Hodge Podge

I have several things to talk about today, pretty much all unrelated.

First, the property manager here has given me permission to start a community garden in the small field (huge useless lawn) on site. She even said it used to be a community garden, but they had problems with crime and eventually dropped it. When I asked about reviving it, she said I could be in charge of it. I made up a flyer (pending approval) pointing out the benefits of gardening and inviting everyone to participate. I even promised a potluck dinner at the end of the year with garden grown veggies. The property manager offered to have maintenance do the tilling for us, and I am just waiting on her approval for the date and such. Woo hoo!

Secondly, I cleared out a lot of space in two closets so I can start storing food. I am waiting for a call from the local homemade candy store (wouldn't that be store-made, though? local, anyway) about 5-gallon buckets. I also need to find shelving to fit in the closets. I am very proud of my food shopping thriftiness lately. I visit the food pantry (which is still very well stocked, fortunately) on Wednesdays, then I make up a menu for the next 7 days based on what we got from the pantry. I try to have to put no more than a dozen items on the shopping list. Last week, I had probably 10 things on the list. I was able to buy almost all organic and spent just under $50. I am desperately hoping that the price of organic food won't rise as much as that of conventional food since organic requires less oil inputs. We are down to eating meat about 3-4 times a week now, down from 6-7 times a week, and nearly all of it comes from the food pantry. We still have to buy meat for our cat, but even some of that can come from the pantry. After all, even with 6 mouths to feed every day, there is no way I am serving roast chicken 3 times a week. One, we get other meats as well usually; two, that much chicken causes appetite fatigue in our house; and three, ... well, I can't think of a three. We are purchasing a piglet this month for a local farmer to raise for us, and the price of uncertified organic hamburger at our local farm is $3.39/lb.

Third unrelated item -- a few days ago I took a detour while taking my daughter back to her dad's house to stop by the house in Nostalgia and we were invited in by the same man who bought the house from my folks 20 years ago. It looks so different. He has expanded the second floor to be a full storey instead of a loft, installed a bathroom, a full-fledged kitchen, two bedrooms upstairs and windows downstairs. It looked so much smaller than it did when I was my daughter's age. It was very cozy. The gentleman said that he was struggling with the payments for two reasons. He is a carpenter and work has been slow, and the taxes have gone up from $600/year in 1988 to $3400 now. Ouch. But it was very nice to see the house again. I had just driven up the seemingly shortened driveway (surely the whole property shrank over 20 years) and looked around while staying in the car, but the man came out and I explained who I was and that I just wanted to show my daughter, and he invited in me in for a look-see and a chat. Very talkative gent. I think we spent 45 minutes there chatting, so I had to make up time since my husband had specifically said not to take 5 hours for the 4+ hour trip. I made it home in 4.5 hours. Very little traffic at that time of night helped a lot. The little hill where I used to build my forts turns out to be about half the distance from the house that I thought. The 30-40 feet in my memory turned out to be merely 10-20 feet.

Nostalgia

I have spent the last few months fighting a hereditary winter depression, but with spring right around the corner, and all my girls' birthdays underway, I am feeling like posting again. I recently posted a question to Greenpa over at his blog about housing design, and today he did his best to answer me. I am so honored.

I thought I would use this post to talk about the house that I consider my childhood home. When I was 2, my parents bought a 5-acre parcel in a backwoods town that was so small it had no traffic lights and a one-lane bridge that went to the next town over. When I was 4, we temporarily lived there in a trailer for a couple of months until my folks found a small house to rent where my youngest brother was born the next year. When I was 8, my parents started building on that property. They had a nice house planned, with a 2-car garage attached by a breezeway. They started the garage first, since it was smaller and the plan was to move into the garage while they built the house so as not to have to pay rent any longer than necessary. The house never got built, and we lived in the garage for just over 3 years, but those were the happiest years of my life.

They built this "house" with their own two hands, and I was proud to help whenever I could. They did have a cement truck come in and pour the floor, but they built the framework for the cement (I don't know what it is called) and leveled it themselves. They did all the framing and putting up the exterior walls themselves, and our church held a work day when it was time to put the roof up. It took several months to complete the house, and we moved in in January 1985, two months before I turned 9.

