Oh, the Irony

This month is when the book is supposed to come out containing my nonfiction publishing debut: an essay in which I tell of the joy and tenuousness of my lifestyle as cyclist-Market-Jell-O artist. There's a paragraph in there where I say how fragile my structure really is; if I fall, or slip a disk....

So as a true nonfiction writer I guess I was bound to test that out; I swear I had no intention and I renounce any unintentional vows to that end. Anyway, on Friday I fell and broke my foot.

I cracked the calcaneus bone, which is the main heel bone. It's not a good thing to break. I don't know yet if it will require surgery and a plate and screws but I do know it will require 12 weeks of elevation and rest. And no, that doesn't mean I get to be high, it means I am supposed to keep my foot above my heart level. And my heart is pretty full.

I have had lots of help, thank goodness. Willy came yesterday to take me to the doctor and helped me build a kind of lounge out of my chairs, all tied together and draped with pillows. I'm propped up here surrounded by books and dvds and Colleen brought over some divine non-inflammatory cookies and a long-handled grabber and I just lie here and do what I can to keep myself grounded and positive. It's my right foot so I can't even attempt to drive and I am pretty darn dependent. Not my accustomed style.

I am so grateful that I know so many loving and generous people. I am so sorry for all the times I didn't respond adequately to their distresses, convincing myself they would probably rather be left alone. Now I know a bit more about how much people really do need each other.

I'm still figuring it all out, not wanting to let go of anything. Market starts April 7th...not gonna be there. The Jell-O Show is March 31...all up in the air. No readings of my essay will be happening for me any time soon, if the book comes out near schedule. All the little jobs I have cobbled together, all my small clients and a couple of big ones: on hold. I want to find a way to do it all still. Time will tell just how naive I can get.

I'm experiencing pain and painkillers. I can use my laptop, but will my writing abilities be compromised? Is there a sweet spot in the medication cycle where I will be lyrical and not stupid? They make me chatty, so I avoid Facebook so I don't spill out. I can still research the house stuff somewhat. I can't go to the graveyards as planned, not yet anyway. I guess I can work with what I have, which is a lot. At least I will have plenty of time and not a lot of distractions.

I might be able to make the most of this, but it's not optimal. I was already broke with expensive yet inadequate insurance. I'll be all withered and have to rebuild all of my muscles and I hope all this sitting doesn't make my back issues flare up. I hope I don't burn all my helpers out with my diffidence and inability to use proper social skills to ask gracefully and gratefully. Talk about aging in place...I got the in place thing right anyway. And I will age. This can be a disabling injury, said the urgent care doctor. Not for me, I said to myself. Not for me.

But I'll certainly have more grasp of the emotional content of the aging process, which at almost-62 I was rather blithely ignoring. My mother-in-law Hope spent a decade or more not walking at the end. I had pain and immobility before, with my back, but that surgery was possibly less complicated than this. I was more scared then, and less realistic. I took so much for granted.

We'll see how it all goes. Quite possibly six months from now I will have left it all behind me and be off on some new quest or other. I'm just in the beginning of this little trip through the wilds. I'll be okay; just different. Most injuries are permanent in some way or other, printed on our bodies and our psyches.

It was just a moment of inattention, looking up when I should have looked down. There are countless ways it could have been worse: I stepped off a roof, but onto another roof, and didn't fall to the ground. My guardian angels tried to help me, but I was dreaming, thinking that what was important was that one apple limb that was just out of the reach of my pole pruner. I wanted to be thorough and get all of the branches that were growing upward to the sun, trying to make them all grow downward so I could pick the apples. What arrogance. Obviously the important limb was the one I was moving, the one that was my foundation, the one I allowed to step out into the thinnest of air. I took my body and balance for granted, just for awhile.

You just can't do that. Being present is a much more intense thing than I thought. Now as I occupy the same chair for the foreseeable future, I will be exploring more finite space. I'll still be doing and learning. I just managed to limit my choices by some huge percentage and wipe pretty much everything off my calendar for a bit. I'll be here, and I'll get back. It just might involve a bit more effort than I thought.

My thanks to my mail carrier, Jeff, who happened by when I was figuring out how to get off the roof. It was so comforting (I have a crush on him, too, so it was embarrassing as hell. He sees a lot though. Told me yesterday he was chased by a dog in pajamas. Yes, the dog.) My eternal and overwhelming gratitude to my friend Pamela, who came over and took me to Urgent Care and looked at the films with the doctors and listened to what they said, and got me all fixed up and even had the presence of mind to order me some Chinese which I ate for six meals. It was fantastic each time. She washed my dishes and moved my clutter and listened to my irrational dribbling as I went through the initial stages of adjustment. Everyone responded and everyone helped.

All of my friends and neighbors are just wonderful people and I am very, very lucky. And the Market network is a wonderfully dependable network.

I had originally titled the essay "Jiggety Jig" for the part about going to Market (no fat pigs, but anyway I liked it). The publisher needed it changed and now I think it is Stay Calm, Nothing is Under Control. That pretty much says it all.

Finding Grace and Bilyeu

I biked out west yesterday to enjoy the kestrels, egrets, herons, hawks, geese, what I think was a pair of green-winged teal, mergansers, cormorants, and of course mallards in the wetlands. As much as I am disliking development right now, I love that bike path out to Greenhill and Royal. I swung by Lane Memorial Gardens although I hope I never try to bike on West 11th again: terrifying.

Grace and Frank were there, in the Garden of the Good Shepherd, Grace sinking a bit into the soggy ground. They have the exact same type of grave marker as Bilyeu and Estella, who are in the Garden of Meditation. I don't get the charm of putting caskets into the cold wet ground but I am glad there is a place to go to find out more about people who are gone. The birth date I had for Bilyeu was wrong (unless the grave marker is wrong) and outside of that I didn't really learn a lot. Their markers are metal (bronze?) with roses on them, and they say "Together forever." Bilyeu died in 1961 and Frank in 1965 and their wives outlived them, so I picture them going together to the husbands' funerals, picking out their markers, and so on, as tight sisters-in-law, but that is just more fiction I am writing about them.

Bilyeu did have two daughters I haven't found yet, Mildred and Margaret, and he didn't get married until he was 38, so there's still a story there if I feel like continuing to read all of the Register Guards way back. I read some of the early years, skimmed them enough to see how they were structured, and will continue that. Farming people don't make the news that often.
Will definitely go out to Coburg as there is a good chance that any of those five mystery children of F.G.'s could be out there.

