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AMY SMITH LINTON

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Farming: Base Camp

9/28/2014

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At first, I thought we would plant some apple seedlings, sink a well, camp in a tent while we visited the Would Be Farm.  Maybe build a cabin in a few years. 

Belay that. Turns out we already have close to 100 apple trees on the land (overgrown, I grant you, and untended for decades, but full-on rows of trees -- producing fruit already!). And it turns out that even when it's not raining, the mud factor makes tenting, hmm, let's say "untenable." 
So we set a small budget and got ourselves a camper. 

An elderly, somewhat frail camper with hideous plaid upholstery.

Okay, full disclosure: a squalid, dented, fake-woodgrain-interior trailer with leaks and a gimpy set of windows. 

A camper on the verge of being junked.

But it did have a propane stove and refrigerator. And running water. 

And it didn't implode as we hauled it down the road, over the hill, past those cows, down the driveway, and over to that nice bluff.

Given a week and access to the hardware store it's quite possible to convert a 150-square-foot  unseemly little metal dwelling into something pleasant for quite a bit less money than most people in my neighborhood spend on rent each month. Jeff is a good rough carpenter, after all, and caulk is cheap.
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We yanked out one of the bench seats and the over-the-table bunk. We removed the scary upholstery and the seedy-looking window treatments and extracted several sarcophagus-like cabinet doors. The previous owners, for a mercy, were clean folk, so it wasn't one of those really disgusting projects.

Jeff shored up the rotted beams and re-floored the soft spots, applied a nice thick layer of roof-seal on top, and caulked the snot out of the seams. He got the windows working and made sure the water system was watertight. He replace the dented valve on the propane tank and cleared the propane system (now that was an exciting afternoon!).

There's a wonderful product called cabinet paint -- applied with a foam roller, it's a water-based paint that sticks to and covers any manner of Formica folderol.  I picked a warmish cream color and start painting everything inside the little cottage-on-wheels. I mean ev-er-re-thing: walls, cabinets, metal cabinet hardware, tabletops, etc. 

Because the spirit of Frickin Betty-Jo Crocker took possession, I also made cream-colored curtains, scarlet slip-covers for the upholstery, and customized linens to fit the odd-size mattress. 

(Note to do-it-yourselfers. If you need to cut foam, get one of those electric carving knives. The kind used by Dr. Frankie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Works great and encourages you to say non-crafty things like "It was a tender subject," and "Transvestites, start your engines!")
Now we have Base Camp. When it rains, we can sit at the table and watch the rain stay outside while we sip our hot (or cold) beverages.
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The Small Dog Chronicles: Too Darn Hot

9/26/2014

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Summertime is hard on the small dog. Never mind being abandoned on a regular basis while her Graven Food Idols go gallivanting in boats -- it's hot like a roaring brick oven in Florida for at least four straight months. 

We fondly refer to her as a fat-head, but truth be told, the small dog DOES rock a thermally efficient physique. Her chesty form and densely packed cranium act like a pressure cooker.  

She's an outstanding panter -- it's an artform for her -- but venting heat is an uphill battle.
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Even when she's willing to go walking early, the sun shines fiercely, pavement radiates heat up through her ratty little toe-pads, and the air is thick with humidity. Her route in the winter stretches to as much as a half a mile on a good day, but in August, she tires after about 50 feet. 

She may have energy to start with, but it flags. She begins to pokey-pete. Instead of trotting along at the farthest forward reach of her leash, she dawdles. As the pace slows, she makes frequent but nominal pee-breaks. 
Between bouts of lolly-gagging, she takes to gazing importantly into the middle distance. Eventually, she holds quite still except for one shaking leg. She is a paragon of canine civil disobedience who resembles -- just a bit -- a runty little Elvis impersonator.

When simply calling her name does not work, we find ourselves clapping or pssting for her attention, tjingling her leash, chivvying her along, and tugging on the harness (the same escalating techniques used by police forces facing nonviolent resistance).
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Lilly refusing to make eye-contact.
We resort to bribery and promises, setting small goals and cheering her on ("Just to the light pole, come on, Bubba-loup, you can do it!"). Eventually, on the hottest of days, we give it up for a bad job. I'm the weak link. I'll pick her up and portage her back to the air conditioning. 

