Windowsill Project

Another great illustration of my creative process in all of its clunk. This will be day nine of the project. I spent all summer procrastinating replacing this half-rotten exterior sill on the old part of the house, south side. My main fear was that the whole wall would be rotten and I'd never get it all patched up before the rains. When we got the sunny stretch I finally dove in.

It took two days to get the sill out, including a bit of online research and a tool survey. It had been a long time since I did anything resembling fine woodworking, so I had to drag out a lot of things to find my cats paw and blades for the reciprocal saw. The jigsaw was missing the set screw...a dumb mistake to let that thing drop without picking it up sometime in the last year or so. I do have a backup jigsaw. Most of my tools are leftover ones from exes who abandoned them, though I bought some Bosch. It didn't take me long to see that I did not have the proper tool to cut clapboards, but I got started, then went to BiMart.

I got a cheap flush cutter, but since you can't say that in public without some scary looks, I will have to find a better name than Multipurpose Oscillating Tool, perhaps Mabel. This turned out to be such a useful item I got some attachments and am quite fond of it already.With that and my reciprocal saw, I bravely cut around the edges of the sill and got it out in one piece. About a third of it was completely gone, but there was not much rot around it, if you don't count the missing end of the king stud with the termite damage. I convinced myself that the damage was old and there were no active bugs in my wall, as there are no other signs.

This does explain the questioning look I got from the window contractor about fifteen years ago when I told him to just put the window trim back on the way it was, without really taking a look at it myself. He pointed out a couple of the worst pieces. I remember making another window sill on the north side, and I know I made sills for the windows I installed in the new part, but I didn't do a great job on those and if you know anything about trim you can tell who made them.

This one is different. I know more now. I know to put a kerf in the underside to keep water from running back into the house, and I know to make sure the front surface goes a bit downhill. I know to use some kind of water barrier under the sill as overprotection. I saw that on This Old House and with some effort managed to get such a product at Home Despot, a place I don't enjoy but which is within biking distance of me. It is a nine-inch wide self-adhesive asphaltum product that smells extremely toxic but looks awesome in place if you don't see the wrinkles and folds. It's very sticky. I have a lot left over even though I installed it twice.

The good news is that now I don't need those cedar spacers I was going to use to fill in the inside gap...the vinyl tape does that job. I might have to cram the nicely fitted sill in since I made it to fit exactly. That is the problem for today. I did completely prime and paint the sill and it is ready to go in, but if I have to shave it a bit I will have to repaint, possibly. We'll see. I'm refusing to work on it until the fog lifts each day, because I work for myself and I am suffering enough being tied to this project for over a week already. It's sort of suffering...I do hate sanding and I am focusing intently on this thing, standing on concrete, for hours each day, so I'm not riding my bike or taking walks or the many other things I am supposed to be keeping up with.

I don't have a table saw. To get the 2x8 board to resemble a sill, I had to remove some wood in some tricky ways. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to polish my skills with hand tools, the kind that use elbow grease for power. I used a backsaw, two planes, some rasps and scrapers, Mabel and the Skilsaw, and lots of straight edges and clamps. I did things wrong, but I can do that just fine when no one is watching. I got the plane to sound right as it turned out pretty shaving curls. I figured out ways to make the edge straight without the table saw and make angled cuts with the skilsaw without losing any appendages. I wasted some hours, but the sun was out and the sky glorious against the amazing colored trees and early on I had decided to enjoy the project above all.

My fall-back was that if I messed up this blank that I made from a leftover board, I could use it for a pattern to make one out of a new, nicer piece. I might have saved myself a lot of work, but the old board turned out to be a solid beauty and I am proud I saved it from the wood rack, where a squirrel is trying to nest and chewing up the ends of all of my wood. (Evicted, at least temporarily.)

So the front edge is still a tiny bit wambly. I worked on it for hours and hours but a bad start makes for a bad finish. There are probably fifteen table saws in my neighborhood and it would have saved days if I had asked to use one to make the initial cuts. I didn't though. It looks slightly handmade still, even all shiny with white enamel.

But I love that about it. Every part of this house looks handmade. I call it my first draft house. I plan to get to the edits with about the same efficiency of the original builders who put it here around the turn of the twentieth century. Houses are really not finished products in the last-century mode in which I live. To my thinking it would feel tragic to throw up a new, finished house in a few months at the huge expense of materials and cash necessary for that modern type of construction. I relish the lifetime project I am involved in with my tiny property and its two tiny dwellings.

I am having a problem with the prospect of aging and diminishing abilities to do things like the roofing I considered and then scheduled for next summer. It might be my last big project, or not. I fantasize about a lot of mostly decorative improvements and things I really do want to finish from my last few edits. For instance, after three replacements I might just decide wooden front steps are not practical, at least as presently designed. Winter is almost here, and most of the things I would like to do will not get done now, but in the next few years, the next decade, I might just do a lot of projects, or delegate them, or leave them for the next owners.

But that's fine with me. I found that the expected rot was not so invasive and terrible as I feared, and that is probably true throughout the houses. I am on a slow time scale, the time scale of a house that is already almost a century old by almost all accounts. This house time


is slower than the human time scale, but tied to a lifetime. The Vaughans are gone from the property, but still tied to me, and every piece of work I do on this old pile of carefully arranged fir connects me with the pioneers and my town's history.

