When the refrigerator dies

You can hope it happens in winter.

I knew when I went to get the frozen blueberries to put in the oatmeal we were in trouble. Not that things were totally mush, but they were on their way. It died either the previous afternoon or during the night. Ever since we moved here it's been noisy, especially when it shut off. Sometimes it sounded like someone might be coming in the back door, an unsettling thought when we're in bed with the lights out. Kind of a refrigerator death rattle.

Not hearing it thump away every hour or so might have been a clue but who notices a sound that isn't there?

There are two pieces of good news. First, we're renting, it's not our refrigerator, and the landlords are replacing it. Second, while I was cleaning it out, I found a bottle of Guinness that had been shoved way to the back and forgotten.

On the flip side, the old fridge was 24" wide and 63" high. Hardly anything comes that size anymore and to make the space for a new one a shelf had to be removed and a tall, narrow cupboard I'd built to go beside the old fridge to hold cookie sheets and things like that will no longer have a home. Still, a new refrigerator is coming.

Today.

Which means we've had several hours keeping stuff cold or as close to frozen as we could keep it. At first, it all went onto the back porch. It was 17 degrees that morning. That held for a while but then the temperatures climbed into the 40s. Finally, though, with a couple coolers to deal with the critical stuff, and our unheated front hall we've managed the rest.

The new one will be here this afternoon.

Listen, it could have been August...

Accepting Winter

I know, I know...

Winter is cold and wet and icy and slippery and annoying. I still have to clear the steps and the walk and brush off the car, of course, but I no longer have to go outside towork when it's 30 below with the wind blowing. Well, I do currently have a part time driving job, but if the weather's bad enough to cancel or delay school, we follow suit. So even though winter can be cold and cruel and dark it's now mainly someone else's challenge.

Someone else can clear the snow off the roof for instance. I've done my share. The first was my grandfather's porch roof. Later I had to clear the roof of my own house in Brattleboro several times. I'm not planning to ever build another house, but if I do it's going to have a slippery metal roof.

The last time I cleared the roof, back in the late 90s, I realized almost instantly I had no business being up there. Being on a roof, especially a snow covered roof, requires a certain nimbleness which I no longer have. Still, I was up there and it had to be cleared. First the ell in the rear, then the back part of the main house, then up and over the ridge to clear the front. I'd nearly got the front done when the shovel slipped out of my hands and over the side. I decided it was a sign I'd done enough but when I tried to climb back up over the ridge so I could get to the ladder the roof was so slippery I couldn't do it. I stamped on the roof to get Susan's attention so she could come out and move the ladder around to the front. No response. I spent the next ten minutes waving to friends who chose that moment to drive by. I waved and stamped my foot. The friends smiled and waved back and drove away. Susan ignored it all, even when I stamped SOS in Morse Code.

The roof wasn't all that high and the snow pile I'd created was fairly deep. I could jump off. Which I did. Clear to my armpits.

I haven't been on a roof since.

I have to say it's easier to accept winter now. At most, it's a nuisance.

And with that settled, everything else looks better, too.

Just a thought...

So I was wondering...

There are millions of cars on the road and those millions of cars use billions of tires, tires that wear down and have to be replaced with more tires that will wear down. And this has been going on for years.

Where do you suppose all that stuff that wears off our billions of tires has gone?

Of course, there's a story here...

 

So

Actually, this is snow toilet #2.

The first was built when my kids were high school age. I'd come home one afternoon when the snow was perfect and they all wanted me to make a snow sculpture. Years before I had made huge rabbits or squirrels out of snow, big enough that I had to get a stepladder to finish the top. If we were lucky we'd get a hard freeze the next day and the sculptures would last for days or even a couple weeks.

Snowmen, the ones with the three balls stacked up, were always a bit ho-hum, except the one time when I was determined to make a huge one. I pushed the first ball around until it was about 4 feet in diameter. Then the second was so heavy I couldn't get it up onto the first one. To hell with it.

My father sometimes got the bug to play in the snow and he made things like rabbits or sheep. Usually they were lying down so he didn't have to deal with legs. Once, since he was into trains, he even created a steam engine. He never had to use a ladder, though.

