There is a long hallway in front of the kitchen at Bedlam Farm, it connects the family room with the long living room on the other side. In this rain and humidity, it has begun peeling and Maria and I fresh from our de-wallpapering at our new home last Summer and Fall, decided to go as far as we could with scraping off the old layers of paper. There were many. I think it’s time to ball Ben in for the sanding and spackling, Maria and I have already devoted two days to cleaning off the walls and we are short on the right tools. And we are tired and hot, too.
It was nice being inside the farmhouse again, it looks wonderful and is ready to receive it’s new family, whenever they appear.
It was difficult to see part of the pasture overrun with weeds and grass and nettles last week, it was gratifying to come back today – we had wallpaper to scrape – and see that my good neighbor Adam Matthews had come by with his tractor and brushogged the pasture. I felt better, the farm looks great, inside the farmhouse, the barns and in the pasture. Bedlam Farm has been on the market for 17 months now, it is still waiting for someone to love it, but the farm has been nothing but a gift to me. I wrote a bunch of books there, met and loved Maria there, stood through many blizzards with Rose, cracked up, starting piecing myself together. It was pretty hot but we spent four or five hours scraping the wallpaper off the hallway near the kitchen.
Might have to call in reinforcements for the sanding and spackling, it was wonderful to be on the farm, I am so grateful for having found it. It changed my life, in many ways it saved my life. Maria and I both stood on the porch, looked down over the valley and were awed by the beauty of the place. Some lucky person is on the way.
It’s heading for the 90’s again today and when it gets hot, the porch gets crowded. The chickens come and sit under the chairs, the barn cats each take a rocker and Red hopes up to cool off after moving the sheep. This doesn’t include all of the plants and flowers, ants, flies and bugs. Family portrait, sort of.
Some of you may remember John and Diablo, who I photographed last week while John pulled Diablo in a wagon because he isn’t crazy about walking in the heat (Diablo, that is). I asked John if Diablo was sick and he was pained by the question. No, he said, he just likes riding in a wagon. I found John and Diablo this morning, John was fixing his lawn mower, Diablo was lying in the garage door (note the fan for Diablo.) John says Diablo loves riding in the wagon, and he loves hanging out with when he works. The two are not often apart, I gather.
John says he will check out the blog today – he hasn’t heard of it.
Mother Earth is sending me messages, I see them every night.
Every evening I run out with my camera to catch one of the beautiful storms sailing in night after night, the sky angry, emotional, full of color. But a new sky, a different one. It was inevitable that one of these would knock the power out, and last night, this one did, just minutes after I took the picture. Maria and I were sitting on the porch when a huge bolt of lightning struck across the road, accompanied by window-rattling booms of thunder. The power was out for several hours, I lit up the Kindle and read and sweltered. It came on during the night.
We are all experiencing weather, everyone reading and seeing this – heat here, rain, there, tornados in one place, storms and wind in another. We all talk about the weather and squawk about it, but weather has become the elephant in the room, Congress pretends it isn’t happening, we talk about the economy, we all focus on our own storms, our own heat, our own weather, yet weather has the potential for connecting us, it is a universal experience, like losing a dog, we each lament our own weather, but seem unwilling to see that it is a universal, not an individual experience. Weather troubles seem to be the norm, no longer an anomaly.
The media is happy to frighten us with weather alerts, but nobody really wants to focus on what they mean, what the real story is. How this binds our divided world. We are like the masses of cowed people in those old sci-fi movies, denying reality until it knocks us off our computers and away from the TV screens, we end up running through the streets in terror and confusion. In the movies, at least, it is usually too late. People pay for hiding their heads in the sand, for being selfish. I do not believe it is too late, it is surely waking me.
I am always struck when people talk about their grief over losing an animal that they seem to not realize that everyone around them, everyone they are talking to, everyone reading their comments, has lost an animal, it is not just their grief. It is not our suffering individually, it is a collective experience yet we are all lost in our own narcissistic worlds.
Last night, sitting in the dark, in the sticky heat, I was thinking of the people out west in 120-degree heat, the people in Southwest, still digging out from tornado damage, the firefighters lost in Arizona, homes underwater in Florida and Virginia, the devastated Jersey shore. I decided to think about them, not me. We are feeling the same things, even if no one wants to see that. We are living in a universal experience. I wonder when we will choose to connect the dots and think of Mother Earth, who is crying out to us to pay attention to her, and to heal her, and then, perhaps heal ourselves. Her messages are getting louder every day, they are written in the sky.
