves become halter tops, window screens turn into drying racks, and, of course, for large parties, a dryer lid makes an excellent pie pan.
Catego
ries dissolve! Anything is possible! I begin to look at objects for their form and material instead of their culturally prescribed use. Using imagination to break through preconceived ideas frees me of the tight jacket of cultural convention and makes me a creator in my world. Of course, people may suspect that I’ve finally gone over the edge (“she’s wearing that rice bag on her head again!”). You have to be comfortable being different, it seems, or have your own community of wacky, resourceful friends.
Although much of modern life is complicated and requires learning intricate details such as how to retrieve all the important data you just lost on your computer, mostly there’s a method, a formula, that someone else has created that you need to decipher and devotedly follow. This is a different mental function then searching your property for something to hold your pants up, and far less entertaining.
And it’s great retraining for an era of dwindling resources. Reduce, reuse, and recycle make the difference between drying those delicious apples for winter or not. When you live with little means, each of them means a lot.
Trespass
There is a pond in a nearby meadow. When I swim there, small bright green frogs line the shore. I swim toward them, eye to eye, and watch their cheeks quivering steadily with breath until, at the magical closeness, they simultaneously dart into the water in scattered directions, some over my head, splashing in around me. It seems I am somehow baptized, or cursed, by frogs.
I’ve never seen other humans at the pond, although a worn rope swing hangs off an oak, and a moldy kickboard rocks at the shoreline. Sounds travel easily over the surface, the “kerplunk” of a turtle that lifts its beak, senses me, and slides off its log perch into the water. I float belly up and listen as marsh wrens scold from the reeds: one is low and steady; another pitched, frantic; still another creaks. Clearly, animals have unique voices, recognizable to each other. This was a conversation among individuals, undoubtedly, about me. On a low branch stands an indignant jay, blue head feathers puffed up. It adjusts its position on the branch and stares.
So this is what it is to trespass. To enter another’s world uninvited, crush the plants, rip through the unseen spider web, wake the turtle, scatter the frogs. To go where we are not necessarily welcome, where we have asked no permission, oblivious that other beings have a sense of home, which we violate until we either enter respectfully, or make it our own.
Not that we are always trespassers in nature. People have lived as part of the land, moving in without rearranging too much furniture, listening and tending and giving way. For most of us, though, rather than wake in it, we “go into” nature, living as we do mostly indoors.
I will return to the pond daily, all summer to swim, following the same worn path and drying off on the same hot rock.
Eventually, I learn to enter unobtrusively. Watch my step. Go slow. The frogs become laissez-faire, the marsh wrens amp down to a rustle, turtles raise their crusty heads, but stay on their rocks.
So goes this crazy quest—for a Chicago gal to put her feet in a pond in Rainbow Valley, Oregon, as a member of the family.
Second Glance
Although “zu-weet” rings at you
from everywhere in the forest,
it takes awhile to find
the pale-green Hutton’s vireo singing
from the oak tops. Each trill
causes its whole body
to vibrate. After that,
you cannot stop seeing it
quaking in the golden leaves
every time you look up.
And even with careful steps, you almost miss
the western lizard lumbering across your path
through the elegant jeffrey pine.
But when you bend down,
how startling it stands out
from the needle mulch.
Lifting its curious eye,
fingers splayed on a twig,
clutching, and blinking.
At first you think Oregon ash bark
is white as alkali until
you touch the pale crustose lichen
stretched like a glove
photosynthesizing and reproducing
along its entire trunk.
So when someone proclaims
a woods devoid of life
egg hatch, grub munch,
bee buzz, frog hop
newt mate, spore slide,
root suck, leaf drop.
it is then you begin to understand
what within us is ill
and wants culling.
Rot
Today I spread the gluey, gooey ripe compost out across the garden and dig it into the soil before planting seeds. The land swallows this dark muck like the good medicine it is, with a squishing sound like a burp.
All winter we have scraped broccoli stems and orange peels off our plates into our compost pail in the kitchen along with coffee grounds, egg shells, and any organic matter except meat, watermelon rinds, and corncobs, and trudged it out to a big open bin near the garden to “feed the critters.” When it’s pouring rain and the pail slops against clean pants this is not a favorite chore. A cascade of colorful, odoriferous food scraps tumbles onto the grubs and fruit flies that multiply in an orgy of leftovers. I then toss a handful of grass clippings over them the way a priest sprinkles holy water and head back to the house, pail swinging.
