It's curtains until spring

Today is a blowy day in the hill country. The sky is leaden, heavy with clouds. The wind whistles around the potting shed's corners. It's swept the porch clean, saving me the trouble. It carries David's and Chris's voices, up the hill from where they are working on David's house, the whinny of a horse, the cry of the hawk that's circling, riding the thermals, likely hunting, too. A front is predicted to move through in the next day or so, bringing rain and the colder breath of real fall. Somehow, out here, I feel it more than I did when I lived farther south. It's as if the wind is giving me notice to prepare, to brace myself.

Curtains.

The wind has made me think of curtains. I've left the windows of my little garden shed bare on purpose, open to the expanse of sky, the sweeping, tree-softened landscape ... a distant ridge of hills. While the weather was warm, I didn't mind it when night fell black against the windows. It was a thrill to look out and wonder at the moon sailing high amid the scattered luster of stars, so many stars. But now, somehow with winter coming on, I have ... not a wish, exactly, more like an instinct to cover the glass, closing out the wind and the night that falls so early. Even to see the cold face of the moon is not so compelling as the desire to feel tucked in, warm and snug. How it is that a wisp of fabric accomplishes all of that is beyond me, but it does. Curtains. In winter, its curtains ... until spring, I think....

The Story House, Chapter 3 - Found Treasure

The view opens from the moment you pull into the drive and is
now visible from almost every vantage point of future homesite
and garden shed

On some days, I can’t decide if moving onto this property was the craziest, dumbest idea I ever had or the most joyous and perfect. There are moments when I’m just overwhelmed by all the challenges, along with the potential that seems to exceed the limit of imagination, and I wonder what ledge I’ve stepped off, whether there will be an end to the learning curve. But the moments of delight that are liberally sprinkled throughout the shadows of uncertainty, of pure frustration, are irresistible, and I’m pulled by them. Like finding the old barbed wire speared dead center through the cluster of live oaks that stands between my garden shed and what will be the front porch of my house. We think as long as 50 years ago, or more likely longer, someone put up a fence alongside the oaks, close enough to the trees that over time they grew around it, absorbing the wire, healing the wounds it must have caused. We unearthed a few of the cedar posts, too, and found them to be only somewhat rotted, which shows just how impervious cedar (or more accurately Ashe juniper) is to weather and time.

I knew I wanted to find a way to use the wire, to preserve it. It’s like the horseshoe I found and set on my front step, and the chair we found abandoned underneath one of the oldest oaks on the property that some hunter left behind. I pulled it up to sit beside my front porch for the time being. I’m amazed at how sturdy it still is. The things I’ve discovered here, from the clumps of pink-blooming wild flowers in full bloom for weeks now without a single ounce of my effort, to the fox burrow, to the shimmering tail feather a chaparral shed near the birdbath, is a link in the chain of this land’s history. Such finds set me to dreaming; they tell me a story. Even the gorgeous view that has widened with every cedar tree we cut down sets my mind off, wondering who might have stood here in this very spot a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. Did they see what I see? Did their hearts rise? Were they overcome by a fierce wish to protect this land as I am? A few things they wouldn’t have seen a thousand years ago are the thick overgrowth of Ashe juniper and the barbed wire. Neither is native. But for better or worse, each has had their chapter in this land’s history. They’ve left a mark on its soul.

As for the use of the wire, what to do with it came to me the way a story does, in a sudden image. But instead of a character or a situation, I saw a wreath, studded with flowers. Weeks before, without knowing what I might do with them, I’d bought some vintage looking, painted metal flowers, and on the day I conceived the idea, David and Chris happened to be welding the roof structure onto the shipping containers David is remodeling into a house. So I took my length of wire down to them, and after David formed the hoops, Chris welded them in place, then I brought my found treasure home, wired on the flowers, and twined a garland made from finer wire through the hoop. The entire project took an afternoon and now on the door of my garden shed hangs a reminder of that old fence.

I look at it and wonder about the man who built it, his purpose for doing so, whether his plan came to fruition ... what happened to him and his family. Sometimes, when I sit on my porch steps, staring off into the blue distance, I can hear the voices of the ones who were here before me, whispering, telling their stories, weaving them from the lively, determined wind, and I lose myself in the sound.