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One year & 18 days in -- Giving thanks, I lit three fires

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(One year and twenty five days in: a prescript

It is a beautifully crisp early morning here, in the 30s, with the promise of another cold, clear day. I can almost smell the pinon burning in the fireplaces of northern New Mexico, 1,200 miles and many moons to the west. This diary entry has taken a while to finish, as I am now confined to short periods at Kinko’s in the early morning and late afternoon, sandwiched around hard days in the dirt. But I will try to finish this morning, and get on with this “cheap spa experience.” Here are my memories of Thanksgiving Day, and my 12 hours back home. Enjoy.)

Ah, the moment before everything changes. It seems particularly quiet at these times, as if even the birds and the small ground critters stop their chatter and their leave-rustling to think about what has been, what is happening and what lies ahead, just around the corner. Today, it is in the low 70s here in Tenase (the name the first settlers – the Cherokee and the Shawnee – gave to this place, waiting too late themselves to build their own fences to keep us foreigners out). Tomorrow, after some hard winds and much-needed rain, it will
be in the 20s. I am glad that I spent the day planting tulips and daffodils and pansies, spreading topsoil and tucking everything in with shredded pine mulch. That way, the rains will not wash away the new soil nor expose the balled roots of the flowers or the small, brown balls that will be flowers. That way, everything will settle in, take root, hold on during whatever winter is to come and then take off in the spring. That is, I hope it happens that way.

I hope all of you had a relaxing and family/friend-filled Thanksgiving. For this diary entry, I want to share with you how my day of thanksgiving went. Or rather, the part of it that involved my first “approved” trip back to my farm since last Christmas. In most ways, it was a wonderful day, filled with appreciation for what I’ve had and still have, a busman’s holiday in the garden, a time with my two dogs, a mostly quiet time. A time unlike most of yours, but comforting nonetheless.

Like all other residents at the “house” who had behaved themselves (and that’s not all of us), I was approved for a 12 hour pass on Thanksgiving. Although I had received invitations to join many friends at their Thanksgiving tables (thanks kindly, Dub and Nevernal and Chicken and Ed and Sherlene and Jonellie), I could only go somewhere that had been previously inspected by the powers that be. That place for me – and the only place I really wanted to be – was my deep hollow home. I chose my 12 hours to be away from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, and to get ready for the trip home, I did four things:

a) installed new brake lights on my pick-um-up truck, bright lights that now work whenever I hit a toggle switch on my gear stick. (That way, I could squeeze every minute out of the time home, instead of having to leave early while the sun was still up)

b) bought new king-sized sheets and pillow cases and washed and dried them using the “house” laundry room in preparation for taking a long nap in my own bed (something I have wanted to do every night that I’ve tossed and turned in my single bed-sized cot at the “house”, on my plastic mattress and pillows, with my roomful of unawaredly and mostly unconcernedly noisy neighbors, even though they share the grown men’s dorm with me)

c) sorted through my clothes and books in my small locker to take home the extra pairs of shorts and tee-shirts that I won’t need until I go home and the books that no one else at the “house” wants to read.

d) went shopping for my Thanksgiving dinner – a pound of rib-eye steak, big russet baking potato, a young tender bundle of asparagus, tomatoes and an avocado, sliced sourdough bread and fresh brown turkey figs. Delicacies I had mostly not eaten in at least a year, food easy to fix and fit to fill me up. Food unlike the Pilgrims, or all of you, ate – but just what I wanted.

With the clean sheets, the extra clothes and books and the foodstuffs in my newly brake-lighted truck, I left the “house” at the moment the punch-clock turned 6:00 am. Actually, I waited an extra minute to allow one of the younger residents to check out ahead of me, a young man who had been in prison for the past three years and was headed to be with his wife and 2 ½ year old daughter, together at home for the first time ever. My dogs didn’t know I was coming so I knew they could wait a while longer. This young man (part Cherokee and Shawnee himself) had two loved ones waiting for him, two people he shared his soul with, and he needed to move on out the door ahead of me.

The Nashville streets were mostly empty as I headed south out of town. A quick stop at Starbuck’s for a “large coffee” (I can’t get myself to say “vente” or “grande” there, I’m not quite that precious yet) and two cinnamon doughnuts for the drive. I could drive the way home with my eyes closed, I have done it so much over the past 36 years. But my eyes were wide open that morning. To see the frost on the early morning fields, the horses waking up by nuzzling each other’s backs, the cows resting near their sleeping calves, the fall crop that had just been with us for a short time. A few deer grazing on the edges of fields, a few farmers up and on the way to their barns, a few wispy clouds
catching the sun’s rays, a few formerly fast miles that dawdled that morning. I stopped in Leiper’s Fork for two sausage and biscuits, and made a short side trip to Sherlene’s to pick up my chainsaw and other garden tools. That detour got me to take the even more back roads to home – Pinewood to Shoals Branch to Bootlegger’s Lane to Tom Rail to Beard Road to the old Natchez Trace. To find my way to the back way to the farm, across Sharkey Shouse’s hayfields that now are mine (at least for a while longer), off the ridge and into the hollow.

