Another house, another surge of energy and questions. Like:
1. Does household use only for a well mean no watering of a garden?
2. How do they anchor fences in rock? Does that make building a fence much more expensive in the mountains?
3. What does 6.5 gallons per minute recovery on the well mean?
1. how do we get info about the septic system?
2. how do we get more info about the well: depth, water quality, water quantity?
Has the cedar siding on black mtn been treated with fire retardant chemicals?
Easy to sit back home and let the questions come, then 1 e-mail, then a second, then a third. I don’t want to be too cautious, but I also don’t want to buy something with flaws obvious to someone who knows the local scene. Water quality, availability and flow rate are all important in water poor Colorado. Fire is a big issue with mountain homes in Colorado’s fire red zone, a zone which happens to include all the areas we’ve investigated so far.
These questions are in addition to square footage, usability of the space, attractiveness of the house and lot, privacy, kitchen, all the ordinary factors. We can assess those using our own subjective yard sticks and make firm, confident decisions, but in matters we know less well, like water and fire, hesitancy seems prudent.
All of these questions swirl around because we have the means to make this move and the will. So they’re happy problems, or questions, but they are questions.
Maybe I’ll look back a year from now, from somewhere high in the Rockies when the sky hits mountain blue and the cirrus mimic the tails of nearby horses, maybe I’ll look back and remember this day. 62, sunny, blue skies with high wispy cirrus clouds and leaves just starting to turn. And a drive east toward Stillwater, toward the St. Croix, with the intention of lunch with Bill Schmidt at the Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter, but finding it full, going to Sal’s Angus Grill, a biker bar in Whitworth. Whitworth? An intersection, near as I can tell, with a huge ballroom and Sal’s, the whole town.
The drive from here took me east through the northern reaches of the Twin Cities exurbs, across Anoka County with its sod farms and nurseries, lakes and marshes and forest, then across Washington County with its expensive country estates, more marsh and lakes and plenty of cute decorations for Halloween. It was an hour so of ambling through the very southern end of the Boreal Forest, seeing the blue-black lakes reflecting back the sky, choppy with light winds. A lot of other folks out, too, just driving, seeing an October wonder day.
Bill invited me to lunch and I picked the spot since he was driving on from there to see the color along the St. Croix, something he and his late wife, Regina, would often do, meandering as the day took them. That’s how we ended up at Sal’s, wandering north from the Gasthaus. We ate, talked about the move to Colorado, his family, but mostly we affirmed our now long friendship, passing an October lunch with each other.
And so the end times have begun. I expect no rapture, no bugles, no seals breaking, no anti-Christ rising but I do anticipate moving from this place, my home for over 40 years. With that move so much will become past. The Gasthaus. An easy lunch with a friend of many years. Access on a whim to houses and neighborhoods where I’ve lived or where Kate lived. The cultural riches here: the Guthrie, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the MIA especially. Those early years in medical practice for Kate. All of my ministry. Raising kids time. All that will become more past than now since their physical context will be far away.
The end times, at least the Christian version, is followed by that great wakin’ up morning when the dead rise from their graves. So too it will be with us following the end times here, a whole new life will rise from the ashes of this one. I look forward to it.
Went for dinner tonight at Osaka. I love their sashimi special roll. It felt like cheating on Kate though, since I don’t recall ever having gone there without her. So, I called her. She reported that the romantic Russian composer street house had an uneven first level, a studio that would have required $50,000 to bring up to code, no space to hang art and too many steps. That’s why we sent her out there. No regrets.
She’s still looking, has her eye on a particular place. She plans to drive around by herself tomorrow, looking at houses, then she and Ann Beck will resume on Tuesday.
While I waited at the Wings Joint on Friday, I picked up a paper I only read when I’m there, Tidbits. It had some aphorisms called old farmer’s advice. Not sure they’re from old farmers, or farmers at all, but I found a few of them amusing:
Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong.
Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.
Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
And, my favorite: Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old fight, he’ll just kill you.
Let me explain. In 1975 I began a year long internship at Bethlehem-Steward Presbyterian Church at the corner of 26th St. and Pleasant Ave. The focus of this work was neighborhood ministry, finding out what the needs of the area were and responding to them in some concrete fashion. This was work I could do and did not involve me in the more philosophically ambiguous (for me) worship, educational and pastoral life of a local congregation.
Over the course of those years, which included a good deal of time at South Central Ministry, based out of the old Stewart Presbyterian building which sits three blocks south of Lake Street on Stevens Avenue right next to the freeway sound barriers, my work at South Central was even more politically and neighborhood focused than at Bethlehem-Stewart.
