Carpentry for Women part II: who we are

This is part two of the rather absurdly lengthy six-part series about my carpentry for women class at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont. If you missed part I: Arriving, you’ll find it here.

There are nine of us in the class. In no particular order, we are:

• Jory, a school social worker from Vermont, a hiker and gardener, mother of a college-aged daughter.
• Ilona, a recent Smith graduate, former ultimate Frisbee player, student of an international boarding school, and classical guitarist, working now in an office job in the green economy in Washington DC.
• Donna, a nurse from Central Massachusetts, a motorcyclist, who dreams of building a home closer to her two grown sons.
• Alexis, a middle school art teacher and ceramicist who recently purchased five wooded acres of land in New Hampshire, where she plans to build her own timber-framed strawbale house.
• Theresa, a former financial executive from New Jersey, a single mother whose children have grown. The day after her youngest child got a job, she quit her corporate job working for real estate developers, to move to Philadelphia where she will study urban planning.
• Sarabel, a free-spirited employee of the Farm School in Western Massachusetts, a nonprofit that provides overnight, back-to-the-land experiences for children.
• Cindy, a retired diplomat of the United Nations, now splitting her time between Vermont and South Africa.
• Sasha, quiet, a 30-ish newlywed who works with youth, who is moving to a new city the day that class ends, and starting a new job two days later.

Then there is me: mother of two, wife of eleven years, semi-professional writer, striving to do more for myself.

I count the number of students who appear over 35, and under 30. The class seems split evenly — something that brings me no small relief.

We have two instructors, both professional women carpenters. Patti drives a silver Ford pick-up truck, is partial to Long Trail beer, and carries a guitar in a case emblazoned with bumper stickers, one of which says “Practice conscious acts of solidarity and organized resistance.” In her spare time, she rides motorcycles, plays folk festivals, has a radio show celebrating women’s music. She wears a scruffy T-shirt and a worn Yestermorrow baseball cap over her short hair. She stretches her muscled legs in front of her as she describes the 11-year process of building her own home.  At one point during the week, she will tell us she does, in fact, own both an iron and a blowdryer — both are in her wood shop, used exclusively for carpentry.

Lizabeth — there is no “E,” though I will spend the week stumbling over that — is direct and wry, a former Peace Corps volunteer, simultaneously petite and  rugged. Her long hair swept up casually, and she wears a T-shirt that says, “Don’t Panic: Go Organic.”  Lizabeth explains why she became a carpenter in a single, short sentence: “because my dad was a sexist.”

The house that Ali built

More thoughts on caprentry…and on Vermont…and on my sunburned shoulders…and on my blisters…and on power tools…and on the kind of woman that chooses to spend a week’s vacation in the woods, swinging a hammer and cursing like a sailor. More of all of that to come. For the moment, though, I offer this photo, of a not-quite-complete shed that I helped build — me! —  and that was built entirely by people without a Y chromosome.

Great week, folks. Great, amazing, exhausting, badass kind of week.

Women made this. I made this.

Just one sentence

You know how sometimes you fall behind? Like, maybe there’s something you need to do. I dunno, something small, an it’ll-take-ten-minutes sort of thing?  Could involve updating something, a blog, maybe. Something. And yet you don’t do it? There’s no reason, and you’ve never had trouble before. You just don’t ever seem to get to it? Ever?

It’s not that there’s nothing to say. There might be plenty to say. Of course there’s plenty to say; there’s always something to say. There’s good stuff, heartbreaking stuff, fungus, polenta, all of it. And you want to write about it, you do, all of it, and sometimes you even lie awake composing things in your head. But then morning comes, and you get up and somehow just don’t have it in you anymore. You look at the computer and think, “nah.”

And it gets to the point that you are looking at your computer like a dangerous object, moving around it cautiously, like if you get too close it might just explode or shoot darts into your eyeballs.