So then I came home that day when the snow was right and the kids said it was time to build a sculpture again. Forget it, I said.. It was near the end of the day, I was tired, and when the snow's right you have to work hard and fast. They kept after me, though.

"All right, what'll it be?"

"A big toilet," Tonja said. "We ought to make a big toilet."

So I found my buckskin mittens, grabbed a couple shovels, and we all went to work. At least I had help building the pile. We had it nearly shaped when it all collapsed. Some of the neophytes didn't understand about packing the snow on the bottom. By now the sun was about to go behind the hill and the snow would soon lose some of it's workability. In the end, though, with all of us working on it, we finished just as it was getting dark. The final touch was to shove the rake handle into a snow to stand beside the toilet.

We were on a busy corner in Brattleboro and a lot of people saw the toilet.Several people stopped to take a picture of it. One woman laughed as she got out of her car and said she thought it could be improved witht a brown stain or two. 

When we were living in England I'd told some of the neighbors about the Brattleboro toilet. We hadn't seen a lot of snow over there. They used to have proper winters but the last 30 years or so significant snow has been so rare that some of the younger people don't even know about snow tires. A little snow and everything shuts down, much like Georgia or North Carolina.

But there was snow one day, about 4 inches of wet, sticky snow, the perfect sculpting snow. I called Jon Parker, one of our neighbors. He and his wife were teachers and he did some fairly intricate woodworking as a hobby. They'd heard of the Brattleboro Toilet.

"Come on over, Jon. Now's the time. We'll build another toilet."

So Jon arrived a few minutes later with his son Robbie in tow. I had a couple five gallon pails and I put them both to work collecting snow from the stone patio since it was cleaner and easier than scraping snow off the lawn. We'd not been working very long when Robbie, who clearly hadn't got into the spirit of things, decided it was all a ruse to get our patio cleared. He put down his shovel and went home. Jon stuck around, though, and we kept working.

In the beginning, I think, Jon was hesitantly game. He joined in because I'd invited him. Before long, though, he got caught up in details and his precision woodworking gene took over and my work wasn't quite accurate enough. I had to get him a long bread knife so he could slice the snow to a straight and precise shape. Funny how people suddenly get on board and take a bit of ownership in a project.

In about a hour we had it finished. Word spread through the village and even up to neighboring Walgrave. People began to stop by. The toilet wasn't visible from the street like the Brattleboro Toilet since it was in what was in our "back garden". Susan and I called it our back yard but we were corrected. In England a "yard" is where you might park construction equipment, tractors and things. Was it a lawn, then? No, no. It was a garden laid to grass.

And that's the story. Facebook reminded me it happened 6 years ago. Sometimes our four and a half years in England is like another lifetime. Other times it's like just last week. 

If you'd like a street view of Hannington, the village where we lived, you can find it on Google Earth. Search for Hannington, Northamptonshire, England.

No Direct Translation

There are a lot of foreign words with no direct English translation. You can find several lists of them on Google. A year or so ago someone posted a link to one of these sites online and I checked it out. Most of the examples they gave I would probably never use unless I was trying to show off and even then only a few were marginally useful. There was one, though.

Sobremesa

Sobremesa is Spanish and literally means "over the table" but it's used as a name for that time spent after a meal, hanging out with family or friends, chatting, and enjoying each other's company.

Sobremesa. Not only a useful word but a concept we should all keep in mind.

Susan and I saw it in action while we were in Europe, not just in Spain but in France and England as well, especially when were were eating out. We never felt we were being rushed because they wanted to turn the table for the next people. The bill never came until you asked for it. In people's houses sobremesa could go long into the night, at least until someone decided they had to leave and that would release the rest of us.

It was an easy, relaxing time.

You can't sobremesa standing up or watching a clock.

The Blog Name

I owned a house in Brattleboro, Vermont, for almost 36 years. It was an old house - really old. One reference I found suggested it was built around 1788. It had been part of the Herrick Farm, a house built for the help, which explained a lot of things. The beams, for instance. Some were hewn, some were sawn with parallel marks from a pit saw, and some had mortises cut into them for no apparent reason, at least in this building. It was an assemblage of parts salvaged from other buildings.

