new blog

www.coffeeblog-thedailybrew.blogspot.com

right now, it's still just copied and pasted posts from this blog but stay tuned for more daily accounts.

living breathing coffee

It blows my mind that I've been so neglecting my sweet, little blog so much but I'm honestly left with no choice in the matter. It's either neglect the blog or ignore some daily essential function... which I'm already having to do. There aren't many left to neglect.

I closed up the shop myself two nights ago and opened today all by my lonesome... which I totally enjoyed. Coming in on a quiet, warm, overcast morning and having the place to myself before the open flag goes out... getting the three brews brewing, putting on some Nina Simone to keep me company, the place has a soft, fresh light to it...

Right now, though, in the bigger scheme of things, this place is a fucking wreck. The owner has totally checked out and I understand where she's coming from. I was the same way at the inn before I left but the yard is overgrown, the stone wall that wraps around the front of the building is thick with weeds, the two plastic tables on the big porch are just permanently filthy from never being wiped down. The other three have been stolen. Inside the shop, there is a thick layer of funk on nearly everything. The toaster oven (which has a bent fork wrapped through where the handle used to be and was purchased at a yard sale for $20) ... it caught on fire this morning and I had to unplug the thing, run it outside and pour water into it. The spray bottles don't spray, the fridge doesn't really close and the faucet is kept from a permanent drip with a Phillips screwdriver.

The landlord (who said, and I quote ~ "that faucet doesn't belong to me") has hired a mowing/landscaping company to come and start taking care of the grounds. Rent has been jacked up $100 a month to cover the cost of that service, as well as her growing property taxes and insurance (and her million dollar divorce). The mowing service came today with chainsaws to cut down some of the leggy trees along the side of the building and I ran out in a panic at one point when he started to buzz through the pretty one right outside my sink window. I insisted he stop till I talk to the landlord (who I still haven't met ~ only talked to on the phone) so he walked next door to one of the other many buildings she owns and brought her back. The tall green tree, which looks so beautiful when it collects rain, is cracking the foundation of the building. I'd have loved to draw up my EarthFirst attitude and insist that the building is just getting in the way of the tree but... I let it go. The tree is gone. And twenty minutes later I was already appreciating just how much light the windows now let in.

I should be sitting down right now and finishing my business plan. I should be plugging in those last numbers, writing up a resume and appendix to attach to the back of it and creating the "executive summary".... a cover letter, of sorts. I should be doing this so I could get the money in my hands to clean this place up, buy some hanging flower pots, new deck furniture, spray bottles.... hire me a plumber.

And I will... but before I go.... wanted to put it out there that soon soon soon I'll be posting an entirely different blog. A coffee blog. I'll keep this one as a journal of sorts and use it for it's own thing but stay tuned. I'll post the link when it's up and running.

More on coffee

My last day at the inn was yesterday. I made my rounds saying goodbye and realized, in doing so, that I might actually be genuinely missed by many of them. Not because I've done anything stellar to the department or because I've gone above and beyond in any way... but probably just because I'm a laid back person and like people. I don't shit talk and I have never fed into the beuracratic bullshit. I drove out of Stowe, my car a sauna in the 90 degree weather, listening to Feist and wondering what life will be like without the small but steady salary I've had for almost three years.
Today, I'm at the coffee shop, dying behind the counter in this heat but starting to understand the ropes here. I'm able to look around and see what needs done and the little systems here are starting to sink in.

I leave tomorrow for a week.... down to Pennsylvania to visit family and friends and when I get back it's nose to the grinding stone. Registering a tax ID number, getting payroll information and insurance policies into place, meeting with all the necessary people to make sure I'm all up to code. I'll have to fix up the half finished kitchen through the month of June, along with the sauna box office space on the second floor so that Ella will have someplace other than the coffee counter to amuse herself.

We've cancelled her childcare situation for the summer and have decided to have her here with me.... which I'll probably regret in a few weeks.... but already she's proving to be quite the little helper. I've showed her where to pour the beans, how to retrieve things from the closet fridge, how to wash the dishes, collect dirty plates and clear tables. She loves wrapping an apron around her waist and looking official. Her karate teachers, two brothers, have a web design office upstairs so they're down here all the time hanging out and drinking milkshakes with her.

I think I'm onto something here. I'm a sweaty mess and covered in grease from the focassia rolls and totally jacked on dark roast but it feels damn good.

even stowe has dirty old men

i was sitting at my friend's little cafe in stowe today, working on the coffee shop stuff. i was in the throws of putting together the "capital investment list" for the business plan. basically i was sitting in the midst of three or four commercial kitchen equipment catalogues and newsflyers, pricing out stuff that i'm going to need.... lists being made. pen in hand. brow furrowed.

the place was crowded with the noon lunch rush and one older gentlemen came over to my table after a while and leaned into it, looking over the catalogues.

"i can't help but notice that you're looking at commercial kitchen equipment. i work up at the mount mansfeild resort and have been in the hospitality and tourism industry for seventeen years."

he asks what my project is and then proceeds to tell me about the high-end catering companies he's run and the Atlanta, Georgia coffee shop chain he had, like, twenty years ago... "organic way before organic was hip..." (organic should not be considered hip. it should be considered an absolute fucking necessity, moron)

so, as he's leaning over the table puffing out his ego and his bad breath is wafting into my darling yogurt parfait, i notice that his gaze keeps moving down my face and into my tank top... like, right into my tank top. up and down. down and up.

so when he asks me if there's anything he could do to help with what i'm doing, why - i ask myself - didn't i say that what he could do to help would be to stop leaning over my workspace and checking out my boobs. they aren't even big boobs. they're tiny, little boobs.

i came so close to saying it... actually opened my mouth and then just shut it.

i'm way too polite for my own good.

Tis the Season

It's officially summer.

I know this not because there are flowers growing up in my flower beds or because we eat most of our meals outside now. Not because the screens are in the windows or Ella's bedtime has been naturally extended an extra hour or two because of the longer days. It has nothing to do with the upcoming Solstice or my suntan. I know this because there are small, dead rodents - or the body parts of small, dead rodents - all around my house.

Yesterday, a sprawled chipmunk was dropped in front of our kitchen door. Today, I found myself bent to ground, squinting, to try to figure out why that raspberry was furry. It wasn't a raspberry. It was the nose end and guts of a small mole. Just the mouth, teeth, whiskers and guts. I can't shake the image.

The barn is full of decomposing critters. The roads are littered with them. It's just a damn good thing they reproduce at the rate they do... otherwise their species would surely be doomed.

composing

seven times over
this unpaved road
remembering
waterfights as the sun went down
the beginning of summer nights
and only three more days of school

sky turned red
air gone just a little cold
barn cats gather like a congregation
at our ankles
wrapping around our feet like summer brambles
spiders start to freckle the barn windows
on bradly road
multiplying in fierce numbers
seven times over

the bush elms start to crack and crumble in this yard
bent spine of her favorite story
chapter by chapter
night by night
by bedside
window open to the night choir
the doorway between spring and summer
coming in to sweep her forehead
like my kiss goodnight

sunday shift

spent another afternoon at the coffee shop.... figuring out how filthy dirty the place is, how many new systems need to be put into place, and exactly how i should assault the paperboy who never delivers the paper on time.

i'm wishing i hadn't already committed to the price i did and i'm realizing it's still a pretty good deal.... considering.

driving home today along the hogback, feet tired but window down and clouds moving in and cooling things off, i started to realize just how suffocated i've felt these (almost) three years that i've been at the inn. kind of like i've been underwater the whole time, my only air coming in through a crazy straw. a clogged up crazy straw. like, wet and moldy clogged up.

there's a handful of great people i'm going to miss seeing.... people who make me laugh pretty regularly, people who have genuinly reached out to me in hard times.... okay, maybe like two people. three tops.

but i won't miss the long drives into stowe, i won't miss the weird little economic bubble that stowe is, i won't miss the feeling that stowe is a club and membership is limited.

i will miss the high end library and amy's cafe and my regular trips to the dump from which i've kept myself and my family well dressed for years now.

i won't miss having a passive aggressive bossie (or a bossie at all), or twice monthly manager roundtable meetings that make me want to kick a hole up through the center of the table just for kicks..... i won't miss tourists with diamond studded manicures and white furry boots that match their white furry muffs and coats.

i will miss chocolate martinis after work at pie casso and having daily access to a health club and sauna. i'll miss doing bodywork.

maybe in three years, or five years, when i've put the shop up for sale and have found my new adventure, published that year's bestseller, i'll be listing all the pros and cons of what i will and won't miss in the heart of johnson..... but for now it's just nice to know that i'm soon to be manning the fort, navigating my own waters, making my own playlists, building a mean foam.