I also went across the street and chatted with Mae, my neighbor who has lived on the corner for a long time. She was born in 1920, and in 1933 her family moved from Irving, where her father lost his railroad job in the Depression. That used to be a town but is now absorbed by the River Road developments. She said they were going down the asphalt road that was 13th at the time and saw an unused "shack" on the corner of the unimproved Van Buren, and her father sent her to ask the neighbors who owned it. It was a man named Rogers I think, and he agreed to rent it to them for $5 a month. It had no windows, nothing, so was probably some kind of farm outbuilding left from the Huddlestons (she says they were farmers, as most people here were then.) She and her brother would get fruit crates from Guthrie's, the little store on 11th and Tyler (which is still there in a very different form) and her father used them to line the inside walls. He installed windows (probably scrounged or hand-built) and her mother planted flowers, and the landlord came back and raised their rent to $10. When the house was torn down they found the statue of St. Joseph that her father had put in the rafters to watch over them.

Mae's family was from El Paso and her mother was apparently a fantastic maker of enchiladas and tortillas, and Mae told me a lot of stories about her life then. She didn't remember the Vaughan Dairy, so it must have been gone by then, but she remembered Willow who owned the house on the SE corner, and someone named Nashom who owned the big house on the NW corner, which I believe was the dairy farm house. I looked around in it when Pat Albertson owned it. Mae said Pat really put a lot of work into saving that one, and it is now owned by someone (in)famous for having the only leaf blower in our part of the neighborhood. It still retains its grand character and some of the plantings.

Mae and her husband Red bought the property on the NE corner of 13th and Van Buren for $800 in 1946, and Red built their house, eventually expanding it to move in her mother who still lived in the improved shack. When the sidewalks and repaving was done in the fifties, it cost them $3500 for each property (at some point they had bought her parents' lot too) and because she volunteered as a translator for the courts and worked for a lawyer, they were allowed to "Bancroft" them, which was basically a payment plan I guess. That was a lot of money to be assessed. Mae has always been a really hard worker, and a favorite at Bi-Mart. During WWII she worked in Great Falls MT as an airplane mechanic, on B-17s. She says it annoys her when people limit the discussion of women working to Rosie the Riveter, because riveting was nothing compared to working on the engines. She wired their own house, Red drilling the holes in the studs, and Mae running the wiring. No wonder they responded so well to me working on my house. She says Red used to stand at the window and say that if he could he would go and help that young lady (I was in my forties) who was working so hard. I didn't know, but all of the neighbors watched me for the twelve years it took to rebuild that house. I remember being awed when Fred from across the street brought me over some ring-shanked finishing nails when I was nailing on porch flooring. I didn't know there were that kind of nails.

Anyway, Mae told me that the duplex next to me and my house were there in 1933, and the duplex used to be a single-family home. When I look at it I realize that the only thing that makes it look different from mine is the pop-out in the front that makes it a duplex, and all the stuff in back added since I have lived here, so I am itching to look at the structure. I have a little theory going that our houses and the shack on the corner were built for the workers for the farms, Huddleston's and then Vaughan's. So I just went outside and asked my neighbors if I could have a look in their basement, and sure enough, inside a beadboard cabinet and under some partial siding, there were the 1x12s. The house next door is a twin to mine. It's all so thrilling to me. I think they were raised up for the foundations, got new siding, and in a series of renovations became what they are today. I am going to have to research the whole neighborhood.

That would be a worthy project. I got a fabulous book in my huge library stack called "Landscape Change in South Eugene, Oregon," by Alvin W. Urquhart. It has a map by a real professional, Koch, from 1892, that just has a tantalizing piece of the head of my street where it hits the fairgrounds, with the name Vaughan on it. There was also some important work done by Jon Pincus (someone I actually know) for the city, the Eugene Downtown Core Area Historic Context Statement (1991) which shows the land claims and dates of ownership. My property was definitely Huddleston, acquired in 1903 to add to his original 640 acre Donation Land Claim on the other side of Van Buren. They got that land free from the US government in 1889.

So I think they farmed the land before they actually owned it, because no one had claimed right up to their line, and I think they built these houses between 1880 and 1900, possibly just after 1903 at the outside. That would explain the construction and the similarities. So thrilling.

Also, on one of my doors that old lockset, called a Rim Lock Keeper, dates from the mid-1800s, and is original to the five-panel door. I believe it was the closet, which is why the lock didn't get updated to be more functional. I even had a six-panel door, though I forget where it was. Maybe it was the back door. I'm glad I took so many pictures. It looks like the front door of the little house, which was probably a garage built later, still had a while porcelain knob on it, with another underneath. I will have to see if I still have that one in the wood storage. Wow. I'm just way too excited about all this.

Doors are portable so they don't really tell their complete stories, but I'm sure they were made here during the wood years, when there were countless small mills. Mae said when Red wanted to build in 1946, he couldn't buy wood, had to go to Portland for it. There was so much building going on then, they used up all the wood. I also read that between 1893 and 1898 there was almost no building going on, because of a financial panic in 1893. Somebody got overextended.

But the farmers just kept doing what they were doing, I'm guessing. If they couldn't buy new, they recycled what they had. That most likely explains the board with the names, which probably came from Elmer Van Orden, salvaged from another project. That could explain many things.

Though, of course, some things will never be explained, like how we got so lucky to have this sunny day which I really need to get out in. I'll be back when the rain starts.

Mulkey Findings

Took a hike up Hawkins Heights today to see Mulkey cemetery, which is not too hard to find and is indeed on the top of a small hill which used to be a pear and apple orchard. F.G. Vaughan is buried there, with his second wife, Miranda, and some of their descendants. The original settlers, William and Phoebe, are buried in Coburg, with William's brother Thomas and Floyd's poor first wife Angeline. Two of F.G.'s sons, Floyd B. and Richard (Richey) are up there too, in the two Mulkey plots.

Angeline was killed by falling from a wagon at 47 and I searched through old newspapers to find the article in 1882 describing the incident. It said they had five children at the time, which is fascinating, because three of the four children that I knew about were all born to F.G.'s second wife, who reportedly was his housekeeper, Miranda Freeze Haskett. They married in the same year, 1882, because of the five children I suppose, and they proceeded to have some more. I know about one, Richey.

There are various Vaughans buried there who have no information with them so far, including several children who died young: Casper, Bonnie, and Leta. They were also born after 1882, so might have been cousins or something, though they are buried with F.G. and Miranda. I wonder if some of the five might have been Miranda's, and because she was the housekeeper, they were living in the household, and the reporter didn't know the difference. A couple who lie here were named Mack and O.H. Haskett, and they were two and five at the time of their mother's step up. Her earlier husband isn't identified yet, though.

