Originally Posted 12/30/09 on Save the Farm Blog:
As part of my campaign to hold on to our way of life, I am doing something I haven't done in a very, very long time. I am teaching writing workshops in my home.
A wonderful teacher and friend, Eunice Scarfe, encouraged me to take this step.
"What's your place like?" she asked. I answered without hesitation, "Cozy and warm." Eunice smiled and nodded, and a new purpose for Pink Tractor Farm was born.
Registration for the sessions beginning in January has been light so far. I tried leaving small piles of flyers around town, but apparently nobody allows that any more.
A notice posted on a bulletin board or in a window was the best I could manage. I did those postings with my grandkids so it was worthwhile whether anybody sees them or not.
I must now decide whether or not to go with small workshop groups this time out. And, if I don't do that, should I offer these workshops again at another time, perhaps a less busy season?
I do like the idea of writing and sharing in my welcoming living room. We shall see if that is meant to happen.
I am copying the text of my flyer here, in case you haven't yet seen it and would care to comment. Meanwhile, cross fingers for me if you are of a mind to do so.
WRITE FOR LIFE WORKSHOPS
And So We Begin….
A gathering of women writing and sharing.
Telling stories from our lives, then and now.
Circling in to a community of words and feelings.
Given voice in stories deserving to be told.
We come together in January when it can be dark
and we will create light.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Let Our Lights Shine
Originally Posted 12/30/09 on Save the Farm blog:
I always go overboard with decorations at holiday time. Lights on the tree, lights bordering the windows, even lights on the pink tractor.
The lights shine especially bright this year because, against all odds, we are still in our house at Pink Tractor Farm.
The tussle with the bank goes on. We continue our trek through the labyrinth of this administration's Making Home Affordable Program which may or may not reduce our mortgage payment to manageable size. We have read the reports of how this program has actually benefited relatively few Americans for the long term so far. Still, we trek on.
In the meantime, the holidays were bright. Family and friends were with us. Our wonderful grandchildren stayed for nearly a week and will be back soon. We laughed and ate too much and prayed. We missed those who were absent and prayed for them also.
On the day after Christmas, Alice celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday, and Jonathan cooked!
It is a small miracle, or perhaps a large one, that we are still here in our cozy yellow house. We celebrate that miracle and wish that each and every one of you were here to celebrate with us.
Happy Holidays. Blessed New Year. Keep shining.
I always go overboard with decorations at holiday time. Lights on the tree, lights bordering the windows, even lights on the pink tractor.
The lights shine especially bright this year because, against all odds, we are still in our house at Pink Tractor Farm.
The tussle with the bank goes on. We continue our trek through the labyrinth of this administration's Making Home Affordable Program which may or may not reduce our mortgage payment to manageable size. We have read the reports of how this program has actually benefited relatively few Americans for the long term so far. Still, we trek on.
In the meantime, the holidays were bright. Family and friends were with us. Our wonderful grandchildren stayed for nearly a week and will be back soon. We laughed and ate too much and prayed. We missed those who were absent and prayed for them also.
On the day after Christmas, Alice celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday, and Jonathan cooked!
It is a small miracle, or perhaps a large one, that we are still here in our cozy yellow house. We celebrate that miracle and wish that each and every one of you were here to celebrate with us.
Happy Holidays. Blessed New Year. Keep shining.
Signs
Originally Posted 9/30/09 on Save the Farm blog:
The Pink Tractor Farm sign was fashioned by a fine carver out of fir fit to withstand the wildest Pacific Northwest storms. I was pleased as punch on the day several years ago when my husband Jonathan bolted it to our front fence.
The sign weathered nobly and became more natural to the place every year as if it had sprung from the soil, a cousin to the cherry, apple and pear trees nearby.
Our carver friend, Jonathan, myself, our island neighbors who drove past that sign so often they took it for granted as part of the landscape. None of us anticipated the storm so devastating it howled down our sturdy fir marker and replaced it with another made of base metal that said For Sale.
