My body, my floor

My life has been absorbed by a floor the last few weeks, and to a lesser degree the last few months with planning the floor and advocating for the floor, and now, at last, the third coat of polyurethane is drying. The floor is a thousand square feet, tongue-and-groove oak, and it is in our new dojo.

My body aches as do the bodies of the other martial artists who helped. The floor is down. Did I mention this all had to be done in a hurry? In a big hurry? (See there's a lot more work to be done at the dojo.) As I write this , people are standing over the polyurethane and saying, "Hurry up and dry." Sanding was hurried and the labor force for that part of the job was small, so I rented the drum sander instead of the random orbital sander. The drum sander was faster but it made marks. Those marks are permanent. I cried all Saturday morning about those marks. I wanted the floor to be perfect. The floor is not perfect.

This is one of those blogs that I wrote and rewrote down to about a quarter of its original length, because saying the wrong thing, it could cause bad feelings. You have to be careful with expressing feelings, but you also have to make sure you don't deny feelings. Denying feelings is guaranteed to make your back and joints ache and your bowels irritable. Denying feelings can clog your arteries.

The floor work kicked my ass, as did the negotiations preceding. I tried out some metaphors to describe how I feel right now, something about being run over by a truck, something about being strapped down and dry humped by men with scratchy faces and wiry belly hair. My mom would say she'd been rode hard and put away wet. But even that folksy cliche doesn't quite sit right, because in it the horse is a victim, and I've never been a victim for more than about ten seconds.

Feelings, fortunately, are fleeting. Tomorrow I'll be rested (and can help with the other dojo work). The floor, as imperfect as it might be, is beautiful, and I look forward to attacking and defending there against all manner of imaginary opponents.

Fencing Team

There was plenty of work to do at Susanna's farm this weekend, where we were replacing the fence in the first section of the donkey pasture, nearest the driveway. The last fence had been put in in 1974 (when I was twelve), and there had been a lot of beer drinking involved, as I recall. A lot of the work involved tearing out the old fence and about half the posts (highway posts and railroad ties), which were rotten. Fortunately, Christopher had bought a post-hole driver and auger for the tractor, so we didn't have to dig the four-foot-deep post holes by hand. While others in the group were setting the wooden posts, I was cleaning up the fence line, taking loppers to the vines and small trees growing up there, then trimming with the string trimmer, and finally raking the ground out so we could have good fence-earth contact. Next came driving the T-posts two-and-a-half feet into the ground, a pair between each pair of wooden posts, and Christopher and Matt Schwartz and I finished that just as the fencing team got their first 330 foot roll of woven wire stretched. The fencing team was my brother Geo, his kid Matt, Geo's old childhood friend Todd and his beautiful twenty-year-old daughter Diane and a big dark-eyed cowboy she's intending to marry. He was even wearing a cowboy hat! Together he and Diane handled the job of attaching the fence to the T-posts with clips, using fencing tools, and somehow his white T-shirt didn't even get dirty. All us females kind of perked up after the cowboy showed up, as he put out some sort of manly electricity into the pasture air--even Sheila, who had been complaining all afternoon about her back pain was up and moving around, making conversation and smiling. The cowboy was just back from the Iraq war; he had done three tours of duty in his four-year stint. He didn't seem to be damaged, but of course you can't tell what goes on inside a person from just meeting him. His best friend over there was killed, he said; after that, he was quick to make a joke, saying he had really been more afraid of his future father-in-law, Todd, than he had been of the Iraqi insurgents and everybody laughed. We said thank you for serving our country, and thank you for helping out our donkeys.

Garlic Mustard Progress

Some generous people came to my home this Saturday to pull garlic mustard, and I'm ready to fall at their feet in gratitude. In fact, if I can quickly learn to post a photo, you'll see me more or less falling at their feet in gratitude in a black-and-white photo that darling Christopher took. We ate lunch of fresh blueberry muffins (made by world-class grammarian Norma VanRheenen, who came with chemist husband Verlan) and some Italian fruit & vegetable salad (from grant writer and fiction writer Ginab, who also brought buttery rolls). I made some deviled eggs (the favorite of my twelve-year-old nephew Matthew Campbell, which meant he convinced my brother George to join us), and also some regular fruit salad and little grilled cheese or ham and cheese sandwiches on french bread (made by me). Poet Susan Ramsey came prepared with her own bucket (she is no stranger to garlic mustard pulling), as did my mother Susanna, who has been pulling daily for hours at her own house. My father Rick, the notorious retired Kalamazoo Gazette photographer came as well. My niece Kellee Campbell, aspiring mathematician, and my brother Mike showed up during the first of two cocktail hours, and at the first one we limited ourselves to one of the bottles of wine that Ginab brought us, and we drank it mixed (for hydration) with fizzy water. Together, the whole lot of us pulled a Volkswagen sized pile of flowering garlic mustard, which is lying on a tarp, covered by another tarp. If it begins to go to seed on the ground, we have to burn it, and burning fresh g.m. is a wet mess; if the seedpods just stop forming and give up, then I'll put the lot of it on one of my compost piles. The most important thing is that because of my friends, I have a lovely natural-ish woods. Because I have the only natural-ish woods around, that means of course that the deer hang out here and eat all my wildflowers--I swear they beheaded every marsh marigold and a lot of trout lilies. I put a cage around my prairie trillium (a threatened species), so they couldn't eat that. One high point in the afternoon was encountering an eastern box turtle, a land tortoise that might live to be a hundred. Its plastron was hinged! Christopher took the aforementioned photo with an old medium format camera, and it has a vintage look---we are posed around are garlic mustard pile as though we are at a Victorian picnic, looking both relaxed and serious about our mission. Susan says, "A few period hats and we could be saving our family camp in the Adirondaks." The second cocktail hour went on and on and on into the night, and we surprised ourselves by eating all of the food and drinking all of the wine. Mission accomplished!