I'm in love with the mystery and extension of it, in both ways. I picture my son practicing his hand-tool skills on replacing some of my work, maybe living in the houses with his own kids deflecting their demands for skylights and balconies and secret cubbies. He will shake his head and marvel at some of my stupid mistakes, and make a few of his own perhaps. I will definitely document the history of the house with and without me, have a story to seal up in the walls for the future, or in the library for the community, or just to enjoy the process of building the documentation as I have built up the property.

Every time I garden, building the soil or nurturing the trees I rescued, every time I fix something or add an improvement, I am participating in a sacred, fulfilling and basic quest for shelter that is comfortable, durable, and beautiful. It has been a lot more than a windowsill project this week. Maybe I am taking my time with it because I can, but it feels intentional. I love looking inside that old wall.

I must remember these emotions next summer when it is roof time. It is fun. This is my kind of fun.

Monday Mornings

Mondays are odd when you work Saturdays...for me it can be kind of a day off, or a launch into a crowded week, and today I am starting slow. My house is cold, so I worked out on the stationary bike a bit while I read some essays from a library book that has to be returned. It's a big motivator for the bike that I can ride it while reading, or watching TV, or just for a few minutes here and there. The scenery does sometimes lack interest.

My living room is full of projects that are in progress: redoing my Holiday Market displays, getting my tote bag design pinned down, looking at some old art I pulled out of the files to see if I can use it again. During the late 80's I did some really precise and well-crafted art, between four- and six-color designs of flowers and birds stuck in pockets printed on the shirts...the pocket concept got a bit forced but there is a little group of orchids and a lovely rose, and quite a few birds, so I am thinking I could use parts of them for some little bags I got from Mike's garage sale. As with the tote bag design, I have to get things out in view and look at them for a few days while I visualize the details and get a fully realized plan. I love how my creative process works itself while I do other things. The big drawback is that I have so many things in various stages that it gets messy fast.

All of these art projects are just piled upon my house research which has slowed, and I really have to clear the table again and get back to the book. Maybe my window of opportunity has closed a bit with the approaching holiday sales season. Maybe just saying window will get me closer to my window sill project which I am so reluctant to dive into.

It's just a rotten window sill but it involves removing siding from the south wall, the original south wall, so I don't know what I will find and possibly destroy in the process. One of my theories is that these present windows were larger than the originals but I don't know how I would find evidence of that. I know I don't have even a single piece of the siding left, as I used every scrap to connect the remodeled part back to the original, and even had to use a different type on the back wall where no one will notice, plus some T-1-11 that is hidden behind the wood rack and will need to be replaced someday too. So when I put it back together with the new sill I will somehow manufacture, I will also have to patch in some siding that will fit. The kind I have is pretty obscure and doesn't even show up in my research of clapboard types. I'd go to Bring to look for it but that will take a strong will so that I will not come home with more projects. I find old stuff irresistible so a trip to Bring can be dangerous.

Payment is starting to come due on the lick-and-a-promise decisions I made when trying to finish the project enough to get us moved in back in 2005 or whenever that was. There were some things I did that I can't really understand at this point, unless I just ascribe them to ignorance. I knew so little about houses and wood back then that now there are glaring awkwardnesses and projects that involve tearing things out and replacing them. All of my outlets are upside down because I saw one done that way and thought it was correct. I followed right down the path of someone else's ignorance without doing the simple research of asking one dumb question. I did that more than once, sad to say.

Houses just don't really last very long, as they are such a collection of details and components with lives of their own. I guess I will be working on this house for the rest of my life, if I'm lucky. That's a relief in a way, since I can put things off for next summer knowing they will just rest here and wait for me, like the back door of the shop which has needed replacement for a decade now. Yes, it's getting worse, and no, it's not going to fix itself, but the urgency isn't really there. I can take the time to do a better job than I would if I were in a hurry. Somehow I have learned that I want to do a better job. I suppose that is a form of maturity that I am happy to have gotten a glimpse of at my age. It sort of balances out the other urge that takes the form of "I just don't care," and "that's good enough." Might be good enough for the short term but those long terms are a much different proposition.

It's hard to know what is really important. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Some of the tiniest things persist and linger and over time smell worse and bigger, and it's a mystery why they don't just fall between the cracks like so many other tiny crumbs. I've tried to slow down and be more careful just in case the tiny detail I am concerned with becomes one of the persistent ones. Obsessing over tiny details is not the way to get a lot of big things finished, though.

Today my goal is to finish one project in the living room so I can get my sewing machine out, in order to finish a few more. I'll either pick the biggest or the smallest, or if the sun comes out I might switch goals and tear into that windowsill. Although it is cold and this northwest wind isn't helping, I'm running out of chances to work outside. I have almost dug up the last of the Bishop's Weed for this season, a very opportunistic weed I have been trying to eradicate for most of the time I have lived here. I'm right on top of it now that I have two good feet and my back is behaving well. My Mom reports that the ivy I grubbed out of her yard a few years ago has remained grubbed out. She occasionally has to pull some, but the great majority is gone. If that impossible task succeeded, my Bishop's Weed one can too. Persistence is a virtue I seem to have taken in.

So I will persist in mixing my day off with my crowded week and see what I can get crossed off my list today. Maybe I will start with this lovely bowl of figs I just got from one of my favorite farmers. First I will put them in the living room so it will count for my finished project if none of the others qualify. Not really cheating, but still repeating a really time-wasting habit of those who live in small places...moving things from one place to another. I do a lot of that. Sometimes I call it organizing, sometimes cleaning, and sometimes it just makes me laugh.

