These Two Hands

I have hit my limit with the handmade-ness of the toolshed. I wasn’t happy with how it was coming together; the gaps were too big for my liking (remember the cladding was split not cut, so the logs bowed out and in as well as left and right) and I just wasn’t fully loving its finished look. I lay awake last night until 2am, thinking about it unhappily.

Yet this afternoon I went out again to spend hours in the 92 degree, 75% humidity heat splitting another log because doggone it, I SAID I would finish this thing and I WILL!

Until I had a revelation. Who am I doing this for? Myself. Why am I doing it? To use up existing free resources. To prove I can construct a shelter from materials our own land provides, with just my own woman-power and old-fashioned methods. Am I satisfied that I could do it if our little family were suddenly stranded 200 years ago? More or less. Am I enjoying it? No. What would I do if I didn’t have to carve all this wood by hand? Tend the garden. Tend my daughter. Be kinder to myself. Be happier.

So before I went inside this afternoon I took all the cladding back apart. After dinner I went and bought – gasp! – plywood siding. The rafters and underlying post-and-beam structure will still be made from recycled and home-grown lumber, but you won’t know it to look at the outside. And honestly, the neighbors will like it better that way.

I’m disappointed in myself because it feels like I gave up too soon – that with more perseverance it would eventually come together. It feels like if only I were good enough, I should be able to make it work. But I am ruining my body and angering the neighbors with my wood-splitting banging; I am tired all the time and so less able to be a good mother and wife. I don’t believe a tool shed is worth it. I think I owe it to my family to force myself to just relax.

I went out and girled it up the other day with a good friend of mine. The next day I thought it was pretty funny that I was barefoot in the kitchen wearing an apron that matched my pedicure, and decided to take a picture.

Sofía noticed right away.

“Mommy, can Sofía has pretty toeses too?”

Of course, my love.

“Mommy! Sofía has painty-painty toeses!”

Laughter and snuggles for all.

I got the first bit of cladding done today.

Only the far left log is nailed in place; the others are all loose like puzzle pieces, getting moved and turned this way and that, to see which way they fit best before being trimmed and nailed in place.

My borrowed sawzall really helps trim up the sides of the split logs so they will fit together better. Nowhere near perfect, unfortunately; there are gaps big enough to slip my flat hand through. Oh well, I don’t have to live in it. (Though after today I was thinking really, really hard about the benefits of just plywooding the other three sides, lemme tell ya.)

It was mid-90s today, but I was so sure I’d get this side finished & raised into place that I went out anyway. But durn it all if I didn’t run out of cladding! Splitting another 20′ log in the muggy tropical heat is no fun at all, but I suppose if I ever want to get this thing finished, that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow… GRUMBLE.

Old-fashioned marigolds, not doing a very good job of keeping squash bugs off my pepper plants.

A meadow of pink, yellow, and blue weed flowers among the white buckwheat.

I don’t know what these flowers are called, bu they’re such a beautiful shade of blue.

Plain-Jane but oh-so-important peanut flowers!

On a trip to the Children’s Museum earlier today.

She quickly tired of the sparkly tutu and went instead for the caveman dreds, bat wings, and upside-down wand.

Pepper and tomatoes need plenty of calcium to keep them healthy through the growing season. I usually plant mine with a mixture of crushed eggshells, sugar (for beneficial soil bacteria), and epsom salts (for magnesium). But this year I forgot!

The plants’re all starting to look a bit sallow. It could be all the attacks by bugs, it could be (most likely, actually) late tomato blight, or it could be a need for a booster shot of calcium. Well, at least one of those I can take care of.

Eggshells to the rescue!

These powdered eggshells usually go right back to the chickens in their feed as an organic calcium supplement; but we have plenty so these can help my tomatoes and peppers. The shells will soak in this water for 24 hours and then I will mix it with another gallon or two of water and give all the plants a good soaking. The excess shell bits will get scattered on the ground around their roots.