One more thing in the pot.....

The land next door to us that just recently came up for sale. We were offered the first right of refusal. We looked at this land back in 1999, when we first started our land hunt. They weren't ready to sell at the time and we just happened to land this farm lease right next door to it about five years ago...been in contact with the owners next door since about building up the pasture and making arrangements for a hay contract.
This hillside is like a holy place. From the top of it is a fine view of Mount Mansfeild and the Green Mountains. The way the wind blows from the top of it, you'd think She was whispering secrets directly to your heart.
I don't know that we can NOT try to buy this land. I just don't know how to survive the juggle it'll entail. This little strip of river valley where I live has become home and I feel like I'm a part of the cycles here already, the hidden waterfalls in the woods, the geese migrations. I've watched Ella grow up under the canopy of it's hillsides. The farm we lease will likely never come up for sale and in order to stay where we are, this land is possibly the only option and definately the preferred option.
Wish us luck. It might mean diving headfirst into another building project, in which case, I'll need all the support we can get. But if it works out and we end up calling this place home, something will have surely clicked in the universe. Something in the cosmos will have aligned for us.

I just copied and pasted this old post here.

We found out last night that the owners of the land

next door are accepting our offer. One hundred and twenty acres.

We meet with a realtor on Saturday about selling

the land we own up the road.

Deep breath.

A Lune

Kids run loose

in the Tilton yard,

dusty kneed

and candy

faced, round belly fed.

I lose count

in trying

to track their ages.

Family van

full of teen

and toddler, Mama waves

like absent

clock-work to

dust raising pick ups

that drive too

fast comes this spring~

no rivers rush, no

mud clogs up

this Lapland

route we know so well.

But sweet winds

start up on

this hill and sure as

each spring comes

red clusters of

trillium up on

Tilton's hill.

(like a haiku ~ except it's 3*5*3)

Spring 2006

LaoTong

A hybrid of Alice and the serpent,
she came slithering from the limbs of the
Oak tree, book in hand, when I first arrived,
shaded by the thick, early autumn leaves.
Old Victorian fireplace mantles
littered with beheaded roses, dried up
and collecting dust. She's been raised up with
the sixties as her soundtrack and tarot
as her catechism.
"Heathen," the old
church ladies would say before they sent her
away from the basement of the North Main
Slovak church.
"Too many questions, that one."

We spent our earliest years driving the
camels from diner to diner. Caffeine-
our water in the desert, fueled our shared
verse. That dirty valley fueled perspective.

Half her face once hid behind that parted
sheet of brown hair. All these years later she
hides behind a more subtle veil. Somewhere,
though, in the years between then and now, that
shy girl came out and danced with an apple
in her hand. Reaching back to hand me the
fruit, her voice rising above the canvas
and drum,
"Bite down real hard and suck all the
juice out," she'd said, her feet pounding the Earth,
dirt in clouds around her ankles, skin brown
and shining. Eyes closed, I smiled, thinking of
those old ladies and that lost First Holy
Communion. She is her own creation
story, this one.

By then we'd outgrown coffee, she and I,
and by that time, the valley too. Though the
verse and the music and the highway lines
provided ample fuel. Then instead of
hair, she'd hide in bathtubs or in bottles
of brandy, her words slow, spilling out in
sticky sweetness from lavender teeth and
blackberry breath. She would smell of sweat and
summer and song. Her penmanship like egg
whites. The milk of her pointed fingernails like
calligraphy, like the folds of her skirts
falling on hips she hardley knew she had.

We found comfort in lovers and laughter
and as always, we'd disect it all by
fireside or waterside. By bridges
we had yet to walk across.
We live on
opposite sides of the highway lines now,
she and I, and occasionally the
geography of our busy lives finds
us, brushes in hand, painting fresh new lines,
feet in step, hips rocking rhythms now to
lull one or the other's daughter to sleep.
And still she smells of sweat, song and mid-day
sun. The rocks move themselves, still, from beneath
her graceful feet.
I draw what I can from
the easiness of Early, disrupted
by the growing up, by the dissection
of mystery and by bones scattered like
fossils from our digging - bleached and brittle
from time and weathering.
I make my own
mantle now from those old bones and song and sun,
from old bottles of brandy and Oak leaves
and coffee beans. I now make my own slow
geography and in that making I
am sure to always draw my highway lines
back to Her.

Auntie Me

My friend Sarah comes to visit in Vermont once or twice a year. She comes now in June, for the solstice, and we light candles on the pond and drink sangria. We've known eachother since we were fifteen years old. Last year, as her maid of honor, I told the story about the first time I came to pick her up in my car. I pulled up outside her old Victorian house and honked my horn. It was getting on evening and the house was shaded by a huge tree. I'm guessing maple. Maybe oak. I was about to honk one more time when the branches of the tree started to shake just a bit and she came slithering out the tree, book in hand. I knew then that it was love at first sight. A girl after my own heart. And she still is. The love runs deeper than any post can possibly convey.

We endured her years away at college, fixed up an old Volkswagon and set out to explore. We read to one another as we traveled back roads and freeways and even switched up drivers with that van at 65mph. Impressive.

She sat on my lawn two years after that VW summer as I labored inside my Main Street farmhouse with Ella. She sat and cried and rocked back and forth and sent out blessings. I felt them.

I left Vermont at 5pm, seven years later, on April 16th, when she went into labor, drove seven hours to Pennsylvania and labored through the night with her when she had her daughter. Living so far away, especially now that we're both moms, is almost painful. It's been so hard not to see her daughter through all of her firsts, not to be a regular auntie.

When Sarah would come to visit, when Ella was younger, I would occasionally catch her with tears in her eyes. Just watching Ella play and tears brimming her eyelids.

After spending a week now with her daughter, and falling absolutely in love with her, I understand now those tears. I understand how hard it was for her to pack up her car and go. To not be closer, to not be watching her grow.

The solstice is in three weeks. She'll be up here, in the knee high grass and house full of ants and the broken showerhead. But we'll have important business of eskimo and butterfly kisses to attend to. This time, after our week on the ocean, I think she'll remember me.

the ocean.....

...was all that. and then some.

isn't it always? sun, sand, not a cloud in the sky. fish tacos, old familiars, excessive drinking every night. i've been home three and a half days and i'm still exhausted.

we came home on sunday to grass up to our knees, ants in the house, a broken shower head and hungry barn cats. our "man servant" housesitter must have fallen short. we found two condoms in the bathroom. i can only guess.

so i've hit the ground running and have about a thousand and three phone calls to make, a hundred and ten people to meet and not enough hours in the day. i planned on giving my notice at work next week but someone has let the cat out of the bag. words out. and so it looks like i'll give my notice today. maybe friday. i'm not really worrying about it... which is so nice.

my head is still on the third floor deck of the beach house. it's about 6:30pm, the sky is starting to streak with an oncoming sunset, the moon is orange and directly above the horizon. it's full. i'm dancing on that deck with ladies and a toddler, a glass of wine in my hand. there is still sand between my toes and my skin is still hot with the sun. there are a half dozen or more people in the kitchen cooking food. sauces, pastas, salads, more. another half dozen at the table just laughing. all week. just laughing. and music and the sound of waves hitting the earth.

when can i go back for more?

More on Coffee

We agreed on a price and have drawn up an Asset Purchase Agreement. Very exciting! I went in last week and had my first day behind the counter, learning the espresso machines, how to brew, make sandwhiches, serve pastries, etc. It was great. My feet hurt, but it was great. I spent the entire day eyeballing the walls and the trim and the details, considering new paint colors and decorations.... the need to nest stirring inside me. I'll be borrowing extra money from the bank to purchase some new seating, nice paints, a stove, used sink, crepe machines and a toaster. Maybe more stuff... depends on cost and how much money I really want out on loan building interest....eeeeek.


I'll be leaving for vacation tomorrow after work. We pick up our rental van, drive to northern New York to pick up our friend and her daughter and then drive through the night to the eastern shore in Maryland where we'll spend two nights with Bill's family before we head south to the outer banks in North Carolina for a week! Ella is about to explode from excitement. Just playing barbies in the back of the van with her friend Amelia would be enough of a vacation as far as she's concerned. Bill has tried on his rash guard surf shirt and borrowed wet suit about a half dozen times since Friday. He's also been checking the water temperature and condition of surf every day on the surf shop's website. Me.... I just want to lay a blanket on the sand, not caring if it's sun or moon or storm, and just lay there and listen to the ocean drive out the activity in my brain. I'd like a week off from the activity in my brain. I don't want to think about business plans, three year financial flow charts, having to sheetrock the attic office in the space or how in the hell I'm going to handle learning all my inventory and purveyors. A break. The ocean. Then I'll come back and dive back into the java land.

