Five years

Esquisse for the "petite maison"

Five years. Five years is a very long time, in dog years and in blogs. Two years is already long. Two years since I last posted. Once. Once in five years. It has been a long five years, and, in some respects, it has been a good five years. They group in various ways: the year I lost the weight I'd always wanted to lose, and the five years I have maintained that weight; the year I got strong; the year I learned definitively, and forever, how to keep my horse, and any horse, from bolting on me; the year my mother spent in a nursing home, and died; the year of working on the house plans, and of practically not seeing my horse. I can look forward to new headings for periods of years, the first one being the year we did the renovations. That one is coming, after 17 years. 

There are many reasons I got quiet. There are few to begin again. More importantly, why did I ever start in the first place, and what was I trying to accomplish? The invitation to write my memoirs, the opportunity to practice writing, outside of my journal, and the exercise of learning to make the personal universal, while pacifying my outbursts of temperament and most difficult emotions by remembering that they are exactly that, and not my personal enemies. I enjoyed it; I was embarrassed by it; I learned its futility in earning me a publishing contract, and even a following; I got some practice writing, and I am far from Jane Austen, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf and The Shatner Chatner. That last was really tough to take. 

I didn't even do a very good job of keeping up in my journal. That felt futile and embarrassing, too. I am not here to document my life, but to have one. Everyone wants attention. Even my favorite Instagram accounts reveal themselves as efforts in marketing, with the curation that requires, and I look at my own gallery and realize I don't get it. I might even reject it. It also takes a lot of time to do it that well. Hats off. 

Expectations. I don't want to set myself up to fail in them. I want praise, not constructive criticism (thanks, anyway). I want to be honest, and I just don't have that courage. I want to be a writer, but I just don't have that, well, courage, nor creativity of imagination. I am adequate, which is enough for life, but a bit disappointing for me personally. I would like to wield more power in my pen writing, and my pencil drawing architecture. I have sudden ideas that are pretty good, actually, but they do not come from that incredible place that leads to really great stuff. I don't really want good enough stuff, but if I am doing it for myself, that is what I am going to get. Budget hurts, naturally. I am talking about our renovation now, by the way. 

I didn't return to talk about that, though. A disembodied friend from across the virtual social network universe said she missed it. 

"Do you update your blog? I loved reading it, and your [renovation] adventures and your bike tours and your horse riding and your adventures."

"No. I think it's totally gone. I never even saved any of it," I told her. 

It's true. I had googled my blog a few times over the past few years and found another page in its place, something on writing the perfect college term paper. Sisyphus for term papers. That made sense. It also meant that my domain was gone. That's what happens when you don't update your credit card information. But, she had gotten me curious, motivated me to dig a little deeper, and so I opened Blogger. First, I tried with the app on my iPhone, and I learned that it had gone the way of the dinosaurs, sometime along with Google+. So, I tried from Chrome, and nothing showed up. I Googled -- I am a total Google customer -- the possible reasons for its disappearance and learned that no, Google does not automatically delete inactive blogs; if I had never deleted it, it was still there on Google's servers somewhere. 

By now, I realized I actually cared, a little bit. A little bit more than I expected to because it was important to an audience of one person half a planet away, who I had never met in person, and who writes better than I do, I'd like to add. Her recall of details and her use of them in recounting personal anecdotes that convey emotion blows me away. That probably helped motivate me to search enough to figure out which Google account I needed to sign in to find out that all I had to do was update my credit card information and remove the custom domain name that wasn't mine anymore, and there it was, what you are seeing.

I felt relief. I was attached to it, after all, or some of it anyway. 

I sent her a message, "It's all still there on Blogger." 

She replied, "So glad you found it. Sometimes it is good to remind ourselves how creative we are. Your blog was/will continue to be a place of beauty, looks at life's foibles, and astute observations."

"I have no idea how anyone else could ever find it."

"I got it from that address. It's just as I remember it. I hope that you continue it."

I considered migrating it to WordPress (the obvious and up-to-date thing to do), and decided I didn't have ambition enough for it to bother. I'd also have to know what it should look like, and that energy must be reserved for our house. Maybe later.

So, here is the beginning of a continuation. I have been measuring, drawing and getting estimates for a year now, the day we returned from a failed bike trip (justement) across the Alps to Croatia that turned into a week with our sick cat in an AirBnb in Languedoc-Roussillon, visiting the châteaux Cathares, Carcassone and hiking, and I said, "Now. Start now."

I'll note in passing that not 10 days after we returned, a nun living in the convent less than 500 meters away, across the field with the two donkeys, who visited us at the fence behind our little wood deck, was buried in the mud from the devastating storms that destroyed parts of the villages we crossed every day that week. The place we rented was filled with that mud. Which alone is pretty strong indication that God doesn't save you because you led a lifetime of prayer and good deeds. It might even argue that chance exists and that there is no heavenly rewards system in place, and that you have to just be a decent person here in this life for the sake of yourself and everyone around you. 

So far, that work led to the repairs on the leaking roof because the first thing is to keep water out of the house, and to the replacement of the old oil furnace with an Hitachi high temperature heat pump system because the new generation of heat pumps work in renovation with the old cast-iron radiators. Hallelujah .We were able to get a new heater for the pool as part of that contract. I cannot tell you how happy that made me. Out with the old, the inefficient and the broken! In with the new!

And never do I stop marvelling at how easy this really is -- for anyone with the means for a comfortable, and even a reasonable, budget. I know because I did it for such people. For years. All it took was a phone call to a trusted contractor, and it was done. Not so when every penny feels stolen from your retirement and last years, when you are left to wonder if you will be afford to eat the food that won you that wonderful weight loss, and what feels like a brand new and functional immune system along with it, but a lesser quality of pet food than you presently feed your animals. Not that I haven't been putting us in that situation for the 6 years now, already!!, that I had had Fibs, who I now think of as "poor Fibs", so little do I see him in the run up to final decisions and signing contracts.

I imagine, then, a future in which my chosen contractor comes when promised, stays on-site and works beautifully, my plans rising up off the paper into exactly the volumes and spaces we need to make this house a delight, and a valuable asset (probably the biggest delight). I will have asked every question possible and sought all opinions helpful to deciding how best to spend every centime of any future leisure budget we might have enjoyed, had we not decided not to sell this place 17 years ago.

And, the secret is that I dream that this work will do more than earn me a contract for my memoirs, but the possibility of doing such work, even better work, for others. Of course, my degree being from the US, I cannot practice in my own name here, but I don't let that stop my brain from concocting fantasies in which other architects line up to sign my drawings.

And, right now, I am vibrating, and not from anxiety for once, but from excitement because I think that for the given the contraints, I have found the best solution I can. I can see it. The roof is in folded dark metal ( like zinc, but cheaper). The walls are clad in wood, treated in the Japanese technique of Yakisugi, or burned wood. The floors are concrete, the walls in white drywall with birch or poplar plywood cabinetry separating some spaces and making some objects, like the Japanese stairs. The windows are black-framed aluminum, 30% cheaper than wood, sometimes covered in slats of wood to obscure the view and play with opacity and transparency and create a lantern effect. I imagine the lighting having a photovoltaic control, bringing the lights on in the evening as the sun sets, and bringing up their intensity as the night darkens around guests seated on the terrace around a table covered in candles.

I almost forgot the wood shop and lawn tools storage. I guess we'll just have a woodstove and a few easy chairs in that space. It certainly will encourage me to get out and mow the lawn.

I'll keep you posted, whoever you are.
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