Back When I Was a Creator of Fantasy

Many, many years ago, my father made me a Spanish hacienda-style dollhouse. At that time, miniatures were very popular and everyone in my family had either a dollhouse or a model train set. My grandmother's was a Swiss chalet. My sister's was southern-style with tall columns on the porch. My mom decorated shadow boxes, rather than a full dollhouse, with colonial-style room settings. My preteen self enjoyed the south-western aesthetic - earthy pastels, terracotta pottery, geometric rugs, bleached cow skulls - so the hacienda was perfect. I lovingly painted each room the perfect color and constructed a little kiva fireplace all by myself. I probably even made some furniture for it out of balsa wood, but I can't remember. At that age, I lost interest in things rather quickly. I gave up on furnishing the dollhouse and it sat untouched for I don't know how long. Then, one unremarkable day, I was struck by inspiration and the hacienda became a fantasy realm filled with fairies, gnomes, dark hooded figures, mermaids, and other mystical creatures.

My hacienda fantasy dollhouse.

By my mid-teens I was deep into fantasy and my forgotten dollhouse was the perfect place to create my own magical world. The entrance hall and living room was the realm of the fairies - delicate, handcrafted felt creatures with butterfly wings made of painted feathers that were easy to find at the local craft stores at the time. All the figures were, in fact, handmade by me of felt. Felt was cheap, easy to get, didn't ravel when cut, and was very easy to hand sew. The white unicorn liked to hang out in the fairies' living room when it wasn't just chilling on the front porch.

Where the fairies are.

The kitchen was where the dark hooded figures gathered to perform rituals. They did more conjuring than cooking in there so they never bothered with getting any major appliances. The dark unicorn enjoyed spending time with them.

Not sure what they were up to but none of the other residents seemed concerned.

Upstairs, the gnomes took up residence in one of the bedrooms. Theirs was a wilder setting, closer to nature, as they liked it. There was even a small stream running though that was likely a leak from the adjacent bathroom.

The yellow cootie was not a pest, it was a pet.

The gnomes' favorite food was acorns. While none actually grew in the house, they would magically appear in the fairies' living room. The gnomes would take turns venturing to the first floor to collect them. 

Just stay out of the fairies' way and you'll be fine.

The mermaids lived in the bathroom, as should be expected. They are the only residents with actual faces. Markers don't do precision work on felt, so I decided to keep the rest of my little creations expressionless.

The water bill was huge at this house.

The second bedroom was an arid place filled with sand and warm stones. A serpent moved in with its hoard of priceless (plastic) jewels. It never troubled anyone else in the house as long as they didn't get too curious about its treasure.

Careful little fairy! Look but don't touch.

There was a slight infestation of tiny red bears. They may have come from under the stairs but no one knew for sure. They only lurked and watched so all the residents decided it was easiest to just let them be.

Like an endless game of hide and seek.

I remember having such fun poring over the walls, shelves, and bins in craft stores searching for the perfect thing that would make my fantasy hacienda more complete. I intended to collect old bark from my dad's sawmill to cover the roof. I don't remember what my plan was for the siding. As usual, I lost interest. This time, the dollhouse sat for 30-ish years gathering dust. It's still at my parents' house. I was there this week. I don't think I'll revisit the old hacienda but it did make me wonder when I stopped creating things. I do some knitting and sewing now and then, but nothing like when I was a teen. Maybe the practicality of adulthood took over. I need to see about changing that.

The Night Before Christmas

Every year we would go to Grandma's for Christmas Eve.  There was no river to cross but our trip did take us past the family sawmill and up the hill through the woods to Grandma's house.  I was told it was tradition for Santa to decorate the Christmas tree as well as bringing presents.  That was not the tradition at home, only at Grandma's, but I never really saw a problem with that.  When we arrived, the door to the living room would be closed tight in waiting for Santa to come and deck it out.  As the adults finished up getting dinner onto the table, my sister and I would lay flat on the floor trying to see through the thin crack under the door.