(Because the shells are powdered, I’ll have to stir them every so often to make sure they all get soaked; if I’d used whole eggshells I probably wouldn’t have to. Bleh.)

Seven eggs, potatoes and onions and cucumbers from the garden became our first fully home-grown meal tonight (well, almost – I didn’t grow the dill or the lemon for the salad).

Farm-fresh tortilla española and a side of cucumber salad, with (non-home-grown) cherry clafoutis for dessert.

Warning: Lecture.

This is a great part of the reason why I feel so strongly about raising my own animals for meat, eggs, and honey.

Ignorance. The hand-washing syndrome of paying someone else to do your dirty work for you, allowing you to take the lives of the animals that sustain you completely for granted. I believe that if you look at your chicken dinner and get all squicked out at the thought of that chicken dying at your hands, then you shouldn’t be eating it.

Why do we make it so easy to forget that something died for you? Doesn’t that seem wrong to anyone else?

I was a vegetarian for more than five years not because I was all gooshy about cuddly widdle animals – I don’t buy into sentiment much. I was a vegetarian because I thought our nation’s food production systems – specifically those related to meat – were fundamentally broken and sickening and I chose not to support them.*

I’m no longer a vegetarian, but now I am lucky enough to have the means to raise my own animals. I can make sure they live the fullest, happiest lives I can give them, before painlessly and respectfully dispatching them with my own hands, never taking their lives for granted. And along the way my daughter will become educated about where her food comes from and exactly what a privilege it is to eat as well as we do: all I can ask is that she become a knowledgeable and conscientious omnivore.

Even if once she’s grown she doesn’t choose to go my route, it’s a good bet that at least she won’t write stupid blurbs to her local paper and get made brutal fun of across the internet.

*If you’re interested in understanding more about our nation’s food production, one especially good book is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, which intersperses highly educational chapters with anecdotes about her own family’s attempt to live and eat locally for a year. I love Kingsolver’s writing in general and I thought she handled this book’s balance pretty nicely, while articulating beautifully why it is necessary to rethink our nation’s pattern of food production and consumption. (In fact, I think it’s so great that I’ve ordered copies for a few relatives of mine who don’t understand why I do what I do. I’m not very articulate, so I hope this book can convey to them some of what motivates me in my quest for back-yard self-sufficiency.)

It was in the mid-90s today, but since my time is limited before the Fall rains start coming I went out to work on the shed anyway. Sofía obliged me by taking a nice long 3-hour nap, so I got what felt like a good amount of work done… except to see it in the pictures you’d think I could have gotten it done in 15 minutes!

Taking a break, drinking ice-cold homemade root beer.

Consider that I was using all hand tools. A crappy hand saw to cut logs to length, and a hammer and chisel to cut and flatten the ends of the beams for nailing onto the posts.

It. Was. Painful. How did people ever used to build whole houses this way?

So originally I was going to make the entire shed out of my own logs, right? Well, a chance find at a Freecycle pickup for something else resulted in my taking home five pressure-treated 6×4″ posts, already exactly 6′ long – just the right length. I had been fretting about how to safely waterproof the ends of my log posts, so this was a perfect solution. (Thanks, Leslie!)

I’m frustrated by how little work I got done in my short naptime work-window – just the post and beam frame of one wall and the rafters cut. I had been hoping to get the rafters hung and the side cladded and maybe the whole wall even raised and the posts concreted – I even brought down sacks of concrete with me in the wheelbarrow! So this evening I broke down and begged a sawzall off my chicken-coop-building friend. Power tools ahoy! I’m crossing my fingers this will cut my work time waaaay down … otherwise, there’s no way this shed will ever get finished because I’m sure to get distracted by some other random project first!

Yesterday as we were driving to the fair, we topped a hill and the forest stretched in all directions. Sofía stretched her arm out and said “Oh, Mommy! Oh, Daddy! It’s ocean trees!”

Could she really be poetical this young?