Sunday Afternoon

No deep thoughts today. I'm just sitting at my table by the kitchen window. A cat just walked through my yard. Before I moved in, the trashcan would always be open, and that cat got used to going hunting in it. I've been keeping it closed.

It's cold here in North Mississippi, cold and windy, but the warm up is coming Wednesday. I cannot wait! I'm sure the vegetable plants I put in the ground last weekend also will be happy to have some sun.

I'm barely staying warm in this space but for a great sleeping bag and lots of throws. The living area has only a small gas type heater but no blower. Worse is that the big beautiful factory-like windows are an energy suck. I literally see gaps as well between the outdoors and the window air conditioner placed in one of window frames. OMG! Who thought that a good idea?! My guess is someone who is in denial about how cold it gets in this part of the state.

This morning at Sunday School (I've started back going after ten years away), the old men were reflecting on how they struggled to stay warm in the houses of their childhood. According to them, they in fact took turns standing in front of the fireplace. A bowl of water left out indoors would freeze overnight.

When sharing with a friend who grew up in rural Alabama my ideas about bathing without a "real" bath or shower, he told me that he had been born in a house without running water. I suspect many people my age had that same experience. Many of the brick houses my friends grew up in in the South were built in the late Sixties through the Seventies. Perhaps those friends are humbled by those truths, or maybe they aren't. I'm not sure. What I do know is that even though I grew up in a house with a full bath, it was always the conveniences that I was trying to leave behind. Life it seemed to me then as now was not meant to be lived without direct contact with the earth. I do not mind fetching water or scratching the earth in order to eat. But maybe if I had no choice.

Whatever the case, I am enjoying working for my bath and for my life in this way.

This morning, I watched a YouTube video in which a woman, a transplant from Argentina, transformed a shipping container into a home for herself and her young daughter. This was not a fancy schmancy modern, architect-designed palace. She did all of the designing and building herself. The home was ramshackle and practical and real and lovely. But admitting that her daughter sometimes complained about not having this or that luxury, she posed, "Who says you have to have pink toys, and a pink room with pink furniture to be a happy kid," and added that where she came from her self-made abode would be considered very nice. My sentiments exactly. Who said you have to have granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and a kitchen island, or a "garden" tub and Kohler fixtures to experience bliss?

In the last month, I have spent a bit of money, more than I'm comfortable with actually, furnishing and equipping my space though I've received a few free items, cheap compressed paper shelves I've painted, packing crates directly from the trash bin, and a lawyer's bookshelf left at the curb. It had an inch of dirt on each shelf and was home not to books but to spiders, but it looks great now and holds almost a hundred of my books. I can see it now from where I sit, and it's a little visual clutter I guess but also comforting. This place is coming together slowly, and that is part of the joy.