It was easy to be killed in those days; the papers are filled with children's deaths from falling in vats of boiling water, being kicked and stepped on by livestock, and being bitten by rattlesnakes. The first recorded white burial in our area, in 1853, was Jesse Haskett who was bitten. He was 32 at the time, so could have been Miranda's father maybe...she was born in 1854. But her maiden name is Freeze, so maybe it's Haskett Freeze Vaughan, and maybe she was adopted by the Freeze family after her father died. The young children could also have been fathered by the man who employed her...wouldn't be the first time that happened. That would account for three of the five, maybe.

But Richey Vaughan was 21 in the year of the accident, so it's likely he was already gone and not a child. Of his three children, the longest-living was Elnora, who died at sixteen. Poor Alta May died at three, and none of them were born then. I think all the descendants came through the Bilyeu Vaughan line, through his two daughters. There are some unused grave sites behind Floyd B, who died about the time I was born, and unless I find more records I might never unravel it all.

The records are really only available if some descendant figures the stuff out before everyone forgets. There are so many forlorn grave markers in the old cemeteries, with the stories buried too. It's a bit sad, so I've been skimming the newspapers to see if I can find anything that will add to the knowledge for some unknown reason.

These people are not even my relatives. My grandparents on my mother's side, whom I was lucky enough to know, were born in the 1890's. My grandma emigrated to Nebraska and lived in a soddy. They were farmers who took that "free" land near the sandhills that is now coveted by the big oil sands pipeline. They were good people, and I think of them often when I look around for traces of these Oregon farmers. My Mom, 86 now, was born after most of these people were adults, though she and Grace are only forty years apart.

I had to make a family tree for these Vaughans and will do more research to see if I can pin down a few more facts about them and embellish my imaginings. I want to find out who all the children were. It has gone a bit beyond my house, though I'm still on that trail.

I will have to see the other graves now, because there are people buried nearby that aren't recorded. I expect the Coburg cemetery will be full of mysteries. I expect Grace's memorial to be a little dry and unsatisfying now that I have imagined so much about her life. I picture her growing up on that dairy farm, just like my mother did. Mom was lonely even in a family of ten kids, and she wanted to see the world (which she has, and good for her!) I see little girls in dresses wandering grassy pastures dreaming big dreams.

I don't know how big Grace's dreams were. Maybe she didn't have kids because of the number of children who failed to thrive in her ancestry. I wonder if they were poor and malnourished, in the years before the farmers learned how to work this land. It was rich, but like the land they came from, floody. It's a theory that the cemetery is up on top of that hill because of the Missouri Floods of the 1840's, which may have driven those folks west. Maybe anyone who made that trip weakened themselves irrevocably with all that suffering. Heaven knows childbirth was not easy in those days without much medical care, and injuries usually resulted in death unless the person could heal himself.

To tell you the truth, I don't think I would have even liked these people all that much. The newspapers I've been scanning for details show that Eugene settlers were racist, sexist, elitist men without many scruples when it came to treating anyone who fit their definition of "other." They waltzed in here and took the land that was best and exploited it. They felt that the natives' time had passed and destiny was in their own favor, as well as their God.. Even Grace was a member of some secretive "societies" like Easter Star, the women's branch of the Masons. I know when my father joined the Masons they were still pretty anti-Catholic, though the Job's Daughters let me in after some discussion because only my mother was Catholic, plus I could play the piano. I didn't stay with it long enough to learn any of the secrets, because my piano skills were humiliating and I kept messing up the processions with my stumbling playing. Besides the fact that intolerance never did sit too well with me, as a child of the sixties.

And of course just because the paper spouted bigotry, that doesn't mean the ordinary people were bigots. They were just farmers. They probably just wanted to farm and feed their families and love their land. (Maybe they loved it, maybe they just exploited it.) I doubt the dairy farm was really the farm part, since it was only two or three acres in this location. F.G. probably still grew alfalfa and corn on his other lands. I suppose the cows could have grazed all the way up to the orchards on Hawkins then, though, before people built all these damned houses and fences. It feels like there is not an open square inch left, and people like me keep putting more structures on that too.

I'll go to Mulkey again now that I know it's walkable (though it did take three hours.) I want to see if there are orchard trees left; I didn't see any. There are a few oaks, the kind that keep their brown leaves until spring, and Doug firs and cedars that are probably volunteer. I want to remove those cotoneasters from the Vaughan's plot. Grace wouldn't like knowing they are pushing on the stones. I wonder if she was the one who chose to have callas on her parents' gravestones, when they were buried in 1926 and 1932. I'll also have to study gravestone design now I guess. Not many men up there have the calla design...now I think F.G. loved flowers too and taught that to Grace.

Mulkey was apparently the first preacher to have a church here, and he and Hawkins donated the land for the cemetery. Hawkins had a big orchard, and a big beautiful house with a wrap-around porch that is lower on the hill. I've been in it; Nan Lester told me she bought it from the family, as I recall. Nan is sadly no longer alive, so I can't ask her, but I remember quizzing her thoroughly on it when I visited. It's a gorgeous house, hardly touched, just exquisitely maintained. Hawkins made some money off of his apples, or more likely by selling off the land he claimed.

The last of the orchard used to be next to their house, but now there are two new fancy Craftsmans packed in there. The entire Hawkins Heights is packed with big houses, not quite the McMansions like higher up, but big and expensive. I tried to find a Mulkey house, and there is one good candidate with a little piece of original work left, but really they all looked kind of the same to me. I want to see old, classic houses, exquisitely maintained, not new ostentatious status-declaring boxes. But of course the ones I like were ostentatious at the time. Not mine. I'm pretty sure it was once built for workers to live in, with no second story, just the basics. Frank and Grace made it nice. I made it valuable again. Kinda valuable. Loved, anyway.

You either have to have a lot of money, though, or a lot of time, or maybe a lot of relatives so you can have a carpenter and a plasterer in the family. It's pretty hard to keep up with all the things that need work. When we bought this place, nothing substantial had been done since the plaster went on, except the addition of the flooring. Some of the original green paint was still there, on the back of the house, and all the signs pointed to landlords using it as a rental. If Grace and Frank lived here, it might have been the last time an owner lived in the place, and they sold it in 1924, if my records are correct.