Where she tanks up on water before staggering to her bed. 

If history holds true, she'll spend the next six hours snoring mightily, recovering from her exertions. Unless she hears the faint jingle of car-keys, the merest whiff of anything yummy, or if someone uses the word "cheese" in conversation. Then she'll bounce up, all ears and expectation. 
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Two Books: Tribal Identity

9/23/2014

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Seems like it was Mrs. Larney's Latin class that had us chanting,  "Single: I-you-he/she/it, Plural: we-you-they" to memorize the various grammatical persons.  So much of what Mrs. Larney taught really stuck with me -- and for so many years, too. 

When I started reading The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, I was reminded of that chant. Many novels are told from the perspective of first person -- presenting the events from that person's singular and peculiar point of view.

For example (and these first lines are identified at the end of this blog entry): "I have just come home from a visit to my landlord -- the only neighbor I shall be troubled with," or "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," or "You don't know about me without you have read a book called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter," or  "The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it."  

The Weird Sisters (the title a reference to Shakespeare's King Lear) takes first person to an unusual level: the plural. Instead of "I," it's "we" talking to the reader.  

The story is told from the collective point-of-view of three sisters rather than alternating between each one, as they face a variety of family crises. Here's a quotation showing the clever sleigh-of-hand the author uses to tell us about one of the sisters while maintaining the sense of being a group of sisters:

"Cordy had never stolen anything before. As a matter of pride when our friends were practicing their light-fingered shuffles across the shelves of Barnwell's stores in our teens, she had refused to participate, refused even to wear the cheap earrings and clumpy lipstick or listen to the shoplifted music. But here she was in this no-name desert town, facing off against the wall of pregnancy tests, knowing full well she didn't have the money to pay for one. A Wild West shootout: Cordy versus the little pink sticks at high noon."
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The book is good -- I wouldn't be bubbling about it otherwise -- and not just because of the novelty of first-person plural. The writing is supple and interesting, rich with matter-of-fact observations and clever references, and vivid characters (the girls' father is a scholar of Shakespeare who nearly always speaks with a quotation from the Bard, for instance).  The sisters' coming-home adventure is engaging, and author Eleanor Brown performs a kind of magic trick in presenting that peculiar collective identity often shared by sisters at home. 
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A book-end companion to The Weird Sisters is Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides -- a novel narrated by the collective "we" of the boys in the suburban 1970's-era neighborhood who observe and try to understand while a family of girl-children implodes.  

"We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't  fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
Rather than focusing on the suicides from the perspective of a single boy witness, author Eugenides expands the scope, magnifying the bewilderment and mystery. The events of that year take on the significance of myth, and the boys come to sound like a Greek chorus: "Sometimes, drained by this investigation, we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last." It's funny and horrible and very affecting.

It's an old truth that bears repeating: the perspective from one tribe never quite reaches the far side of other people's lives.  Maybe this is the work of all good novels, to give the tribe of readers a peep into someone else's experiences. 



* Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

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Gratitude: A Short List

9/19/2014

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Things for which I am profoundly grateful:
    1. That I am alive in 2014. Instead of being alive in, say, 1814... Or 1514... Or 614... (This covers but is not limited to: antibiotics, voting rights, the writ of habeas corpus, and air conditioning.)
    2. Sailboat racing. 
    3. The natural history fact that wolf spiders have never successfully mated with deer ticks.
    4. Apples. They are not the only fruit*, but I believe they are the overlord of fruits.
    5. My favorite skipper, who took me on our first date to see Rudolph Nureyev in "The King and I," and has continued to surprise me ever since.

*Neither are oranges. 
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Onto the Virtual Refrigerator

9/16/2014

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There's probably a mock-credit-card commercial in here somewhere: 27 blank notebooks: $377.  14 12-packs of disposable fountain pens: $133.  Adding a fiction publishing credit to the list: priceless.

Or maybe not, but a very short story of mine has been published by an audio magazine called 4'33".  The website is http://www.fourthirtythree.com/ 
It's story #99, "In Which I Propose a Handful of Questions to Three of the Citizens Involved Who Are at Present Unable to Answer."  

