The Donated House

Today’s wildlife is an unidentified butterfly. Or moth. I’m not sure.

I made an inkle loom out of an old warping frame I’d had kicking around for years. I was making a mess, as you can see, until my mother told me the correct method of achieving woven tape rather than a mess. Now it’s working well.

I found the last of the great Lancashire industry leftover yarn sellers and bought some nice cotton yarn.

Catie and Simon came round to do some work, drink some tea…

And go for a nice walk in the hills above Todmorden. The weather’s been lovely.

And Antony dug us a hole in the ground. I’ve booked an engineer to come round on Monday, so hopefully he will approve my plans for the foundation.

After our rather slow and unskilled attempts at building a wall, it was built in two days by my increasingly valued friend and neighbour Antony. He did a lovely job, and clearly has the right kind of mind for fitting together bits of odd rectangles in a solid form. Which I really really don’t.

The new loo is in use now, and it’s absolute luxury.

It was designed (with a few pointers from me) by Daniel, who then also built it, having never really built anything in his life before.

The bucket is a wheelie bin with a compostable bag liner, but the principle is the same. I hope a bin will go for about 6 months and then it can get wheeled out to a sunny spot and sit for another 6 months before being dumped on the pile to go at least another 6 months before being used as garden compost.

Daniel was fantastic, a real pleasure to live and work with, an excellent young man and I very much hope he will come back and visit us regularly.

His girlfriend Ramona also visited for the last week of his stay, and helped to finish the building. They they went off to spend two weeks hiking and camping in Skye, so I hope they survived.

I suppose it’s maybe a dubious honor to have us think of them when we use the loo, but it really is such a great little building and such a step up from the previous arrangement, that I will always think very fondly of them when using it.

Yeah, it’s been a long time since I posted. You’re not the only one to mention it.

The truth is, until a week or so ago, I really didn’t have the energy or the will. I’ll be frank, my mental health has not been the best, for a lot of reasons, and I am fortunate that I knew what to do, and thankful that life has more or less cooperated.

I have a card, framed, on my wall that says:

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”  -Eleanor Roosevelt

I am amending it. I’m adding an asterisked note. “Only one thing at a time though.”

I’m not going to go into any detail, it’s obviously personal stuff, but I’ve been overwhelmed and not functioning particularly well. It’s been one of the hardest years of my life on many levels and I have done a lot of reflecting, some of it pretty painful, on why that is, how I got where I am, and what changes I need to make.

That’s why I say I’m fortunate that I knew what to do. I have had to simplify my emotional environment, sometimes to the cost of others, and sometimes I’ve had to accept it being simplified for me, without resistance, even though it was painful.

I have made other, subtler changes too, and rediscovered some stuff I’d taken for granted and neglected on some back burner for years. I think I had forgotten who I am to some extent. But I feel as if I’m starting to remember.

Maybe it was what gets dismissed as a midlife crisis by people who are not involved. At any rate, I have done almost nothing practical, beyond the absolutely necessary, for a long time, and that only with a clawing, desperate effort that left me spent most of the time.

I’m not sure why I’m putting this all here, knowing everyone from my mother to my mother-in-law reads this, as well as all my friends and a considerable number of strangers.I suppose I believe in openness and that stigma and embarrassment lead people to be isolated when they are in emotional need, and that’s bad, so I try live as if it shouldn’t be that way.

I’d like to thank everyone who knows me for whatever patience and kindness they’ve been able to show me during the past year or so. I’m not always soft and sweet and fuzzy, I’m sharp and raw and I can cut. But I love my friends and family, my lifestyle and the ways I am able to overlap with people as I move along, the volunteers who have lived here and helped out, the neighbours who return my smile and lend me things and come over for a chat, and all the people who have helped carry my load while I have been laid low.

A few things have got done around here since my last post, so I will try to catch up and do an entry for each subject over the next few weeks. I appreciate your continued interest and support. Thank you.

A random selection of snapshots (kindly provided by Jane) of Anna’s birthday weekend.

The cake was one Gog Magog Molly could be proud of.

Scenes from the outdoor kitchen.

The chicken house has made no further progress lately. Still no chickens.

This was Jane’s first time here, so she took pictures of the porch…

The garden…

And the cabin. Which is nice because I often forget to take pictures of what I look at every day.

The exciting event was taking Boggarts up to Heptonstall and having a photo shoot at the old church.

We got dolled up in our Boggarts Evening Kit finery.

Nobody thought this was odd at all… see www.boggartsbreakfast.org.uk for further explanation of what this was all about.

Elmo led a walk up the hill and a few bits of bilberry picking took place. I intend to make time for proper bilberry picking soon. I intend to make gin with one batch.

Everyone enjoyed the view over Todmorden from the rocks.

Especially Jane. Thanks for the pictures, Jane.

I’m not sure we’re naturals at this wall building thing, but here’s how it’s gone so far:

Gerhard from Germany built a good, sound foundation and got a couple of courses up before it all started to go a bit difficult. So, aiming to get back to a flat course of large stones, we picked out a couple of monsters that would fit. But obviously we couldn’t lift them. So we did like the stonehenge architects of old and built scaffolding.

That got them up to the level of the base… but moving them still turned out to be a bit of a task. It’s amazing how heavy rocks are.

Still, we triumphed in the end. And then went and made a cup of tea. And that’s about as far as we’ve got.