Make a Choice and Chase it

By pulling out a chainsaw and chopping a hole in my bedroom wall, I fashioned an unintended portal, a gateway to a place of joy. A choice I could not return.

Memories do not appear in chronological order. I am learning this the hard way. So, I choose to write them for you as they are gifted to me by my broken, faltering, colourful memory. This is my choice. I will chase it.

A hole in my bedroom wall is the story that came up for you today. In Letters from The Kitchens Garden Farm. Written in my studio overlooking the midwest fields.

The Letter from the Kitchen’s Garden Farm

The Hole in the Wall.

This house was on a hill. Right up on a ridge above the sea, where the sun and the wind seared it in the summer and the rains pounded it in winter storms. It was not a particularly old house but it was warm and the land-lord was absent but kind. (My favourite kind of landlord and I have known a few). I was a solo Mum of too many kids - renting to someone like me was seen as a risk. So, I was grateful for this landlord and this house.

I lived in this house on the hill when I was a teacher at the secondary school in the day and head waitress at night. The kids were finding themselves and finding their voices and their growing limbs were coltish and hungry. The little house boomed with their voices and fights and arguments. They would do their homework at speed. Reading it aloud to me from the littered kitchen table as I sat on the bench listening with my feet perched on an open drawer a hand hanging out the window. They would wake me in the night to say a friend of theirs had arrived drunk then vomited red wine on the white carpet but they had remembered the salt trick and called his Dad. They each claimed one night a week to cook their signature dish as we fell over each other to get to the fridge. They never complained that they only had two pairs of shoes - one for sports and everything else and one for school and every other else. And Saturdays were housework days to clean everything and wash everything else and change sheets and towels, and sweep paths and weed gardens and make a list then do the grocery shopping. You know how much teenagers eat right. Though I have a feeling kids ate more in those days - 3 or four sandwiches at a time. Entire chickens. Boxes of cereal and huge blocks of cheese. Steak and cheese pies by the package. The volume of vegetables and fruits we bought each week was the stuff of legends.

My bedroom in the rented house was small. (Have you ever thought that all the houses we live in are second hand). (Unless you are frightfully rich and frightfully brave and build your own home). Anyway my bedroom was small but big enough to swing a cat (barely). It had room for a bed and a dresser (though I did not own a dresser, I had two ancient and very large suitcases. The one on top was for the summer clothes the one underneath for the winter clothes - swapped seasonally - all black) and a chair which I found on the side of the road. It was called The Big Chair. (Where is Mum - in The Big Chair). There was a great big walk-in wardrobe where I stored all my treasures and paintings and sometimes children would sleep in there. I painted the walls of this bedroom yellow to try and cheer the room up. And that worked to an extent. But it was still a dark room with two small windows overhung with trees. Outside one window was a little walled brick courtyard that you could not access from the bedroom that overlooked it. The little courtyard was like a walled garden in miniature. It was ringed with sorry long neglected raised beds, and weedy sad trees. A couple of struggling roses but not much else. Dry or Dripping. Sad. The leaves from the neighbours trees lay in slippery moldy piles. It looked gloomy from the window. There was a shed with a big picture window built along the back fence. Nothing ever happened out there. It was a dead space.

To get in there I had to walk down the hall to the back door, onto the driveway, around the side of the house, through the carport, shuffle (breathing in) past the car and through the back gate of the garage, so I seldom went there.

It was a wholly neglected after-thought. I wanted to get out there but just did not have the energy. We sat in the kitchen at the tiny table, with the open windows and we were happy with that. But in the summer holidays when the kids spent half their time with their father and I was only working one job (no school) I would look out the window with narrowed eyes. Painting an entirely different space in my imagination.

Then I thought about putting a hole through the wall. The bedroom wall. This idea grew and grew as I mulled it over. I spent an entire winter agonising over the idea. Getting up the courage to ask my landlady. Would I upset our calm relationship. Asking too much. I imagined sleeping with big French doors opening into this courtyard, long gauze curtains blowing in the breeze reaching up from the sea. My room opening into the private garden.

