Tales from the Shark Tank

My friend C. decided that since I now live considerably closer than I did, she would drop in today. And so she did, learning in the process that it was just under 2 hours drive to get here. My husband gets there for trial in an hour and a quarter, so I shall be asking him about his route, but I think the difference less that than driving speed. C. has always been a law-abiding driver, whereas my husband sometimes considers the numbers posted on the speed limit signs to be advisory. Anyway, it was absolutely wonderful to see her, and we had a pleasant hour’s visit before she had to get home to her own kid, old enough to come home to an empty house but young enough to desire maternal presence relatively soon after his arrival.

She had brought her dog, whom we took out for a walk in my back yard. It’s quite big enough to exercise a dog, though the lack of fence meant she had to keep him on lead. But meanwhile, I got a tour of my own back yard from a country girl. She pointed out the shag-bark hickory trees to me, showing me how to tell when the nuts were ripe and when not to bother with them. (If they have holes in them, something else has already sampled them.) She showed me what poison ivy looks like when it has withered and turned red (and she was right; I never would have recognized it on my own) and found sorrel, feverfew and lamb’s quarters in my yard, pointing out that they were going to grow anyway, so I might as well eat them. I’m quite comfortable with that philosophy, I must admit. She is also the first of my friends to visit and not consider the house isolated. Her standard is whether or not you can see another house, and indeed you can. She also told me how to attract deer to the yard, though she allowed that perhaps since I do intend to put in a garden, I might not want to lure creatures to whom it would constitute no more than a pleasant small snack.

So now I have a basket containing a couple handfuls of nuts, with plans to gather more so that I can see what difference fresh nuts make in nut bread. Sorrel makes a pleasant soup, I know, and I’m sure I’ll find uses for some of the other things that are out there. I’m no survivalist; I know perfectly well how dependant I am upon modern technology. But I still find pleasure in using things that can be found in the yard rather than the grocery store, and in knowing that the only environmental impact of getting the nuts for my bread into my kitchen is that there aren’t quite as many for the squirrels to find and hide.

I’ve grown accustomed to the sounds of this area. Most of them are made by things with vocalization apparatus. I hear loons laugh, and I’ve heard coyotes howling more than once. I must say, it’s a tossup with sound is more eerie or more compelling. Those which involve motors generally run on the road outside the house, and I’ve learned to tell by ear which are standard vehicles, which are school busses (distinctive even from a quarter mile away) and which are farm machines. Those last sometimes turn off the road, but even when they do, I can hear them crunch on the gravelled area on the west side of the house, in front of the barn.

You may imagine my reaction, then, when I heard such a monster rumbling toward the house, but didn’t see it come into view. Instead, the rumble got louder, shaking the house, and seemed to be coming from the east side of the house where there is no road. City kid that I am, it didn’t occur to me why that would be so, even though I’ve looked at the brown, dried soybean field over there and wondered when it would be deemed ready to harvest. The answer, of course, was “now”, and the rumble was that of the harvester. It’s a huge machine, half the size of the house in its own right. It moved through the field at a pace that could have been matched by a man afoot, but left behind bare earth with light furrows traced across it where there had been knee-high plants, in a wide swath that no human could match. And no one had to follow after to collect the plants cut down; the harvester picked them up and deposited them in a trailer pulled behind. One man could manage it nicely. But in my mind’s eye, I could see a whole group working together to the same end, and in much the same pattern. Watching a weaving machine, it is impossible to see the echoes of the task it has taken over. The same is not true of the harvester. The tasks are the same; cut the crop down and gather it up. The difference is that one man does what took dozens to accomplish, no more than two centuries ago.

First of all, I should reassure my gentle readers (if any remain after so long a hiatus) that I haven’t fallen into the Kankakee Marsh. I’ve been trying to be half a dozen places at once, and I’ve even gone walking the paths around the marsh, but I have not fallen in.

We are at long last done with our part of our version of This Old House. Everything has been removed except the tools necessary to complete repairs. We took several van loads of things to Goodwill. I mean to tell you that van was full to capacity; we had taken out all removable seats to increase the cargo capacity. Then there was the small mountain of trash bags in the driveway, awaiting Monday’s trash removal. I haven’t gotten calls from the neighbors, so I presume the garbage crew was kind enough to remove the bags without counting them. Now the general staff my inlaws have taken over the project, and are overseeing carpenters, roofers, painters (our fabulous volunteer painting crew got a good start, but it wasn’t quite complete). I don’t think we could do this without them, or at least not with anything resembling grace.

Mind you, there still isn’t room for all the things we have left, so we shall be doing yet more weeding and pitching. I suspect now is the time when the process will become painful. The things we have now are the things we wanted to keep, but darned if I’m going to live the way my parents do, crowded out of their home by their possessions, with aisles to walk through and no more. I can’t stay there when I visit, though it’s a 3 bedroom house; there isn’t room. There aren’t three clear spaces to sit in the livingroom, nor the kitchen, nor the family room. We may have boxes from here to Yenervelt, but at least we can walk around and sit down! But with that shiningly bad example of the consequences of keeping everything before me, well, pitching or e-bay become far more palatable options.

The walking goes apace, to the point of needing new walking shoes because I wore out the internal structure of them. I was amazed. I’ve done that before, but it took me a good long time. This time it took less than a year, and at the rate I’ve been going, I’ve been told that this new pair will wear out in less than six months. That’s fine with me. The jeans I thought I was going to have to replace fit again, and I’m hoping that the next time I think about replacing them it will be because I’m in danger of a “wardrobe malfunction”.

So far the quest for broadband has been a flop. The wireless signal doesn’t get here, for some reason. I had a tech on top of my house, trying to show me how much signal he needed and how much he had. There was quite a discrepancy. There’s another wireless isp nearby, with towers in different places, so now I’m waiting for them to come out and test. Failing that? Well, dial-up it is. Meanwhile, I’ve become a known customer at Panera’s in Valparaiso. I get the feeling that if it weren’t contrary to company policy, they’d just ring up my iced tea and bagel without my saying a word. Or perhaps not – I do vary the variety of baked item I get now and then. What can I say? It could be worse. Right now the only thing that truly annoys me is that I had to wait a month for them to get here only to hear “oops, won’t work”, and now have waited another two weeks with no test from the next folks. I understand it; to say that there’s a demand for this is an understatement of epic proportions (Verizon, are you listening?) but it’s still moderately irritating.

I spent about 3 weeks sewing madly, as a little bunch of us former SCA types decided to attend a ren-faire in Oregon, IL last weekend. I must have done a reasonable job, as we had been there all of 5 minutes when someone asked us when our performance would be. We explained that no, we weren’t actors, just a little bunch of folks taking the opportunity to play “dress-up” in our late 40s and early 50s. Since the women we were speaking to were in their 70s at least, we got chuckles and nods of understanding for that. And we had a fabulous time. I learned (by experiment) that I am still quite capable of pulling a 50 pound bow, though I didn’t try to shoot it. Too many people around for that to be safe, and no archery range set up. I failed my saving throw on a lovely leather belt pouch, but made the others. Of course we all melted a bit, as I took stock of the date and sewed for early October in northern Illinois – linen for the undertunics and lightweight wool for overtunics. (For those who follow such things, the period I was using for garb was 11th c. Saxon, shortly post Conquest.) And then it was 84 out… ick! We made rude remarks about Normans and the French generally, which went right over the heads of most who heard them and got laughs from those who understood. And we stayed up and talked all night. It’s been a very long time since I did that, and y’know, it was grand. Today I spent catching up on things like sleep. And tomorrow? Tomorrow I get to go back to unpacking.