Big shout-outs of thanks to sailing sound-guy Rod Koch, who connected me with Jon Shea at jonsheabass.com, who made me sound remarkably like myself. Only better. 
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The parking meter approves.
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Piecework

9/12/2014

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The special vocabulary of sewing can be confusing –– as with so many skilled fields of endeavor, needlework has its own way of using familiar words.

I freely admit to not paying attention in Home Economics. I was obliged to attend it in high school (girls WERE allowed sign up for Wood Shop, but only those from the first half of the alphabet in my year. Dash it all.). 

Being fortunate in my friends, I skated through most of Home Ec with minimal hands-on work. Cooking –– well, there was no escaping the assignment to make from-scratch biscuits. 
The biscuits I made were used as pucks in a hallway floor-hockey pickup session. And they made it undented all the way back to study-hall. A proud moment for me then as I was determined NOT to buy into the traditional gender-role responsibilities of home and hearth. 

But later –– a decade or more later –– a friend patiently showed me how to sew a straight line without attaching my hand to the fabric. Later, my sweet mother-in-law took me under her domestic wing, providing a sewing machine and some gentle tutelage. The language came to me slowly, with nothing meaning what I first thought: basting, batting, bearding, blocking, backing, taking a tack (plus bar-tacking!).
Anyway, all this dithering on the way to something like a point (a word which also has a sewing-based meaning, natch)...Quilting.  

Technically, "quilting" is the process of stitching fabrics together with some sort of fluffy middle layer. Like anchoring the layers of a big fat club sandwich with a frilly toothpick.  Quilting makes the difference between a down pillow and a down vest. 
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I am not particularly interested in the frilly toothpick part of making a quilt. Instead, I like the part known as piecework (not the same as a union-organizer's "piecework," oddly enough) where a person gets to pick colors and figure out designs. 

Despite this u-turn toward the domestic arts, I didn't budget much time for the hobby: the first quilts I made took ten years start to finish. 
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Such is the mystery of human nature: when faced with a big writing project a couple of years ago, I took up a couple of ambitious sewing projects. Why not an outdoorsy hobby instead? In a word: summer in Florida.  In a word: heat-stroke. In a word: avoidance.
I shuttled to the sewing machine as a break from working on revisions to that novel. Two hours of rewriting, a cup of tea, two hours of piecework. Repeat until both "The End" and a 96 x 76-inch fabric creation were achieved.  It's astonishing, really, what a bit of stick and carrot can make a person do.

I completed the revision (that story another day) but after finishing the piecing, and sending it to a talented mother-son-operation to get quilted to some cotton batting and a backing, I didn't take the last step: binding. (Ironic vocabulary choice for an aspiring novelist). 
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Closure is another word with a variety of meanings.  In sewing, "closure" might refer to buttons or zippers.  

In mourning, it's the (alleged) last step, when the loss somehow ends.The desire for closure –– to finish things –– is part of our basic human aversion to ambiguity, so they say. 
My subconscious sends up this vision on the subject of closure: 
Mumsie, holding a paperback splayed in one hand, holding open the spring-loaded screen door with an elbow, saying in an exasperated tone, 
"Yes or no! In or out! Shilly-shally, dilly-dally!"  
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Anyway, the quilt –– among other projects, o novel of mine! –– has been lurking around unbound. So I sat myself down this summer and started stitching. I achieved closure in roughly the same couch-time as four World Cup matches.  
If only a bit of red thread and attention could stitch shut all the open doors in my life...
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Farming: Harvest the Sun

9/9/2014

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At the Would Be Farm -- our stretch of abandoned farmland in Northern New York -- things are pretty basic. We spend a few weeks at a time at the small camper we fixed up, making frequent visits to my sister, where we raid the freezer and empty her hot-water tank with impunity.  

Still, while at Base Camp, the laptop and the cell phone need charging, and it's civilized to have electricity for lights and running water inside the tin-cabin-on-wheels.