Home at last, home at last, great God(dess) almighty, I was home at last.

If you know my pick-um-up truck, you know everything about it is distinctive. Including its mufflerless growl and rattle. So my dogs were to me before I made the last turn in to the house. Grinning, dancing, running back and forth in front of the truck, finally moving to the side to allow me to move a little faster to my stop in front of the house. As soon as I opened the door, Annie and Duke – all 200 pounds of them – were in my lap, licking my face, pushing their heads under my hands, knocking each other (and me) senseless with their greetings. Bless her heart, Annie was shedding tears, or maybe her eyes were
just runny that morning. I know I was close to tears myself, though protecting my teeth from their hard-headed kisses kept me distracted enough not to be lost in the pleasure of their much-missed company. We stayed there for several minutes, me allowing them to have their way with me, making no effort to move, just saying all the sweet nothings that came to mind in the presence of my two unconditional friends, my furry family.

But there was much to do. And I was there to do it. So I finally pushed my way out from between the two of them, walked slowly over the north-facing deck and unlocked the kitchen door. The familiar coolness of the house surrounded me as I entered. It was as I had left it, and then again it was not. Since the water in the house is not working (probably some broken pipes somewhere), there were dishes in the sink that I had left after my last meal there (last Christmas). There were books on the kitchen counter that I had also brought home 11 months ago. But there were also several big bags of dog food that my good neighbors had brought to the house, the neighbors who have come to the house at least once a week for the past year+, keeping the dogs fed and at home. Something old, something new.

As with most cool late fall mornings in my home, the first order of business was to start a fire in the wood stove. My neighbor’s daughter Cheryl had a porch-ful of dried oak and hickory, gathered there during the short time when she actually stayed at the farm. But before starting the fire, I checked on the condition of the wood stove. Good thing I did, because below the metal cover was a very large mouse nest, built with insulation and wood chips. Had I started the fire without looking, the house would have smelled like wood smoke and mouse pee for my entire visit. Nothing living in the nest, so after I
removed it, I got the fire started, an empty dog food bag covered with twigs, small broken branches and the cured wood from the porch. Within minutes, the stove room began to warm and, with it, slowly, the rest of the house.

I got the food out of the car and into the refrigerator, still running because Cheryl has continued to pay the electric bill, even though she seldom visits the house except to feed Annie and Duke. Then it was upstairs to put the clean sheets and pillowcases on the bed, to re-cover it with the deep blue bedspread and two of Miz Kelly’s hand-stitched quilts, the Dresden Plate and the Sunshine and Shade. Boy, had I looked forward to a long nap in my own bed. And now it was ready for me. But then again, so was the rest of the farm.

After the house fire was lit, there were two more fires to build. I gathered some more cured wood and headed for my sauna, to get the fire going there hours before I planned to sweat. That way, the walls, benches and floor would all radiate heat, as well as the bedroom stove that was the firebox there. No mouse nests here, just the sound of flying squirrels scurrying behind the sauna walls, being rudely awakened by me for the first time in almost a year. The same family of squirrels had made their home in those walls for years, and hearing them made me feel at home, again. I got the sauna stove up to a dull roar and, for the next several hours, stoked that fire to keep it red-hot and ready for me, whenever I slowed down enough to climb in.

The last fire was a small bonfire, built between the sauna and the house. This fire was an indulgence, because the day was warming up and there was no need. But there was something comforting about building that fire also, for its reminders of the days and (mainly) nights when I had sat by similar bonfires in that spot, alone or with loved ones, friends and family, quiet in my own thoughts or filled with braggadocio, laughter and longing. Besides, that fire would have a good purpose today. The black walnut trees around the house had shed their annual crop of lower branches, littering the yard and making it hard to walk around. If I were living at the farm, those branches would be used, a few at a time, each morning to start my house fires. But now they were not needed, because that fire was built and would have to last until Christmas. So my little bonfire became the destination for those branches, broken across my knee or bent until breaking on the ground. A place to clean up the yard, a start to that process which would not, could not, begin in earnest for a number of months yet.

All of this motion was buffeted by soft emotion, by my smiling at being here, by my having things to do, for my place, in my place. It was still early, and there were still at least two things I wanted to get done today. The first was cutting the lawn grass, to make the ground around the house look lived-in. That was a tall order, literally and figuratively. The grass had only been cut one or two times since my departure, so it was THICK and TALL. But my lawnmower was there and my neighbor had brought fresh gasoline at my request. So with a few pulls, the silence was broken by the little (lawnmower) engine that could, slowly, ever so slowly, carve a spot in my baleable front yard.