Of course it is also possible that many people did things to it that are not evident. The boards with Frank's name could have been moved, or taken off and put back after the improvement. There was one section of some later ugly wallpaper that I didn't save, put on where the stove was removed I think. There was a brick chimney still partially there where all the ants lived. There was probably some kind of back porch with a view of the pastures (and what I think was the original farmhouse on the corner) and all that open space that used to be here instead of all of us.

I almost wish I could do the remodel over with more care. I broke a lot of the wide baseboards trying to pry them out, as the hardwood (fir) flooring was put in after they were...they extended down an inch below the floor, which took me some time to figure out. There is probably something under the hardwood that could provide a clue, though I have no reason to remove it. There was some awful asbestos tile under the grubby kitchen linoleum, which was glued down to some really long fir flooring that was then ruined, though I saved enough to floor the porch. Definitely when this house was built and rebuilt there was plenty of good wood to use for it.

And definitely the person who built the place was not the same one who built the cabinets. Those were finish work, by someone who had done it before. They were painted red over green and had terrible plastic covering on them that wouldn't be removed. I guess they had to go, like someday my wonderful maroon, dark green and dark turquoise tile will get sledged by someone who thinks it looks dated. Time marches on, oh yes, it certainly does. We think we are putting down roots, but sometimes things are harder than we expected.

Sometimes our legacy rots and isn't fixed back up. Weeds crack and hide our work; our epitaphs go unread. I will not even have a grave, so my words will have to last. Thank goodness there will be plenty of them.

More Grace

I'm developing a relationship with Grace Bowers, steaming apart her wallpaper and trying to research her family. I found a lovely article about her 100th birthday, which was in 1986.

She lived in that house on 12th street, or one near it, until she was 96, and grew up on the Vaughan Dairy which was in the area of 12th and Van Buren. One of the houses around here might be the original dairy house, or other buildings from it, including mine. I don't think it was all that successful, though, as there were many dairies in the area, and though they bought the land I researched around 1908, the neighborhood was built up rather quickly after that and they were probably pushed out.

Other things might have happened, like World War I (Elmer Van Orden was in the Navy then) and the big flu epidemic, and of course the Depression. At any rate I haven't found any news articles about them. I may be able to find an advertisement if I look through all of those old newspapers, which is fun and fascinating but takes way too much time.

I found pictures of William T. Vaughan and his wife Phoebe (Hazlett), and they look like pretty normal farming people of the time. I think William led his wagon train in 1847, which was in the same time frame as the Donner Party, if that gives you chills. Floyd G. was born in 1832 so he would have come with them, at the age of 15 or so, and made his life here. They settled in Coburg at first.

Grace was an avid gardener so I will have to go down to my neighbor's house and see what kind of trees and plants she has, and ask her what she knows about Grace, if anything. That house isn't as old as mine.

In fact, I think my house is really old, maybe even 1880-1900. The original construction was of that style, so it could easily have been here before F. G. Vaughan bought the property, built by some earlier settler, possibly even the Huddlestons. It isn't fancy, though, so it could have been built as some kind of outbuilding, a barn even, or a servant's or worker's house. I think the clapboards and front porch were put on when the foundation was put in, I think possibly under the existing house. Houses were often built without foundations by people who were poor or didn't know how to build in a wetlands. The foundation blocks can probably be dated by style, as they are fairly distinctive.

I actually think the place was remodeled in someone's approximation of the Craftsman style, and I think the geometric wallpaper was supposed to carry that theme.

So I have this kinship now, that of gardeners and homebuilders, and it's vital. I sent a Facebook message to a woman who might be one named in the article about Grace. I'll see what I can find out in histories of Coburg and other cemetaries.

I think one thing I'm finding is that these were just ordinary people, so they don't show up in the newspaper just like I don't show up much (though times have changed, that's for sure.) Phoebe Vaughan looks a bit grim and self-righteous, but maybe she just needed dentures. It couldn't have been easy to stand by a husband who dragged the family from Missouri to the wild west. I suppose it was a wonderful dream to farm in the Willamette Valley but it couldn't have been easy. They worked themselves to the bone, most likely.

Think I'll hike up to Mulkey and see who's there. I need to step away from the keyboard. I should also pull some more weeds while the weather is decent...and I will think about Grace and whether or not she planted my apple tree. She probably would have shot or poisoned that squirrel that is living up there, eating the buds so I will get no apples again this summer.

"Frank, go get the shotgun. It's either squirrel stew or another year without applesauce."

Also, there used to be a Pig Club. They had socials. We live in a funny place.

More of the Mystery

After I spent another day in research which required an additional day to get the virus out of my laptop that I picked up by being online too much, I found out some thrilling things!

Death records are mostly what is available with the people I found in my walls. It turns out that Grace Bowers and her husband Frank have a lovely little stone together in Lane Memorial Gardens. Ironically she died in 1989, when we were just beginning to fix up her old house. She was 103!!! And because they had no children (as far as I know anyway) she didn't seem to have an obituary. Her husband, Henry Frank, did have one and it said they were living around the corner on 12th Street when he died in 1965.

Her full name was Grace Edna Vaughan Bowers. That's right, she was Floyd Governor (or Gouvenir) Vaughan's daughter. He also had three sons, Richard by his first wife, Floyd B., and Bilyeu. Grace and Frank were married in 1911, so one theory is that they all built her a house.

I can't tell if the name on the board is Floyd B. or Floyd G. Old F.G. was born in 1932, and came to Oregon in 1847. That was quite early in Oregon settlement, so they came by wagon. In fact, I found a little blip of information that says F.G. Vaughan's first wife was killed in a fall from a wagon he was driving in 1882, when he was fifty, and had one son, Richard, who was 15. Floyd married his housekeeper and had the other three children with her. So he was quite old when Grace married in 1911. That makes me think that Frank worked with his brother-in-law Bilyeu and their friend Elmer Irwin Van Orden, from Marcola, to put up that board. Maybe one or all of them were carpenters (someone built some really nice cabinets and counters) or maybe Elmer had nothing to do with it and they got the board from him somehow, since the dates on the board are three years apart. And I think Frank did the upgrades, the trim with his name so proudly, himself. I picture Grace doing the wallpaper, especially the florals. But Floyd the elder could have built the original house, or bought it from whomever did build it in the late 1800's. Somebody with adventurous taste put in that turquoise stuff, I think. Back to Deeds and Records for more. I have to find out how many lots they had back then, and I might be able to find out who built my neighbors house where they lived when Frank died. I might be able to find out their professions and other details from censuses, or by paying to join Ancestry.com.

