Day: July 16, 2013

I remember when I gave Maria use of the Studio Barn in exchange for helping with animal care. It was 2006, there were three cows, 36 sheep, two barn cats, three goats, three dogs living at the farm, it was a mad, creative, out of control place. She was shy, quiet, sad it seemed to me, shut down in some way. She never smiled, hardly ever spoke.

She worked restoring houses during the day, she had left her art behind. At first, she would only come to the Studio at night, around 2 or 3 a.m., Rose would growl and I would look across the road from my bedroom and see the lights go on, I never heard a sound, she was always gone by daylight, I didn’t see or talk to her for months after she started making her art there, she was like a deer, she came silently and left silently. I couldn’t imagine how she slept or rested, I could see how important the Studio Barn was to her, she loved the space, she made it her own, it was hers from the first day, no longer mine.

I worried about her in the barn all night, I started leaving food for her inside of the Studio Barn. Cheese, chocolate, bread, and it was always gone in the morning. Like a cat. One evening, I was surprised to see her car outside of the Studio Barn in daylight, I took a deep breath – I was afraid of spooking or disturbing her, it was her space – and made some microwave popcorn.  I brought it over to the small barn, a steaming aluminum bowl.  Mother the Barn Cat was sitting inside of the Studio Barn by the fire, she and Maria had become good friends in the night, of course.  Mother, who never came inside a building, came inside the Studio Barn to sit by the fire and listen to the coyotes howling outside. Life with animals is such a journey of the heart sometimes.

I carried a tray, popcorn and tea, it was a cold night. I knocked on the door. Can I come in? Am I disturbing you? There was music playing in the background, some chanting, fabric was hanging all over the place, Maria looked happier than I had ever seen her, she asked me to come in, and we sat in the two overstuffed chairs that were in the barn, we ate our popcorn silently, munching, listening to the fire, Mother got restless and went outside to hunt, when we were done, Maria showed me the beautiful quilt she was working on, and I knew to look carefully at it, and then to leave and go back to the farmhouse.

We each said later that we were as comfortable with each other that night than we had ever been with anyone in our lives.

After that, I would leave food in the Studio Barn every weekday night and in the morning, there would be an empty tray left by the back door of the farmhouse. It was months before I talked with Maria again in the Studio Barn, but I knew it would happen again. The Studio Barn is special to me.

A number of people called our realtor Kristin Preble after we announced yesterday that we had decided to rent Bedlam Farm. We hadn’t thought about renting, but the housing market here here has not yet fully recovered, and we like the idea of having people living in the farm until things sort themselves out. Many people have suggested that Maria and I turn the farm into some sort of retreat – for writing, photography, animal rescue, art. Those would all be wonderful uses of the farm with it’s privacy and outbuildings but that isn’t what Maria and I do for a living, we love our work, and running a retreat isn’t what we want to do.The farm is well suited for almost anything, it has a restored old farmhouse and four restored barns, one with heat and water.

Many people say they are sad about my leaving Bedlam Farm, but I am not sad about leaving, I have no wish to return, we are very happy in our new home and our life together, we have no shortage of stories to write about and good photos to take or art to make. That was where we needed to be then, this is where we need to be now. The first calls were encouraging, some serious people who want to explore life in the country for a year or so and bring their dogs, maybe some sheep and horses, to the farm. We are open and flexible to the right people, we want people who will love the farm and care for it. We would consider a multi-year lease if it seemed right.  Maria and I want to talk to the people who are serious, get a sense of them. We want to feel very solid about anybody who rents Bedlam Farm. We like the sound of the people calling so far.

For confused newcomers, I see there are some, Maria and I put the farm up for sale more than a year ago, we moved to our new farm in October of 2012, the photos and stories you have been seeing and reading are from the new farm. For those who have questions about the rental of the farm, please call Kristin at 518 854 7888.

I enjoyed resuming my weekly Tai-Chi lessons with Scott Carrino at the Pompanuck Farm Institute. Scott is a good teacher, patient and careful, he is, I suspect, struggling to figure out how I learn. I had trouble all throughout school and never made it through college – got booted out of two – and the more I read about autism, the more convinced I am that I have mild and creative forms of it. I don’t consider it a disease, but a creative opportunity. Every day someone asks me how I write a l lot, take photos, help run a farm, teach, and I always think the same thing – my mind handles multiple tasks and imaging with great energy and focus, but struggles with linear information, a hallmark symptom of autism.

I told Scott today that for me to learn Tai Chi, he has to show me one thing each lesson, and only one, once I get the concept, it starts to work for me. Scott is getting it, I think, he loves it when I bring Red, the two of them are very powerfully connected in ways I don’t quite understand. We worked on the fifth movement of Tai Chi, a celebration of life and earth. Tai Chi, says Scott is about softening our lives.