I never remember there being a specific main course we would have every Christmas eve dinner.  There was turkey or maybe chicken and probably a ham a year or two.  There was sometimes fish, though I never really got the hang of fish until I was older.  There might have even been a lasagna one year if it struck Grandma's fancy.  In later years, when we had all aged out of Santa we even had picnics with potato salad and hotdog cooked in the fireplace.  But when we were little the dinner did not really matter.  The food was always good but that part of the night was for the adults. 

Grandpa would sit at the head of the table and my dad would sit at the foot and the rest of us would pack in around the sides.  Sometimes it was just the seven of us – my grandparents, parents, sister, brother and me.  Other times my aunt and uncle and two cousins were there too.  We kids would eat quickly and wait impatiently as the grownups chatted and laughed and seemed to ignore the torture of our wait.

Eventually, the adults must have taken as much fidgeting and whining as they could stand.  Grandma would start clearing the table and my siblings and cousins and I would take off like a stampeding herd, racing hand and foot up the ugly green-carpeted stairs to my grandparents' bedroom.  We would clamor for a good spot on Grandma's hope chest with its faux leopard skin drape that sat under the large window.  There we would fall silent, pressing our ears and foreheads against the glass to wait for the first sound and perhaps even a sight of Santa or his team.  We clung to each other in giddiness, giggling in quiet, breathless gasps of anticipation.  I remember my oldest cousin, far too old to actually believe anymore, encouraging us to stay quiet and listen hard.  Santa was on his way.

And then we would hear it, faint at first and then rising to a glorious crescendo.  Sleigh bells!  He was coming!  He was here!  Santa had come and right at that very moment he was leaving presents for us all just downstairs.  It must have been an eternity for us to wait until we heard the bells again this time fading into the night, signaling the end to Santa's work there.

One of the adults probably called us back downstairs at that point but the sound of our excitement and trampling feet on the stairs would drown out even the loudest shouts.  At the bottom of the stairs the door to the living room stood open waiting for us.  Inside the room was aglow with warm light and all the beauty of the holiday.  The sheer awe of it was almost indescribably.  Grandma's plain old living room had been transformed.  The tree glistened with white lights, glass icicles, glittered wooden animals and birdhouses, strings of tinsel, and little silver foil cups each with Hershey's kiss inside.  Fresh green boughs covered the mantle glittering with more lights and dotted with red poinsettias.  On the table in the corner, two green ceramic trees with multicolored lights stood guard on either side of the hand carved wooden nativity that glowed from its own light within.  Best of all were the piles of presents, freshly delivered, spread around the base of the tree, sometimes stretching all the way to the arm chair near the television.  It was a truly amazing and delightful sight to behold.  And to think, Santa had done it all in mere moments as we waited breathlessly in the room above.

Of course, the truth was that Grandma had spent the day, maybe even more, putting up the tree and decorating before starting on dinner for that night.  She would bake several dozen kinds of cookies in the days leading up to Christmas too.  She must have been a very busy lady.  And all her work was not finished when she shut the door on the decorated living room and served up a wonderful meal.  Some time along the way I learned that after we had gone upstairs after dinner Grandma would sneak through a small door from the cellar way into the living room and would plug in the lights that encircled the tree and ran across the mantle.  Then she would descend into the basement, climb outside through the Bilco doors and run around the house ringing sleigh bells.  She would then sneak back in and be quietly waiting with the other adults as we thundered down the stairs to see what Santa had brought.  I don't know how she did it some winters with the ice and snow built up on the doors but she did – every year, until somehow we had stopped believing in Santa, of course. 

Several years ago when we had gathered at Grandma's for Christmas Eve dinner again, Grandma decided to revive the old tradition.  As we sat around the table over desserts, yes plural, and coffee and tea, lingering far longer than anyone in the under-ten set could have stood, she sneaked outside and ran around the house with her bells.  She made sure to knock on the window behind my father just to make sure we knew that it was her instead of Santa.  It always was her and it's almost better that way, believing in a real person and not an elfish saint.  Yet, to this day I'm still convince that one Christmas Eve I caught a glimpse of a reindeer hoof briefly dipping below the edge of the roof.  It was magic.  

Merry Christmas!