My house is built near a creek, all of whose waters flow from springs on my farm. So despite the highness of the grass, it didn’t take long to clean up the yard, stopping every so often to add more black walnut branches to the fire. So, warmed to the task, I took on that section of lawn that borders my garden, cutting the grass in one direction only, pushing and then pulling the lawnmower back over the same strips of ground, so that the cut grass could all be blown toward the garden, where it built up as a nice mulch around the edge of my closest raised beds. The garden itself was a mass of weeds, clogged with vines of morning glory and honeysuckle. But as I mowed the grass, I could see the many colorful gourds that had volunteered in the garden, laying on the ground or hanging, weed-like, on my many trellises. So as I finished one chore, another presented itself.

But first, a short break. I had worked steadily for more than an hour, had shed first my sweater and then my long-sleeved shirt. And I was thirsty. Though the electricity was on, somewhere my house water pipes had broken and there was no water in the house. But not to worry. I grabbed a quart mason jar and walked down to the creek and alongside it, balancing on the loose stones and the rock shelf, to my big spring. A spring so big and faithful that it was marked on the first known map of my county, as a place for Natchez Trace travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries to get good water. Now it was mine and the water was flowing there for me. I dipped the mason jar in the closed in spot I had built to keep the creek water out of the spring in heavy rains. And drank the cold, tasty water – not one but two quarts of it to fill me up. And took another jarful to the porch, where I sat a while, with Duke crawled up clumsily in my lap, drinking spring water and eating my first container of figs. Enjoying the quiet, the occasional bird calls, and nothing else.

After the break, it was time to get on my knees. I knew that weeding the entire garden would be a many day task, so I picked out two of the raised bed rows, four feet wide and 120 feet long, to get weeded today. The ground was soft and the weeds (at least most of them) yielded easily. The weeding was helped by my decision to plant annual rye grass last fall, before entering the “house”, as a ground cover for the garden. That ryegrass had died and its stalks and blades had made a thin mat of mulch to keep the ground underneath moist and malleable, making the weeds grip the ground gently, allowing them to yield to me without protest. Slowly, on my knees, I worked my way down the row, gathering the gourds as I went and concentrating them in one row to be covered by the weeds I was pulling. Sometime later, maybe at Christmas, I would retrieve those gourds and lay them out in my barn loft to dry, to be protected by the barn snakes against any field mice who might want to bore their own holes in those gourds. To dry there, to lose their yellow, orange and green coloring for mottled shades of brown, to be retrieved later by me, Jonellie and her two sons, to be taken as a gift to her sons’ school to allow all their school-mates to make gourd nests for hummingbirds, chickadees and other small city birds. That would be nice, to take that unexpected bounty from my fallow garden and turn it into a teaching tool and a chance to support what was left of the wild in east
Nashville, to shelter the color and the sweet life of the birds there.

Once or twice, as I weeded, I got up to re-stoked my three fires. The sauna was toasty, and my time in the damp of the garden, on my wet knees, made it all the more inviting. Given how much food I had brought, I knew that I would have to sauna first. So after finishing my two rows, planting them again with ryegrass to start that cycle over again, walking to the barn to retrieve some papers from my former life, sought after by some Navajo friends to help them with yet another project to bring sobriety to their families, it was time to get naked. And to sweat.

Before getting in the sauna, I made a call back to the “house”, one of my several accountability calls made that day to reassure the CMOs that I was indeed where I was supposed to be. Normally, the “house” rules were that inmates had to stay near a phone to be ready to accept a call from the CMOs at any time during the 12 hours. But I had asked Ken and Hazel (the two CMOs on duty that day) if they would mind if I just called them regularly instead, so that I could work on the farm and sweat in the sauna, two places and activities which would make hearing a phone ring impossible. They were both fine with
that, so every 90 minutes during the day, I stopped and called them. “Yes, it’s me. I’m still here. Talk to you again soon.”

With that accountability done, and with the sun creeping slowly over the southern sky, it was indeed time to get naked. And hot.

The sauna must have been about 200 degrees when I crawled up on one of the benches, the one that allowed me to look down the creek toward the spring. I was sweating before I stretched out, on a sheet with a beach towel for a pillow. Lord, the heat and the still faint smell of cedar from the last time I had done a sweat and put cedar chips on the stove to let the experience be a soul as well as body cleansing (before I entered the “house”) wrapped around me. I lay there, not doing much besides settling into the heat, which came at me from all directions. I had to take my glasses off and put them outside, for fear that the plastic frames would soften. But then, it was just get comfortable, breathe deeply and be thankful for being there, at that moment.