When I get back in June, I'll be putting in a half dozen, maybe more, shifts at the shop... squeezed in on my days off from the inn. In July, while I finish working out the financing, I'll assume the owner's shifts so that she could devote her attention to her new business venture. Hopefully by August we'll close the deal and I'll be the bonafide owner. Still haven't found a new name for the place. It's currently called Groovin Beans and that name has got to go. I've had some great suggestions from friends but I'm still waiting for the heavens to part and the sun to streak down in golden rays when I hear THE NAME but that hasn't happened yet. Considering that it took us twenty days to name our own kid, I'm wondering if I should just get on with it and pick one for the shop. Otherwise, this could go on for years!

I meet tonight with the current owner tonight to go over our revised draft of the Asset Purchase Agreement, work out the details of our roles through the month of July and get the rest of the info I need to complete the financial aspect of the business plan. After this meeting I think I'll be able to wrap my head around the rest of my summer. I may even be able to organize those thoughts. Make a list. Not panic.

And then, maybe, the ocean won't have to work so darn hard to wash away my mind clutter. Maybe I'll be able to offer it up myself and watch it wash out to sea.

rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim rim

S*I*P*K*A

Drumming Words

Amidst the craziness of this coffee deal, getting ready for a week and a half vacation and hopefully purchasing the land next door, I'm taking a six week African dance class. The group that teaches the class is Jeh Kulu Dance Company and they are out of Burlington.

They're from West Africa and the teacher comes with three or four drummers. There are twenty or so women and two men, one of which shakes his bootie like no white man I've seen. The first class was held the night that our friend held the "dry run" for his new restaurant so I drank a half glass or so of wine before showing up for class that night. The second night, I skipped the wine by chance and discovered that the wine is essential. Even if it's three sips!

My good friend grew up with the Beatles and tarot cards. When I was eighteen or nineteen, her mom introduced us to a psychic who was in town for a few weeks. The psychic, upon meeting me briefly, proceeded to draw an elaborate drawing that she then explained. There were all kinds of details and totems and past lives, one of which was as an African woman (banished from the tribe, but that's another post).... I never knew how much weight I put into this encounter but I've always kept the drawing and remembered what she had to say, as did the friend I went with.

After these dance classes, though, graceful as I might otherwise be on my feet, all I can think to myself is that woman must have been wacked!

MORE ON COFFEE

Have I mentioned that I haven't had a cup of coffee since March?

I'm sitting with my friend's laptop, in the cafe she's just purchased (seems to be a trend within our circle right now) and before me are pages and pages of business plan guides, references, profit and loss statements and payroll information.

I just spoke with the current owner, who has been awesomely patient while I get all my ducks in a row, and told her that yes, for sure, I'm buying her stuff. I thought I had made that clear the other day but she said she had to get in touch with the owner of the building who wanted to put the shop in the paper to look for a new owner. So we clarified. I'm taking it on. We get together tomorrow so that I can continue to bombard her with more questions..... licensing, zoning, purveyors, insurance, utilities..... and to let her know my offer on her price.

I have a bad habit of stumbling over my tongue when I talk about money with someone. I have a hard time entering into a conversation about money with confidence and clarity. Maybe it's because I've had such a strange relationship with the stuff. When I turned eighteen, my great aunt decided that she wanted to share her wealth with her family before she was too senile or long gone to experience the satisfaction of seeing us all enjoy it. She married a wealthy man who taught her how to invest her money well. She was widowed at fifty, after which she married her sister's husband's brother (got that?) and the two of them enjoyed a sweet and comfortable life together.

So, at age eighteen I was handed a check for five thousand dollars. My parents, who were in many ways fairly controlling, chose this one time to not impose rules and regs and unsolicited advice. I have no idea why and now, in hindsight, I wish they had. I didn't even know how to balance a checkbook. I withdrew the money in large quantities from the ATM and it was spent on booze and weed and music and pretty little hippie dresses for all my girlfriends. It was gone by the end of the year.... and then, lo and behold, came another installment. Just go ahead and carbon copy that first year. More weed, more booze, more Grateful Dead shows and pretty little dresses. By the third year I "invested" the money in a 1972 VW van and paid my dad's quack mechanic to restore it so that I could get the hell out of dodge and find my place in the world. The fourth installment went toward massage school, fifth installment went toward a deposit on a sweet little cedar rental home shortly after Ella was born and the last installment paid for part of the deposit on our 32 acres of mountain paradise.

I didn't grow up with money. We weren't a wealthy family. I think I've mentioned in prior posts that my folks woke up and banged on the heaters to get em going and to scare the mice away. So being handed such large sums at such a young age with such little guidance really left me with no skills on how to budget. I'm still learning.

The years following such abundance have been sparse. We're a young family, getting going in a place where economic prosperity isn't a norm, and we're part-time farmers to boot. We're still banging on our own metaphorical heaters, I guess you could say.

It's only been in the past two years, maybe three or four, that I've gotten comfortable balancing a checkbook, checking my account online and keeping a general kind of budget when it comes to groceries, insurance, gas, etc.

So, I've gone over the first half of the business plan and now have to type it into some master copy. Next comes the financial peice that Bill helps me with. Bill, who has been on his own, for the most part, and self sufficient since he was fifteen. When we met, 12 years ago, he had an immaculate apartment in Lancaster, Pa, a good paying job and a very organized budget. He is the left side of my brain.

The Pagans are Coming! The Pagans are Coming!

Every year, on the first Sunday after May Day (or Beltane) people come out of the woodwork to gather in the woods behind the state house in Montpelier, Vermont for an event we call All Species Day.

I learned about it three years ago and it happened that my birthday, May 1rst, was on that first Sunday, so I got to celebrate it in this old traditional way. It was like a coming home. A hundred or so people of all ages gather in a circle in a feild around noon and witness or join in in a ritual to honor all the directions and their elements.

All the winged creatures of the East dance around in a procession within the circle.... little kids with paper mache beaks, old men on stilts with raven's wings. Then the summer creatures of the south, the lions, the goats (there was an actual goat on a leash this year!) took their turn within the circle singing their song to the south. Next came the pretty blues of the western waters... dolphins, little girls in their mermaid playclothes, a beautiful woman adorned in long blue dresses and silks and bells. And lastly, the earth creatures of the north... the elk, the deer, the bear. Old Abenaki women in leather mocassins and a man with the skin of a coyote draped across his shoulder.

After all the directions are honored, a bent old crone comes creeping into the circle, staff in hand. She crawls into a ring of haybales and disappears under her dark cloak. The familiar troop of dancers that organize this event every year start shaking their hips in their long white skirts and enter the circle in teasing waves, moving closer and closer to the center of the circle, to the heap of old crone and hay bales. They throw their petals onto the crones cloak, the dormant earth, convincing spring to come and then they sway back and forth, into and out of eachother and to and from the center.... like waves. Like sex. And only when the drums could beat no faster slender white fingers start to ripple from that heap of hay and then elbows and shoulders and long locks of dark brown hair and the shimmering green robes of the spring maiden. She's enticed, like Persephone, to come up from the underworld and bring with her the warmth and growth and rebirth that comes after every long winter. And meanwhile, the stag in his huge masked head and stilts, waits in the woods to guide us all in a drumming parade down the hill, across the street, around the roundabout and down Main Street and State Street in a long, colorful medley to the state house lawn. The dancers, still swaying their long white skirts, lead the parade and there are little kids dressed as rabbits, fairies, turtles, etc. all following parents dressed as older rabbits, fairies, turtles, etc. all walking slow in the procession. One of my friend's daughters trailed along a white paper mache crayfish, about two feet long and all trimmed appropriately in shades of pink, fastened to a little plastic rollerskate.

Once at the state house everyone spreads out their blankets on the big lawn and feeds their (by now) whinying, hungry children. People kick back to watch the spring maiden and paper mache stag do their hand fasting and copulation dance on the steps of the capital. The kids come back to life and jump off the canons, play chase, freak out and do their thing. Some more drumming, some more African dancing, a may pole dance led by fiddle and guitar and then everyone slowly trickles home to wait for next year.

I think sometimes about the people of my hometown, that old coal mining town where the politicians are all crooks and the general population is just generally disgruntled. Where it seems the atmosphere and enthusiasm are still coughing up old coal dust.... and I wonder what they would do if this scene came strolling into town, drums beating and plopped themselves down in front of the courthouse.....if a spring maiden and a handsome, bearded stag simulated good lovins right there with cars driving by and life going on. I look up at Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, all gold and overlooking atop the capital building and I thank something or someone somewhere that I landed here, of all places.