And maybe one day you go to an anusara yoga class, a place that is difficult enough to go, what with all of those open-hearted people twisting themselves into pretzels and bending themselves in ways that, I’m sorry, are just not possible. But you go, and the instructor there talks about change, and the possibility that in a single instant, you might be radically different than you were before. And you are open to that possibility, you would like to be radically different in an instant, so you try it. Blink. See? Radically different! Poof! Just like that! Except it is not true, you are still you, exactly as before, and you are still not doing the things that need to be done. And while the instructor talks about embracing radiance and rooting your feet, and sweeping your tailbone and rounding your kidneys, and curling your shoulders around your heart, and hollowing your armpits, and extending your thighs and bringing your palms together, you cease thinking, “none of this is anatomically possible,” and begin thinking, “I’ve got to do that thing! I’ve just got to do that thing!” And then all of the pretzel-like people with the right yoga clothes and open hearts sense the dark, swirling mess that is your heart and your head, and they toss you out of yoga class, right on your ass, because, let’s face it, you are nothing but an imposter. A yo-poster.

And creatures are born, and creatures die, and it rains and rains and rains and rains, until all of New England is submerged in water, and people start wondering whether perhaps we should have started that ark already. And still, you don’t sit down and do that thing.

And finally, you start thinking, “one sentence. That’s all you need to do is one tiny little sentence. Just something. Because otherwise it will be nothing. And if it is going to be nothing, you need to decide that it is nothing. Nothing can’t just happen, it needs to be a decision.”

It is time to decide. Will you do this thing, will you write something? Or are you done? Decide. Are you a man or a mouse?

You are neither, of course, but one sentence, if that’s all it is, seems possible.

So one sunny Saturday, on what might be the first sunny day of the half-gone summer, with your husband and children at the playground, you finally sit down, thinking, “one sentence. Just one. That is all.”

And you sit on your sofa, everything quiet save for the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of a clock, a cup of coffee by your side, and you take a deep breath. Then this is what you write:

The cat did not have rabies.

Downside of country living? Rabies woes

So, Merrie got bitten by a cat. We were at someone else’s house, and Merrie went into the barn, where she found a cat. Cats are furry, and despite all my warnings to the contrary, to Merrie’s mind, furry = wants to be pet. The cat sat still, tolerating the petting for a while. Then, when Merrie didn’t expect it, the cat sank its teeth into her skin.

It was a hard bite, the kind that leaves deep marks, though it didn’t appear to break skin. Maybe one puncture. But still small enough that it didn’t really bleed, or barely. So…no big deal. Right?

Still, to be safe, I asked my friend if the cat was up to date on its shots. “I think so,” she said. “It’s a neighbor’s. We just took it for a spell.”  But she was almost sure it was up to date. Really, positive. Almost positive. She would check.

(You know where this story is going, right?)

Alas, the cat was a year overdue for its rabies vaccine.

Rabies is a bad disease. It’s a viral infection of the brain, always fatal. It causes all sorts of things you’d never want to have happen: paranoia, terror, hallucination, paralysis, panic, delirium. Awful stuff. The name, rabies, is the Latin word for “madness.”

Another thing to know about rabies: once you start to show symptoms, it is always, always, too late. By the time you find out you have it, you’re as good as gone. It’s not a disease to mess around with.

And another: it’s not difficult to transmit. Even a scratch from a rabid animal can do it.

One more: the only way to know for sure if an animal has rabies or not is to euthanize it, then cut its head off and test the brain.

What I did on my summer vacation, by Ali

Okay, so summer is just begininning. But I have been traveling, with limited internet access along the way. This is why you have hear neither hide nor hair from me. (Fear not, beloved worriers: all is well).

First, we went to New York City for a handful of days. This was delightful. Stayed at the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn, which was only just being built back in the day when I called myself a Brooklynite. At the time, it seemed like a crazy idea. A Marriott? In the middle of Brooklyn? But it was lovely, well-appointed, centrally located. And filled with people who apparently didn’t think it so crazy after all.

We did all kinds of things. Dining out, the Ellis Island museum, funky little shops. At one point, we went to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, and Merrie took photos of the New York skyline with my camera:

Photo credit: Merrie

I got to visit my sister’s light-filled, Pottery-Barn-esque office:

That is my sister in the background. She is yelling at children. It turns out that light-filled, Pottery Barn-esque offices are not the place for high-energy children.

Also on the trip, I got to meet my new friend Oscar.

Oscar might need to go on a diet. He is HEAVY, dude.

(if you weren’t around in February 2008: yep, it’s real).