It only took about 15 minutes before I was ready for a cold plunge in the creek. I walked the 100 feet to the place where the creek widens at the spring, and taking a galvanized bucket that I leave there, I poured five buckets of cold spring water over my head. It felt cold, of course, but a pleasant cold. The kind of cold that counterbalanced the heat that was soaking into all my muscles, joints, bones, brain. After the fifth bucketful over my head, I walked back to the house, leaving a trail of steam behind me. It was time for some
music.

I grabbed my big yellow workplace ghetto blaster and propped it up n the sink in the anteroom of the sauna. Given how deep my home is in the hollow, I could not pick up much. But I was able to tune in the Nashville public radio station. Instead of music, I was blessed with a recitation by the actor, Charles Laughton, on the meaning of spirituality and its many forms. And the first words I heard were from Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, recited by Laughton in a deep sonorous voice. It had been at least three decades since I had read any Kerouac, but it was easy to remember what an influence that beat poet and writer had had on me and everyone around me in the late 1960s. His celebration
of the simple, of the mist in the High Sierras and the smell of bear’s breath, of the walking meditation that he and Neal Cassidy experienced together climbing Mount Tamalpais before Neal left for a sabbatical at a Buddhist shrine in Japan and Jack went north to work as a fire spotter in the Cascades, to write and to meditate, and to drink too much wine.

Listening to those words, written by a dead man and read by another ghost, was such a gift. To be reminded by what forces of intellect and nature I had come to this hollow, had come in hopes of sharing a similar trail as Jack and Neal, and later to learn that I shared the vision of a peaceful, rural life with Helen and Scott Nearing and the other back-to-the-landers whose writings had confirmed by own dumb luck and bucolic choice, that long-ago trail that brought me here. To my home. For now.

The segment ended on NPR, and I turned the radio off to end the sweat in silence. Something about the piece got me thinking, hard, about the Third Step in 12-STEP, where we “make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of (our Higher Power) as we understood (that Higher Power)” Sitting in this hot sauna, seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling the presence of my Higher Power, Mother Nature (the Great Mystery), I meditated on trust and on the moment.

Two more cycles of sweating and cold-plunging, more time to think about what I have had and still have. It was a peaceful way to spend my last few hours home, before another accountability call and dinner. As I left the sauna for the last time and lingered naked in the creek to cool off, two neighbors drove slowly down the ridge to check on me and the farm. They were bundled in jackets and pullover caps, but as we talked, they shivered in their seats. I asked them why they were so cold and they said, “Seeing you standing in the creek, naked, pouring spring water over your head, anyone would be cold.” Well maybe. Anyone but me.

The sun was beginning to fade, so I quickly cooked my big Thanksgiving (not) dinner and sat on the porch, throwing pieces of the steak to the dogs at my feet. It was oh so filling and the fullness extended from my stomach to my heart. But I knew that my time was running out, too soon. I considered laying down on my freshly made bed, something I had dreamed about for months, but I knew I just couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time to really relax into a nap for fear that I would oversleep.

Rather than feel sad about that, I received a phone call from my family (two brothers, one sister and their offspring), extending some holiday cheer and concern up the Natchez Trace from Columbus, Mississippi, where they were gathered and where I was part of the eighth generation born in the southernmost county of the Appalachian region, as the hills descended into the black prairie that ran all the way to Big Muddy. Once the call was done – the catching up on family news, the jokes, the review of unencumbered plans (my god-daughter, Cactus, talking about taking a semester in college to study in New Zealand. My immediate response, “Fuck yeah!!”, was a little too gangster for the speaker-phone, but my excitement shown through.

The sun set as I hung up the phone. All that was left to do was to make sure that my three fires of thankfulness were on the way to burning themselves out, were safe to leave behind. I took what was left of my unneeded clothes from the truck and threw a few more books and a winter coat in there. Duke tried for the last time to pin me in place with his injured leg and Annie stayed on the porch, looking sad and finally looking away. I pulled away from the house in the pink and orange dusk. At the farm gate, I stopped to lock up behind myself and saw the dogs one last time, staying a respectful distance away on the road, knowing I was gone again. Not knowing when I would be back.

Hours later, standing on the front porch of the “house” watching other residents straggle in from their own short times home, listening to the noises of the city and surrounded by its buzzing neon and fluorescent lights, I spied the sliver moon. Breathed deeply. And gave thanks.

The heat of the sauna lasted all night, in my small bed, in my room full of strangers. Keeping me awake, to think of you.

Until the next time, take care. Give thanks, whenever and wherever you are.

Turn your life over to the care of something that is kind and tender, strong and loving, and bigger than yourself. It is all good.

Postscript: “Get yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars once in a while, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural favors, take flower-arrangement classes and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for krissakes, get a friendly human-being gal who don’t give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb white machinery in the kitchen.” (“Oh”, says Alvah sitting up glad, “And what else?”)

“Think of barn swallows and nighthawks filling the fields….”

Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

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