I could find out what all the Huddlestons did with the properties before they started selling them. I could find out the ages of all of the houses on the street and some of their histories. All of which would be what is called backstory in fiction and would fascinate the fiction writer in me. I wonder if Richard's mother dying had anything to do with Grace's life, if that was why she didn't have children. Grace herself has a "delayed birth" record, which means either her birth was difficult or her record wasn't entered when she was born. I'll have to look that up too. Or write a short story about it all.

But the construction of the two sections of the house were so different, I'm thinking that they just remodeled it. They would have been in their twenties when she was married, and her husband was even younger, just 21. If the house was built in 1916 he was 25. Certainly you could build a house at that age and with minimal skills back then before codes and contractors licenses and all that. You can still get some slack for being the homeowner/builder.

But the mystery of when the original two rooms were built deepens. I plan to research the building methods and do even more research on the wallpaper, since I found very little real information there. I steamed some of it apart and discovered that both the turquoise and the brown had the same border, that rather crude block-printed geometric pattern. It's possible that it was locally or regionally made, I suppose.

F.G. Vaughan was a farmer, and I think Bilyeu and his wife Estella were too. There was one purchase of sheep recorded in the county records under Bilyeu. I suppose most people did some farming back then, if they wanted to eat. Eugene wasn't even surveyed by Skinner until 1851. There's a good bit of history in a book I have called Market Days, published by the Lane Pomona Grange, and it's amusing. Apparently "dog fennel" was a hugely problematic weed back in those days and I still have quite a bit of it next to the house. Some things don't change much I guess.

There was a lot happening here, though. In 1867 when there were only 800 inhabitants in Eugene City, there were 13 dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, two photographic galleries, two tailor shops and a milliner, among other commercial businesses. People were working and creative. By 1910 there were paved streets and electric streetcars. Even before the turn of the century there was milled lumber and moldings available from Midgley's Mill. Farmers sold produce by peddler's wagons all over town, and the first filberts were planted by George Dorris in 1900. Hops and mint began around that time too to replace the wheat which was the first cash crop around here. All of those plants volunteer in my gardens and persist in my neighborhood's margins.

I found some interesting moldings over the boards in the back wall, so the original outside surface of my house could well have been those long boards with the molding as battens over the substantial cracks between them. They might be cedar, and are now on the outside of my sauna covering cracks there. The house could have been built much earlier than 1916, and I'm inclined to think it was. Even the front porch, which has a bungalow appearance, could have been added, and the original house could have just been those two rooms. Certainly the back door was much newer than the five-panel ones indoors, some with their old locksets intact. I will continue to research and speculate. I'm having a blast.

Living Treasures

Now that I have floated the concept of the living treasure we have in our oldest craftspeople, it’s time to craft some clearer proposals so people can discuss them. I plan to make two separate ones, for my two organizations, Oregon Country Fair and Saturday Market, which have different policies and forms of operation and committee structures, but many artisans in common.

My thinking is that for now, we just agree to the concept, that there could be a “Master of the Crafts” designation. That might be an awkward name. Grandmother and Grandfather is close to what I imagine, but of course they would be too casual and vague to use for titles. Call it “Accomplished Artist of a Certain Age,” then, or “Old Hippie with Skills.” A designation.

Just kidding, but the name will be one thing to settle on first. I think it should focus on accomplishment and mastery, while honoring the creative individual who manifested it all out of thin air day after day, decade after decade. A lifetime of creative action that is still ongoing and open ended in our artist's minds. Most of us don't stop being creative. Ever.

Then each organization would need to assess the population of such people. How many of us are there? What would be the criteria? I’m thinking forty years of artistry (could be in all media) and an age of 65 or 70. There would have to be other descriptors as well, although not necessarily a judgment of quality, more of dedication. It just seems to me that someone who has put in a lifetime of work within an organization should get some form of a nonliteral gold watch. If we were employed, we would, along with getting our pension funds robbed and our benefits cut. We don’t get any pensions or benefits, but the point is that our chosen lifestyle leaves us rather vulnerable as our ages advance. There isn't anything in place in current policy, though in regard to Saturday Market, accommodations are often made case-by-case. This becomes an imperfect process that can be subject to too many variables and requires too many thoughtful but similar decisions, and none of them are easy. Honor dedication.

That’s all for now, I want to concentrate on the designation. I want to set aside any attached awards or accommodations or what might be seen as privileges or entitlements. Keep in mind that I want this designation to be earned, and clear in its criteria. Since there would have to be some evaluative body, I recognize that there is going to have to be policy created and set, and that is a big task with either organization, and it has to be done over time, with great thoughtfulness. But I think people can get behind the designation. We could give an award, like the Peach thing that food booths get, some visible badge or plaque of some kind.

This is a marketing bonanza for the organizations. Each designated artisan could have a pictorial display of their history, craft expertise, and the range of products and accomplishments in their lifetime so far, and if these had a uniform look, the customers would learn to recognize and look for them. It shows the roots of what the organizations are now, how the subculture came to be, and how it extends into the present and the future.I think customers would find this fascinating and we would all benefit. I want this to enhance revenue for all concerned, not take income away from either the organizations or any part of the vendor population. Enhance.

The artisan, in my imagined scenario, would enter into a trust agreement with the organization to continue to bring their highest artistry to the show, in whatever ways they were able. If they could no longer do their traditional craft (and to use me as an example, if I were no longer able to screenprint, which will happen) they would be free to change their art to any and all other forms of media. It would be easy for them to start bringing watercolors or scarves or writing. They would agree to abide by all of the standards and guidelines in place, particularly in spirit if not in exact detail, but basically they would get a pass to just create and display and sell their creations without the usual scrutiny. They would have earned this through their dedication and would be trusted to uphold the agreement to the best of their ability for the rest of their lives. Trust.

My main point here is that if you look at our organizations, we are all in agreement that we owe a lot to those who have built them with years and years of dedicated participation. If you sell somewhere for forty years, you understand how it works. You are part of it in so many ways that you can’t really separate your life from it, and it brings great sadness when you can no longer play your part. You need it. So let’s find a way for it to need you. Mutual support.

We can’t let our adherence to our rules allow us to discard people who can’t keep up. Standards change, juries get more demanding, and the organization and the elderly crafter begin to go in opposite directions. I will be able to do less as my organization asks me to do more. We need to think about our personal sustainability.

For each organization, there are going to be proposed policy changes down the line that are going to meet with resistance. My concept has already met with resistance, and my position is that those parts we resist are what we hold sacred. We need to identify those places where we get stuck because our concepts of them do not have any change built in. Turn the sacred upside down and take a good look at its underside.