Merrie and I had been watching Project Runway, and we made a trip to Mood Fabrics in the fashion district, the place where designers. We also wandered through the city imagining outfits inspired by the random things that we saw — one of the tasks of Season 2 (and if you watched that season, please don’t give away the winner, for we still don’t know). Anyhow, we wound up snapping lots of photos of things, and my camera is now filled with dozens of pictures like this:

Rest in peace, dear Fishy Fishy

Let’s say you have a seven year old, and you allow this seven year old to get a fish.

Let’s say your child was elated the day you bought this fish, a bright blue betta in a little plastic container, the kind of container that might have otherwise held a $3.90 serving of fish soup from the local Chinese takeout joint. To make the fish feel at home, you purchased a little floating piece of bamboo and some pink glass stones for the tank.

Let’s say this fish was no more affectionate than your average fish, that it swam and moved its fins and ate pellets of fish food and didn’t do much else. But somehow your child adored this fish; she talked to him and cooed to him, fed him and fretted over him and loved him profoundly.

Then, let’s say it dies, and your child’s heart is broken.

Postcard from Vermont: happy spring

It’s spring, yo. Just like that, in a mere day and a half, we went from having no leaves on the trees to having great bursts of green, like powder puffs, unfolding from trees. Warmth is in such short supply in New England. Winter lasts, and it lasts, and it lasts. And then suddenly, over a weekend, everything changes. The air smells rich and earthy, songbirds chirp in cacophony, and fields and lawns — which the day before might have been dull and matted — are suddenly technicolor bright.

It does a heart good. I tell you, it does.

Earlier this winter, after everyone in this house had been sick, off and on, for weeks, reader Anna commented to me that she suspected my family and I were not getting enough vitamin D. It was the lack of sun that was making us sick, said Anna, bringing us down so we had no fight to give to the germs. I was out in the sun this weekend, feeling the warmth go through my skin, seep into my core, and I thought, she’s right. Anna was just so right.

Sun, soil, blossoms, birds, bugs, bees. It is like waking up, like spring cleaning for the soul.

Elsewhere, there is much to worry about. Such an imperfect world is ours, with our potential pandemics and our economic tumoil. But it doesn’t feel that way today, not as the kids scramble around the backyard, finding snakes that have emerged from dens to warm themselves in the sun, not as peonies push their way up through the dirt, not as lilacs and bleeding hearts prepare to open themselves to the sky, not as I load seeds and soil into the back of my car, ready to get my hands dirty.

Oh, it is good, spring is. So good. Happy warmth to you.

Kale, crochet and the hyperbolic coral reef project

Look! The universe created a story just for me! It involves many items I currently list in the category of Lovely and Worthy Things: sea life, yarn, our natural world, activism, science that I don’t-quite-understand, and skills developed through simple, frugal living. It touches on kale (one of my favorite vegetables), and encompasses the mysteries of our universe. It shows how math and science, these traditionally masculine enterprises, can be enhanced by things that are traditionally in the feminine realm, including good old fashioned domesticity.

I’m telling you: it’s like the universe gift-wrapped this story and left it on my doorstep with a big red bow.

But first: consider the kale leaf. I’m talking about curly leaf kale, with the way its edges expand, then curl playfully into ruffles. Curly leaf kale takes a form that mathematicians call hyperbolic.

Unlike most of the things that we see around us (spheres, flat surfaces) hyperbolic forms are exponential; as you move away from any point on a hyperbolic surface you get exponentially more space. Hyperbolic forms are filled with dizzying ripples, which give way to ruffles, which then curl over on one another until you have something that is wound up, beautifully, inside of itself.

Think MC Escher. Think ballerina tutus. Think kale leaves.

For most of history, nearly 2,000 years of geometry, hyperbolic forms weren’t even a twinkle in some mathematicians’ eye. In fact, mathematicians only discovered it, because mathematicians kept trying to prove a “rule” about the way the universe worked (Euclid’s fifth postulate, in case you’re curious), and they kept failing. Finally, in the early 19th century, some mathematicians (Gauss, Bolyai, Lobachevsky, if you care to know) realized that maybe there was a reason everyone kept failing. Maybe, in fact, there existed some kind of geometry where the old rules didn’t apply.

And there was.