The whole thing might be a little more foof than I prefer but I love it all the same and am so grateful that my daughter looks forward to it every year.

Oh, and if anyone knows how to spell paper mache, let me know.

coffee coffee buzz buzz buzz

So I'm all the more wiser now that I met with my small business advisor.... who happened to retire from that post about two hours after our meeting on Thursday afternoon. But the nice fellow that he is gave me his business card and his home telephone number and personal email so that I could contact him with whatever questions I have and deliver to him my business plan and Monthly Flow Chart upon completion so that he could then make up a Three Year Projection Sheet for me to present to the bank upon requesting my business loan.

Breath.

I just sat at my kitchen table for two hours.... the first time I've had since Thursday to sit with all this information.... and I read through all of the paperwork about writing my business plan. To use a metaphor here.... this feels like a starfish trying to navigate it's way through a deciduous forest.... alien territory. I spent the first quarter of that time just sitting there with my head buzzing and eyes crossing, remembering that panic of sitting at my kitchen table trying to cram a semester's worth of neglected World History into my brain for tomorrow's final. The heat rushing into my face, that 'i'm so totally fucked' feeling creeping into my nervous system. It was like a disease that lasted from fourth grade until I stopped giving a shit halfway through my senior year of high school.

Anyway. I had to get past the daunting entirety of this project and began by simply reading through each section of what a business plan required. I had two outlines/workbooks to look at and compare and just took my time with it, like I was learning a foreign language. Which I am. This is. Bill suggested I write an outline, which is how he seems to function by simple nature, and I rolled my eyes like the adolescent I was reverting to and then, also like the adolescent, proceeded to do exactly as he suggested only after he was out of my way and in bed.

Business description, marketing, competition, operation, location, financials...... my head hurts.

But about three quarters of the way into this it dawned on me that I was starting to make sense of all of it and it also occurred to me that there have been plently of other ventures in my life that I've taken on without having had any prior experience. Motherhood, for one.

But when I started working at a group home for teenage boys in state's custody in 2001, I started there totally wet behind the ears. I had no degree in pyschology. I went at it with my heart. I read through case files, learned the lingo, toughened up, and loved them in a very quiet way. I became manager of that group home within six months and learned how to write reports, keep medical records, document case incidents, yadda yadda yadda. I learned how to hire employees, fire the ones that sucked and take care of the paperwork involved.

When the group home closed I stayed with the organization until all "my boys" graduated from the program and went on to stumble through their lives like we all do. I gardened until I knew what would come next. I had never gardened before. It was in that quiet, mindful environment, my hands in the earth, that I decided to get back into bodywork. I hadn't practiced in years but peiced together a worthwhile resume. From there I stumbled into my next job at the inn.... having applied for a job as massage therapist and gotten offered the job of massage supervisor. Here I learned marketing and promotion, budgeting, inventory, and how to dodge beauracracy and loads of bullshit.

And now coffee.
But first, a business plan.
And before that, sleep.

Ruminating Fears

I'm meeting with a small business advisor this afternoon to look over the Profit and Loss statements from the previous two owners of the coffee shop. I'm basically looking for someone who knows numbers to look at me in all honesty and either tell me to run screaming in the other direction or to go for it.

I tend to romanticize things and so I'm trying, hard as I can, to be realistic about the degree of work that'll be involved in this. The thing that scares me the most is dealing with the business end of things.... balancing the books, learning QuickBooks, payroll, inventory. A friend of mine just recently purchased a sweet little health food type cafe in Stowe and I accompanied her on her jaunt to Costco last week. I know she has to make a certain amount each day to just break even and that most days, being in the early stages still, that doesn't happen. So halfway through our shopping trip it dawned on me.....how is she paying for all this food? Just simple concepts like that trip me up. How do I pay for the food? What bundle of cash do I pay my employees with? It's not like I'll be going into this with any real capital and isn't having some initial capital the saving grace of most small business entepreneurs?

Granted, I'm not totally satisfied with my current job. I'm understimulated, under-appreciated, and completely fed up with a beauracratic environment. The bossies want me there a specific number of hours each week and for two and a half years I've been telling them that my position really doesn't require that many hours (in the off season, especially). In an effort to save my time and their money, I've tried proposing different situations but have been told, in response, that they don't care if I come in to count paperclips..... they want me there. So I go. But as a result, I have a lot of down time. I've been fairly spoiled. Leaving the cush-ness of this position, a guaranteed salary income, two weeks vacation pay, sick days, no financial risk..... all for a behind the counter, on my feet, greeting people all day, drone of the steaming whistle, good conversation, constant stimulation, casual environment and absolute and total financial risk. Hmmmm..... It's a tough toss of the coin.

Will I be able to come home from work and leave work behind? Will I be spreading myself way too thin? Will I absolutely love the transition? Will I drink too much coffee and drain my adrenals and put myself back on track with past health issues? Can I stand that temptation? I haven't had a cup of coffee in about a month.... a HUGE undertaking for my addictive personality.

So, here goes.
The owner needs/wants an answer by the end of this week. Pressure is on.

Sunday's Child ~ Full of Grace

I called my Nan this morning, first thing, mostly because I knew she'd be awake. I caught her on the john and in her birthday suit, which for some reason she felt comfortable enough divulging that information to me. I don't know. At 87, who gives a shit, I guess.

Before she wished me a happy birthday she told me all about this four thousand dollar check she received and that if she takes it to her bank she'll somehow get an additional forty thousand dollars from some Chris Roberts at the Golden Globe Awards. Old people can be so naive. It scares me. Scares our whole family.

She asked how old I was and told me that when she was my age she was finished having her three kids and her mother that year had helped her sew mother/daughter dresses for Easter. Something about the french stitches being all backwards itchy and some such detail I can't recall. She also told me that she was born on a Sunday morning at 7a.m. and that the church bells from the Polish church on Willow Street in Swoyersville were chiming. She told me that each of her children were born on Sundays and in the mornings as well and so was my Pop.

We spent about ten minutes on the phone, which is a fairly long conversation with my Nan, as she spends most days getting her hair done and playing poker. She wished me a happy birthday and when we hung up all I could think was, ' Is she still naked?'.

Birthday

I smelled fresh cut grass for the first time this afternoon.

I planned on spending the entirety of my birthday in the woods today but I woke to grey skies and cold temperatures so I took myself shopping instead. Went a little apeshit at the consignment store. I treated myself to some takeout sushi afterward and as I drove home balancing the soy sauce and raw fish with the steering wheel, the sun came pouring out and the clouds tarried along in another direction.

So I came home to a beautiful day and a beautiful birthday cake.... double layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and a fig and raisen goop between the layers. My chef friend, Jeff, gave me new windsheild wipers and a bulb for my left headlight. Bill and Ella got me fuzzy clogs and a beautiful embroidered April Cornell shirt. I guess there is something else in the mail but that'll be a while yet. I love presents.

I made myself some chai and pulled on my mudboots and a sweater to hit the woods before the school bus dropped Ella off. On the walk, I discovered this season's first spider webs, trout lilies, skunk cabbages, and leeks. I walked the land next door, the land I pray will be ours sometime soon. I found the far border, marked by a long stone wall and followed it till it trailed off. I then traversed the land until I hit the other stone wall and followed that until I reached the mountain stream. I followed the mountain stream to a point that was familiar and then walked further back until I came to "my waterfall".... a place I discovered three years ago when I took myself into the woods for centering and stumbled upon that waterfall like a small child in it's own universe. I also spied a mama moose with her baby that day.

From here, the sunny window and tall work desk, I'll go to my new African dance class and shake my bootie to West African drumming by actual West Africans! Vermont is so unbelievably white.... and so when I come across someone with some actual color in their skin I just want to hug them and buy them a cup of coffee. It makes me miss my hometown. It's one of the few things that make me miss my hometown. That and Middle Eastern cooking. And perogies.

And then it's dinner and vino at our friend's opening night at his new cafe. I couldn't ask for a better birthday!

Let me boast......

I came home yesterday from a hard morning's work at the horse barn.... let me just say here that I've been supervising a massage department at a very professional historic inn for two and a half years and have yet to get a raise. Yesterday was my third or fourth shift at the horse farm and she's upped my pay by a buck. What's wrong with this situation?

But.... I came home bone tired to discover my kitchen full of good smells. For dinner last night we enjoyed a carrot ginger soup, stuffed mushrooms, roasted beets and fresh spinach tossed with warm spaghetti squash, fresh mozzarella, dried cranberries, walnuts and dressed in a lemon and olive oil and sea salt drizzle.

