Her life is anything but still

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, personal growth

In younger days, any "plan" I concocted was long on goal, short on method. It took many years, multiple failures, and much learning (mostly the hard way) before I learned a modicum of process planning. The successes I did have were hard won, typically much more hardly won than necessary. This gives me much sympathy for Catherine Goldhammer.

In her lively account Still Life With Chickens: starting over in a house by the sea, Ms Goldhammer narrates her personal coming-of-age, at an age I'd guess is about forty. The story outline is simple enough: prodded by new singlehood and impending penury, woman seeks new digs, woman finds new digs that trigger her creative impulses (i.e., a fixer-upper), woman obtains said digs, transforms them, and herself in the process. And the chickens? They are the catalyst. A bribe to her pre-teen daughter, who will not otherwise consent to move—the specter of street living not having sunk in—the chickens with their constant needs drive these two lives rapidly forward.

Ms Goldhammer is good at covering her tracks. She names places suggestively, but obtusely, so at most one can determine that her new home is at the shoreward end of a peninsula in or near the Boston suburbs, facing the north coast thereof. That coast is rife with little peninsulas, including any number that might merit the moniker Six Mile Beach. Though it is not far from her former, tony neighborhood, it is culturally worlds away.

Like Blanche DuBois, but for different reasons, she has benefitted much from the kindness of strangers. Some did indeed become friends, while others, mainly carpenters, electricians and other contractors, went out of their way to help this clearly addled homeowner, who gets half the kitchen finished before even beginning to put in the big, big window over the sink; opening the wall reveals two electrical mains that must be re-routed.

I once helped my father remove a single mis-located kitchen window and insert two in better locations. Dad did something like that to every house he owned, including the ones he had designed himself and lead-contracted. The man can't leave well enough alone. Anyway, I've had a bit of experience of "go batter down that wall, we're going to make this room four feet longer." Thus in another way I sympathize with the author.

Through it all, the months of cooking on a hotplate and washing dishes in the bathroom, a winter that set 50-year records for miserability, her chickens needed attention, food, doctoring, cleaning up after. The complaint of a mostly absentee neighbor sent her on a round of permit-getting, which ended in her amazement at the practicality of a small town zoning board, compared to what she knew to expect from her former place. She got her livestock permit, her neighbor shook her hand, and that was that.

Yeah, I sympathize with her. She's found a place that suits her to a tee. She'll never leave. Her peninsular cottage has become a sacred refuge. I'm on the lookout for my own refuge. I have a pretty good idea where it is to be found, as long as it is still there when I am in a position to return. Will I retire in one year, or two, or three or more? Much depends on when I decide I've had exactly enough of it where I am, and resettle where I remember feeling truly at home. Why I left is a story for another time, but if it is ever possible to return, I'll find out...