At least with the figs I will have something to show for it at the end. Hope your day is productive!

Weather Rules Now

I just hate to be cold, so fall isn't fun for me, with the winter coming on...but usually we get a terrific warm October so I'm still hoping. I brought in all the green tomatoes, though, and will patiently wait for them to redden and then can or dry them. The shortage of sun does make it all the more delightful when it does come out. I don't have a clothes dryer, so it creates timing challenges, but I'm used to watching the skies and predicting. I have a few things out this morning that will be swiftly brought in under the eaves if we get a shower. I got the west side painted and it looks all clean and new, and I evicted the squirrel from a nest on my old wooden Market booth that for some reason I am keeping. South side will have to wait unless we get a long stretch of sun. I have a young Flicker coming to my suet and keeping the starlings intimidated. The bushtits don't seem afraid of the Flicker, and the birds seem to know which ones I am fond of and which I am not.

This photo is from late July when I set up across from a flower seller at the Tuesday Market. She saw me admiring the glads and gave me the whole bunch at the end of the day. Sweet. Tuesday Market was fun while it lasted but I had a hard time keeping my body going twice a week like that. Market is a very physically demanding day, as most of you know.

Trying to wrangle a bunch of details like windshield wipers, fixing flats, finishing the caulking. It's endless, the maintenance, and I'm trying to take comfort in it rather than finding it discouraging. Everything needs attention periodically, and a few things have gotten away from me. But I cleaned the attic a bit (of things I had hidden up there to reduce my clutter) and am working on the project room. I got out so much stuff for the wedding prep in June, and now have to get it all back into the filing system that is my space.
I am a visual learner and like a lot of stimulus to be creative, so I have a lot of what other people call clutter. I know it is my job for the remainder of my life to de-accumulate and change my habits, and I've started on that.

I will probably take the time to create a new blog for my house research and book project. I got all my research organized and took it in to the Lane County Historical Museum to see what they could tell me. I had a lot more details on my people (I'm researching the Davis, Huddleston and Vaughan families, mostly) than they did, and some might help them date some of their other materials. The researcher found me some wonderful items, though, including a journal by one of the other sons of William Tyler Vaughan describing their trip west, and a photo of Samantha Huddleston's house, built in 1853. I'm not positive, but I think it is still there, dressed up to look newer than that. I had walked by the location on 8th St., 356 W. 8th, the day before, and it was next to a house that looked old enough, but now I can take another look and see if I can find the bones underneath the modernity. It has two front doors and is now a duplex, but I think James Huddleston might have built it with Samantha's mother Catharine Davis in mind. She was a milliner for a time after her husband died, and one half of the house could have been for her to do her sewing and receive clients. Catharine lived for 40 years after Benjamin Davis died in 1858, only 8 years after they had arrived here and taken a land grant out on River Road. Samantha outlived her husband by 37 years, and the two women had a lot in common, and were both powerful in our history. The photo is of Catharine near the end of her life. I have a photo that may be Samantha and Iantha with their mother, but I can't prove it. Yet.

I have just about enough information on Samantha Davis Huddleston now to write an article about her, though of course much of it will be speculation amid the few documented facts. I know my land was part of the original Huddleston Donation Land Grant, which was the piece that is now circumscribed by 8th, Jefferson, Chambers, and either the Amazon or some line across around 16th or 17th streets. That is most of the west side neighborhood, but Samantha platted and sold off most of it beginning around 1900.
I can trace my particular little piece to a sale to the Vaughan family in 1908, but I had hoped to prove there were buildings on it earlier than that, and couldn't find any indication on the few maps from that time.

The Museum had a wonderful map show (extended through this week) including some excellent hand-drawn maps from around 1900. The photo shows a little piece labeled F.G. Vaughan, and it seems to say it is 48.63 acres, but the map isn't precisely dated.  I'm still chasing down a couple of details about that. Eugene is shown as a blank inside it's limits, as this map is about the unincorporated areas. I was lucky enough to get there on Tuesday morning before they had put that map away. It is too fragile to keep on display, so it went back into its wrappings.

One thing fascinating about history like this is that so much is continually lost because no one wrote it down, or there were no descendents, as in the case of the Huddlestons. Samatha's son Henry lived with her his whole life, and died a year before she did in 1926. And that was the end, except for other Davises whom I may not have found yet. I know one of her sisters married a photographer, and if I could find his collection of ambrotypes, she would surely have been pictured in some. Unfortunately he lived in CA and Iantha Jane died there, so I don't think the UO has any. That research is never-ending, though, and I can't really do it all right now.
I'm trying to bring my focus back into my house and write the book, because I will distract myself endlessly with these small details. It's all so very intriguing. We're so lucky in Eugene to have so much physical evidence left, houses and trees and artifacts. Our history is really still quite new.

My organizations are having Annual Meetings and elections and politics is a crazy mess, and I love the quiet of my living room with my research spread out and all my photos available to ponder. I'm still learning from the demolition photos, now that everything is covered up again. My theories are refined, adjusted, reflected upon, and some I'm still sticking to even when they seem unlikely. This is the good side of winter and I suppose we need the inside time when it is too wet to garden or build. Balance is a goal.
And winter brings bean soup and steamy kitchens and flannel sheets, and more books. I hope to survive it. I will miss the lovely, stretched out warmth and the evenings on the deck. I hope next summer comes before too long. I'm going to have a few projects left over for it.
And now that we have had two rainy Saturdays in a row, and thrived nonetheless, I can do this fall Market thing. I got new tires on my bike (after a flat on my trailer at the end of Market last week) and I have the full rain suit and shoes covered. I'm not going to worry about it. I will try to enjoy everything that comes.
Not really much else to do about it, but grin. And read. And write!

