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There’s nothing more fun than chasing John on a frozen lake. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt this level of joy. I am jealous.
Due to my sad neglect and serious lack of writing 100 words per day, I will now take this time to make a sweeping update on my life. Please imagine that speedy scene in Amelie, if you will, where images flash as the narrator speaks quickly. It’s been a blur:
I was hired as an adjunct professor. John now does his own laundry. It’s an experiment or maybe an identity crisis for me. We’ll see. I have decided to embrace the cabin. I cleaned and nursed Bella back to health after her snake bite. I filed 3 years worth of paper work. My attic is bursting at the seems. We have offered on and lost our 12th house. John is depressed. Bella turned black and blue. 
Bella got better.
My sister had a baby. He’s perfect. 
She named him after my father. I still can’t call him by his name. For now, I call him “Buddy” which is what I call all baby boys. It’s also the name of my sister’s dog. Nothing new in the garden except weeds. I still haven’t planned for my class. I’m preparing for my fourth winter.
Well, I think that’s it.
I said that I would write about it when I was done crying. I’m not sure that I’m done crying. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m not. But we have to get back on that damn horse and start looking for houses again despite the fact that every ounce of my body is opposed to this.
On Friday, we learned that the a**holes that are selling the house we were supposed to buy would officially not replace their absolutely dysfunctional and against-code septic system. They would also not be lowering their asking price. They, in fact, probably never wanted to sell their house in the first place. They just needed us to waste two months and $1,000+ dollars to figure that out.
So, I’ve learned my lesson. If we ever do find another house that we love, I won’t be writing about it. I never expected this 10th deal to fall through, so what makes me think number 11 will be any different? I will continue to write about other things. I apologize for my sad neglect, especially my two weeks with no Garden Diary. I simply haven’t been able to think about much else besides the strong possibility of winter #4 in the cabin. And there we have it- still not done crying. Still homeless. Still in utter mourning over our loss.
Invitations for the official pity party going out next week.
Yesterday was our original closing date for the house we are currently seeking to buy. And we are still waiting for a response from the seller on whether he will fix the dysfunctional septic. People say that buying a house is stressful. I don’t think “people” generally go through what we have gone through. And to make it even more unbearable, our friends who also offered on this same house have already moved into their new house!
I’m tired of waiting. I want an answer and I want the answer I want. Living here is getting more difficult by the day. To help explain that, let me entertain you with a list of things I will not have to do if we buy this house:
- Use my living room chair as a drying rack for my comforter
- Light our stove manually with a lighter
- Worry about running out of wood before the end of Winter (i.e. running out of heat)
- Do laundry in my in-laws’ basement
- Give the dog a “shower” because we have no bathtub
- Eat dinner while sitting on the couch (because we only have on kitchen chair and our table is our desk overflow)
- Feed the dog in the bathroom (it’s the only available floor space)
- Store my clothing outdoors (basically)
- Feed chipmunks unwillingly
- Go in the attic to get another roll of toilet paper
- Wonder if mice are eating my wedding gifts (also in the attic)
- Keep my sewing machine, winter clothes, and high heels next to John’s tools, chemical engineering textbooks, and smelly hockey gear
- Use the back of my front door as a coat hook
- Sleep with my bed against the wall
I could go on and on. I really could. I think about this stuff all the time and then I think about how I have no idea when it will all be a thing of the past. It’s had it’s charm and romantic moments, but now it has me nearly in tears quite often because sometimes you just want to make spaghetti without a risk of explosion.
I don’t like learning new things. If I am not instantaneously good at something, I tend to become frustrated and give up. I have never been instantaneously good at many things. In fact, the only area in which I ever felt confident in my abilities was school; I could learn anything if I studied hard enough. This is unfortunate as I am no longer in school. I am particularly inept at learning things that require any level of athletic prowess or hand-eye coordination. When asked to swing a baseball bat publicly, I have immediate flashbacks to gym class in elementary school, outfielders being called in in the far off chance that I would hit the ball at all.
Because of my negative experiences with public humiliation, as a result of my poor depth perception and general awkwardness, I will avoid trying new things in front of most people. There are a select few individuals before whom I am willing to attempt something new and those poor souls do not consider themselves fortunate. I am not easy to teach, easily feeling inadequate, stupid, inept. I berate my teacher for pushing me beyond my clearly limited abilities. I give up, repeatedly. I consider myself incapable if I am not immediately an expert and this is probably why I have never been able to become talented in any area. As a therapist, I know what I should be doing here- changing my thoughts so that I will feel more confident and, in turn, will be able to expand my horizons with less strain on my relationships. But, alas, it is the therapist that need the most help.