Putting it all on the Line

I think this past weekend may have been the last time I get to hang laundry outside.  There may be another mild, sunny day with a nice breeze this fall but the days just aren’t long enough anymore to get the clothes fully dry.  I supposed I can keep hanging out laundry until the snow flies but I'm not that hardcore.  My grandmother told me how much she hated hanging out clothes in the winter. Her fingers would get so cold.  Sometimes the corners of the sheets would freeze to the line and tear when she tried to take them down.  She did say it was kind of neat to see the frozen clothes standing up on their own next to the wood stove.  When they thawed they would be completely dry.  I still don’t really understand how that all worked but I’m a historian, not a scientist.

I really like the way clothes smell when they dry outside.  There’s a freshness to them that can never be captured by dryer sheet companies no matter how hard they try.  I also like the way the fabric feels after a day flipping about in the wind.  Sure, a drying can fluff up your towels just fine but it’s just not the same.  I’m not so fond of birds that decide to sit on the line, especially during berry season but I suppose a spot to rewash is a small price to pay.  One of the first things we added to the back yard when we bought our house was a clothes line.  I almost feel sad that I won’t be using it again regularly until spring.

I will finish up these insignificant ramblings with a little poem I learned from my grandmother.

I love you. I love you. I love you almighty.

I wish your pajamas were next to my nightie.

Now don’t get excited and don’t get all red.

I mean on the clothesline, not in the bed.

Tales of Gardens Past

I was never very outdoors-y when I was kid.  I remember my mother yelling at me one summer to go outside and get some fresh air instead of staying inside reading.  So, I took A Tale of Two Cities with me out the window onto the porch roof.  Then she yelled at me for being on the roof so I had to come back inside.  I never did finish reading the book.  But, for some reason, once I got married and settled into a garage apartment with some land, it made sense to plant a garden.

Our first garden was not particularly impressive.  I had been working at a drug store while my husband was finishing college.  When the seed packets on the small display at the end of the seasonal aisle went on sale for ten cents each, I bought up a bunch of them.  We got a little bit of this and a little bit of that from the garden that year.  I remember picking four, rather pathetic ears of corn and being so excited that they had grown.  Corn is not known for growing well in the rocky soil of the Adirondacks.  Just that we had gotten those few ears to grow was enough to keep me going.

Our first garden on the mountain

The aforementioned corn

We learned really quickly that we had to plant vegetables that fit the nature of the season on the mountain.  Things like peas that could be planted as soon as the ground thawed did well as long as we got varieties that could handle the heat too.  The weather there went from freezing to full summer within a couple of weeks.  Spinach never worked.  It would bolt before it was big enough to harvest.  Swiss chard, however, grew beautifully.  Bright lights chard is still a household favorite.

Our last garden on the mountain

Bright lights rainbow chard

When we got chickens, the garden really perked up. (I’ve got plenty of chicken stories to share later sometime along the way.)  It’s amazing how much their coop cleanings added to the soil.  Chloe, our house bunny, contributed too.  Up north, a compost pile can sit for a whole season without breaking down.  The added manure really helped everything digest.  After just a few years we had such a productive garden that we had to buy a chest freezer for everything harvested.  And that was on top of all the zucchini, tomatoes, and chard we gave away to friends and family.

Our first batch of chickens on their first day in the new coop

Chloe the house bunny

In a way, even then, we were following the Shaker example.  The Shakers kept notes about the weather and growing conditions and what plants grew best.  We did the same thing.  My husband had a weather station and he recorded daily temperature and rainfall.  I’ve got a notebook filled with what varieties of vegetables grew each season and how well.

We had a pretty good thing going up on the mountain but that the economy took a dive and jobs dried up.  One thing led to another and in 2011 we moved to the Southern Tier of New York.  The first house we rented had a nice back yard and we were able to plant a garden.  It also had a well-established family of woodchucks. 

Our Southern Tier garden

Woodchucks hanging out by the shed

The next house we moved into did not have space for a garden but it was close enough to my in-laws’ house that we got to use a couple of their raised beds.  That kept my hands in the soil but it didn’t really feel like gardening.  This summer I planted a few raised beds outside of the museum where I work as part of an exhibit on local agriculture.  It was a fun project but I am really looking forward to having a real garden again.  I remember spending so many peaceful hours working over the same plot of land, weeding, checking for pests, looking for the first signs of vegetables.  I want that again.