August has come, the fix-it time of year.

A month has slipped by and although I have had many thoughts, I didn't feel like doing the usual overview and analysis and scrutiny needed to wrap things up and make statements about them. I still don't, but I recognize that I am enervated and need fun things to remind myself what I love. Like writing.

The wedding/family reunion/OCF sure happened and it was intense and exhausting, and pretty darn fun. I wish I could have slowed it down. Having a video of the wedding is great, and it captures the moments very well. Lots of grins and warm feelings all around. It's hard to go back to normal.

 Normal means things like death and depressing house repairs and big projects I have no desire to begin. The roof on the shop needs replacing, and not just the shingles, I have to repair the plywood where that angry raccoon tore it up last year. I'll have to move that up on the priority list. I hope no mice moved in...I heard strange noises today. The roof on the shop isn't the only thing that needs to be fixed out there. I still have plenty of post-OCF sorting and repacking of things I don't even really want in the first place. I guess I wanted them at some point. I suppose I still want to be in the retail t-shirt business. Maybe tomorrow I will want it more than I do today.

I made myself go back out to the Fair Site several times and spent three days on a ladder re-shingling my little roof facade out there. It was fun, I realized about halfway through, so I slowed down and tried to enjoy it. Certainly I love spending time out on the land, with the birds and my solitary thoughts about the politics and the people and the complicated production that is Fair, and I like making things and solving problems, especially when nothing much is on the line. It doesn't matter a whole lot what I do to the booth, as it is built to rot 51 weeks of the year and look rustic the remaining week. I left some teeth of the old shingles to vex me in future years and get me back out there to work on it some more. It served me to have that new project, with cedar shingling which I hadn't done before and which is satisfying to do, but now it's done and I have projects at home that do matter. Maintenance and repairs have gotten a bit ahead of me in the last year what with the foot and all. And it hurts. Didn't like the ladder. I get a little depressed by my foot pain, even though on the scale of pain it is so minor and so not a problem like most people have problems. Still, it's more or less constantly getting in my way.

 Depression is an odd state for me. Maybe I flirt with it, as I really don't go that deep, usually able to distract myself with some project or other. My cousin, actually my Dad's cousin, Michael, died last week. He was only five years older than me, and I didn't exactly feel close to him, but I am much more affected by his death than I expected to be. It brings up all of my discomfort with death and illness, and that helpless feeling that comes with the grim options connected with the process. I know we will all go some way or other, I know it is part of life, all of that, but it's a big adjustment for the people left behind to regret and wish they had done better. I could have done a lot better by Michael, and some others I'm thinking about, so I'm kicking myself a little, which is probably a good trigger for depressing feelings and I guess I should find a way to stop.

I suppose I did the best I could at the time. When I feel too vulnerable I am not much good to others, and I tend to run scared and hide. I was a bit afraid of the emotional issues brought up by my Dad's side of the family and everything associated with that, and still wanted some answers from Michael which of course he couldn't give me as he was not holding those answers. No one is. I wish I would have tried harder to see what else Michael had to offer me outside of his association with my Dad, but I don't know if that would have been any easier. So I feel bad that he up and died and now I can't do better for him.

Of course the healthy thing would be to do better for someone else, someone who is in my life and could benefit from that. I'll try. Doing better for myself would also be smart. I could get that massage I need and make my friend Pamela a key lime pie for her birthday. That I could do. That would feel good, plus Pie!

I feel better already. All we can really do is try over and over to do the best we can when we get the chance. It helps if we know what those actions are...but mostly they are about being present and listening and paying attention, even if we are bored or not interested or feeling selfish or panicked. I can do better with that.

I'll get to that roof problem. Today I can't even make the list of things I have to do next. Maybe the list will be easier to make tomorrow, or even later. I do have some lovely purple tote bags on the line that I dyed last night and this morning and that could make me happy. It rained a few drops, which was different. I notice the neighbors have not only taken the tarp off the cob house in my view, but have taken off the roof as well and it looks like they broke up the pond surround and I am hoping they filled in the pond. I can't really see into their yard that well but it looks like they took off the front of the house too, and maybe it will not be a cob house anymore. If they don't reroof it it will soon be a heap of mud and straw. Maybe that is what is making me sad, since it is not something I can control at all, yet I have it in my daily view and have loved it for almost twenty years.

It is reminding me that when I was building this house they built the cob house, spending two months on it one summer when I was doing foundation work on my fifteen-year project. John and his friend Martin, who were around five, found the foundation work next door much more fun that what I was doing and they got just covered with mud. It's a happy memory. I should show the new neighbors the pictures and tell them what I know of the history.

It's all making me think about my own house again and all my research that needs finishing and further development. I do want to write that book. Perhaps I need to assign myself some kind of creative schedule so that time is built in for writing, as fun. Like bike riding used to be. I need some fun.

Fortunately the Slug Queen Coronation is this Friday and the laughs are guaranteed. I probably won't think about death or roof repairs or t-shirt sorting or anything like that on Friday night, and if I motivate to make that pie for Pamela, I can look forward to the taste of that. Those tricks should work.

Okay, I think I can go on now, I have tempted myself back into enjoying my life. Really, one little blog post is all it takes? Amazing, the wondrous human mind. Guess I can stand looking around to see what else is wondrous and delightful. Might even be surprised.