I stepped up to bat and made us popovers for dessert, filled with strawberries and drizzled with chocolate. What happened to my cleanse?

Chef Update

Once a year or so, on our farm, a bull lands himself in the freezer. We usually raise a pig or two, as well, although this year I want no part in that god awful mess. They bust out of their pens, dig up our neighbors perrineal beds, and smell like death.

But we have an upright freezer in our mudroom loaded to the gills with beef and pork (and blackberries, currants, cherries, and plums). Our visiting chef friend is, for the most part, a vegetarian chef but he's getting ready to head to Alaska before he heads back down to "the ice". In Alaska, he'll have to prepare meals for carnivores and so he's been dipping into our freezer to gain some practice.

Yesterday he pulled out the top shelf filet, basically filet mignon, and tonight he's making beef stroganoff with mushrooms. I can't get home quickly enough.

Land Update

We went to the bank and it was kind of a trainwreck.

We currently own thirty two acres just north of the farm we lease and it was there that we built the house a few years back. We rent the house to a few college kids who seem to take good care of it. I'm pretty sure they sit around, smoke weed and play video games. It's better than keg parties. We were hoping that the equity we have in that property would make for some borrowing power to purchase the hill next to us. We didn't want to put our land and rental house on the market until we knew, for sure, that this land next door to us could be ours. It just feels really smart to have a chunk of real estate to fall back on......
But it turns out that it won't go as smoothly as we'd hoped.

It entirely goes against Bill's nature for him to sit still for any serious length of time, so having him in bed with the flu for four whole days was like having an alien shacking up in my bedroom. And since he couldn't do anything productive with his hands, he put his head to work. In between feverish ramblings he came up with the idea that we would tell the owners that we wanted it, offer to pay the full appraised value and let them get back to us. If/When (when, when, when!) they agree to that, we would then ask if we could put down a "good faith deposit" right now and pay them the full price in the fall. Should they agree, we would put the 32 acres and beautiful house on the market right away and pray pray pray that it sells quickly.

That's all we've got.

The owner, a very sweet lady from New York City, called us this week to see where we were with it all. Bill gave her the low down and she told us that her brother was flying into the country (from god knows where) and her husband was returning to the city (from god knows where) this weekend and they would be discussing it.
We're expecting to hear back sometime next week.

And my birthday is Tuesday. I've been asking the universe for some pretty heady presents, I know. A coffee shop and one hundred and seventeen acres of pristine land. I remember the first year I moved to Vermont. I was grateful for a thunderstorm on my birthday. My demands are growing, I guess.

Cup a Joe Update

I'm still in the throws of figuring out if I'm going to buy that coffee shop. It's a sweet little space and I'd love to be working only ten minutes from home, in a place where Ella can hang out on a couch with her Connect Four or walk down to the bookstore or over to the park or the library. Everything about it feels right. The current owner would like an answer by the end of next week.

So far I've attended a workshop on Starting Your Own Small Business, which was a kind of pre-requisite for meeting with a small business advisor. I'm meeting with him this upcoming Thursday to go over the Profit and Loss Statements of the current and previous owners and basically get some honest advice from him about whether or not this an absurd idea.

The coffee shop is located in an old yellow and turquoise Victorian building with a wide wrap around porch right in the center of Main Street in Johnson, Vermont. Johnson is home to a state college, an artist residency studio, and a ton of really good people. The shop includes the entire downstairs....the counter and coffee room, a little room with a few tables and two computers, and a large, bay window room with a non-working fireplace and beautiful, colorful, lush furniture. Upstairs there is a psycho-therapist, massage therapist and web design business run by friends of mine. The owner of the building, from what I'm told, is "a bad to the bone bitch" who does nothing for the building. The upside of her slum-lord approach is that one rarely has to deal with her. So I know, going into it, that that is one strike against what I'm doing. Whatever repairs the building needs, whether electric or structural, are my responsibility. And the upside to that is that Bill does carpentry for a living and has a great head for electric stuff, from his days as a sound man.

The big room was once home to the local health food store but they purchased their own building across the street and now operate out of that. The rent for just that room is almost $600 and while it's an awesome space for customers to hang out in, it's often sparsely populated and a huge expense. So I'm trying to figure out how to make that room make money or find someone who wants to run a little business out of it. Any ideas?

I've noticed, too, that since I've had this in the mix, I've been a total slack ass at work. I've taken sick days, come in late, left early and have already "checked out" mentally. So, cross your fingers. I've never worked anywhere longer than 3 years. I've been here two and a half years. The clock is ticking.

Sweat Lodge

I spent this past Sunday in the woods, beside a wide mountain stream and endless evergreens, preparing for, participating in and then breaking down a traditional Native American sweatlodge.

With that last Noreaster dumping another foot of snow in Vermont and then melting within a week's time, spring came so suddenly I hardly noticed it happening. But walking the long ridge of a trail into the woods toward the lodge, my boots crunching on old, cracking leaves and brand new shoots of grass, I was reminded of a memory from many years ago.

There's a place in Dushore, Pennsylvania called the Haystacks. It's a part of the Appalachian trail where the boulders in the water are so large that at night, under a moonlit sky, they look like bales of hay.... the tall round kind you see mid-summer after the second cut of summer grass. There are little round caverns in those rocks under the water that are carved by thousands of years of current and you can swim into them and look out at the sun's rays streaking down into the river. The fish come and swim around your toes and nibble on your skin. The ferns are long and ancient. It's a holy kind of place.

To get to the campsites down by the water, you have to walk nearly two miles on a dug up old railroad bed through the woods. Walking that trail a long time ago in early spring with a good friend, lover at the time, I remember thinking and saying that "this is the way the world smells". Remove the emmissions of deisel, population and plain old crap that lingers around us in the atmosphere and we're left with the smell of those composting leaves and thawing earth. The smell of bark and pine needles being warmed again by the sun. The smell of water running and the sweetness of the dirt it permeates at it's banks. The smell of animals coming out of hibernation.

The lodge was led by a shaman who came down from Canada with a firekeeper. Louise, the shaman, led us through each stage of the lodge, physically, emotionally and spiritually, while the firekeeper was resonsible for heating and delivering the stones. We each came with two pouches of tobacco, one of which was given to the firekeeper and one which was given to the shaman. When someone within was struggling and needed support, the shaman, Louise, would call out to the firekeeper, in French.... "TABAC!"..... and he would sprinkle some onto the fire, onto the stones, which were called Grandmothers.

The frame for the lodge was built when we arrived but it was our responsibilty, the eight women I was sharing this with, to line the floor of the inner circle with hemlock and cedar, to dig the pit in which the rocks would be placed and to create, with the dug up earth, a mound shaped like a turtle that would face the water and the heating rocks. We then laid blankets, tarps and skins on top of the lodge, leaving a doorway facing East through which to enter and exit, always in the same direction.

This was my first time participating in a sweat lodge. I had no idea what to expect. Before we started I kept sneaking off to pee behind an uprooted tree, afraid that my bladder would interupt the experience. Little did I know that whatever fluid my body contained would come pouring through my skin. My bladder would be left wondering what the hell happened!

The ritual is performed in four parts, one for each direction. After the first round we filed out of the lodge to breathe cooler air, splash off in the stream and just be. I took my breath by the bank of the stream where I watched the water roll over the rocks, the light collecting in it's folds and I knew that once I re-entered that lodge, things would change. And they did.

After the second round, we crawled, practically on all fours, needing a hand out of the lodge. In the lodge, between drooling and sweating and generally existing as t.v. fuzz for the better part of an hour, I hardly knew who I was... which, in light of how heavy life can be sometimes, was surprisingly refreshing. I cried, I shook, I felt at times like a wet dishcloth. I tapped into things long forgotten, soaked up the scent of resins and sage and cedar igniting in little bursts of red, dancing light off of the rocks. I rode the crescendo of Louise's singing over landscapes that came into full view for being in such a confined space. The lodge did indeed become a womb and the heat and the steam and the pulse became the very heartbeat of the experience. Louise was our trustworthy umbilical cord, rooting us to the Earth and to our hearts and to our flight.

Between the third and fourth rounds we remained inside the lodge, with the wool blanket door flapped open. Most of us, at this point, were lying on our backs, knees in the air, skirts falling around our hips, soaking wet, wondering how we could possibly stand one more round. But we did... and with grace. That last round, surprisingly, was the easiest. I don't know if it was because I had already come so far or because I knew it was drawing to a close. At this point, my liver was cramping and my body still shaking but I was able to draw my body closer to the rocks, instead of wanting to shimmy away from their heat. I was finally able to perceive them as guardians, as grandmothers, and to understand that all of these epiphanies, all of this shedding of old skin and old perception was a direct result of the rocks' hard work. Like any dirty job, whether it's hanging sheetrock or conquering our worst monsters, it's only when we move closer into it, put ourselves into the task, press our noses right up to those ruby red stones, that we start to see the results of our labour.