I hated that sign, tried not to see it when I turned into our driveway, told myself it could not possibly be real.
Then two things happened – an afternoon at the bank and a roofer sneaking down our driveway. I’ve told those stories already. They led to this one.
Somewhere deep inside me my own storm rose. It grew in fury and burst forth, toppling that flimsy metal sign into the ditch. Realtors, curiosity seekers, buyers scrambling for a steal of a deal were swept away in this tempest and have not yet returned.
The Pink Tractor Farm sign is back on our front fence. Jonathan and our grandchildren put it there a few Sundays ago. We have no idea how long fate will allow our sign to reign over our orchard pasture. We only know that is where it belongs.
The Pink Tractor Farm sign was fashioned by a fine carver out of fir fit to withstand the wildest Pacific Northwest storms. I was pleased as punch on the day several years ago when my husband Jonathan bolted it to our front fence.
The sign weathered nobly and became more natural to the place every year as if it had sprung from the soil, a cousin to the cherry, apple and pear trees nearby.
Our carver friend, Jonathan, myself, our island neighbors who drove past that sign so often they took it for granted as part of the landscape. None of us anticipated the storm so devastating it howled down our sturdy fir marker and replaced it with another made of base metal that said For Sale.
I hated that sign, tried not to see it when I turned into our driveway, told myself it could not possibly be real.
Then two things happened – an afternoon at the bank and a roofer sneaking down our driveway. I’ve told those stories already. They led to this one.
Somewhere deep inside me my own storm rose. It grew in fury and burst forth, toppling that flimsy metal sign into the ditch. Realtors, curiosity seekers, buyers scrambling for a steal of a deal were swept away in this tempest and have not yet returned.
The Pink Tractor Farm sign is back on our front fence. Jonathan and our grandchildren put it there a few Sundays ago. We have no idea how long fate will allow our sign to reign over our orchard pasture. We only know that is where it belongs.
Fear and Anger
Originally Posted 9/9/09 to Save the Farm blog:
Long ago, I was a community organizer working with mothers on public assistance. The plight of these women and their children was dire. Everywhere they turned, the circumstances of their lives conspired to hold them down. Their only hope was to rise up against the system and demand what was rightfully their due under the law. They were terrified of doing that. They understood that, if they did fight for themselves, they could end up worse off than they already were.
My job was to find potential leaders among those women and guide them toward becoming more angry than they were afraid. My job was to stand by them as they guided other mothers to do the same, to become more angry than they were afraid. In the process of all of that becoming, those women discovered their personal and collective power, and I discovered some of that for myself also.
But, like all of us tend to do sometimes, after a while I forgot what I had learned. Consequently, six weeks ago, when my husband Jonathan lost his job and we knew that without his income we would not be able to afford our high monthly mortgage payment, I was afraid. I prayed. I grappled for scraps of hope. I grew more desperate every day. I concluded that we would have to sell our home.
Nine years ago, we bought this house and five acres on Vashon Island in the middle of Washington State’s Puget Sound and moved here from New York City. The transition was difficult, and it has taken me just about all of this time to think of myself as living here instead of back there in the city I loved more than any place I had ever been in my life, except maybe Paris.
I valued our island farm and life so little that I even gave it up once to move to Seattle on the mainland. Eight months later, we admitted what a mistake that was and moved back. The people we had sold the farm to disliked island life so much that they sold the place back to us. Unfortunately, the bank wasn’t quite as cooperative. Our new mortgage payment would be twice what it had been before we left the island.
Two months after our return, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next year and a half was consumed by my struggle to survive that diagnosis. Thirteen surgical procedures, three of those on the same day, but no chemotherapy or radiation, so I actually felt rather lucky. Especially because, through all of it, I was in our yellow house on Pink Tractor Farm, a blessed sanctuary if there ever was one.