Weddings and Ruffles

In a week I will be giving my son away in marriage! Weird concept for someone who has not married herself and isn't even thinking about it. Some rituals are frightening just because they will tickle our senses...in this case my sense of loss comes to mind. I hadn't associated loss with this wedding at all until I found out that I will be walking him through the labyrinth and then handing him over, as if I were giving up the nurturing role to his wife, with all they symbology that goes with family succession and the dominance of the future over the past. Another reason to have a good cry before the day of.

It has been all about gain for me, solidifying a relationship with a stupendously amazing daughter-in-law, being proud and always surprised by the growth of my former little boy, getting a family reunion thrown in for good measure, plus having the overlay of the concentrated ecstasy of the Country Fair, which is like all the holidays rolled up in one sweaty sensual package. It has started to sound like fun, now that I am finished printing, have a handle on all the shade needs of the booth and the people, and have my stock more-or-less filled in and ready to sell.

I'm still working on my *steampunk* costume, which will not be very steampunk I don't suppose, since it will be too hot to wear the Victorian black dress even though it is split up the side so I can get into it, or the brocade robe I had planned to embellish. My sewing machine is still in the living room, next to the table I finally put up to manage the many Jell-O hat ornaments I have in progress.

I'm making things for the hats of all the wedding attendants, Bride and Groom, flower girls, etc. I also plan to have them for the guests, and myself if I get busy and make one for me too. I will. These things are still on the list to complete.

I am trying to clean and de-clutter my whole house (my whole life?) in preparation for my family, most of whom have not seen the house I built and the life I have here, centered around crafts and art and Radar Angels and Saturday Market and the Fair. I want it to look as polished as possible, but of course I don't have time for spring cleaning now. I have a list of excuses, though, starting with my year of the broken foot when a few maintenance kinds of things got away from me. I am just going to appear a bit messy and disorganized, a bit in the classic artist mode. I just can't cover all the bases. It makes me feel old and triggers my sense of loss...and makes for way too much stress.

I guess if they think my house is too tiny and cluttered they probably won't say anything. I'm still proud of it. I call it my first draft house...I haven't had time for the edits that would make it ready for publication. My whole life is kind of like that. It's moving too fast to keep all the loose ends tied up. Sometimes we just have to hang on and do the best we can.

So here we go for a few more days of that before we launch. I will get finished! I will show all of my polished facets and most of my chipped and flawed ones will be kindly overlooked. This is life at its peak for the next week or so. Nothing will be under my control. It will be fast and fleeting and full of all the emotions there are (maybe we can skip horror and dismay and dejection and such) happening all at once.

Hope you can share it with me! Wish I had time to upload some pics of the Jell-O. It is going to be an amazing, overflowing hoopla! With ruffles!

Following up a little

My last post got a lot of readers...I hope it served to inform rather than inflame. It helps me to remember that everyone has an opinion, and feels that it is equally valid. One of the main points that I hear from my fellow small business owners is that people with an economic stake in the issue ought to be the ones making the decisions. Visionaries are great to bring out the possibilities, and Dime a Dozen types seem to find endless ones, but the decisions should be in control of the neighborhood users, the ones who will live or fail to thrive with the results.

The Working Group, which is meeting regularly to talk over the possibilities, functions well. It's a tough process to take groups with essentially opposite views and bring them together into some kind of agreement, or at minimum, understanding of the entire picture, so that all stakeholders can have a voice. Representatives are one level removed, of course, so it is critical that the representatives don't get too fixed into position without regularly checking with their interest groups. That is, of course, difficult during the Market day, and practically impossible outside the Market day.

We were rocking all day on the west block, with no time for anything but what we came there to do, which was to offer our wares to the many wonderful tourists, track fans, students, graduates and their families, and local people shopping for themselves, their Dads, and their whims. It was pretty great for some, marginal for others, and mysterious in all the ways it always is. We didn't even have much time for our usual hi-jinks. Unlike the previous week, however, my side of the blocks was not all abuzz about the street closure. That was a relief.

We people who sell are natural family members, no matter where we are located. Our issues are more similar than different. Our affinity grows over the years and we get boundary issues...we fail to see them after awhile. We're close in an odd way, intimate for a day every week, but not having a lot of knowledge about each other outside of that interface, unless we make those efforts, and most of us have. It's rare to find someone who doesn't feel a part of the community, though of course for some it takes awhile, or they go away mad, never really getting the feelings.

I'm thinking that some of this plays into the issues some vendors seem to repeatedly have with our favorite Fair in the woods. We aren't there long enough to really feel a part of the life that goes on pre-Fair, and we don't always feel included. We work on the weekends when most of the volunteers do their volunteering. So often our "feedback" comes out of our frustrations and feelings that we don't belong, and it comes out as complaining.

I regret my part in this dysfunctional type of communication over the years. It's way too easy to complain and not do the further work of understanding the situation from other viewpoints. Even when you try to understand it, you sometimes come from the opposite side of the issue, and rarely do we have the time during an interaction to listen to other sides, to really feel them. Email, so often one-sided, can add to the distress. I apologize for all of the vendors who have fallen into this trap, who can allow the frustration to add up until it gets to the ranting stage, which of course prevents the next stages from happening. Tired, overworked people so often just lose patience and go to one of their defensive positions, generally the most familiar one. Feeling the victim is all too prevalent, and bullying can also emerge.These are not the better sides of our natures.