There was an old, toothless Abanaki man there named Burton Spotted Eagle and he joined us in the lodge with the firekeeper after the sweat was over and led a pipe ceremony. It was quiet, reverant work as we filed out and started unrobing the lodge and dismantling it, scattering the small saplings through the woods. Two fly fisherman arrived downstream and their casual voices carried loudly on the water. They weren't there for long. I'm sure our meditative scene tucked into the spring woods might have scared them away.... what with about a dozen soaking wet people working silently around a fire with elk and deer skins piled high by the waterside. Not something you stumble across every day in the Vermont woods.

What I came away with from that day will be in my heart forever. There are little pockets of it I've recalled in the days since and I have a feeling that they'll continue to resurface as time progresses.... in perfect timing....like little offerings.

The Thinking Blog Award.......

Thinking Blogger Award

I've been awarded the thinking blogger award by SelfTaughtArtist. Thank you! It's nice to know that someone enjoys reading me!

In turn, I need to pass the baton to five other bloggers that I enjoy reading. Shouldn't be too hard. Make sure to check out the instructions on the bottom of the post to see what comes next.

Misplaced in the Midwest ~ I understand this is not your first thinking blogger award this week. Take a bow! I have to say that it's been amazing reading about the huge change you're about to embark on. Your writings about the coffee shop buddies takes me right back to my hometown roots. I plug in every day to see what new gemsword entrees your plating up.

Self Taught Artist ~ Yes. I'm giving it right back. You introduced me to blogs and you keep me on my toes about keeping the posts coming and you make me feel wonderful about writing. AND you give me an insight into what the life of an artist entails. Something I'd never have considered, considering that bird and dog drawing thing...........(see your comments page re: art trauma at a very young age!)

Penelope Twist ~ I only wish I could have been so in touch and so eloquent when I was a teenager. I can't say enough about what a gift you have with words. Keep the words flowing and your heart open...........

BoobsInjuriesandDr.Pepper ~ Well, for thinking, yes, but mostly just for making me laugh with each new post.

Sharala ~You are definately the most dedicated blogger I've come across. Since I've been tuning in, I've enjoyed your photography more and more. I've enjoyed seeing the world, especially the world of Chicago, through your lens.

Congratulations, you won a Thinking Blog Award. Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. The participation rules are simple:1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. 2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme. 3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

I have a secret..........

The bug is traveling through my house like a freight train. If I go according to the timing of it hitting Bill and then hitting Ella, by all rights I should be strapped across the tracks tomorrow, around mid-morning, with a raging headache, body aches, possible barfing and high fevers.

Ella came home early from school on Wednesday with all of the above. When I came home from work later in the day, she was nested in our big bed with the tv and dvd player in the corner, a buffet of cough syrups, tinctures, kid's Motrin and Vitamin Waters on the bedside stand.... and dad, cuddled beside her, just barely having gotten his strength back from his bout with the bug.

While I would never wish ill upon my child, I secretly enjoy when she's bedridden with the bug. Not only because it slows her down and quiets the volume level in the house, but because in that quiet there is a nurturing and stillness that rarely happens otherwise. Ella isn't the kind of kid to sit on the couch and read a book. She's not the kind of kid to come randomly and curl herself into your lap. She's far too active, far too physical and busy for that kind of immobility. She climbs trees, swings from grapevines, climbs the haybales in the barn, builds forts in every corner of the house with every blanket we own, and is just generally, as I've called her before here on this blog, our jungle house pygmy.

When Bill gets sick, I tend to his needs, make him soup, draw his bath, make him toast and I'm kind. But I don't crawl into bed with him. I sleep in another room and refuse kisses and cuddles. I'll run my fingers through his hair when his head hurts but then I immediately wash them when I'm done.

With Ella it's different. We lay on that big bed for long periods of time just staring into eachother's eyes because, for her, there's really nothing else to do. She coughs in my face and I burrow my nose into her sweaty fevered hair. I savor it.

I don't necessarily enjoy catching her puke in the palms of my hands at three oclock in the morning, or changing the sheets because the puke just dripped through my fingers anyway.... I could pass on that end of it. And it is always so painful to not be able to take away their aches and pains but there's something magical in keeping her comfortable, to spraying the room with peppermint and eucalyptus to freshen it up, to keeping a cold compress on her fevered forehead. I remember when she was much smaller, her remedy to any ailment was a cold washcloth. If I stubbed my toe, turned my ankle or suffered heartache....all of it could be remedied with a cold washcloth. She'll be ten this summer and sometimes I pine for that simplicity. It will never be that easy again.

Yesterday the temperatures almost reached seventy and we opened the windows beside the bed and listened to all of the new birds who have arrived on the farm. We noticed the first purple bunch of tiny crocuses and I went outside with the clippers and cut some for her bedside table while she watched longingly from the screened window. Mid-day, when the fever was low and her energy level relatively good, she sat at that window and sang her little heart out.

Today we made it outside, gathered branches that had broken with winter storms, mended one of the fences that the cows kept breaking through and played connect four in the sunshine. We walked back to her "secret garden" and hung out by the stream and laid on our backs with the sun in our faces. Woody, our Border Collie and Trixie, the best kittie in the entire universe, accompanied us on our travels like mascots. She was moving slow and pacing herself, eating light and staying low-key.

Tomorrow she'll rise with a vengence, like Hades when he comes to claim Persephone in autumn. She'll rise with pounding feet, operatic singing and maniacal laughter. I know it. But hopefully, if the freight train flu comes to claim me, hopefully hopefully, she'll comfort me with a cold washcloth. Just this one last time maybe.

Spring Slush

My head cold morphed into Bill's flu. I seem to have escaped the vicious throws, barely dodging a more serious spat with the funk, but Bill has been in bed for twenty fours now rotating between sweaty fever and teeth chattering body chills. There's no school today due to the hurricane force winds out there so Ella is home playing nursemaid to her dad in between her movies and dress up play while I work. She's all full of empathy and pity and sympathetic eyebrows. Me..... I'm trying to do the same. I'm trying to be a good little caretaker, cold washclothes at the ready and drawing a bath with Epsom salts..... but it's only because, in the event that I follow in his footsteps later this week, I'd like to have the same doting attention. Really, though, I secretly think he's a big baby. He usually is when he gets sick.
But this morning I woke up at six a.m. to do chores and it was wicked outside. Winds, slush and freezing rain. All the cows were curled up like puppies, cozy in eachother's warmth. I shoveled out the mounds of shit and realized we were short on hay so I found myself driving to the Farm and Garden before seven am for three bales, coming back and feeding out several more flakes to all of them and then finally kicking off my shitty boots in the mudroom at eight oclock.
We're right at that time of year when the firewood and the haybales are either gone or almost gone. Most parts of the country are enjoying spring bulbs and new grasses, blossoms and birdsong. But here we are in the midst of one more fucking noreaster and with two logs left to burn. Here's to hoping that by Friday the sun will be out and the temps will be in the high fifties and all the creeks will be swollen to their banks with melted snow. Here's to hoping I don't get the flu, too.

oh my golly day

My head is full of head cold and my back is aching from yesterday's deep tissue massage. I'm on a mission to restore my body to health. It's a slow, slow mission. I'm also in the midst of a spring cleanse, which basically means I'm cleaning out random body parts by various techniques I won't divulge just now. But the past week or so it's been no meat, no wheat, no dairy. I did cheat today with pita chips in my soup.

Why the dollar signs?

We went to see our "bank lady" today and I just had to include all the affore mentioned body stuff to drive home how very hard it is to wrap my head around numbers when my body is in a clouded state of detox and ache. I lost most of my comprehension for math in the fourth grade when we got into long division and it's been all downhill since then, really, which is why I'm so manic right now about Ella understanding and memorizing her multiplication facts.

We went to see our bank lady about the land next door that has come up for sale. We wanted to sit with her and our bank file and figure out if it's going to be at all possible for us to buy this land..... without having to sell the property we own, anyway. Our goal would be to purchase this land, sell off the road frontage peice, put that money toward building our own place and then selling the property we own right now and lay all we get from that down on the new mortgage.... which would almost, if not totally, pay it off. Sounds dreamy.

But the numbers aren't all there. Not yet anyway.