That was when I found the Wings Joint. It was run by a Chinese guy and sat on Nicollet, maybe 8 blocks south of Lake Street. These were the best wings I’d ever had. Crispy, always moist on the inside and just a bit of zing, which could be amped up with the hot sauce. At the end of my day (often after 10 pm) at South Central, I’d stop by the wings joint, pick up some wings, then buy a six-pack of beer and get started on both on my way home. This was one of those urban equivalents of a special bay on a lake or a place with rare plant species in a forest, a unique haven, a place with qualities you could find no where else.
Then, I moved away from South Central and away from every week visits to the Wing Joint, though I would still, on occasion, go back to it.
When we moved to Andover, it seemed that all those unique finds, gathered over many years of wandering the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, would disappear.
Imagine my surprise when I read in a newspaper article that the Wings Joint had moved to Blaine. Blaine! I knew where that was now. So, I hunted down the the Wings Joints new spot. It’s in a strip mall with little presence, concrete block buildings with a Subway, an Asian grocery store and a Nail joint. But it was the same place. The same wings.
So on occasion, as I did Friday after dropping Kate at the airport, I take off Highway 610 at University and drive north, well into what used to be the heart of Blaine, stopped at the Wings Joint and enjoyed their atmosphere, unchanged from the Lake Street days. At least in my memory.
When we move to the mountains, to a state far away, all these special places: urban havens, Scientific and Natural Areas, places along Lake Superior will be lost. Not disappeared, of course not, but there will be no equivalent surprise of finding that unique Denver spot all of a sudden taken up residence in Idaho Springs. I don’t have the memories.
Making those equivalent memories in Colorado is something I look forward to, that slow accumulation of local knowledge, but the utility of all that Minnesota knowledge will fade away, useful only for the very occasional trip back.
11 hours of sleep last night, a nap this afternoon, by tomorrow I’ll be back in the land of the fully awake, a state I try to encourage on as many levels as possible. Still feeling a bit numb from the sudden whirlwind of energy about the Tchaikovsky Road house. I didn’t mention that it had a great address, 329 romantic Russian composer street.
I remember, come to think of it, another stupid state, finals stupid. Just before, during and in the immediate aftermath of final exams my world would narrow to streams of data, large chunks of ideas and my focus would be tight. Cooking was ramen noodles, mac and cheese. Lots of coffee, pencils, outlines and summaries. Finals stupid and move stupid are very similar though move stupid has occupied a longer period of time. They both simplify and constrict the flow of information, ratcheting down to those matters relevant to the task.
It’s simplification and constriction that produce the effect, the shoving out of irrelevances, pushing them to the periphery and maintaining attention, a most precious cognitive resource, where it needs to be. But these are not states I would want to last very long. They produce an intense concentration on particular results, necessary, yes, but there are other pursuits that call to me.
Kate’s in Gilpin County right now, or on her way there, looking at the house we both liked. She’ll see several others over today and Monday.
Meanwhile I slept from 11 pm last night until 10 this morning. All that house hunting energy that kept me awake yesterday morning dissipated and left me sleep deprived. Got up at 5:45 am to feed the dogs, back to bed at 5:59. Being sleep deprived is difficult for me, I don’t like the feeling, call it sleep stupid, and my backup personality comes closer to the surface. That is, impatient, easy to anger. Well, it’s my backup personality in my estimation.
Maybe, it just struck me, that sleep deprivation puts me in a particular mood and keeps me there for the duration. I’ve become intrigued with moods recently. Moods are the local weather of the psyche while personality is the climate. Maybe I experience temporary global warming heating up my weather during sleep deprivation.
Gotta go outside and strengthen the silt fencing again. Rigel, and in her trail, Vega were playing in the resurfaced area, the part where we had to have a bobcat take care of their efforts over the last three years.
In this moment Kate’s the scout and I’m the homesteader. Gotta go done homesteader stuff.
Saw an ad for Army Strong. Well, I’m move stupid. There seemed little room this week for Latin or leisure reading or relaxing into an idea, letting the mind drift. Yes, a bit of time for art but even at the Walker I felt rushed. Thank goodness the garden has gone to bed. Sleep tight, baby.
These pursuits, which I consider my normal activity, the stuff that gets me up in the morning and excited about the day after, have been crowded out by movers, mortgages, the hunt for a new home, diving-Scrooge McDuck like-into our finances, tweeking and checking, ordering the septic tank pumped out, figuring out medicare when we move, a long list of things, intensified by meeting with the stager and the realtor on Wednesday.
These are all boxes that require check marks. So, it’s not like this is optional activity.