We all have to watch out for this. We all have to ask ourselves what would make us feel more a part of things, would enrich our experience, would help ease whatever problems we run up against. Pretty generally it is not something that can be done by the other, by "them." It has to come from "us". That translates to "I have to do it."

I started volunteering for OCF a few years ago when I felt that I wasn't "seen." I had some mishaps and some anger and worked through it to figure out what parts were mine to own. Pretty much all of it, I realized, had to be fixed by my own efforts, and by changing my attitudes. It has not been easy, but I did find that the response was positive whenever I offered to actually do something, or when I expressed my thoughtful opinions. People who pitch in generally gain a lot more respect than those who observe. There is always plenty to do, and you can find a fit for your particular talents.

The volunteers get tired of pointing this out. Everyone works hard to make it all happen, and everyone certainly has their level of self-interest, but to a true volunteer, the common good is always more important that the individual effort. People who love the Fair are really genuine about this. The social change, the economic opportunity, the chance to relax and have fun and be openly creative and enthused, the intensity of positive energy, all of these are real and essential to thousands of participants. Reducing it to a weekend of making money is way off from the real value of the giant spinning peach.

Yet money is made and should be. We can quibble about the details and we can certainly refine the process and the growth and the future possibilities, but we are all there for more than that, or we would be somewhere else that weekend. We can, and must, speak up about our experiences and our ideas for the refinement, but whenever we go to the "us vs. them" territory we need to back up and take a reality check.

If you don't feel part of the "US", then figure out what is holding you back. If you hear yourself saying "They did _____" then ask yourself who "THEM" are, and go further into what they might be trying to do or thinking about regarding the situation. You can believe that you are not being targeted for anything. Nobody wants to make your life harder for any reason. There is always a deeper goal, and with OCF and my other organizations, it really seems to be true that underneath there is the real, deeper goal of the common good. I believe this about all of the groups I am part of.

Really. And furthermore, I believe that this can be found underneath most movements for change, even if it is traffic change we are discussing. I think that is why people get so entrenched and offended. They do think they are working for the common good, and they are hurt when they are told they are wrong in whatever way this happens. If they have the crusader archetype working in them, they sometimes feel like they are the only one working for the common good. They sometimes fail to see what is really happening around them.

My feeling about the situation at 8th and Oak is that we must first really define the common good in detail, and then we can promote it. Next we have to learn to trust each other, and that is really hard until we find out our similarities and identify our differences. This takes research, and time, and words, and the physical presence of each other in the room together. And of course it takes honesty, some humbleness, and a lot of real work.

As one metaphoric example, I rushed out of the shop to the WG meeting without getting the ink off of my hands, and the garden dirt out from under my fingernails. I worried about this until I looked around the table at the other hands, and they were pretty much all dirty hands, working hands. This wasn't the type of business meeting with suits and ties and expensive fountain pens. We had a lot in common, and it was the dirt. The land, and its fragments. 

We all need to remember what we have in common and look for more. The way we are going to find the elegant solutions is by working deeper, and the way we work deeper is that we follow the consensus-seeking process. I am so committed to this after a lifetime of learning it, that I will not probably understand someone else's need for majority voting or solutions that require a yes or no. I see that as cutting out the sometimes inefficient, ponderous process of listening to all of the people who will be affected. All of them, the ranters, and the thoughtful, the visionaries and the practical ones who just want to get to work. Everybody has to have a voice.

So if we are representatives, we need to know if we are speaking for our interest groups, and we can't just allow ourselves to get fixed into position. I knew last week at Market, by the many, many conversations I heard, that my position represented my interest group and had in mind the common good. I felt confident making that blog post, and carefully tried to make my point, but I hope I also conveyed that it was only a slice of the big picture.

The big picture and the elegant solution are not yet set. They are fluid. The spinning peach is not a rigid and unemotional thing. The streets downtown belong to everyone, the public. The users, even if we pay for the use, are not the final word on the matter. We need to know what the customers think, what the officials think, what the drivers think, what the property owners in the neighborhood think. We need a broad discussion, and we need to find the consensus. If we fail to go through the process, we will spawn the complainers, and we will fail to find the elegant solution.

It's a neighborhood, what happens there on Saturdays. Just go look at it on any other day, and you will see a different neighborhood. One of my issues is that I want all the people who use the blocks, including the drummers, including the cops, including the farmers and the hippies and the car people and the cyclists, to feel enough a part of the neighborhood that they will want to speak up about their experiences and will want to be part of the solution. It is difficult to speak for those who refuse to pitch in.

And so I come around to the complainers. I joke about my frustrations with my organizations and I sometimes lampoon and poke fun with my art. I've called it the Annoy-Again Country Fair and laughed loudly. I've tried, in recent years, to add a bigger portion of love into that formula. When I criticize, I am pointing out my failure to communicate in a more productive manner. I've tried to suppress my complainer and unleash my hard worker and pitch in and make the change I desire to see, in as loving and participatory a way as I possibly can.

So I type things, arrange tiny black marks into some kind of order to transmit some kind of thought into being. I organize, I witness and document, as impartially as it is possible for me to be, as imperfectly as I must. I presently take minutes for five different bodies. It's a hell of a lot of time, though thankfully most of them only meet once a month. I attend and participate in the meetings, and if they last two hours, that means I spend at least another two hours listening to the recording and trying to make it organized and communicate the sense of the meeting. Then send it out, make sure it is made part of the public record, and make sure it gets to all of those who want to know about it, if that is within my power. I humbly am corrected many times and often am helped to a more clear, more careful communication.