On top of that, our local coffee shop, the heart of our little village town, has just been offered to me for a really reasonable rate. I considered purchasing it the last time it came up for sale but they were asking far too much and so I wrote if without much hesitation. Now, though, it seems like a good deal. It would mean leaving my secure but totally unsatisfying job that is forty five minutes from home in an incredibly elite and obnoxious tourist town to work only ten minutes from home in the company of my familiars.

But do I want to be a business owner?
The truth is.............

I'm really kind of lazy. I like the fact that I come into work here and have so little to do. I have time to blog and read and visit with friends and go to the this town's coffee shop and slack off. I love feeling like I can get away with something. Anything. It's the really juvenille part of me that sneaks out in weird little ways. If I ran this coffee shop, I'd have to learn how to work a Profit and Loss statement, how to do inventory and ordering. I do that at this current job but at a much smaller rate. I take care of payroll and hiring (and firing) here but it doesn't belong to me. I can walk away. I have no real financial investment.

I love picturing myself behind the counter at the coffee shop. I love thinking of how I'd redo the counter and repaint some of the walls. There's a whole back room that is 3/4 converted into a kitchen space. I'd open for breakfast and serve crepes.

So, there's alot in the mix right now. And in twenty minutes I have to meet a client for a massage and hope that I can make it through the whole hour without dripping boogers on his backside.

One thing at a time.

Breath

The ability to let go is like a muscle. If left unused, it will need to be toned, brought back to life, given attention. When that ability to let go is cramping, resisting, and refusing, breath and nurturing is often the best tool. Our bodies, like our hearts, so badly want to cling to the familiar, want to remain in the comfort zone, no matter how knarly the comfort zone might be, but it's the plunging forward and into the sticky mess of discomfort that gets us through to some other side.

We store so much old shit in our bodies. Old sadness, old anger, old insecurity. It turns to rot in there and the aches and pains we start to feel in the middle of our lives are just the first resonances of that old shit. All the words we wish we had said, all the times our hearts were broken or betrayed, our bodies respond with tension, stress hormones or just plain heartaching, and those responses, those stress hormones, if left untended, if left alone.... they ferment in our bodies like sour milk. They become those little knots of lactic acid inbetween the shoulder blades.

I'm starting to feel something palpating. It happens every spring. Every spring some of that old stored up baggage gets shed, like skin, making way for the new. It happens with the first calls of geese overhead in the morning, with the robins sprinkling their song in the bush elm outside the house. It happens when the sun starts to make a wider ring around the day and the snow starts to melt wider rings around the trees.

Exercise isn't such a chore when the days get longer. There's more time for it. Breathing and stretching releases all those old fermenting aches and pains. Clearing out the body seems possible. Almost as possible as clearing out the heart.

Chocolate Jesus

I've never celebrated Easter with Ella.

We do Christmas only because it simply can't be avoided but there's really no mention of Jesus. She knows the stories of Jesus, she thinks he's a pretty cool prophet, but that's pretty much where the stories end. She knows that Christianity and Paganism are two different religions and that, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the church began a mission to try and erase the earth religion of the hillspeople and villagers by kind of super-imposing their holidays on top of the Pagan holidays. I mean, how else does the rising of Christ meet up with the rabbit and the egg? Or the evergreen tree and strings of light intercept the birth of him? Somewhere along the line all the symbols just kind of merged together into this weird little medium and everyone stopped asking questions.

But we've never done the Easter thing. We've decorated eggs on the Equinox for years and have celebrated the fact that our days would now be getting longer than the nights but Easter has always come and gone.

This time of year, we're almost always tapping trees and boiling sap into sugar. Three years ago, a friend of hers came over to help and be a part of the experience. She came with her brand new pale pink Easter basket and whatever cool stuffed toy came inside of it. Ella looked like the kid left out of the newest club. Why didn't the Easter bunny bring her anything?

The two years that followed she spent in Pennsylvania with my parents. She went to church with my grandma and spent most of the hour with her jaw hanging in her lap (or just drooling from plain boredom). She received the basket and the chocolate egg and the Barbie or stuffed rabbit or whatever else was lavishly bestowed upon her that day. The Easter Bunny came alive in Pennsylvania. Grandparents are always good for that.

This is the kid who caught me in the act of writing the note from the tooth fairy and still believes anyway. I was just getting in the way of magic, as far as she's concerned... so it's really no big feat for her to take on a whole new fantasy creature to believe in. So, yesterday, as I'm leaving for work, she looks up dreamily and asks " I wonder what the Easter Bunny will bring me tomorrow?"

I automatically start mapping my route to work. First to Big Lots for a basket and some of that weird grass shit, then to the chocolate store for a bunny and little chocolate eggs and jellybeans. Am I really doing this? But yes, I am. And honestly, I enjoyed it.

I found a beautiful green woven basket for $2.50 and the grass was yellow and made of paper, not plastic.... very pretty. I work right next door to an amazing chocolate store and so I loaded up on foil wrapped dark chocolate eggs and "gourmet jellybeans" (what the hell are "gourmet jellybeans, really?). I bought organic, orange spice chocolate squares and "Non Parallels" ~ toasted hemp seeds atop drops of organic belgian chocolate. Pretty groovy Easter basket if I do say so myself.

I felt like I should buy her a present for Easter. I knew she'd be expecting one after two years with her grandparents but I just couldn't bring myself to buy some over packaged Made In China Barbie or some crazy thing like that. I opted for some prettily painted flower pots and six packages of flower seeds. It's a spring holiday, right? If we lived further south, we'd be enjoying crocuses and daffodils instead of a full day of snow!

So, we've spent the better part of our day gorging ourselves on dark chocolate and lying around on the couch. Oh, and we did make eggs.... last night. They were quite lovely. We blew six and boiled six. Dyed them all. If we could find the ground out there, we'd go searching for a pretty stick to make a mobile out of the hollow eggs but that will just have to wait. In the meantime, it'll be egg salad sandwhiches and chocolate in the lunchbox all week.

She left a note on the kitchen table with a bowl of chopped up carrots. It read:

your the best.

Love Ella

gust

for

you.

can you

sine your name writ here

name_________________

And when her friend called this morning she said, "Yeah! He came! And now I know his real name. It's Mr. E Bunny!"

And there is one advantage to having snow on Easter. She was able to see his tracks outside the window making a path all the way to the neighbors house.

What a Flake Am I?

So much for one post a day. Does it help that I think about it every day? That I comprise paragraphs of my daily life while I drive or do my grocery shopping? That I hear conversations in quotation marks and visualize sentences with paranthesis and exclamation marks?

It's been a crazy week.... and I'm writing now from the new desk that Bill built in his office. Having almost the entire month of March off, being between jobs, he took that time to gut his office and build a new desk along the back wall. The desk is very nice but it's abnormally tall and in order to sit comfortably at the laptop, I have to prop two pillows under my behind and I'm left feeling like Gilda Radner in that Saturday Night Live skit where her feet don't reach the ground. What was the name of that character? I feel like I'm four and a half years old right now and I should have pigtails and an ice cream cone. But I can type exceptionally well for a four and a half year old.

Moving on.....

I don't talk much about my job (probably because most of the posting I do is from my desk there and I don't want to push my luck) but I manage a small massage department at an old historic inn and practice massage there five days a week. It's not an ideal situation for me... a bit too beauracratic and too far from home..... but it's served me well for almost three years now and I hope I have served them well, too.

This week we had our "manager's outing". It usually consists of a day on the mountain, a hike to some lookout, dinner and drinks and a night at our sister inn waaaaay up north. This year, however, it was closer to home and we skied, hiked, and ate on our own turf and then had the option of getting a room at the inn where we work....one of the "luxury rooms. Mmmmmmmmm.

I'm so glad that we checked in early, that I took a bath in the huge jet tub and then laid on a blanket in front of the fireplace and read my book. I'm so glad we enjoyed that four poster canopy bed before dinner because I drank too fucking much at the dinner party. Yes, I think I may have been one of those. I made a committment to myself to only drink two glasses of wine but somewhere between those first two glasses and throwing up before twitching myself to sleep, I somehow managed to take down an additional two glasses of red wine, two dirty martinis and a shot of something or other at the bar before we left. I then woke up at five oclock in the morning and lay there wondering how the hell it happend and fretting about the events of the night. Was I at least subtly wasted? Did I stumble or slur? Was I totally obnoxious with that water-gun? What was that I was saying about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts? Please tell me I didn't go so far as to tell my boss how much I sometimes hate my fucking job? Fuck fuck fuck fuck. If I hadn't felt so badly about Bill having to nurse me the night before, having to hold my hair back and walk me to bed, I might have woken him up just for reassurance.

