How to plant your heart into a place

The kitchen sink we salvaged and the tile design above I made from tile bits she had saved.

My son, now 15, playing with the hose.
Mom in front of her front door,
the place I go in the night. 

         


               
           First I see the house across the small circle drive and my heart begins to ache.  I am here to help my mother pack up and move, from this home that she built, back across the country.  I knew saying goodbye to it would be emotional but I had no idea it would be this intense.
         Next it is the smell.  Straw, earth, mother, fresh air, good cooking past.  All making a recipe of odor like no other.  It is the smell of my mothers home.  On walking into the house and smelling this smell for the first time on my last visit, I am shocked by how much I both know it and love it.  My heart fills with what seems like more blood then my chest can hold and tears rush to my eyes.
      It is night time. I am not sleeping.  I leave my son asleep and get up out of my mothers bed, quietly creep past my her asleep on the floor and go outside.  Not far away I hear coyotes singing, they are very excited.  I sit on her small front stoop just near the door, my feet on the soil, the broken down wood chips,.  I lay my hands on the soil and my heart pulls me down.  Down into the earth, the soil that my mother is in.  I can not separate it from my mother, from my memories of her.  I look up at the sky, the stars, and back to the soil and I weep.

Mom's house shortly after it was finished.
I wish I had newer photos to show what it looked likes now,
just imagine color, beauty and abundance. 

       The building of this home started more than 18 years ago but I think the idea had been in my mothers heart for most of her life.  My mother has always had many wonderful friends but she has also never afraid to leave.  My whole life she has had a pattern of searching, starting communities and than search again.  In the 70's, when I was young, she and a group of her friends bought some land outside of Milwaukee and built a building of recycled barn wood and telephone poles.  When I was 18 she left Milwaukee to tour the US and visit intentional communities.  She ended up on the west coast, where she remarried a playful quiet man, Matthew.  Way ahead of the tiny home trend they made a home together in what really was a friends backyard shed, with every inch ingenuously used to create a fully usable hone with kitchen, loft bed and living space.  In 1996 she attended a natural building symposium at one of the communities she was visiting.  Soon after she and Matthew found a co-housing community, on an island near Seattle, that was just starting and they joined in, excited to build a home together using natural building techniques.   Each family had a small section of land on the larger parcel to build a home on.  The land had been an old farm, neglected and full of blackberry brambles but also large hemlocks and cedars as well as a nice open areas.

The dutch door my mother had made in honor of Matthew

       And then my mothers sweet loving husband, Matthew, was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  They had had 10 years together before he died.  I was living in San Francisco and visited her a few months after his death.  I remember we went to a movie and afterward she cried and cried in the car as snot ran down her nose.  We went out to look at the co-housing land where they had been getting ready to build their home, staying in the old barn.  Her lot was one of 7 set in a circle on the sunny hill covered with grass.  2 of the others houses had already been started.  She was going go forward with building the home without our Matthew and would be the her own general contractor, meaning she would coordinate all the details, hiring the carpenter, electrician,  plumber etc.   An old grey carpet marked the area that would be her house.  They had planned what by american standards would be considered a small house made of straw bales.  She also planned on not borrowing money but staying on her limit budget.  Already in preparation electricity had been brought into near where he house would be and there was a pile of dirt near the buried utility box.  It was longish, almost the size of a human burial mound.  We did what we do so much of in years to come, we gardened. We planted flowers on the mound.  I remember sunflowers.
       My next visit we worked on the foundation or footing.  It was an unseasonably hot week for the puget sound area and each day after we worked we took showers in the setting sun from solar shower bags.  to this day it is one of my favorite life memories.  Showering naked out in the open, feeling the hot water wash off the days dirt and sweat as the golden sun shone on me and the cooler evening breeze brushed past. One morning my mother, I, and a teenage boy she had hired from near by, worked as fast as we could, shoveling cement into the holes in foundation blocks and around the rebar we had stuck in and bent, racing with the drying cement and the speed of the cement truck shoot.  Cutting back blackberry brambles was also huge part of the experience of this land and so the kind of clippers you had was important.   Felco's being the premium brand, my mother proudly but protectively shared hers with me and I embraced this task with glee, loving such a clear and present weed foe.  I would spend hours clipping back the huge mounds of brambles that spread over the land. While joyfully fighting back the blackberries with these clippers I found an old sink in what must have been a collapsed shed.  Even though my memory of this visit is all about the foundation I imagine we gardened. Gardens, food, flowers, earth, these are all things tied into my relationship with my mother, I can not see or feel one without the other.

