After some 50-odd years of wandering through life, across country and back, through more than a few careers and two short-lived marriages, I’ve planted roots in Berea, Ohio, only a few miles from the house where I grew up and where my parents still live, and where I went to college (as a music composition major, of all things). Planning my next move while extracting myself from what turned out to be a disastrous second marriage, I browsed online for a place in which to start again. I found a picture of a little yellow house built in 1875, 100 years before my high school graduation, and I immediately fell in love. When I researched further, I found that it is exactly next door to an 1840 house that I had been a hairs-breadth away from buying just 5 years earlier. I had to see it.
I drove out to meet the realtor, and found I was early. I parked the car and sat on the little iron bench on the front porch. The street was quiet except for a few dog-walkers, and two blonde children with backpacks walking down the street to the library, their heads close together in whispered conversation. Birds flitted in and out of the odd-looking tree that filled the front yard. I felt like the little porch had been just waiting for me to arrive.
From that moment, I felt at home. My little crooked yellow house truly is crooked — every plane and surface, outside and in, is slightly (and sometimes much more than “slightly”) askew, but sturdy and solid. Sunlight pours in (when there is sunlight here in northeastern Ohio), the backyard garden grows all the vegetables I could want. Deer wander through each evening, and a family of groundhogs live under the porch. The twisted and ancient weeping mulberry tree out front, which is rumored to be the oldest living thing on the block, supplies berries that I turn into mulberry jam. The long lot, one of the few original lots still intact, floods regularly due to the proximity to the famous Berea Quarries just beyond the back path, but I’m bit by bit building up raised beds where English roses and astilbe and peonies and poppies and bearded iris bloom.
But why this blog? Some years ago I was downsized from my full-time career in computer programming and project management; since then I’ve been lucky enough to get by with contracts here and there. To fill my time, and to heal my soul after the heartbreak of the blowup of a relationship I thought would be the culmination of my dreams, I’ve started to believe I can still find the joy I used to find in doing anything that involves fiber in my hands. The dream during the marriage was that I’d make a fulltime career of that passion — I’d harvest the wool from my sheep, process it for sale, sell my handspun yarn and knitted/crocheted/needlefelted goods at our farm market stand… it never quite happened then, at least not as I had imagined it would, but I can make it happen now. New dreams for a new day. Not the same, but somehow still possible.
As I write this, the not-quite-Spring sun shines through the antique windows in my antique house. Spinning wheels beckon, and a large unused upstairs room is full of fleeces to be processed. My simple Navajo upright rug loom is in pieces waiting to be reborn. The English needlepoint loom I inherited with the house, plus a basket of expensive English wool needlepoint yarn, waits in the parlor. My cats nap on the sheepskin rug, and there’s a basket beside me full of wool and cotton. I pick up a ball of my handspun yarn, made of fiber I sheared and washed and combed myself. A handful of dreams.
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