A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at July 31st, 2008

Where is the cleaning up the desk Genie? And the creating a perfect garden one; or, at least a perfectly beautiful garden even if it isn’t perfect. And where are the cleaning the house, doing the laundry – ooops, I’ll have to get up, now, and transfer the hours-in-waiting wet stuff to the dryer – and the dinner Genies? How is it that, with no daily, exterior job, I still never have time to get everything – sometimes, anything – done? Part of the answer is that my day, the part I devote to stuff I do and Jim doesn’t, ends when his day ends. When Jim comes in at the end of the day, it’s time to get food into him and we do like to cook together. It means, however, that at about 5 PM I’m pretty much done in the office, if I’ve even spent a good day here. Usually it’s like today: I spent the morning weeding before it got so blisteringly hot, sneaking in a few email conversations; phone conversations to make appointments or check on stuff we’ve ordered for the winery; paid a couple of bills; wrote some thank you notes; scooted around the web looking for various things like the best sites to sell antique books, new places to put this blog; sorted through the piles on the desk….

My revelation came a couple of days ago. In my previous life, the one in which I had an exterior office, I often didn’t settle in to the work at hand until 5 PM, after most people went home. That’s when the daytime flow stopped and there was concentrated time, at least a couple of hours. Not that my desk was much neater; it wasn’t, but my life certainly felt a lot more organized. I attempted to explain this to Jim the other day, when it hit me. He wasn’t especially keen to hear it, though; so, after repeating that I had this revelation three times and then asking if he had actually heard me, he grudgingly answered he had but it ended there. So he never heard my unspoken suggestion that I might be more productive if I sat here for a couple of hours in the evening.

I think I might have had a deeper insight into the women’s movement if I had led a life that kept me working in the home from the beginning. Oh, well, no more time to complain as our dinner will take a little forethought, four kitties are sitting here and looking pointedly at me and a dog is languishing near the kitchen door knowing his empty dinner bowl is on the other side….

Posted by Holly at July 5th, 2008

Maybe here is how to do it. I’ve just washed the kitchen floor again. When I lived alone, before I was married, I swear I didn’t have to wash a kitchen floor more than once every two weeks. Okay, I did work outside of my home every day and rarely cooked except once in a while for company so the floor didn’t get much use. But still. I do it here more than twice a week and, truth be told, it could stand it every day since we both track in dirt, mud and hay strands. But, since I do do it, I just figured out a new pattern that leaves me off in my office while the floor dries where I can do any number of things of interest solely to me like play Mah Johng on the computer or … write! Oh, the cleverness of me. Please, let it stay a little damp and grey out – as it is now because, after all, it is July 5th in Oregon – so the floor takes a little while to dry.

I am sure, if I had been married into this life 40 years ago, I would have invented the consciousness raising movement on my own; not the equal pay for equal work part, though, because Jim’s rate of pay is way too low for this kind of labor. I’m not complaining; although I realize it sounds dangerously like that. Really, I am just an observer and commentator on my current life, which, curiously enough, is filled with aphorisms deriving from the farm.

Jim lives and breathes by the weather forecast during haying season, listening to the computer voice forecast on the car radio many times a day and tries to figure out when he can be making the hay, not only when the sun is shining but so that it will sit out there in the field while the sun is still shining so it doesn’t get wet, moldy and rendered unusable for the original intent of feeding the horses. I wonder why he grows the hay, actually, instead of buying hay while the sun shines and save himself the anguish and frustration of the pesky weather and the vicissitudes of old equipment that falls apart frequently.

Also not complaining, I wonder why there needs to be an early bird to catch a worm. And there are. They start their singing just about when dawn is arriving which, at this time of year, is before 5 AM. I assume they are catching worms and I understand Jim’s urgency to get out of bed and into the vineyards because there are a lot of them to prune and trim and train and cajole into producing lovely grapes. Farm work revolves around the amount of light available and I get that. After two plus years of marriage, Jim sweetly brings the thermos pot of coffee and leaves if for when I do wake up because my brain does not gather itself into a thinking sphere until several hours later.

We did get up together every two hours for two weeks and then once a night for the next three weeks while we feeding the filly foal who was so sick. The only way I could really make it work was to put my clothes on the floor next to the bed not only in the order of which I would put them on but also in position. That way, with my sweat pants set up accordion style, for instance, I could muster enough cohesive thought to get into my clothes, out to the barn and perform the rote tasks involved in mixing the formula, filling the monojet syringes, and mixing up the medicines we gave to Ellie until she was strong enough to hold her own and began eating her feed.

It was a revelation to see dawn every day from that direction. My only previous experiences with dawn were returning home after a night of stepping out to jazz clubs when I was dating a NY newspaper jazz writer.

So here it is the Saturday of the July 4th weekend; day of rest today (if you’re of my Jewish faith) or coming (if you’re of Jim’s Catholic beliefs) and I’m feeling a little guilty sitting here and writing this because, by now, the floor in the kitchen is dry enough for me to go out the door, into the garden, take the hoe to the weeds and distribute used hay on the aisles between our 50 plus tomato plants to keep the weeds down. Don’t tell Jim, I did sneak in 45 minutes to watch the end of an old movie on TCM while I was making the bed and putting away the laundry….