Mom working on the shed she and her neighbor built all out of small pieces of scrap wood. 

          The next time I came to help much had happened to the house The walls and roof of the house were up.  Visible Post and beam.  We covered the straw bales with chicken wire, pinning it on with what we called Raberta pins (instead of Robert's pins) and then plastering it with a mud plaster that would later be covered with lime.  She had salvaged the sink I had found and it was going to be in the kitchen.  I plastered the window wells and above where the sink was to go,  adding tiles that my mother had collected and making a mosaic above it.
     Over the next years, as I had my first son, I visited my mothers home often, some times 4 times years for weeks at a time.  We Talk on the phone in between visits and  I hear all that she is doing, learning about all the people who help her.  On each visit I see the new additions, the details that we talked about coming together.  Her frugality meant each detail was been part of the puzzle.  How do we do this with very little money?  What creative way can we make this work and look nice?  Each wall and item had a history, a meaning, a story.  Using a cow water trough as a bathtub, visiting restore over and over to find cabinets, my brother building the rock wall under her south facing bay window, mill ends for the bathroom cabinet, a dutch door she saved up for and splurged on in honor of her late husband.  This carpenter who she payed and traded massages with for work for that or another carpenter who became a closer friend.  Another friend helped plaster this area, another handy person creatively used drift wood for that.  The truth window, a piece of glass in the wall, in which you could see the straw the walls were made of was made in the shape of a heart.

Behind mom and Andre is the arbor that is now
a tunnel dripping with grapes and kiwi

The sand pile that enabled me to help my mother so much in the garden. 

     When the big work of the house was done I gardened.  My son grew from baby to toddler to boy playing in the sand pile she had. She planned, we planned, We planted, she planted and planted, plants volunteered, we watered and weed and weeded.  Always there were the annual greens and vegetables but for the future she planted fruit vines, bushes and nut trees.  A plum tree volunteered.   Now for gardens to grow lush and green one of the things they need is nitrogen.   You can pay for fertilizer that has nitrogen in it or you can use a resource that most of us consider waste, and that is you can use pee.   My mother had a "chamber pot" and almost every day she took the time to mix it with water and spread it on some spot in her garden.  The grassy hill on her lot became a lush garden.  Neighbors commented on how beautiful it was and what a green thumb she had, and we laughed, really she had yellow pee. The garden was almost too lush for her to keep up with, flowers and plants almost every where.  Beautiful, wild but loved.  And on each visit I would work for hours helping her reign it in.
   And the meals, oh the food!  Visiting Mom was treat, almost everything was fresh.  She traded or bought eggs and milk from neighbors.  While we gardens, me compulsively and her in and out while my son played, she would throw together a meal with ease.  The results would compete with any of the high end restaurants I worked at in San Francisco.  Fresh rabbit and garden greens, with sweet caramelized onions and baby potatoes, dripping juicy chicken, fresh apple crisp or raspberry pie from her garden.  food so good it was it felt a waste not to lick your plate of every last bit of sauce.  Now was when I learned the true value of a garden beyond the tomatoes of my childhood.  I had had no idea fresh kale strait from the garden could be a sweet and tender thing.  For meals we sat around a little round table that she and Matthew had found on the side of the road with the words "fuck you"  carved into it.  They had sanded out the words, but she almost always covered it with fresh simple table cloth, most often blue.  Often she would invite friends over and the amount of memories I have at that table is a flood; the setting sun pouring in the front dutch door to us. Warm full heart, mother, friends, juicy meats, root beer floats, card games, my son in a high chair, then sitting with us, laughing.

The sun hut we built during her natural building workshop 

The last addition to her lot was
a second small house (room )
designed by a friend of hers to be small, easy and affordable.