I was still healing from the final surgical procedure and still exhausted when Jonathan was laid off from the job he had devoted himself to and loved for our entire nine years in the Pacific Northwest. Then, suddenly, the farm was for sale in the worst housing market anyone around here can remember, and we were camped out at our son and daughter in law’s house on the mainland while strangers tramped through the rooms where we had lived our life.
All of that time, I was afraid. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house for enough to give us even a remote chance of buying another someday. I was also afraid of how it would feel if we did sell the house and those tramping strangers took up residence where I now understood that we belong.
I was afraid, but I had not yet become angry. That happened three days ago.
We were back in the yellow house for a few days with our grandchildren doing our best to behave as if this were a normal Labor Day weekend on the farm. My granddaughter and I were preparing to make applesauce out of fruit from the trees in our front pasture while my grandson played with the toys he was rediscovering after our month-long absence from what both kids think of and love as their second home.
“Grandma, somebody’s in the back yard,” my granddaughter said, sounding anxious.
I opened the door to discover a man I had never seen before headed down our driveway from the truck he’d parked in front of our garage. He looked startled to see me and took a step backward toward his vehicle. “Didn’t the realtor call you?” he asked.
No one had called. No one had told me that this guy, who turned out to be a roofer, would be coming to climb up onto our house looking for a reason to drive our already rock bottom selling price even further downward.
I began to tremble inside, but I would not recognize until sometime later that this trembling was the deep down seismic beginning of an eruption. In the meantime, my granddaughter and I milled apples into sauce that she decided should be tarter than my usual recipe. My grandson constructed one of his wonderful concoctions out of a building set he had forgotten he owned.
Jonathan would not come home till hours later from the job where he works now as a carpenter among men a third his age. He would take aspirin for his aching knees while I told the story of the guy with the truck who obviously believed we would not be home while he trespassed across our roof.
Somewhere between the beginning and the end of that telling, I knew that we were not ready to give our home to people who had no respect, much less reverence, for the sorrow we were suffering or the loss we faced. Somewhere in there, I recognized that we had inside us what it would take for at least one more battle to save the farm. Somewhere in there, I became more angry than I was afraid.
Long ago, I was a community organizer working with mothers on public assistance. The plight of these women and their children was dire. Everywhere they turned, the circumstances of their lives conspired to hold them down. Their only hope was to rise up against the system and demand what was rightfully their due under the law. They were terrified of doing that. They understood that, if they did fight for themselves, they could end up worse off than they already were.
My job was to find potential leaders among those women and guide them toward becoming more angry than they were afraid. My job was to stand by them as they guided other mothers to do the same, to become more angry than they were afraid. In the process of all of that becoming, those women discovered their personal and collective power, and I discovered some of that for myself also.
But, like all of us tend to do sometimes, after a while I forgot what I had learned. Consequently, six weeks ago, when my husband Jonathan lost his job and we knew that without his income we would not be able to afford our high monthly mortgage payment, I was afraid. I prayed. I grappled for scraps of hope. I grew more desperate every day. I concluded that we would have to sell our home.
Nine years ago, we bought this house and five acres on Vashon Island in the middle of Washington State’s Puget Sound and moved here from New York City. The transition was difficult, and it has taken me just about all of this time to think of myself as living here instead of back there in the city I loved more than any place I had ever been in my life, except maybe Paris.
I valued our island farm and life so little that I even gave it up once to move to Seattle on the mainland. Eight months later, we admitted what a mistake that was and moved back. The people we had sold the farm to disliked island life so much that they sold the place back to us. Unfortunately, the bank wasn’t quite as cooperative. Our new mortgage payment would be twice what it had been before we left the island.
Two months after our return, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next year and a half was consumed by my struggle to survive that diagnosis. Thirteen surgical procedures, three of those on the same day, but no chemotherapy or radiation, so I actually felt rather lucky. Especially because, through all of it, I was in our yellow house on Pink Tractor Farm, a blessed sanctuary if there ever was one.