I gave myself a solid talking to for being a wimp and plucking at my courage I asked the landlady and she said no problem as long as I paid for it myself. Oh. I had so little money. My idea stalled but I still thought about it and talked about it. After a while I was able to do a deal with a fellow I knew. He was a carpenter. It would only take a couple of hours he said. (A couple of hours after almost a year of me thinking about it). He and I went down to the local secondhand shop. I found a door leaning on a back wall that had lots of glass in it so it would let in lots of light. It was an ugly door. Not a French Door. Probably a wash house door. It was cheap, solid, perfect. My friend got out his chainsaw and cut the hole in the wall, then framed it out and hung the ugly washhouse door with its shiny new handle that cost me as much as the door. We were pleased, we had created a portal through the wall of my bedroom to the little courtyard. Once he was gone I stood up from The Big Chair. I opened the door, closed it, opened it, closed it, opened it, pushed the Big Chair out the door and walked out into the courtyard to sit out there. It was magic.

This changed my life. It really changed my life. That hole in the wall. That small decision. That infinitesimal choice changed that house. It opened up my familys spaces. We had our own private walled garden. We carried our plates and our books and our cups of tea and out we went.

I found a big piece of driftwood and the kids and I wrangled it up the beach and into my station wagon and up the hill and into the courtyard and set it below the new door as a step - it wobbled every time I stepped on it but I loved its warm salty smoothness on my bare morning feet. I created a compost heap and washed seaweed and built up the soil in the raised beds. I sowed seeds and collected cuttings and baby plants from the houses of friends, I set rose cuttings to grow at the feet of their mothers, I shoe-horned an outside cooker through the gate and collected old dinner tables and chairs from the second hand shop with candles and pots of geraniums and lemons and in one summer this little courtyard, this tiny space became our treasure. It was a joy. Winter and summer. Just joy. On an ordinary day there were five of us in that house - now we had a huge outside living room.

That choice, that decision; changed our lives.

I could have the door open all night because it was a walled garden. The metal gate was locked. We were safe. My dog Mazolet Mazout the Marzipan Kid a long black lab, slept out there, moving in and out of the door during the night, doing her rounds of the bedrooms. The door was open all summer long. Night and day. We do not have screened doors in New Zealand so it was totally open - right beside my head in my bed.

On Saturdays after sports and the housekeeping hour the kids and I would sit out there for a yarn. We ate bread and cheese and olives and apples. All the kids friends would know to come over and wander down the hall and through my bedroom then out into my little sunny courtyard that had ample shade from the neighour’s tree in the high summer if we got hot. The teenagers would sit along the 10 foot high walls and on the roof of the sleep-out, like leggy badly behaved birds, herons, gulls, great owls, their feet bare and brown and their hair long and beaten white by the sun. My own friends would begin to trickle in as the late afternoon fell and there was a great overlap as my children and my friends chatted and laughed. I remember a person we did not know very well saying into a lull - in a surprised I just discovered this and did you know kind of voice - ‘the more love you give, the more people will love you’ and my kids and I catching each others eyes, we knew that. That’s about all we had for sure. Love. Fierce fighting love. Then the kids would begin to drift off with their friends, to the river or the beach. “Be home by ten, tell your parents if you are going to stay over.” No cell phones then. Just the one phone and kids riding off into the cooling night.

A friend would bring out a bottle of wine. Someone else would have a mixed tape. Maybe fish or sausages were thrown on the barbie. We would talk and talk. These days would become weekends and we would talk and plot and draw, and write, my camera was always close to my hand.

You will remember that I was divorced by then. Happily. I was not living with the father of my children, A choice. And I did not re-marry for almost twenty years. Another very considered choice. This tiny garden space gifted to us for half a decade became almost communal. We pulled out drafting boards to plan photographic exhibitions and readings and concerts on the beach and plays and short films, plans for whole native forests. All this was discussed and dissected and chosen and actioned from this little courtyard lined with scented flowers and herbs in the raised beds that a person could perch on, with second hand chairs and stools and drift wood chairs. My back in one seat and my feet on another. Every choice changing the world. The light dying down to the fire and the candles. The little shed became a sleep out studio space and different artists and agitators and musicians spent months or weeks or days dossing down within its warm dry walls. A place to sleep in between. Its big picture window cleaned and sparkling.

We were a scene. We created stuff. Rocked. All because I cut a little door in my bedroom wall.