Right, so let’s get to the fishing part. Outside of one experience with my parents when I was certainly under the age of 5, I really never learned to fish. Despite living on a lake for three years, I never took much of an interest in the activity. This is likely for a number of reasons. First, my husband is generally not that into fishing, only doing it occasionally and often “socially” if fishing can be considered a “social” event. Secondly, I have never really understood the intrigue in throwing a line out and waiting and sitting and maybe drinking a beer and waiting some more before a fish bites. And finally, as mentioned previously, I don’t like learning new things and my husband knows this. I am convinced that he dreads teaching me as much as I dread learning, knowing that I am likely to tell him that he is a crappy teacher and couldn’t explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. By the way, this is only a slight exaggeration – his use of words for communication is limited, but that’s a topic for another day.
But last weekend, John decided that he could teach me to fish. This is primarily because he has a new-found interest in the activity and he probably feels bad if I have to sit there and watch him fish. If you thought fishing was boring, try watching somebody else fish! Last weekend, I caught my first fish, a sunny. And this weekend, I caught three more sunny and a crappy. It wasn’t that simple to teach me to fish- I did yell at John, give up, and even stormed off on one occasion. I blame house buying stress, in part, for my over reactions. I struggled to learn to cast in one smooth motion, often flinging the hook two feet in front of the boat or forgetting to release the line and swinging the hook dangerously close to our faces. My husband takes for granted that these sorts of smooth and graceful motions don’t come naturally to me. He also takes the nice pole and gives me the stinky one with a line that gets stuck.
I have also learned that fishing isn’t really about the fishing, it’s about the catching of the fish. A few brief moments of excitement where we reel in and guess what sort of fish is on the other end of the line. I can see how the fishing would be enjoyable in the sense that it is enjoyable to take in the sights and sounds of the lake, but I can do that without a pole in my hand. Really, it’s about the catching of the fish.
So, I have learned something new, reluctantly and with unnecessary drama. Now we spend weekends paddling our paddle boat, dog seated between us, fishing lines behind us. I will never be an expert fisher. I will never hang my catch on my living room wall or go on a fishing trip. By next weekend, I’m probably going to need another lesson in casting. Learning to fish is one step closer to getting over my insecurities and accepting that I don’t have to be the best at everything. It’s one more way to enjoy our lives, spend time together, and take in the beauty of the lake. Just when I though it was only about catching fish, I realized it was about something else altogeher. Sometimes it is worth the trouble of learning something new.
It was one beautiful weekend. So beautiful, in fact, that I am just now getting to write about it. Three straight days without rain and with loads of sunshine.
Let’s recap.
Annual Boat Parade
One Spoiled Fishing Dog
A little break dancing.
A nearly cloud-less sky.
And some sparklers.
All in all, one very good weekend.
Some more reasons to love our life, just as it is…
Bill & Bella - FIshing Buddies
Sometimes rain makes rainbows
It seems as if our home purchase is moving further and further into the distance, the closing date seemingly inching its way toward Autumn. So I will try to do what psychologists suggest to make the time more pleasurable, I will try to think about how little time we have left here instead of how long it will be before we move. I will keep to my promise to write about life in a cabin in New Jersey and just what that means.
When we attended our home inspection last week, the home inspector asked what sort of heat we currently have. I laughed. We have a wood stove. Winters here have not been easy. And, although we have gotten better at staying warm over the last three years, winter seems to get longer with each year. Our cabin was built by John’s great-grandfather, likely as a summer cottage for vacationers. There is no insulation between the knotty pine paneling and the outside walls of our house. Our pipes are tucked away in the crawl space beneath our house, no basement walls to shield them.
There are two great challenges to winters in the cabin – keeping warm and preventing the pipes from freezing. We tackle the first of these challenges by spending Autumn days splitting logs and storing up for the Winter ahead. We fill the propane tank for our little propane heater, but it can’t act as our primary source of heat. Propane is expensive and the heater not safe to be left unattended too frequently. It also doesn’t exactly light properly, often requiring the use of an actual lighter to ignite. So, we burn wood to keep warm, sometimes unable to get a good fire going and sometimes opening our windows in January to let loose the intense heat. John generally gets out of bed in the middle of the night to keep the fire going and I add wood in the mornings so Bella won’t freeze while we’re at work. The carpet is never free of wood debris.
And then there are the pipes. John has wrapped our hot water heater in insulation to prevent it from turning on constantly to maintain the water temperature in the cold under our cabin. We also wrap the pipes in heat tape, an interesting electronic invention that certainly seems unsafe by all accounts. It’s basically wires wrapped in plastic which you wrap around your pipes and plug in to keep them warm. In addition to this, the pipes are insulated. Still, they frequently freeze, leaving us with no water on cold mornings. Or the drains freeze, leaving us with a sink full of nasty dishwater that won’t go away like it’s supposed to. Then John goes under the cabin with a heat gun and thaws us out. We have gotten better at this, having no incidents of frozen pipes this winter.