Eating my curds and whey: making yogurt cheese

Just a quick post to say that this week, I took my homemade yogurt one step further. At the suggestion of several readers, I made yogurt cheese. It is the simplest cheese imaginable, requiring only a few steps, and no cooking, no rennet, no enzymes. Just some cheese cloth that will help separate the solid parts of yogurt from the liquid.

Yet it took me a long time to attempt yogurt cheese. Here’s why: it always seemed to involve hanging cheese cloth from something, and that is where I got stuck, always. Where, oh where would I hang cheese cloth in my house? How would I keep it safe from wandering, counter-leaping dogs, or friendly, fiesty field mice? Where do these people who hang cheese cloth live?

So this week, I simply put a few layers of cheese cloth in a strainer, plopped the whole strainer over a bowl, and put a big dollop of yogurt right in the middle. The whole contraption looked like this:

(this shot reminds me of our bed when we lived in west Africa, the gauzy mosquito net under which we slept every night. Which sounds romantic, but the truth is, when I look back on that bed, with the lizards that leapt down upon us from the ceiling, the roaches that lived beneath our mattresses, the buzzing, malaria-ridden mosquitos that invariably found their way in, leaving us with 106-degree fevers and night sweats, romance is not exactly what leaps to mind).

Then I put the whole thing in the fridge, and left if for twelve hours.

“It won’t work,” I said to myself, as I walked away from the fridge. “It’s impossible. The yogurt will drip right through, intact. I’m going to wind up with a bowl of yogurt, and a messy cheese cloth.”

But would you believe? It worked. After a while, I was left with this:

These are the curds. The watery liquid, the whey, drained away from the curds into the bowl.

Now I’m told that the whey can be used in place of liquid when making bread or muffins. I’m also told it can make fantastic lacto-fermented foods. But I did the simplest thing: I just drank it. I just couldn’t let all the good nutrition go to waste. It wasn’t terrible; it tasted like concentrated yogurt. One small cup was enough.

As for the curds? Holy healthy alternative to cream cheese, Batman! It makes a lovely spread for bagels or toast. I ate it plain, but next time, I’m going to add chives and dill, and maybe a touch o’ garlic.

Here, by the way, is the rainbow that appeared outside my kitchen window on the evening I made the yogurt cheese:

And I’m pretty sure if you make yogurt cheese, you too will have a rainbow appear outside your window. No, really. I’m almost certain of it. Happy Friday, all.

Jellyfish, yogi master penguins, and an old friend

Thanks for everybody’s kind words about my friends Janine and Foster and their amazing family. At the end of that post, I did my first-ever blog drawing, for maple syrup that supports the Peter M. Goodrich Foundation. The first name I drew was Margalit. But here’s what’s interesting: I had already decided that I would be sending Margalit some syrup. Margalit lost a friend on the same flight that Peter was on, and had commented that the hole in her heart could never be filled, “not even in a steamy sugar shack with the glorious scent of maple syrup being made.”

I can’t fill that hole in her heart, and neither will a bottle of syrup from Vermont. But still,  I knew as soon as I read her comment that I would send her a bottle, no matter what. When I drew her name, it was like confirmation from the universe that this was right.

Since I’d already made up my mind to send two drawings, I also drew another name. Emily in the Desert, uber-baker and baby shoe-maker, will get some syrup, too. Emily lives in Southern California, about as far from a sugar shack as can be, and I somehow love the idea of syrup making its way from one region to another, from barren maple trees to lush palm trees, a bridge between worlds. Someone also asked if they could purchase this syrup; it depends on how much syrup they make this year, which depends on the weather. If you can buy it, I will let you know.

Since that last post, I took a little overnight trip to Boston with the girls. We planned to do many things there, including the aquarium, the children’s museum, the science museum. But in the end, the girls loved the aquarium so much that we spent two full days hanging around there, leaving little time for anything else. The girls were utterly besotted with the fish. We sat for extremely long spells, watching wondrous sea creatures move past us. There were comic, sleepy-looking sea turtles; hulking sharks with their steely, soulless pin-point eyes; moray eels, opening and closing their mouths in a sort of hiss as they moved contrarily against the current; sting rays with fluid wings that fluttered in slow motion, like silk blowing in the wind.

Two things struck me above all else.