Since part of the goal of the farm is to keep things low-cost and low-maintenance, we decided against hooking up power.  There's electric service at the road, but it's placed awkwardly for our use. We'd need to install at least three utility poles, which would make an ugly slash through the open vista of meadow and rock. Plus it seems silly to outlay more cash for poles than we spent for the farm's pickup truck...
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Fact #1: the cost of solar power has come down a lot in the past ten years. 
Fact #2: plenty of not-too-expensive kits look pretty cinchy to set up. 
And what else do we know about solar? Fact #3: not much. 

Is that the sort of thing that will stop us? Heck no. 

I browsed the library, but the resources seemed either incomprehensible or too vague. So as is my habit, I signed up for a class. This one is an on-line course through EdX. Free for auditors. Classmates on every continent...





(P.S. doesn't it sound very Mother Nature-y to "design a Solar System"?) 


An eight-week course might be overkill, to be bitterly frank. 

But talk about new neural pathways --!  1 over the cosine of theta. Terawatts. Polycrystalline silicon cells. Diamond lattice crystalline structures...And "band gaps," which, in the Dutch accent of Professor Smets sounds just like "band camps." Making his discussion of how molecular bonds affect the BAND CAMP pretty darned entertaining.

Aside from having those stray three or four brain cells that remembered anything about Calculus go super-nova during the first homework assignment, I think it's going to be fine.  
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A screenshot of homework. Oh yes, those brain cells burst like beluga caviar.
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The Small Dog Chronicles: Keeping Peace

9/5/2014

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The small dog cannot bear conflict. Tickling, soccer, play-fighting. She's just not having it.

She seems to believe that we should all either get along or keep our G@%^- d!#$% mouths shut and our butts plastered to the couch. Unexpected dashing around the house by any human is liable to get her dander up. 

And if, by chance, somebody has to dispatch an insect with a fly-swatter? Katie bar the door. A fly-swatter transforms the small dog into a frantic cartoon Tasmanian Devil, whirling about in a blur, charging the business-end of the swatter. Talk about waging war for the cause of peace.

It's enough to make a person want to research her past: what has made this elderly Boston Terrier so determined to keep the calm? She won't stand for even the implication of violence: smack a palm against anything, and she bows up like a wee tavern brawler preparing to throw down. Do it again, and she'll bark and dash in. A third time, and the hair on her back will stand in a ridge and she'll push her open gap-toothed mouth at the offender.  

I know, it's my fault, this bad behavior. No matter how upset, no dog should bite. Still, because of the gum-to-tooth ratio in that face, I found the whole production so comic and ineffectual that I didn't stop her the first time. As I should have.

At twenty pounds of bark and with a mouth that needs to be angled just so in order to gain purchase on anything -- she's not much of a threat. 
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But still. I warn everyone who comes into the house: don't tease her because she will bite. And -- it goes without saying -- I don't trust her unsupervised with little children. 

Of course, it's super-fun to rile her up. I can't deny. I slap my own arm and cry out, "Ouch" on a too-regular basis. Reliably, she bounces around frowning and telling me to "F#$%ing CUT that SH!# out, right NOW!" 
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Occasionally, she recognizes my ruse, gives me an aggrieved look, and retreats to her bed with a near approximation of dignity. More often, I relent after a few rounds of "Ouching!" and end up kneeling on the floor while she lolls around getting her belly soothed. 

She's right: peace is better. 

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Musical Interlude: The Pursuit of Happiness

9/2/2014

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This may be the single most perfect pop song from its year (1986). 

Okay, okay, it's not Madonna showing off a voice in "Live to Tell," from that year. It's not Run DMC and Aerosmith paving a new road by Walking that Way, or Bon Jovi giving love a classically Bad Name, Bad Name. It's not the Dream Academy one-hit-wondering in a Northern Town. 
And thank the stars above this song does not include anything Lionel Richie (sorry Lionel, you've always felt like someone else's parents' favorite artist to me). 

Toronto-based The Pursuit of Happiness (TPOH to those who know) offered a kickin' New Age Sound with lyrics that are directly to the point and clever. Who among us cannot relate? Or, for some, who among us used to could relate to this message?  I quote this particular song often. Enjoy. 
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