There had been some attempts at cheap remodeling. the back half of the house had a "new" floor but it all but sat on the ground. The front half, over a shallow cellar with a laid up stone foundation, still had log joists. The rafters were logs, too. Very little in the house was level or plumb. In fact the back of the house was about six inches lower than the front which was quite handy if you spilled something. All you had to do is run to the back of the house and let whatever was spilled come to you. I got it for $7,600 in 1964. A house, a barn, a sugar house, and 8 acres. You could do that in those days.

It was a 36 year project. I fixed a lot of stuff and added a room and a garage. In the end it was quite comfortable.

One day in the late 1970s I happened to come across an old map of Brattleboro. As was the custom years ago, some residences had names like Meadowlawn or The Maples. And some sections of town had names, too, like Esteyville, Centerville, and Fort Dummer. The intersection of Guilford and Maple Streets where my house sat was called Elm Corners. The elms are long gone now, but that was too good to ignore. I made a sign to stand at the end of the driveway to restore the name and attach it to my place.

When Susan and I sold everything and moved to California I decided to take Elm Corners with me. Elm Corners, like Lake Wobegon or Grants Ferry, is a real place for me. I've long had my closure with the physical Elm Corners in Brattleboro, but the personal one is as strong as ever.

So that's what Elm Corners is about.

A few years ago I saw Gregory Peck tell a story about a time when he and James Mason were in Ireland filming a movie. Neither were young men, but Mason was older and had had a long career. One evening Mason had gone out for a walk in the village where they were staying. He heard footsteps behind him for some time before he finally stopped and turned around to see it was a woman from the village.

"Begging your pardon," she said. "but would you be James Mason in his later years?"

...his later years...

People have been after me for some time to start a blog but I never had a hook or a place to come from. The blog I created while we were in England was always about telling folks back here what we were up to and the interesting things we found there. My column in the Brattleboro Reformer and later in the Keene Sunday Sentinel always came from a local guy writing about his life. So I had been looking for that hook, the thing that would be non-specific but somehow tied to everything I might write.

Elm Corners - The Later Years

It's where I am now, probably a bit of where I've been, and maybe even some suggestions about what lies ahead.

Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction always had a bit of a snooty sound to me, like the music that is good for you one hears on public radio or that the writing is on such a high plain that one might need several college degrees and an extra set of brains to read and understand it, dense, plodding prose that promises more work than enjoyment, not unlike this sentence. Not my style at all. So imagine my surprise when my friend Ernie Hebert, noted author and professor at Dartmouth, told me that my own novel Grants Ferry could be literary fiction.

Literary? Moi?

I had no idea. I just tried to write a story.

So I looked up Literary Fiction to see why Grants Ferry might fit. The simplest explanation is that literary fiction (also known as "serious fiction") is not genre fiction. It's not mystery or romance or sci-fi or horror. It's also not apt to be plot driven. It needs a plot, of course, a destination, but literary fiction will take its own sweet time getting there and there can be lots of detours and opportunities to become familiar with and close to the characters. It's not necessarily a triumph of Good over Evil but can be a casual stroll to a general resolution of things and driven by the characters, not some outside influence like a ticking bomb.

According the the source I found, there are four main characteristics of Literary Fiction. I've simplified them here.

• Characters and their personal stories generally get more attention than plot. People who enjoy literary fiction don't need to get to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Simply watching the lives of the characters and the events that surround them unfold are more important than saving the world in 300 pages.

• Literary novels are often more philosophical, searching for some larger meaning or truth than one might find in a detective story or an espionage novel. Digging into the thoughts of the characters and what drives them is probably more important than overcoming the next plot point.

• The writing has to be good. The writer needs a way with words that can be either simple or flowery but it must first be an enjoyable read.

• In Literary Fiction just about anything goes - as long as it works.

Finally, Serious or Literary Fiction generally sell in smaller quantities than genre or mainstream novels.

Damn.