And, yes, the move gets more exciting as we press further along. It got very real last night and this morning.
Poking around on a real estate website, I found a house I wanted. Kate agreed. It was in our price range, in a location we considered desirable, with an idiosyncratic design. It’s sort of a conch shell turned broad side down with smaller areas as you move up.
Last night I got so excited I had trouble sleeping. We had to move on this right away. I just knew it. That was where the tweeking and checking came in. And so. When we did move on it around 9:30 am, we found that an offer had gone in earlier this morning. And, most likely, was accepted. But, we could make a second offer. Since we’d only seen pictures we couldn’t do that blind.
Kate left this afternoon for Colorado for a viewing of this house and a few others. We probably won’t get it, just a half-inch too late. But we have no chance if Kate doesn’t evaluate it and decide whether we put in a second-place offer. We got her on a Spirit airlines flight scheduled to leave at 2:07. She called me at 3:45 to say, “Guess where I am?” Terminal 2? Yep.
All this made the whole process more intense for a few hours. More imminent. I imagine I’ll be move stupid for days, if not weeks to come.
A primary text in my rethinking, reimagining my faith is Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute. It’s not the content of the book-though it has useful material about new ways of agriculture-but the gerund phrase it has as its title.
Becoming native. What an idea. The very notion of native is that you can’t be native unless you’re born to it. So what can this mean, becoming native? In my understanding it’s about a process, a careful listening and seeing. Casey Reams, a soil scientist, was notable for saying, “See what you’re looking at.” So often we don’t.
We will never be native to a place where we were not born, but we might enter a state of grace with the land, a “becoming native” state, an ongoing increased intimacy and sense of co-creation. When Kate and I landed here in Andover 20 years ago, I was far from what I understood then as my native turf, the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But, as I wrote here a few days ago, I’ve actually spent most of my life in small and medium sized towns of the midwest, 47 of 67 years. So, I became native, or entered into a state of becoming native to the city.
Becoming native is not achievable from the couch or from books or from yearning. It begins when, as the New Testament says of Jesus’ disciples, you shake the dust off your sandals and finally leave the other place behind. Whatever it is. Becoming native begins when you commit, often unconsciously, to the new place.
After 19 years in Indiana, where I was raised; I lived in Wisconsin for a year, Appleton, and never felt like I landed. By the time 20 years of residency in Minneapolis/St. Paul came and went, its streets were my streets, its future my future. Becoming native happened gradually and unconsciously.
Here in Andover, where I initially felt out of place (a cliche I use deliberately here), becoming native followed a somewhat more conscious path. We decided to put landscaping work into the mortgage and added terrain features such as boulder walls, a tiered perennial garden and several plantings of trees and perennial flowers and shrubs. Initially, the gardening work was bulbs and annuals, almost exclusively in the tiered bulbs above our brick patio.
There were though, several black locust trees in a grove about 40 feet off our back deck. That area, sort of a backyard, had weeds and these trees. Black locust is a dense wood and one often used for fence posts in the 19th and early 20th century. They also have thick, wicked thorns. It was the work of a couple of years, with chain-saw and step-son, before those trees were gone and the stumps had been ground away.
After the bulbs and the annuals, the felling of the black locust grove, attended by sweat and days of heavy labor, including sessions with a rented industrial quality wood-chipper, began to reel me into this place. The soil and manual labor, outdoors work, gave me an intimacy with the grounds I’d never had anyplace else.
Add in the dogs of those years, the planting of this garden and that, the eventual creation of the raised beds, the orchard, the fire-pit and we began to become one with the land here. The bees provided a collegial work force from the insect world.
The house hosted birthday parties, holiday meals, meetings with the Woolly Mammoths, the Sierra Club and parties for Paul Wellstone’s first campaign. Over time this land became home.
Then, becoming native to this place could truly begin. I would mark the moment of crossing the threshold late one fall night, perhaps in November when I heard a scratching outside the study window. Turning off the light in the room I moved closer to the window and looked out at a bird feeder then set up nearby. There, scratching among the fallen seeds was an adult opossum. This was the first opossum I had ever seen live outside of a zoo. He came back several nights, then disappeared, perhaps eaten, perhaps gone into hibernation.
In thinking about the possibility of hibernation I began to see this property in a new way. According to the Minnesota Extension Service and the DNR, there were likely thousands of animals: chipmunks, voles, opossums among them hibernating here in our woods. An image, a vision really, of our land with many, many lives lying below ground or in tree hollows came to me.