This struck home with me. Our lives are hard, fast, filled with edges – bills, bad news, technological problems, worries about work, a bombardment of too much edgy information, things we have to answer, react to. Spiritual work is, to me, about softening those edges, softening my life. This is required every day, several times a day in our fragmented world, so filled with argument and sharp points, the left and the right, anger and judgment. Tai Chi is about moving easily, in a fluid way, conscious of the earth and sky and elements. It is soft motion, surprisingly tiring. It grounds me, though, as meditation does, prepare me for the bombardment of things that is life in our time. Silence is not built into our lives, there is always something to do, check, fix, respond to, absorb.

When I am angry, I soften my heart, when I am anxious, I soften my fear, when I am distracted, I soften my mind. The world could use some softening, I think, my life is in search of softening. Maria is a soft person, a soft love, so is Red, the donkeys the farm. It adds up in a way.

Given my problems with learning, Tai Chi is hard for me, it will take me some time, I love the idea of softening life, I have a good teacher, I am opening to it, I feel it, and I appreciate Red as a companion. He comes and lies by me, stays still while I move, is a softening himself, a witness to my life.

The weather has been great for flies, not for donkeys. It is very hot, humid and damp, the nasty horseflies have come out and when we went to do the afternoon chores Simon came over and leaned his head against Maria, as he does with both of us in fly season. We will try some sprays and ointments but in the real world of real animals, life is sometimes raggedy.

I put up a lot of sweet photos of Maria and her loving ways with our animals. I may be an ass but I am not a donkey and living with Maria is not as simple as loving a donkey. For one thing, she is not normal, she is an artist and she sees the world in a very particular way, she has a special frequency that most people cannot hear.  And when she locks onto something, you better get out of the way. We have just recovered from our socks battles (I asked her last week if there were any clean socks, and her response was classic: “do you really need clean socks every day?” And before you roll your eyes, I am not one of those men. Yes, she does the laundry (when she hasn’t thought of a new pillow design) but I do the shopping and the cooking.

It works out, more or less. Maria is not often seen in the kitchen, she helps chop up veggies for the pizza but mostly she uses the kitchen as a highway between her Studio and the house. For months, she has become fixated on our old and scrungy kitchen floor, which we think was put in around 1956 and is in a state of disintegration. This floor got into Maria’s head she hated it, thought it was disgusting, has been plotting in frustration to get rid of it. Maria was getting a big testy about the old floor, dropping repeated hints about how awful it was, how dirty it was, didn’t I see it? I admit I did suggest she was a tad anal, I did wonder if it could wait until Spring, I did say the kitchen had a grandma kind of charm about it, but she was neither convinced or amused.

Maria has repeatedly accused me of being insensitive to the awful condition of the floor and suggested I was putting way too many things ahead of replacing it (like buying food, fixing the lawn mower, wearing socks, buying groceries). Tuesday, as I lay sweating and groggy from 100 heat, I suggested buying a window air conditioner to help us survive global warming – this is the hottest summer I can ever remember up here – I saw the look in her eyes, that Sicilian look she gets when she things she is being thwarted by yet another blockhead man (this-what-on-earth-are-you-doing-in-my-house?-look.) I could almost hear her thinking, oh, there goes the money for the kitchen floor.  No honey, I grovelled, let’s call Joe and get him over her to estimate the new floor, I can wait until next summer for the air conditioner I said, as I slipped into the bathroom to look for the inhaler and wipe my  brow. Later, she said she had thought about it, and of course the air conditioner came first, I was uncomfortable, a kitchen floor was not as important as that. I was not fooled, she was only kidding. I said maybe we should get the floor done, and she said, okay, I’m happy with that.

She was skeptical right through the morning and kept the heat on.

It is impossible to clean the kitchen floor, she said this morning, as I made breakfast, you just don’t see the dirt, you don’t understand. No, no, I said, I do understand and I called Joe Darfur and begged him to get over here in a hurry. True, I don’t remember her cleaning the kitchen floor all that often, but this is nit-picking, I’m being small. Joe showed up just as I was leaving for my Tai Chi lesson and he and Maria were happily trading design ideas when I left. He was Maria’s kind of guy, he grasped the awfulness of the old floor right away and got right into the many tile and linoleum options. I could tell he loves working with artists, they have fun picking out the tiles and he doesn’t have to bother with it. I asked him if he noticed that artists were all crazy, and he pretended not to hear me.  It was going well, I was pleased to get out of there.

When I got home, it was like I was a donkey. Maria was happy to see me, purring like a kitten, showing me her tile designs she and Joe had worked things out, she liked the blue-gray tile combination,  we will get a new kitchen floor for a few hundred bucks (more than the price of a good air conditioner), marital bliss has been restored. She had already blogged about it, suggesting there gender differences involved (we know how to translate that, yes?). If there’s a lesson in all this, perhaps it is this – to be treated like a donkey you have to not be an ass.

I’m taking her out to dinner to celebrate the new kitchen floor and to show her how happy I am to be getting it.