What am I trying to say here? I’m trying to say if you are in a space that is too small. If you are sitting in an enclosed space looking out; wishing you could be out in that metaphorical courtyard, get your chainsaw out and punch a hole through that wall and put a door in, let yourself out, no-one else is gonna let you out. Everyone else might want you to stay in place. They say. Don’t rock the boat. They say. Don’t for fucks sake think for yourself. They say. Follow the party line or else.

Find your space and don’t let a wall stop you. Find a space to rest and think and plot. Find a space where you and your people are all equal and all listened to. And listen. Then choose to speak.

Find your courtyard or build it. Find a space where you can be you. To rest. TKG Take Ten is a small example of this. A window in a wall so you can look out. It was a risk, it takes a lot of hours, but is an example of a choice that you and I made and we are chasing down.

I launched TKG Take Ten with a simple yet diverse mission: to give you, and me a much-needed daily respite of ten minutes. In the relentless bludgeoning that is modern life, our neanderthal brains struggle to keep pace, demanding a break before they break. Ten minutes a day to lean on the gate with me and rest. This is the courtyard now.

People don’t own each other - you know that right? Open your door. Make your choice then love it. They say humans make 35,000 choices a day. Most of these are automatic but many of those choices take real real-time thought. But what of the ramifications of those choices. How many thousands of those are there. Allow yourself some room for those too. Room to make a choice then chase it down and make it work. Don’t look back. Regrets are bullshit.

I knocked a hole through my bedroom wall and, although it had not been my intention, it started a movement. I am here because of that door.

Celi

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The Recipe:

In a big cold bowl. Stir as you go.

• 3 cups flour (360g) or (2 cups flour, 1 cup corn/flour/starch)

• 1 cup sultanas (or raisins or dates).

• 2 teaspoons sugar (8g)

• pinch of salt

• 3 tsp baking powder (check the expiry date)

• grate in 1 stick of grated frozen butter, (4oz, 114g)

• In installments, pour in around one cup cold milk (or a blend of cold milk and water) until the mixture is workable and is balling up. But not too wet. Be prepared to adjust the amount of fluid. Then turn out onto floured surface pat down with floury hands and cut scones into rounds or squares.

Work fast. Scones are like pastry we need to keep the butter chilled so it pops in the oven making your scones light and fluffy.

Bake at 450 for 20 minutes or until cooked.

You can read one of my scone posts from the kitchensgarden.com: here.

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The most read TKG Take Ten of the Week:

The Morning Bird Conductor

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The Most Read Blog Post of the Week:

Someone Left my Coat Out in the Rain

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And just for fun the most watched UTube clip (I use UTube to store my shorts - not my real shorts you understand!!). Duck looking for a friend. And even more fun the most watched at over three thousand views is Cows at Sunset. Which just goes to show if you choose to break all the rules success might follow - or not!

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The Sustainable Sunday Opinion

I feel a great fear for America at the moment. I am a New Zealander living in America, I only have a Green card so I cannot vote and I do pay taxes. I have a stake in the health of this country. But I am watching some terrifying political rhetoric this cycle. And it is not looking good for the land, the soil, the air, the water and earths resources. I cannot even begin to tell you the terror I feel for our young women. And that terror is not sustainable. We are now past the stage of choosing paper straws - we need to ditch all straws all together- and using cloth bags, we need to focus on buying less shit to put in the bags. We have to do all these things. We have to guard our own plots of land. Plus. Make a choice and vote. Just vote.

Make a choice then make it right. Make it work. Do the thing. Choices are hard. But looking back and wishing you had made a different choice is harder because it is impossible. Going back in time just cannot be done.

So weigh your options. Avoid paralysis by analysis then get on with it. Make your chosen path work.

Stuff I read this week and loved.

Spo Reflections. This one. Tell him Celi sent you.

Have a gorgeous afternoon. This is the band I am listening to! Ha!!

It is sunny here now, an Illinois afternoon in February - almost March. Birds are loving it.

See you tomorrow. (You know where).

Celi

🦋 Letters to my Mother (Letters from The Kitchens Garden Farm) which hosts TKG take Ten AND Sustainable Sunday is supported by readers like you! So if you found this post entertaining/valuable/ please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Dare ya! 🐞 Love ya. 🦚