MindSpinner

Shortly after my children returned home from their Father’s Day celebrations with their dad, Dark-Haired Daughter called on the phone, all the way from the back yard. “We have a present for you. Come outside.”

When I stepped outside they were standing at the back of the yard near the trees, petting a wild deer as if it were the family dog and feeding it carrots. It was a thin deer, as thin as if it were winter out, and it was apparently unafraid. The weather’s been dry here for so long that the grass has turned to straw and crunches like the husks of insects under our feet. I water only the garden, the shrubs and the trees to keep them alive. Farmers have but half the usual hay and fear losing their crops. I guess that it is the drought that brought the deer to nibble carrots from human hands and nip the leaves from the top of a newly planted blueberry bush. Still we are enchanted by a wild thing. I know. Deer may eat my garden this year. Deer will likely eat my apples when there are apples to eat. But since I was small I have felt a pang of grief to know that wild things are afraid of me because I am human, and so when a deer comes to call and does not start and run, it is as if some awful fall from grace has been undone.

Today the owner of a local furniture and appliance store came to replace the baking element in the oven. Dark-haired daughter swears we should have replaced the dryer first. Jeans shrunk skin tight in the dryer are apparently more important than food to a sixteen year old. On the other hand, she who pays the bills counters that clothes get dry with or without a dryer, while baking without an oven remains a hit-or-miss affair dependent on sunny midday hours. Moreover, one cannot fit a pizza, a blueberry pie, or a full-size sheet of chocolate chip cookies in a Sun Oven. Also relevant is the fact that one oven heating element costs much less than an entire dryer, though more than one would like to pay - $120, to be exact. She who pays the bills also notes that dark-haired daughter has not suggested that she and her friends should forego the mewithoutYou concert in order to divert money to a dryer fund. Nobody is suggesting that. We have our priorities.

Today, then, is officially declared to be Oven Day, and we are celebrating by baking brownies. You just can’t accomplish that with a dryer .

I am quite finished with school.

Alas, school is not finished with me.  I should be grading papers now, should have been grading them for the past three or four hours, will grade them sometime - perhaps - at gunpoint.  If you’d like to be helpful, you may lock me in a dark dungeon with a single candle, no garden, and no Internet access, and tell me I can’t come out until the entire stack is conscientiously marked.
I’ve puttered in the garden more often than in the house or at the computer this May.  The results are modest but measurable - six raised vegetable garden beds planted, two left to go, a smattering of vegetables slipped in among flowers and herbs in the kitchen garden, a bean support built today of bamboo and twine.

Though it is green, colorful, and alive, the garden is eerily quiet. Wild honeybees are hardly to be found this year. They are not plundering the blackberry blossoms, where the air should vibrate with their buzzing. They do not cling to slender stems of purple lavender.  As closely as I scan the white clover in the front yard, I can find only two.  I’m relieved to see any at all.  The late frost may have taken the honeybees, or the deep cold of February, or Colony Collapse Disorder, whatever that actually is.  Their work among the flowers is left to others - the tiny insects, the occasional bumblebee or wasp.  I wonder how long the population will take to recover, if it does, and what could be done to help.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must light a candle and make my way down to the dungeon.  If I’m not out by morning, please send a cup of water and a crust of bread, and tell me to hurry up because it’s going to be a lovely day ;->.

I discovered today that my sun oven will heat pre-baked rolls for dinner even when its 5:30 p.m. and partly cloudy out. On sunny or partly sunny weekends, I can slow-cook a meal or bake brownies, muffins, or cookies - these things I have done. This weekend I will try baking my little loaf of bread out on the deck. If the bread is good, I will be pleased and relieved.

When the kitchen oven burns out less than a week after the clothes dryer does, it seems best to consider the situation an invitation to experiment and adventure. Perhaps I am ultimately to pursue Thoreau’s quest to live simply, and my appliances are giving me a nudge. It has to be said, however, that the simple life, however romanticized, is not actually simple.

Why there have to be six wooden swords in the living room every afternoon when I come home, crafted from wood I meant for bean towers, I don’t know. They come out every morning after I leave for school as if reveille were sounded as soon as my back tires roll out of the driveway and onto the street. The couch sulks askew, its broad green back to the front door, its pillows disheveled, oblivious to everything except the TV that squats atop my grandmother’s cherry lowboy like a boxy household gargoyle.

How dirty dishes in the kitchen sprout faster than mushrooms after a week of rain, I do not know. How I have as much laundry to fold tonight as Rapunzel has straw to weave into gold, I’m not sure. I only took my eyes off the house long enough to wade into the paper pile. It’s not my fault I fell into its paperclipped stacks for a whole day, like an Alice swimming about in her pool of tears. It was deep.

But when this evening softened into long lavender light on soft greens, I scooped the white rabbit out of his cage in the house, nestled him into the crook of my arm, and took him outside to meet grass and clover and sky. We sat together until papers, kitchens and unfolded jeans faded like dreams you wake from, and there was only the new world, and wonder.