It was that vision that awoke me to the fact that we shared this property with so many others. It was not our property anymore than it was theirs. We were cohabitants. And not only with animals. The jack-in-pulpit, the columbine, the wild grape and wild cucumber, virginia creeper, the lilies and the iris, the tulips and the daffodils, the garlic and the asparagus, they all rested here over the winter waiting springs touch to come out into the sun.
An anthropocentric notion of ownership, amplified by deeds and by the very process we go through now, selling this property, creates an illusion of our habitation here as the only significant one. Many people would, without much thought, identify humans as the only inhabitant of the land. And it is not so.
Here there are whistle pigs, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, the occasional wandering muskrat and rat, salamanders great and small, newts, garter snakes, toads and frogs, snapping turtles at certain seasons, pileated woodpeckers, great horned owls, crows and geese. There are millions, probably billions, of microscopic flora and fauna that keep our soil vital and nourishing for the larger plants that live within it.
This is a hectare of land, 2.5 acres. It has oak, ash, poplar, ironwood, elm, cedar, buckthorn (grrr), snowberry, river birch, maple, pine and spruce. There are many native and many domesticated plants and six domesticated animals, four dogs and two humans.
Once this umwelt settled into my conscious and unconscious awareness I knew I was becoming native to this place. I will never be as native to it as the generations of rabbits that have lived and died here. Nor will I be as native as any of the other animals or the native flora. Perhaps I have become as native here as the daffodils in our gardens and the lilies, both flowers that thrive on this land just as Kate and I have.
And now we are selling. What does that mean? Really? A certain sum of money, often transferred from one mortgage bank to another, changes hands. Legal documents get signed. Keys handed over. On some day we see our goods loaded onto a truck, we get in our Rav4 and pull out of the driveway never to return. But our cohabitants will remain, snugged into their tree cavity, their underground burrow, their nests beneath the shed. The major natural character of this place will remain largely intact. Sales are about humans, mostly, unless new “owners” abuse their trust.
We will, I think, go through a process of denativizing in which we gradually let go of the sensibilities shaped by these woods, these plants, these animals, these cohabitants. Even if we visit someday, just to see how the old place is getting on, we will return not as natives but as travelers, historical tourists.
We will, I hope, be becoming native to a new place, one with hard rock and high peaks, faraway vistas and remarkable spring snows. But it will not be easy. We will have to earn our place there, just as we have here. Frankly, it’s the part of this journey that most excites me. Yes, the grandchildren. Of course. Yes, Jon and Jen and Barb. Of course. But as to my life and its daily turn, becoming native to the Rocky Mountains is the big joy ahead of me.
Explanatory signs along the way west. This is the meeting with the realtors and their stager. In this meeting the homeowner learns the best way to present their home, a symbol of their uniqueness, in as bland a way as possible so that others can project their own uniqueness upon it. When imagined as one’s own, a home is sold.
Tomorrow we get guidance on the interior work from a person whose expertise lies in arranging homes for sale. We’ve now done as much as we intend to do with the outside, have packed maybe 60% of the things that will go with us, decumulated (yes, that’s a word. Surprisingly, I rediscovered in a much older post, one from October 2005) multiple items of furniture, art and objets d’art, books, files through sale, discarding and donating.
There are, too, the many other matters, financial and insurance matters in particular, that need attention, some of which we can do now and some of which have to wait until we change residence.
Each one of these milestones could have its own little sign, like the text next to an art object in a museum or a plant in an arboretum. Here the mover learns the art of letting go. Here the mover often tears out individual hairs one by one. Or, here a look of glee often passes over the mover.
And the sound of chain saws was heard on the land. The landscaping work has begun. A bobcat, pulled by a truck filled with mulch sits just ahead of a white pick-up with an enclosed trailer. The dogs announce, over and over again, that there are strangers here. Strangers here. Strangers here.
The steady rate of work toward Colorado goes on. We’ve been at this now since late April. It can feel like we’ve always been moving. Always will be moving. But an end exists and it’s much closer now than it was when we first decided to give the whole process two years. As we grabbed hold of this project, various aspects of it have conspired to make moving early next year the best plan.
Though not eager to leave Minnesota, we are eager to start establishing a new life in the mountains. We’ve lived here over well over 40 years, both of us, and our Western life will take time to flourish, just as this one did.
We will have the grandkids, Jon and Jen, and Barb (Tennessee grandma) to help us ease in. Kate says there’s a top 10 quilt shop (in the U.S.) within 40 miles of Idaho Springs so that will give her a place to make new friends. The Sierra Club and other environmental advocacy groups are strong in Colorado, as are certain brands of progressive politics, so I’ll have some places to meet new people, too.
But none of this until after the landscaping is done.