I was still healing from the final surgical procedure and still exhausted when Jonathan was laid off from the job he had devoted himself to and loved for our entire nine years in the Pacific Northwest. Then, suddenly, the farm was for sale in the worst housing market anyone around here can remember, and we were camped out at our son and daughter in law’s house on the mainland while strangers tramped through the rooms where we had lived our life.
All of that time, I was afraid. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house. I was afraid of what would happen if we didn’t sell the house for enough to give us even a remote chance of buying another someday. I was also afraid of how it would feel if we did sell the house and those tramping strangers took up residence where I now understood that we belong.
I was afraid, but I had not yet become angry. That happened three days ago.
We were back in the yellow house for a few days with our grandchildren doing our best to behave as if this were a normal Labor Day weekend on the farm. My granddaughter and I were preparing to make applesauce out of fruit from the trees in our front pasture while my grandson played with the toys he was rediscovering after our month-long absence from what both kids think of and love as their second home.
“Grandma, somebody’s in the back yard,” my granddaughter said, sounding anxious.
I opened the door to discover a man I had never seen before headed down our driveway from the truck he’d parked in front of our garage. He looked startled to see me and took a step backward toward his vehicle. “Didn’t the realtor call you?” he asked.
No one had called. No one had told me that this guy, who turned out to be a roofer, would be coming to climb up onto our house looking for a reason to drive our already rock bottom selling price even further downward.
I began to tremble inside, but I would not recognize until sometime later that this trembling was the deep down seismic beginning of an eruption. In the meantime, my granddaughter and I milled apples into sauce that she decided should be tarter than my usual recipe. My grandson constructed one of his wonderful concoctions out of a building set he had forgotten he owned.
Jonathan would not come home till hours later from the job where he works now as a carpenter among men a third his age. He would take aspirin for his aching knees while I told the story of the guy with the truck who obviously believed we would not be home while he trespassed across our roof.
Somewhere between the beginning and the end of that telling, I knew that we were not ready to give our home to people who had no respect, much less reverence, for the sorrow we were suffering or the loss we faced. Somewhere in there, I recognized that we had inside us what it would take for at least one more battle to save the farm. Somewhere in there, I became more angry than I was afraid.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Good News Squared
It all happened the middle week of March. That Wednesday, we signed closing papers for a new mortgage on Pink Tractor Farm with an affordable monthly payment. The good bank had saved us from the bad bank. A dramatic story really.
At the end of January, I had walked into our island branch of US Bank clutching the fat, green file that documented months of maneuvers on my part. All of my maneuvering appeared to have arrived at no good end. Our home would be lost and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I was there that day for advice from Cheryl the branch manager or maybe just for solace because I believed we were fresh out of options. Cheryl and her husband Chris had been wise and kind during my cancer ordeal, and I was in need of wisdom and kindness yet again.
Cheryl recognized my proximity to despair. She reached across the desk and took my hands in hers. “You won’t lose your home,” she said. “We won’t let that happen.”
Six weeks later, with a lot of relentless determination on her part in between, those words and Cheryl proved to be absolutely true. The five acres of Pink Tractor Farm were firm under our feet once more.
As I said, that was Wednesday. Two days later, I was still stunned that months of siege could be so suddenly over, on the home front at least. I went for my Friday morning walk around the beautiful two miles of what we Vashon Islanders call the Burton Loop. It was a brisk day but sunny. Carla walked with me, and we chatted about how Jonathan was at a breakfast job interview.
There’d been many interviews over the previous seven and a half months, and the result was generally the same. They were favorably impressed, but times were tough so they weren’t hiring. Meanwhile, Jonathan had taken a job that was out of his field and not well compensated but a blessing nonetheless.
Carla invited me for another circle of the Loop, but I was tired from the excitement of the week so I declined. I was back at the parking lot in my red Wrangler when my cell phone rang. Jonathan had been offered the position he was interviewing for, and he had accepted the offer.