For instance, with the OCF, the stated expectation of budget and management is that costs will continue to rise, so fees will continue to increase gradually, spread around the various types of members and guests so each contributes more in turn. My income, however, will decrease over that same time period. I just won’t be able to make more every year to cover the increased fees.

My OCF income pays for my property taxes and my entry fee to the Holiday Market. If I am to stay in my home and continue to sell at HM, I need that to stay in place. It will be a tricky dance. Similarly, to keep my reserve space at Market, I need a certain level of income there to make it work. Just doing these things independently as we tend to believe we need to, I won’t make it. I need my community to make this a more sustainable system for the aging crafter. Sustainability.

So my concept is that we market ourselves in a new way. I have a mental picture of people like Lotte Streisinger and Mary Lou Goertzen and Ayala Talpai and others sitting with their displays, bringing whatever they are currently working on, their books they have published, their teaching materials, and their skills and personalities to an honored place before the public. It would be clearly understood that they were in the category of a living treasure, no longer in the center of the general commercial mainstream but still a part of it, here by grace for some limited time only, to be celebrated and supported in style. If the items they could bring for sale were ten years old, that would just make them all the more valuable. Most of our crafts are one-of-a-kind, and that's just what many people want. Most of us would be able to find media to work in that would continue our productive lives, if it were easier to change in the marketplace.

Why not? We have to figure out what blocks us from putting this in place. There are quite a few areas where we run up on what I call sacred things. Some of these are equality, creating separate classes of vendors, the purity of standards, the control of juries, and changing policy just in itself, which is hard and takes a lot of discussion. We see resistance from those who have already managed to find ways to make it work for them and don’t want any special assistance. We come up on a lot of our fears, the simple fears of aging and death, of ill health, of dependence on others. We are a group that really likes being in control of our own lives and resists calling attention to our weaknesses and needs. But you can hear the fear and relief come out when people immediately start raising their objections and discouragement.

People have a prodigious level of ownership and dedication to both of our organizations. We want to contribute, to give of ourselves, and mostly we don’t want to take or get more than what we think is our share. But we have earned this. We have worked as long as these organizations have existed to make them work for us, and this is just a new wrinkle we haven’t fully considered yet.

It’s not a completely new idea, but it’s a bit new to us to focus on trust and accommodation and making a new set of rules that is less strict than the layers of rules we have worked so hard to put in place. I will quote Michael Bertotti here as I often have over the years: We keep making new rules but we don’t take away any of the old ones.

We keep layering up the restrictions and guidelines but we have a hard time stepping out of that to see the over-arching direction of what we put in place. We want to maintain an increasingly fine level of artistry and keep our marketplaces vital and full of the new and innovative. Our youth-oriented culture thinks we have to do that with young people, and old ones get shuffled off to the side rather than elevated. I really bristle when I sense that I am supposed to get out of the way, and when I feel pushed to meet a new set of expectations that wasn't in place when I started making whatever it is that is in question. I don't want to have to feel defensive.

I believe we are unintentionally making it difficult and ultimately impossible for ourselves to continue to participate meaningfully in what means the most to our lives. Let’s take a look at that. Let’s take the time to carefully examine and respond to our changing needs.

Our organizations are just over forty years old. That is still young, and we are beginning to mature but not there yet. This is an opportunity to put in place a vision that is cutting-edge in our segment of the culture. We need a retirement plan, or rather a refinement plan, because we aren’t going to be able to retire. We need a continuation plan.

I want to age in my place. I’ve carved it out, I’ve invested in it. I want to keep it. I need security, support, and vision to continue to inhabit the life I created. I am one of a large and growing group, and our membership is beginning to show that we are in crisis. This often means that we just die with a garage full of fabulous work that no one has seen, had a chance to own, or has any further purpose or meaning to anyone.

Let’s not abandon those of us who have put in the years. Our current rules and regulations do not allow enough flexibility for these individuals who are so deserving of our support and trust. Just start thinking about it; that is all that I ask. Add your vision to mine and let’s see if we can craft something that we will all be very proud of.

This is My Beautiful House

I spent a crazy amount of time yesterday researching antique wallpaper while fielding emails and ignoring Valentine's Day as well as I could. The wallpaper came from inside the walls of the house I remodeled, under the lath and plaster I removed, literally pasted to the boards that the house is built from. This is the house I've been living in since about 2007 after working on it for twelve years.

It's fascinating trying to imagine the process the previous builders and decorators of my dwelling went through. It was similar (but probably not very) to mine, but there were so many variables and conditions that have changed since then, and so few clues left behind. It makes me wish I had put more evidence inside the walls myself, and also determined to write about some of it for the next owners.

That's one cool thing about working on a house, the idea that some of it will remain when I am gone. Some of it has been here awhile. This house was probably built in the early years of the twentieth century. I searched Deeds and Records way back in the beginning and the land was first recorded as the property of Samantha (Davis) Huddleston, who was Eugene and Mary Skinner's babysitter. This makes the history of Eugene seem very short and personal.

She began selling off the lots in 1906. It has been through about a dozen owners, and it took us a year to clear the title and get the land sales contract in place. We paid $23,000 for it, in 1988, and it was a dump. The yard was total blackberries, puddles, and leaking water and sewage from the inadequate plumbing. I started working on the yard even before we signed the papers, mostly because the filberts and climbing roses had overgrown the sidewalk. It was without a doubt the worst house on the block, and neighbors were very excited when we started working on it.

There are two little houses, a bit bigger now, but neither even a thousand square feet. My ex-partner Mike did most of the work on the "little house" that is my shop now, and I did almost all of the work on the bigger one where I live. I started in 1995 and am not technically finished since I still haven't managed to get the baseboards on. I've even done a few things two or three times already. Mine is a life that responds to my house.

It's a good value, worth maybe ten times what we initially paid, though of course by now I have bought it a few times over and the value is almost all equity. It still has a few problems, some created by me, some fixed, some just maintained enough to be handed over to the next owner.

I've been trying to write the book of it for most of this time also, going through my various crises of faith and trying to get an angle on it that will work and make me want to write. I enjoy the research, and this week I made a list of topics that reflect the things I like most about it, which might work to make a framework for the writing.

So the wallpaper is one. The walls themselves were made with big nine-foot-long 1x12 boards, planed but still rough, probably fir, mostly clear. One layer went vertically on the outside, and one horizontally on the inside. They are separated by a flat 2x4, but no insulation was put into the 2" space. The outside was covered with narrow clapboards, though when it was first built it could have been covered with asphalt paper or shingles. Hard to say.