        My mother was at this point my best friend, we could talk and talk to each for hours.  About our own lives, about what other were doing, about what we were learning.  An amazing woman far beyond building this house and  a life long learner, my mother was always reading, sharing ideas and books with me and taking me to visit interesting places. Permaculture, nonviolent communication, whole systems thinking, all these concepts I learned from or because of her.  One year we came for a natural building workshop she organized and built a small 12x12 sun hut, really a nice extra bedroom behind her house.  We created it our of cob, straw bale and light straw clay and wattle and dob, each wall of the little house a different technique.
      Her home had a composting toilet which worked, but was not great.  It had flies at a point, was too wet at another point, and sometimes smelled a bit. Then she read and shared with me the humanure handbook.  This book changed both of our lives, for me it changed my outlook on life. Everything is a gift, even shit!  Pee is sterile and safe to use on your garden, however poop is full of pathogens and can be very dangerous.  The book outlined all the reason why we should stop compost human waste and then explained how to safely do it.  Mom got rid of the composting toilet.  Where it had been she had a friend build her a very nice box bench with a toilet seat on it and a hinge in the back so a sawdust filled bucket could go inside.  Every day or so the bucket was emptied into the compost pile rinsed and filled with fresh sawdust.  It was an extra chore but as long as we kept up with it it did not smell.  After breaking down for a year the waste mixed with her kitchen scrapes and garden clippings was now incredibly fertile compost.  Her yard grew faster and more lush.
        I moved from SF to Milwaukee in 2004 and I continued to visit but less frequently.   Flying children that can not sit on your lap is expensive.  I had my own garden and yard to work in and when I came home form trips I felt like my own life had been disrupted.  I needed time and grounding in one place to build community in the place I now was calling home and I started to question more and more the indulgence of long distance travel and its effects on our environment. I had another son.  My mother started having longer and longer visits. Sometimes spending 3 to 4 months total helping out her 3 daughters and grandchildren.
       My first son is now 15, We are all aging.  My mother is still vibrant and healthy, curious, engaged. She has a great number of friends. She walks and swims.  2 years ago she lived in the woods for 3 month as part of a wilderness immersion program.   A little before that she put her house on the market for a while and then took it off after she had no offers.  But last year I said to her "if you ever get sick or hurt, and I want to care for you and you are on the west coast and I can't afford to, I am going to be angry"  a month or 2 after that she went home and had an offer on her house.  The offer was well below what she had as an asking price a few years before but she decided to take it.
      And so here I am, visiting her and the home she built, we built, for the last time helping her get ready to leave.  The lot embodies the word abundance.  The walk way to her house is covered in an arbor that is dripping with grapes and kiwis.  The back yard plum has just finishing its rush of raining juicy fruit.  The house is as cute and earthy as ever. I can see stories which ever way I turned my head.  I have a friend who told me that sadness is change in relationship.  Now here I am touching the soil that my mother and I have not just figuratively but literally poured our bodies, souls and energy into.  I can feel my mother in this earth, this soil, this place.  I can see her in the walls, smell her in the air and I am helping her prepare to leave it all.  To utterly change our relationship to it.  I realize as I mourn the loss of this place, this home, that now I am already morning what I will mourn in years to come, the further change in our relationship as she moves on to death and I become the elder.  Like giving birth to a baby, The circle is both so beautiful and so painful.  And within the pain I feel a deep connection to all my ancestors, to all humans, all beings.  A joy in knowing I am not alone, that we all share in this pain when relationships change.

Me, my older son Andre and Moms neighbor Aren,
 now a young man who came to her good bye party. 

        Her neighbors tell me it is wise to make this move now while she can reinvigorate her friendships in the Milwaukee area and grow her community there again.  I understand this in my brain but in the midst of the goodbye I can not feel it in my heart.  Over the next few days I cry over and over again.  I cry as they take the picnic table away and I see the patio bricks my sister chipped mortar off and I laid.  I cry when the kitchen table is moved and I see the empty space where it had been.  I cry as I pick grapes to make raisins for the last time.  I cry at the utility shed,  I cry at night as I see the stars.
       I know I am really blessed, privileged to have add all this wealth, all these experiences.  I know if a family member or close friend I loved died the pain I feel right now would pale in comparison.   And yet I feel pain, longing for this change not to happen, not to leave or be separate from what I love.  And then I realize what the real gift she has given me is.  What her true legacy is.  She showed me how.  How to plant yourself in a place.  How to grow a home.  How to build friendships with people and plants and soil, earth and wall.  How to feel the love of the sun and the gift of the dirt.  The pain I feel is love.  Love, energy, work,  effort, time.  Goodbye house, good bye garden and flowers and grape vine.  Goodbye walls and floor, goodbye memory, history and place.  Thank you. Thank you mother who at moments I can almost not tell myself apart from   I will do it again,  I may do it with out you, without your body present,  but I will plant myself in a place and build and grow.  I will take the knowledge from my mother, the love from the sun, the gifts of the world.  I will ask for the support of my community and I will plant a home.