I'm not one of these people who can enjoy a night of wild drinking and rowdiness. It happens so rarely anymore, and I'm so much more of a control freak than I used to be, that now it just sends me right over the edge. I wake up not only hung over but extremely anxious. The whole thing just sucks!

I spent every single night of my late teens and early twenties drinking to excess. Throw all of the other excesses into the mix and it made for a very colorful youth. But I've worked soooo hard on learning to manage all of the addictive tendencies and, for the most part, I do pretty well. These days, the only active addictions I have to wrestle on a daily basis are coffee and chocolate. So on nights like this, when that little button in my DNA that is supposed to switch to OFF or STOP CONSUMING.... when that little button defaults, I get pretty down on myself. I wake up before the sun and then spend all of dawn panicking about the events of the night before, cringing over and over again as it all comes back in waves.

Turns out, it wasn't as bad as I thought. Well, it probably was but no one noticed because everyone else was just as rosey cheeked as I. But regardless, note made:

Don't party with fellow employees anymore.
Not a good thing.

Too dangerous, too risky.

AND

it's a waste of a perfectly good honeymoon room.

Best Way to a Woman's Heart....

is definately through the belly.

I could get used to hosting a chef. Very used to it.

Last night's spread was simple....for lack of time, really. We had a flat bread pizza with fresh plum tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and some basil from last summer's garden. Beside that on the kitchen table was a simple stir-fry with red cabbage, mushrooms, carrots and zucchini. They were all sauteed in a tamari/sherry sauce and then glazed up into a pleasant goop and displayed beautifully over brown rice and surrounded by halved brussel sprouts.

I'm starting to understand why people do food blogs. I could get used to this.

Mmmm, Sunday

I spent my morning grooming horses and mucking out stalls. It's something I've dreamed of being able to do for years now.

When I was born, my folks lived in a rural town close to the Poconos. I think it may have actually been in the Poconos somewhere. They had some chickens, a pig or two, and two horses. My mom had your typical seventies mullet haircut and wore a good bit of calico. My dad had lambchop sideburns and learned how to dress roadkill. In the first house they rented there, they woke up and banged on the heaters for two reasons..... to get the heat going and to scare the mice out of the cupboards on the other side of the wall.
They lived there until I was almost three and from there we moved onto that small one way street I've recently mentioned in another post.

I guess I used to ride with my mom in the saddle and I think something happened at that young age that has forever endeared horses to my heart. After petting a horse, I refuse to wash my hands so that I can occasionally lift them to my nose and just inhale. Mmmmmm. It makes me high.

Ella and I decided a year ago that by the year 2008 we would own our own horse. We have the barn, the pasture, the routine of chores already in motion.... we'd just need to make a stall and proper flooring for the horse (and feel confident that we could afford the expense). Since we made that decision, I've been doing a good bit of book learning but one can only learn so much about husbandry by looking at books.

Two weeks ago, I had my first shift at a huge horse barn in the next town over. The woman who owns the farm is the mother of a doula client I've recently taken on. She has 27 horses ~ Morgans, Norweigan Fjords, French ponies, Percherons. Oh, and an indoor riding ring where she gives lessons and does therapeutic work with her horses. It's pretty high end.

Having had zero experience handling horses, I was sure I'd be banished to the pony barn until the owner felt I could handle a larger horse but, somehow, I ended up with the Morgans and Percherons and, in the course of one day, I feel like I learned a lifetime of experience. But still, there's so much more to understand.

Today, my second day, I was able to groom the Percherons. Percherons are similar to Clydesdales but a deep black color. She has Tiffy and Jake and they live together in a seperate barn, just the two of them. Years ago, for whatever reason, the owner was considering selling Tiffy. But one night, after they were put into their pens (with a little opening between them so they could visit), Jake got really sick with some kind of stomach ailment. He was on his side, lying in his own pee and really uncomfortable. Tiffy, somehow, opened her gate with her teeth and then opened the gate to their pen and walked up the hill 150 yards or so to the owners front yard and waited there until she woke up. She led the owner down to Jake's pen and it was all fine from there. Jake got the help he needed and Tiffy was secured her place by her mate for a lifetime. It was a like a story out of Black Beauty.

Going into the pen to groom a horse, I take three things in a bucket. A thick wired brush for brushing their manes and tails, a lighter brush for their coats and a strange little gadget for cleaning out their hooves. On one end of the gadget is a little wire brush and the other end is a metal hook to dig into the nooks and crannies to get out the funk and random pebbles.

So far, the one thing that strikes me the most about being with these creatures, the thing that leaves me just spellbound with a feeling of grace and honour, is cleaning their feet. Leaning over beside a horse (especially a horse whose back is a foot higher than the top of my head), tapping gently behind his knee joint and having him lift his foot gently into my hand. There is such trust to that. Such a relationship. It makes me think of thousands of years ago, in the fertile crescent, when the most hospitable thing you could do for a guest is sit them down and soak and wash their weary, worn traveled feet. Every time I have a hoof in my hand I feel like I'm entrusted with sooo much. And I am.

When I first spoke with owner on the phone about coming to work for her every other Sunday, and that I didn't have any experience, she kind of laughed and made a comment about how this would help me figure out whether or not I really wanted to do this. Whether or not I'd really want a horse for my own self. I'm sitting here now, after my second day working with them, my shoulders and back tired, totally satisfied and I'm realizing that "whether or not I'd want a horse for my own self" was never the question. Never never.

It's What's For Dinner

Looks like I missed my Saturday post....and after all that fuss I made about one post a day.
My excuses are valid, though. I spent Friday night at the airport until nearly 1:30am and then drove an hour home from there. Saturday afternoon was spent doing morning chores, overlooking (kind of) a playdate for Ella and then off to work for four and a half massages.

A hometown friend of mine, whose home base has been Vermont as long as it's been mine, flew in from New Zealand on Friday night. He would have been here Thursday evening but the plane he was due to leave New Zealand on was struck by lightning while waiting for take off on the runway. A bit of a setback, yes. All the connecting flights from there were long gone when he arrived in LA and then New York. Poor guy was just an entire day off from his familiar calendar by the time he arrived on this other side of the world.

Now, the upside of having this friend stay with us, aside from the fact that we love his company of course, is that he's an incredible chef. He spends most of his year, for the past three or four years, anyway, down on the South Pole at a scientist colony. He's the vegetarian chef at the base. He's even been featured in Vegetarian Times. If I had the energy, I'd link. I'm sorry, I just don't this morning. He told us, though, that if we host him while he's in town, he'll cook four days a week.

So, after my long afternoon doing massage, I came home to an absolute spread on my kitchen table. Lightly breaded chicken with apples and fresh red currants and in a Frangelica glaze, roasted beets, a simple egg noodle pasta with greens and mushrooms, a chopped green salad with tomatoes and tahini yogurt dressing and, for dessert, baked apples. Oh, and this morning I woke up to blackberry muffins for dessert. Can he stay forever? (dejavu)

Speaking of Fear.........

There seems to be a real catalyst happening among my favorite bloggers, and, it seems, within my own self. selftaughtartist, misplaced and even penelopetwist (who has been blessed with the coolest name ever) are all exuding a new kind of breath. A new kind of perception. Just new stuff. Spring?

Selftaught and misplaced, both, have been discussing fear and there are these little marbles rolling around themselves in my gut right now as a result. Logically, it's clear that diving into one's fear is a powerful means of release and rising above....of productivity and power. And while I've gone there, it's rarely without having been pushed. And right now, as a result of their inspiration and insight, I feel the little push on my shoulder. The little voice urging "go there" "go there"..... and it's like walking across hot coals sometimes. It's like psycho-analysis.

Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun, talks about Sim and Ripka. Sim is the Tibetan word for "clutter of the mind". It's the buzzing and random dialogue and come-backs one never thought to use on time. It's the hesitation and the passion and the disorganization of thought. A stumbling over and over of just too many things. Our best friends, inspirations and worst enemies all vying for our mental attention. It's the stuff that gives us headaches, keeps us up later than we want to be, and gets on our fucking nerves. It's the stuff that makes our shoulders hurt.

Ripka is space. It's the space between all that clutter. The doorway between the in breath and the out breath. It's the place where the water meets the shore, when it's neither coming nor receeding, ebbing or flowing.

When I"m getting on my own nerves with all that fear and self doubt, when I'm avoiding writing with ridiculous, mundane, useless busy work, it's sometimes just a matter of sitting down, closing my eyes and saying over and over over and over

sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim

and then stop

take a deep breath

notice the space between

and then

R*i*p*k*a

Thanks.