Burning Pile
June 21, 2021. We arrived at what we’d soon decide should be called Maison Blum (BLUM for the allusion to flowers and because it works as an acronym of sorts for our names, Bethany, Lu, Michael, and also because of its aural adjacency to blue, like the blue tin roof) and took up our stewardship. Bleeding Hearts and roses were in full bloom, and what is now the shire was a wild meadowland so overgrown that we had to machete a path to the forest to get down to the river. It was such a jungle that we had no idea there was even a pond just fifty feet below the lower deck.
This untamed state of life unbridled was indeed beautiful to behold, and it was in some ways difficult to accept that we would have to trade parts of it away if we wanted space for play and a kitchen garden. I worried that we would adversely affect the wildlife by removing natural habitat - on our first day, while clearing a path, we did indeed bump into a massive mama of a snapping turtle. But it was important to us to have an area for playing fetch with Sadie, an area where kids could run wild. So Michael spent the better part of our first summer clearing the shire and, eventually, nurturing his newly seeded grass. For my part, I was to spend it sifting through an unimaginable amount of stuff left in and around the house by the former owners.
There was a lot of good stuff mixed in with a lot of junk, I have to say, and I so while sometimes I felt like Ariel in her grotto (look at this stuff, isn’t it neat?) I also felt like I had been dropped into a bad episode of Hoarders, stuck with heaps of things that had to be either donated, binned, or, in the worst case scenarios… burned. And some things, like the sweet wooden settee that we thought so charming with its peeling paint (a robin’s egg blue) and its spindly posts, we kept with the intention that they would be fun future projects.
Fast forward to that future, five years on, and that settee, which has been sitting out on the porch in all weather, finally saw the burning pile this weekend (pic above). There was a gleefulness that took over from regret as we mused that not all dreams are meant to be realized - they don’t all have to be.
And what might go where the settee was? For now, it’s an empty space that holds the magic of possibility.
It reminds me of a story my mother likes to tell. When she was a young mum of three and in the midst of nesting at the old farmhouse she and my dad were renting for a mere $600 a month, the place they’d call "Hundred-Acre Farm” since it was sat on so many acres, and where for seven idyllic years they’d tap trees for their prize-winning maple syrup, where my dad would build cedar furniture to sell along with my mom’s vegetables and jams and pickles and cinnamon twists and the famous date squares that I hated, well… when she was in the midst of all of this, and homeschooling us, and dealing with the death of her little brother, she decided that we required a piano. They were practically penniless, but she started searching anyway, trusting that the right piano would come, at the right price. Months of searching, and nothing turned up until one day on a whim she decided to clear a designated space for the desired piano. In a matter of days after clearing the space, the matter was settled. An upright, white piano was delivered to its spot, donated for free by a benevolent acquaintance. The lesson is, my mother says, that if you really want something, you have to clear the space, then it will come.
Now I’m mixing metaphors, maybe, as it’s not as if I have a master plan for what to do with the area where the settee once was now that it’s gone on the burning pile. I suppose for now what it allows is simply the pleasure of the invitation of its emptiness to imagine new projects, most of which will inevitably find their ways to the metaphorical burning pile in turn.