I only get paid for two of those groups, and my sacrifices include not having enough time for my creative writing, my weeding, my getting ready for selling, my relaxation and my life. This time of year I can despair about it, but I want to stop short of complaining and point out what many people do for others. All of those people who are out at the Fair site this weekend are working for me, and it makes me happy that they are enjoying it. Most of them have regular jobs for money and they work weekends for the common good. They bring their particular talents and they put them to the common goals of having a safe, happy event that promotes awareness, spiritual and human growth, highlight artistry of all kinds, and is a heck of a thing.

We all benefit. We all could pitch in a lot more. We all want to belong, to feel good about our work, and to make something wonderful with our efforts. Maybe we are envious of how fun it looks to drive a Gator or walk the eight endlessly, maybe on Saturdays downtown we wish we had strawberries to sell instead of earrings. We really have to learn to appreciate the efforts of others, to respect them, and to feel our kinship instead of our frustration. Step back and turn it around. We all need the relief this will bring.

Develop your trust for your own relief and happiness. Work around those you don't feel you can trust, check out what is preventing your full participation and see what you can do about it. You.

I know you are busy, or shy, or inarticulate, or frustrated, or cynical, or hurt. I hear you, I am trying to see you. Please trust that many, many people are trying to see you. Allow that, and express yourself as kindly and as respectfully as you can, and you may get your needs met. You might have to work a long time to make that happen, but the time will pass anyway, and the frustration hurts you a lot more than the participation will.

Let's all try a little harder, especially now that we are working so many hours and have such important deadlines. One of my favorite pitch-in people wears one of my favorite hats this time of year, one that she gets in exactly the way I created it. It says "Just keep working" on it.

Gotta go. Today I have three sets of minutes waiting, and about twenty steampunk with Jell-O Art hats to create. I'm dyeing two loads of bags and hoodies, and the raspberries need water but my foot hurts too much to drag the hose around the yard. This is my day off. I'm guessing not many of my readers are sitting around with their feet up. This is the busiest time of year for many of us.

So this is the time of year we have to have the most patience, the most compassion, and work the hardest internally as well. It will be worth it. There will be a lot to celebrate. Trust that.

How to Change: Don't Put up Roadblocks

Institutional memory is a precious resource but it can sure get ponderous. Sitting in the same spot at Eight and Oak for 43 years has created some powerful stories.

And when I say Eighth and Oak, I am guessing you think: Saturday Market. You think that, for one reason, because in the last 40-odd years Saturday Market has spent just about a million dollars advertising that one essential phrase: 8th and Oak. It's our home, and notwithstanding that it is a city/county park used by thousands of other members of the public, it is still unalterably a home to me, and Saturday Market history there is my history. And there are dozens and hundreds of members and former members who feel that way. We go there every week and do what we do. Thousands of times, each one different.

I asked some tourists this week about their experience, since I had overheard them saying: "There it is, just like on the website." They had seen one of my fresh new hats, *Grateful Dad* pictured in the new products which Kim, our Promotions manager, documents so frequently. They said they didn't know their way around Eugene at all, but just went for Eighth. Eighth, Eighth, Eighth.

This Great Street, historically the Main Street which got the pioneers from Skinner's Mudhole to their farms and communities up the river road, was a conduit long before Sixth and Seventh became the feeder streets. Long before Eleventh was paved, long before any thoughts of bus-rapid-transit, back when people walked everywhere unless they had a horse. Farmers and craftspeople gathered there from the beginning to trade and support each other.

It is the artery of our Market, and as it runs between our two Markets, Saturday Market and Lane County Farmers Market, it connects us and feeds us and makes us inseparable.We have more than just synergy. Our institutional memory reaches back to when we were ten and created the LCFM by inviting farmers into our membership. Lotte told us all of the world markets she had observed had produce and other food within them, and we needed it too. Throughout the next thirty years we sold together with farmers in various arrangements, and it was always together that we all did our best.

We can't really cut to now and just start fresh with new solutions to what some LCFM members and some members of the community think are the essential problems with the space. We would not be wise to jettison our collective memory and follow the imaginations of new people who don't seem to see us as we see ourselves. We couldn't do it even if we tried.

The Saturday Market is not just an organization, but it is a membership, and every member is an independent, autonomous business. Each one thinks for herself, gathers facts, forms opinions, and makes her (or his) experience, different every week, responding to the conditions of the moment, but within the conditions of our collective experience that we have learned are what sustains us. This Saturday every time I walked anywhere in the Market I heard people talking about the street closure plan. We like having farmers, but this week we were having a hard time shopping over there.

We like having tourists, parking, garbage collection, hand-washing stations, staff, security, etc. We have chosen to spend a million dollars in advertising and promotion, dollar by dollar. And every single dollar we spend comes from the pockets of our members. All of our money comes from us, through the generosity and interest of our beloved customers, for whom we try our best to create a safe, fun experience.

We create it, with the kind assistance of our neighbors and friends and all of the people who visit our town and want what we want. The love shown for our two organizations is prodigious. People are as dedicated to us as we are to them.

And nobody wants to see us struggle. While members of the community have varied opinions on what will or won't work or should or shouldn't happen, our institutional memory knows that it is possible to break what we have. It is possible to ruin it. As strong and mighty as it looks, you can love it to death.