This was the kind of job I had hoped and prayed he would find. Work that would satisfy his productive soul and challenge him the way he thrives on being challenged. I shouted rather loudly several times until I realized that people were looking my way, wondering if rescue was in order.
I was on the road driving toward home when I spotted Carla returning from her second lap. I pulled the Jeep up next to her and rolled the window down. “Jonathan got the job,” I said, still shouting a little.
I only know Carla from our once weekly talks as we walk, but she shared my elation all the same smiling, cheering and jumping up and down. I invite you to join in that joy. Feel free to smile, cheer and jump up and down.. as I am for sure doing.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Go - Dream - Imagine
My precious grandchildren gave me a coffee mug for Christmas that reads: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” – a quote from Thoreau.
My granddaughter Maya saw me looking at that mug one day when we were Christmas shopping. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said.
What I didn’t say was that I feel as if I’ve gone after my dreams enough times already, imagined my goals and even achieved them enough times already, and I am more than a little tired.
Today I press on toward a new year with the mug here to remind me that, tired or not, I am challenged by circumstance to go and imagine and maybe even achieve yet again.
You haven’t heard from me for a long time because I have been rather discouraged by those circumstances I mentioned. I’ve tried to write to you before this, perky pieces about hope and perseverance, but they didn’t ring true so I never sent them.
On the other hand, persisting somehow, is the Buddha quote I so often press on others, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Those words fly back at me now as I gather courage to get up again. There are a couple of projects on my plate that require this rising to the occasion.
First a book, written out of the darkness of my cancer experience, miraculously turning into pages filled with light. My agent likes what I've done so far, and that is a good beginning step. The title is Focusing on the Angels: A Story of Struggle Told from the Bright Side of the Road.
Next are the personal appearances necessary to convince publishers I can market this book for them. Five booked so far, and I’ve hired a publicist to help me come up with more.
We will target writers’ groups, in 2010 at least, with a new seminar titled “The Do It Anyway Guide to Getting Published: Adopting an Attitude of Abundance in a Time of Scarcity”. Feel free to suggest possible venues if you can think of any.
Thus… I am standing again, for whichever numbered time this may be, praying to proceed confidently, improvising the dream as I go.
It occurs to me that many of you are doing the same as we enter the unknown territory of this particular new year. I wish us all Godspeed in the direction of our dreams.
My granddaughter Maya saw me looking at that mug one day when we were Christmas shopping. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said.
What I didn’t say was that I feel as if I’ve gone after my dreams enough times already, imagined my goals and even achieved them enough times already, and I am more than a little tired.
Today I press on toward a new year with the mug here to remind me that, tired or not, I am challenged by circumstance to go and imagine and maybe even achieve yet again.
You haven’t heard from me for a long time because I have been rather discouraged by those circumstances I mentioned. I’ve tried to write to you before this, perky pieces about hope and perseverance, but they didn’t ring true so I never sent them.
On the other hand, persisting somehow, is the Buddha quote I so often press on others, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Those words fly back at me now as I gather courage to get up again. There are a couple of projects on my plate that require this rising to the occasion.
First a book, written out of the darkness of my cancer experience, miraculously turning into pages filled with light. My agent likes what I've done so far, and that is a good beginning step. The title is Focusing on the Angels: A Story of Struggle Told from the Bright Side of the Road.
Next are the personal appearances necessary to convince publishers I can market this book for them. Five booked so far, and I’ve hired a publicist to help me come up with more.
We will target writers’ groups, in 2010 at least, with a new seminar titled “The Do It Anyway Guide to Getting Published: Adopting an Attitude of Abundance in a Time of Scarcity”. Feel free to suggest possible venues if you can think of any.
Thus… I am standing again, for whichever numbered time this may be, praying to proceed confidently, improvising the dream as I go.
It occurs to me that many of you are doing the same as we enter the unknown territory of this particular new year. I wish us all Godspeed in the direction of our dreams.
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