Winters are long and cold. They haven’t been so lonely. In fact, we really can’t escape one another even if we want to. And summers are never quite long enough. Except when you’re waiting to move to your new house and the date keeps getting pushed back for what seems to be a mass of ridiculously petty reasons. Perhaps this will be our first (and hopefully last) long summer in the cabin.
We have our Bella and then we have a few other animals with whom we share our cabin home.
Every Spring we get a solid ant infestation and we always have a good number of spiders hiding in the bathroom (not good for a couple with a big, fat spider phobia). Still, not something a little pesticide spray and a few ant traps can’t take care of.
Mice, on the other hand, we’ve had to learn to live with. For the most part, they do not occupy our living quarters, due to carefully placed mouse traps and their inability to avoid our presence in such a small space. However, our attic is a comfortable living space for them and we occasionally will hear them scurrying about up there. They don’t bother me too much these days.
Then, during our first winter in the cabin, we found ourselves the proud owners of a vole. I only know what a vole is because we had one darting across our living room every night for a few weeks. Well, we think it was a vole but it could have been the more common mole. This I was not comfortable with although I was quite entertained watching John try to catch it. Eventually, our vole moved on or possibly died for lack of food. We now have a dog that seems to keep the voles away.
Our most interesting mystery pet is still unidentified. I discovered its presence as I tried to stuff more sheets into our linen closed last fall. As I pulled out sheets I found piles of dog food stuffed between the layers of our linens. Now, Bella is known to hide food in our house as if we are going to decide to starve her to death at some point. But she is not much of a climber so I doubt that she placed the food on our linen closet shelf, about four feet off the floor. Shortly thereafter, I found more dog food in all of the trays in our desk drawer, underneath pens and sticky notes. Then, as winter approached, we found our snow boots stuffed with dog food. Just when I though I’d found all of the dog food, I found more filling up the purses I store in boxes on our porch. I kept thinking that I must take pictures of this, but I never did, until yesterday, when I found two more lonely kibbles nestled behind a photo frame in a cubby above our bed.
A little chipmunk snack.
(I promise, I’ve dusted my house since I took this picture.) We’ve never actually seen the tiny creature that hides food in our house, but I am fairly certain we are dealing with a chipmunk. I know there are a few living under the cabin because they eat any bird food I put out and Bella likes to hunt them when we go outside. I never did find any droppings so I don’t think we are dealing with mice. And I really don’t think mice would store that much food anyway. I like chipmunks, I think they’re cute. So, as long as he stays out of my bed and my food, I can accept this additional rodent hiding in our walls.
With any luck, that chipmunk will have this place to himself in a few weeks and we will learn to live with just the pets we can identify.
As we edge closer to the strong possibility that we might be leaving our cabin-home in the near future, I feel it’s time I actually write a few things about life in the cabin over the nearly three years that we have lived here. There are some things about this place that I will find difficult to part with and some things that I will celebrate leaving behind. Although I have cursed my tiny home up and down in recent months, living here has become part of who I am.
Since sometime in my high school days, I decided that it would be incredibly romantic to live in a tiny house that allowed for extensive introspection and connection with nature. Lucky me, I met a man who had a tiny house we could make our home in. I don’t know if I ever actually believed we’d move in, and when we did, I was never sure we’d make it through the first winter. But, here we are, three winters later and still surviving cabin life. It has not always been romantic on a day-to-day basis, but it will certainly be a nice story to tell our children some day. It will be an even better story if the cabin is still in family possession and still standing (we do have some foundation issues). While I have probably avoided the extensive introspection, I will say that nothing makes you more aware of your collection of material possessions like having no closets. We have learned to appreciate simple things like having a filing cabinet or not sharing your living quarters with rodents – we will look forward to those experiences. As far as connection with nature, one would never expect to find this sort of thing in New Jersey (at least not one who does not live in New Jersey and appreciate its flawed character). Living here certainly isn’t on par with hiking the Appalachian Trail, but it tends to feel like summer camping trips with my family everyday. We’ve learned to accept some level of dirt on the floors in the summer, as this comes with lake life. We are never more than a knotty pine wall away from the hot or cold of the outdoors and we rely on nature’s own wood to keep us warm in the winter. Are we one with nature? No. But we do recycle. Close enough.
I may or may not leave the cabin by the end of this Summer. Either way, I want to capture life in this cabin while I am still here because some day this life will be a distant and foreign memory.