The inside was covered with a thick kraft paper and some crude, straw-flecked plain paper, dark turquoise in one room, brown in the other. At the top was a printed geometric border, and my research shows it was woodblock printed, probably in the Twenties, as it is Art Deco in style. This was covered with a pale striped damask-type paper with floral borders at the top, Victorian in style but most likely newer than what was underneath, so not really Victorian. But who knows? Where did people buy wallpaper at that time? Did they order it through Quackenbush's hardware? Did a traveling salesman bring around the sample books?

I'm speculating all sorts of things about it. The front door is most likely in the same place it was, because the big porch seems to be the same age as the rest. The more ornate flower print is in the livingroom, but the prettier turquoise was in the bedroom. Maybe the original front room-parlor was in the room without the door, and the one with the door was more of a kitchen/dining room. Or maybe the person who picked out the wallpaper just put the one they liked better in the bedroom. The bedroom paper has less fading and wear, but that room is on the north side. And it has a closet, but of course that could have been added later. Was there wallpaper in the closet? I wish I could remember. I can go on and on like this.

I get an excitement when I think of the huge upgrade the owners made when they put in the lath and plaster over those two (possibly three) paper layers of decorative improvements. The plaster wasn't particularly masterful in style, but it wasn't such a lost skill in those days so the homeowners may have done it themselves. The trim boards were all put on over it, of course, and on the back of the transom boards (need more research, are they called that? Head casings?) Frank Bowers signed his name with a flourish. His signature is big and proud. I put mine under his on most of them.

Grace Bowers was the owner of the lot in 1914, and I think she was married to H.F. Bowers. This could be Frank, or maybe Frank was another of their relatives, maybe their son. Payments of amounts like $100 and $500 were made over the next ten years between the Bowers family and F.G. Vaughan, who bought 2 1/2 acres for $700 from Samantha Huddleston on my birthday in 1908 (only 42 years before I was born). The property was south of 11th St, and west of Van Buren, so it was probably my land, though the records are spotty. But it does say that Vaughan paid the city and county $100 to have 11th extended west.

Can you imagine that West 11th wasn't even paved then? My neighbor May told me that when she was little, her dad built a little tarpaper house where hers is now at the end of our street (ends at the Fairgrounds, which was given to the county by Huddleston I think, at which point it stopped being a racetrack for horses). She's 91 I think, so that would have been 1925 or 30, and she remembers being completely surrounded by a lake of rainwater in the winters...this was just a big pasture/wetlands then.

Anyway I think the Bowers family sold the place in 1924 so they may not have done the plastering. Maybe some future owners took off the trim and put it back on like I did. The windows and doors are cased with beautiful clear fir with the crown molding details that are found on Victorian-style interiors. They are often found on the outside, though. My windows were all plainly cased on the outside, but the casings were sunk flush to the siding rather than proud of it (I love these technical terms) which could mean the clapboards were put on later to cover the cheaper covering of the original house.

It's a fun tangle to unravel, and I will have to go back to Deeds and Records and do it again so I am sure I have all of the information I can gather. I hope you can still go view those. When I did it in 1995 you could still see the spidery handwriting of the clerk who recorded it all.

The single most exciting thing about taking apart and putting this house together was the board I almost missed, but found in a pile of the tongue-and-groove siding I salvaged from the walls and ceiling of the kitchen and bathroom, which was a kind of shed-like thing tacked onto the back side of the original two rooms. Spaced about a foot apart on the back of the clear fir are three names and dates: Elmer Jouvin Van Orden, Marcola Oregon, April 23, 1915; what looks like Howard Bowers, Jan 10, 1916; and Bilyeu or Bilyer Vaughan, Eugene, Ore Jan. 10, 1916.

So Mr. Van Orden from Marcola put this siding up in April 1915, and then Mr. Bowers (maybe H.F., or maybe Frank is the same person) and Mr. Vaughan put it up again in January of 1916.
My feeling is that the 1915 house was recycled into my house in part. It isn't a clapboard, so it may have always been inside, because maybe it was common practice before sheetrock to line your walls with t&g boards. The entire kitchen and bathroom ceiling and walls were lined with this wonderful material, which is now partly on the back of my house where I ran out of clapboards that matched, and partly in my bathroom as wainscoting (and that is another story.)

So I think F.G. Vaughan or his relative Bilyeu and Frank Bowers or his relative H.F. finished building my house in 1916. That would make it just coming up on it's hundredth birthday in a few years. My work at the end of the twentieth century probably bought the house another fifty years, though in this neighborhood in this century, it might go to the dump well before its useful life is over. All of the things I labored over so diligently were done for my own purposes, the kitchen the way I want it, the clawfoot put in without a shower because I am a bath person, the old foundation shored up but not replaced because I didn't decide to put on a second story as we originally thought we might. It's a perfect one-person house, though it could have two bedrooms if you weren't a person who liked to have a whole room full of Jell-O art and silk scarves waiting to be painted. People like bigger houses now, though that trend might be eroding, and once I am gone or can't keep the house, I will have no say, or even awareness possibly, of what happens to "my" property.

I still enjoy working on my houses, but major building projects are most likely not in my future, since the owner-built experience is not quite as easy as it was in 1995 when I started. At some point the little shop will need to be remodeled back into a rental house, I'm guessing. Both could be torn down for a McMansion or some ugly apartment complex. The duplex next to me could doom our whole block, as it is not being maintained and will most likely be sold and demolished. I don't know how many of my neighbors will remain in place as we age. The future is all about as many questions and speculations as the past is.

But starting with the wallpaper I am going to write the story of my life in this house. This is the next stage of my ownership. When I read back in my journals, I remember that this wasn't even the house I wanted. I wanted one a few blocks south but since $32,500 was out of our price range, we passed on that larger yard and cuter place. Maybe we made the right decision.

But I am as thoroughly amused at this stage of my occupation as I have been all along as I have just spent the larger part of two days on the old wallpaper I saved from the dumpster, and I still don't know much at all about it. Writing the book may just take as long as building the house did.

At least we have the internet. Anyone know any of those old dead guys? Floyd G. Vaughan died in 1927, and is buried in Mulkey cemetary, which I am not sure you can even get to anymore, somewhere up past 18th. I'll have to go see if I can learn anything from his gravestone. There's nothing more to take apart on this house; I've had my fingers on every inch except the inside of the bearing wall in the middle. I could still unearth something from the yard, or something more from the Historical Museum or the library. Someone planted the huge Gravenstein right behind the house, and I will study its rings if it ever falls down, which surely it will someday, because it is just a tree.