Somehow this stinky, writhing pile will convert by spring into a nutrient-rich, brownie dough-like miracle food for plants at the same time that it keeps our garbage to a minimum and trips to the dump rare.
Jazzed by the transformation, I gaze down into the compost bin for clues to the meaning of life and develop a compost philosophy. Since dead bodies, if left alone, will decompose and become part of the life cycle again, maybe souls do the same. Maybe when I die my spirit will break up into little parts and get transformed and rearranged and somehow become part of future souls? This could explain past-life memories, spiritual resonances, and déjà vu.
When I explain this theory to Raul, he offers all his future compost duties to me as a gesture, he explains, “toward my enlightenment.”
May Watching a caterpillar climb my scarf I marvel at the transformation it will make, wondering at how much we fear our changes, rather than enjoying the magic. The caterpillar travels randomly, dropping down on the first available place, seemingly without attention to pattern, texture, or direction, waving its head around first, then landing, decidedly, arch up.
Reverence
So every dormant bud, water skipper, screeching jay, is an angel, buffeting up beside me. Humble thought. How can I survive the machine age if attending to the voice of every beetle or cherry tree? Let alone one branch of the cherry tree, or one chip of its bark, teeming with life.
I embrace the web sustaining me. The sky orients, seas fill and surround, oxygen circles through vegetation, soil collects the least flakes of my skin and hair. Where did I think I was, anyway?
If not already home.
On such days I imagine the Dutch shopkeeper Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in the mid-seventeenth century. He assures Mrs. van Pelten that her fabric will arrive tomorrow, adjusts the shades, locks up, and walks down to have tea with his old friend Carl, the eyeglass maker.
“I suppose, Anton,” Carl says, removing his protection mask and looking up from his needlepoint tools, “you’d like to collect some more shards from my floor.” He looks amused. “Help yourself.”
Leeuwenhoek nods, grins, and sweeps a few crystals into a bandana. “Goodnight, Carl, and thanks.” He’s up late, grinding glass into finer and finer lenses.
He doesn’t notice his fatigue, because he’s working on a microscope.
Alone in his quiet shop, by lantern glow Leeuwenhoek places a drop of water “just for the heck of it” under the scope, leans over, looks through it, and knocks his socks off.
Paramecium, amoebas, bacteria—“animalcules,” he calls them, as they are obviously alive. These tiny creatures in their transluc
ent beauty skitter across the water and he, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, is the first person ever to see them. He is awed and terrified. Disease will begin to make sense. And water is never quite the same.
What he couldn’t have guessed, back then, is that we humans started out similarly. One-celled beings with an attitude. When a prokaryote cell swallowed a mitochondrion four billion years ago, a pact was made. “Carry me around and I’ll light your fire, baby.” Stored energy. We were on our way.
Leeuwenhoek lived to be ninety-one years old, rarely leaving Holland, enthralled by the new worlds under the lenses: a spider’s eye, mouthparts of a louse, capillaries. Why travel?
Sometimes I wonder why we all seem to be looking for discovery only beyond our homes—the Arctic, the ocean, the moon—as if we already know everything there is to know about the dramas unfolding in the compost heap. We forgo the mystery in our own souls and backyards.
That forms of life existed invisible to us must have been a mindblower for Leeuwenhoek. But what today exists beyond our senses? What songs can’t we hear? What scents do we miss? What goes untasted by our limited tongues?
The irony is that our ability to detect and appreciate more about the natural world progresses along with our ability to destroy it. The same instruments, sometimes, used for both. What will it take for us to separate these powers? To prove that the apples of knowledge and evil needn’t be from the same tree. What leap of consciousness would it take for us to learn to savor one, scorn the other, and loll around in the garden forever?
Appreciation
“Nope. Still green.”
We wait in salivating expectation for the strawberries to ripen. Siestans on their way to the mailbox will detour a quarter-mile to check on them. Slugs discovered on the strawberries are, with all due respect, squashed.