I'm happy that new farmers are wanting to join what is the premier community gathering in the state, perhaps, maybe in the PNW. Maybe we are the center of the universe as we often say metaphorically. The future of our food is beyond essential, and it seems so vital that young farmers have a way to enter the marketplace, some room, some support. No one is against this. But I am going to draw a very clear line on how growth has to happen at Eighth and Oak.

Eighth has to be open. It is our artery. The closure of Eighth Street for a few farmers' booths is not a step forward to greater prosperity. It will break our Market. No rosy vision of expansion that chokes off our lifeblood will be sustainable or positive for either organization.

It might look good for the farmers. An Eighth Avenue closure plan brings nothing for the Saturday Market members. It will break us.

It may be rude and it is not our style to point this out, but we have a huge imbalance on the Park Blocks, and that is that Saturday Market has grown organizationally to respond to the changed conditions of our marketplace. We have pooled our money through our percentage fee (we pay $10 plus 10% daily for our spaces, plus other fees) and we have rented lots of bathrooms (at an annual cost of $12,000). We have hired security teams for the hours we are there. We have hired people to put up fences, tables, rain protection and shade, to empty our trash cans, to clean up messes, to process people's credit cards and hand out change, to give little kids bandaids and to spread the word of our offerings. We have spent a literal fortune to build our enterprises together and to make them strong, and above all, safe, and we always work until we find something that works for as many of us as possible.

We have subsidized the LCFM with our money, our time, our thoughts, and our hearts for the whole of its existence. We have nurtured it and we continue to pay way more than our fair share for what happens around us on Saturdays. Thousands of my dollars have gone to clean up after the spontaneity of what happens on the Courthouse Plaza. Our staff cleans it every week. We don't rent it, we aren't responsible for it, we don't have any control over it, we just keep it clean. We do that because it is the right thing to do. Thousands of my dollars have gone to sort the trash of farmers' customers, to answer the bazillion questions about the farmers that run through the SM information booth, to do the right thing as well as we know how to do for our beloved neighborhood. We give and we give.

I would not take back a single dollar. I do not like to see the farmers struggle. I would love to see them have the amount of space they need to prosper. However, the space is finite, and we are already using all of it. The uses being made of Eighth Street are the historical, practical, essential uses. It is the only legal and safe bike egress to the west, particularly when Broadway gets blocked off as it was this weekend. It is the way people find the Market, get through it to park, and see what it is. One one side we have the Saturday Market, and on the other side we have the Farmers Market. This is not by accident, and it is not a casual arrangement. Oak Street lacks the intimacy and presence of Eighth. Eighth is not just a through street, it's much more.

We only moved to the Park Blocks in 1982, but we know what it was like when we didn't have the easy entry of Eighth Street. When we were cloistered up on the Butterfly, people were afraid to enter. It took a commitment. Easy entry works for us. Barriers to entry do not.

Closing the Street means narrowing access, and diverting traffic to other locations. Tourists will drive off to Fifth Street, to Down to Earth, to Oakway, and to South Eugene. Locals will find other ways to meet their Saturday needs, deciding not to fight the bolloxed traffic patterns, to take an easier path. It will break us.

And like the other things that we hold in our long memory that have not worked for us, this one will be the worst. This will be looked upon in retrospect just like what happened to downtown through urban renewal, the growth of VRC, and the Downtown Mall. The collective wisdom of the mature institution that is the Saturday Market tells us that this is not the time to accommodate, to experiment, to try out closure and see how it works.

Logistical problems may be solvable, traffic may be controllable, feelings may be consolable. It might look like it works okay for a weekend or part of a season. I'm not sure if you will be able to tell if it is working or not. I'm not sure if the anticipated drop in my  sales and our organization's income, (and the rise in our expenses, which has already taken place as we spend needed resources in meetings and staff time) will be traceable to this alteration in our circulatory system. Nobody really knows.

But we know what feeds us. We know ourselves, and we know the farmers. We know the history of the last ten years of LCFM struggle. We are not new to the situation. We aren't going to put the history aside and doom ourselves to a huge, uninformed mistake by a few people with energy.

Saturday Market is drawing the line. We oppose street closure. LCFM can not own Eighth Street. It is far too valuable.

And through our commitment to doing the right thing, we will continue to work to solve our neighborhood problems. We welcome group process. We have skills to apply to it. We care deeply about our relationships and long, deep cooperative collaborations with the farmers. We think it will break them too, this vision that is not grounded in what is already happening down there.

We are not willing to stand aside and watch this happen. We have offered at least six alternatives to street closure. There are ideas we haven't even yet explored. We have good ideas, a dime a dozen. Just ask.

Don't ask, at your peril. We have six hundred members with opinions. Some of them are grounded in the long history, and it won't be pretty when they surface. Do the work, Eugene City Government, Lane County Government, Lane County Farmers Market, and all who are trying to support small business, economic prosperity, and sustainable business in Oregon. Find the solution that will actually work to improve things.

Don't break us. We are a treasure. Listen to us and respect us. There is no other Saturday Market. Don't love progress more than you love what we have made, what we are making. Do not try to brush us aside.
We are the experts on downtown retail on Saturdays. We sing it every week: Prosperity and fun for everyone.

Can we just get back to that, please? This is the busy season! I have so much to do, to get ready for OCF, for my only son's wedding, my family reunion, my continuing recovery from my broken foot, researching and writing my book, doing the myriad unpaid and paid things I do all the time. The garden needs weeding! I do not have time to go over this repeatedly as we have for the last several years. Do not close the street. Do not close the street. Just don't do it.