At the meeting last night someone quickly explained the concept of Thich Nat Hahn about "inter-is," (yes, more research is indicated), when they pointed to a sheet of paper and said within the paper is the tree, and the logger, and the logger's family, and what they ate for breakfast and who fed the pig that fed them, and the oak that provided the acorns eaten by the pig, and so on. We can never, and waste time trying to, separate ourselves from all that is. Inside the house, I live, and I eat the kale that grows where a Vaughan may have grazed a sheep, and the rocks I found under the house came from a river or a glacier or a truck that hauled them from a mountain, which was driven by a relative of Grace, or the wallpaper was screenprinted by an artist in England just as I now am trying to figure out a way to screenprint on Jell-O.

What a wild and fascinating existence. I wish I could be this alive every minute, because right now I feel like my life is very, very short and tiny, and at the same time touches everything. Leaving a book behind sounds like a pretty good idea if I can just narrow things down.

Retreat

A friend sent me an email about a writer's retreat that includes months of isolated solitude...always something I have thought I would love. I try every winter to create that kind of artistic space in my life. This year it has seemed to be about cleaning.

Cleaning is a control fantasy and although it is necessary to do it periodically for health reasons and for maintenance reasons and for social reasons and for comfort, I still find it mostly boring and time-consuming and haven't really succumbed to expectations (I don't know whose...some Fifties mom like Donna Reed? She never sees my kitchen.)

The layers of dust in the kitchen and bathroom had to go, though, so I did all the shelves and objects I love and have forgotten, and re-organized some clutter and boxed up a few items to get rid of. I cleared out the living room rather thoroughly and even got rid of the futon which was essentially an upholstered shelf since it wasn't comfortable to sit or lie on and only the cat really used it. It freed up too much space really so I brought in a card table to work on and now the room is filling up with the various projects that keep me busy when I watch stupid TV at night.

I know it is part of my creative process to make space that is clean and open but I tend to get anxious if I am not actually creating something, and I tend to fill open space with work. I have heard myself telling me to work more even when I am in the middle of physically working. It's just a drive and a form of self-discipline that the self-employed learn to weather. But I always feel great when I have a clear to-do list and the next steps of whatever project are lined out. Not there yet. The isolation deepens and I get quiet.

The Occupy part of the Jell-O Art Show theme is making me think a lot. Will I occupy my soul like I did last year? Last year the making of the piece was a grief process and I put in a ton of time on it. I don't really want to do that kind of thing, but am reflecting on the life process that is involved in working for political change.

Observing the occupiers online has let me see the passion and joy lots of them are bringing to the task...perfect to express in Jell-O. I've seen many of them appear just like they are in love, tender and full of emotion and inspiration and obsession...they're in love with the possibilities that open in life when we feel powerful. It's hard to see the fog of dejection and discouragement that covers our society when we all feel hopeless about the direction of things to more repression and less freedom and less soul and more empty sex-as-distraction. Being bad is part of the new sexuality, if you haven't noticed, because being bad is much more fun than being good. Or so we think.

I hate Valentine's Day, by the way, because I am a single human who is not in a duo and it is such a reproach to be bombarded with the way the world tries to make us all conform to consume. Of course I want a heart-shaped box of chocolates and all that it symbolizes! I've tried many years making all kinds of valentine homage with paper and gelatin and doilies and whatnot but the fact is that I don't have a love interest and my behaviors indicate that I don't even really want one. I long for one in that romantic way that is not realistic, as I set my life up to deny that possibility. The chocolate just gathers in my meno-pouch, which the advertising tells me is really the reason I am not finding my love. I have to lose weight while eating more sugar. Spin around again. Get dizzy.

It's all advertising! A box of candy does not really speak about intimacy and dedication to others. It's just something to learn from. And the Occupy movement does not escape the advertising and other forms of marketing that pervert and change the drive for power over one's own life into the widely misunderstood political forces that create actual change.

Actual change is what happens when people go home from the demonstration and are kinder to each other, more helpful, more forgiving and compassionate. Each action and thought and statement they make shifts subtly to one more positive, uplifting, progressive. They then dedicate their life to continuing this process of change, often with little visible result.

And then, shift happens! We can see in this movement many of the people who have been dedicated to change since they were young, and in fact we see them all around both in and out of the movement. We see them take the boundless energy of the young people who are newly introduced to the possibilities and channel it, make it palatable, integrate it into the lifework so many are doing. This can feel like co-opting (remember never trust anyone over 30) but it brings it all into the glacier of infinitesimal movement that is social change.

Everybody got to fall in love again this winter. It was fun, it was sexy, it was heartbreaking and it was full of emotion. I think it will be a productive relationship, this one between the people of the world and the structures that control and direct them, this one where the people try to not be such a submissive partner and get a little help with the housework for a change.

I think the advertisers and marketers will use it if they can, and part of the struggle will be to expose them too. There is no doubt that strategy is a tool of the "government" or power structure that is well in place and will be ruthless in protecting the status quo. But the true power of the people is that we can't be fully controlled.

We will do what we can see that needs to be done. People will throw themselves against the fences and walls and open up the hidden doors. No one thought the Berlin Wall would be dismantled and no one thought the parks would be filled with people becoming suddenly visible. We can't go back. It might not be comfortable and safe but change is in progress as it always is, and it just got a major energy infusion.

So yeah, I am trying to Occupy my soul. This is not a new endeavor, just some new framework for it and some new people and some new ways to encounter them. New kinds of chocolate with chili peppers and spice.

New ways lead to new projects and new ideas and more fun. It can't all be good. Some of it is boring housework and some of it brilliant flashes of intuition. Some is longing and desire and some real affection and dedication. Some is heard and some will be left in the roadside dust.

My job is simple, to keep observing and thinking and doing and then manage to express it all in Jell-O by March 31st. Sometimes I think I should have ignored the revolution and become a medical technologist as I had planned. Then my task would have been to fill dishes with agar-agar instead of Jell-O, and grow organisms instead of primroses and violets. Maybe I would have gone to medical school and maybe I would be a whole different person with a whole different life, opening a two-pound box of See's next week. Or maybe not.

It's all speculation. All interpretation. All selection of possibilities, and it seems that choosing the most life-affirming option at each turning point has been a good choice. Practicing peace leads to peace. Practicing art is a never-ending joy. I think I have a soul to occupy. Now I just have to spin up a message that won't make everyone too dizzy.