The house was situated about 300' in from the road. I know our driveway was incredibly long to walk up and down, and impossible to shovel. My folks always hired a plow when the snow came. Being so young at the time, my impressions of size were distorted, but I think I remember my dad telling me that number as the length of the driveway.

Our house was 20'x24', with a 12' loft along the southern 24' wall. The door was on the western 20' wall, and since it was supposed to be a garage, we had two huge windows in the south wall, which were going to be the garage doors after the house proper was built. Those windows had no glass, just two sheets of plastic over them inside and out. Lots of sun, lots of winter warmth. We got upstairs by way of a ladder that was too steep to be called stairs, but just flat enough that we could go down facing forwards if we wanted to be naughty. Upstairs were five windows, three along the south wall, and one each in the eastern and western walls. I have not seen this kind of window anywhere else. They were square, probably 3' to a side, with just one sash, and to open them we pushed them up and out from the bottom and stuck a pole in to hold them out. No screens. My cat used to like jumping out my window, then coming back inside and doing it again. There were no windows in the northern wall, and the roof was saltbox-like. It was two stories high on the south side, went up to a peak, then down to the first floor on the north side. It was covered in asphalt shingles. The walls were insulated, and half of them were sheetrocked, the other half just had clear plastic holding the insulation in so it didn't fall out. None of the sheetrock was painted. The ceiling was also insulated with plastic over it.

There were no interior walls, either. The ultimate in open-concept living. There was a railing along the edge of the loft so we didn't fall down onto the woodstove. The woodstove was in the center of the house, slightly offset to the north so that the stovepipe went up beside the loft instead of through it. We had a propane stove that we used in the summer when it was too hot for the woodstove or when Mom was baking. Our woodstove was not designed for cooking, though it did work well for it. The northeast corner was the kitchen area with the stove, some salvaged countertop for storage and workspace, and a small table for the two dishpans which constituted our sink. The southeast corner housed the table and chairs, which sat right in front of one of those huge windows. The southwest corner was the living room, with a sofa and an easy chair, and the northwest corner had the ladder upstairs, the woodbin, and some bookcases. Upstairs we visually divided into three "rooms". I hung a blanket from the rafters to segregate my 8'x8' "room". My two younger brothers had the middle 64 square feet, and my parents had the western 64 square feet. The front 4 feet of the loft was for walking, and at the end (down by my room) was the "indoor pot". This was a 5-gallon bucket with a toilet seat set on top. We were only allowed to use it at night or if we were sick. Mom emptied it into the outhouse when it got full.

We heated entirely with wood, and when I was 10 or 11, I used to start the fire each morning. My dad worked second shift, and although my mom stayed home with us kids, she kept his hours. We weren't allowed to wake them up until at least 10 am. Being a kid, I naturally got up at 6 every morning. We were homeschooled, so I would get up, go downstairs and light the fire, have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, then start my schoolwork. I remember the woodstove as a long, cast-iron box on legs. The stovepipe came out a short end, with the door on the other short end, and the long sides had a hunting scene on them. It was a beautiful stove. The top had a single level, so it was easy to cook on it. We always had a big stockpot of water sitting back there to keep the humidity up. It also provided conveniently easy hot water if you weren't going to drink it. If you were going to drink it, we had a teapot so the water would stay clean. I suppose we used the stockpot like the hot water reservoirs I have seen on pictures of wood cookstoves.

We had no electricity or running water. The house was wired for electricity, but my folks never had it run in from the street because they were going to wait until the house was done and do both buildings at the same time. We lit our home with kerosene lanterns, had a fridge only in the winter (the entire outdoors was our fridge then), and had a 13" TV with rabbit ears that ran off of a 12V car battery. We had a well that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. I don't know why it didn't work in the end, but it was near the bottom of the driveway and had a red pitcher pump on it. I remember watching my mom dig the hole for the outhouse, which is featured in some very funny stories that I tell my children. (Like the time the baby goat jumped down there. Eeew!) The outhouse was situated off the northeast corner of the house, probably 10'-15' away from the house. It certainly wasn't as elaborate as Greenpa's THWASPCO, but it served the purpose.

I have great memories of that house. I wish I could buy it back and move my family back there again. It has probably been brought up to date in the almost 20 years since we moved out, though.