September 2008 – Into the Woods

Roofing, Day 1 (of 2?)

There was quite a large crew working today, and a lot got done. I should have charged for parking. Here they are roofing the uphill face.

The two custom-made windows were delivered today. I believe the shape is a trapezoid. These two windows are part of the symmetrical window assembly of four windows that flank the fireplace in the living room. The windows in the living room will reach almost to the full height of the living room — 21 feet.

French drain is not very photogenic, but it’s very important. It’s a perforated pipe embedded in gravel and covered with a filter screen. There are, I believe, seven tons of gravel in the drain system. Very nice.

A half profile with the uphill face roofed.

Half profile from the downhill angle.

Roofing around, and flashing, the dormers took some time.

Update, Sept. 29

We’ve had more than two inches of rain here in the last week. It was the remnants of a tropical storm that came in from the southeast off the Atlantic. It came down slowly, and it soaked into the ground instead of running off. As a consequence of the rain, work has been on hold. A large load of gravel arrived today for the foundation drain system. I believe it’s called “French drain.” I have no idea what’s French about it, but it should do a good job of protecting my foundation and keeping it dry.

The day lilies loved the rain. The grass and clover I planted last week is germinating profusely. The new grass and clover is too tiny for my camera to photograph.

It continues to amaze me the resources nature has for holding onto, and creating, soil, as long as there’s some light, some water, and some nutrients. This fast-running weed seems to particularly like stony ditch areas. This is brilliant, because plants without runners would wash out before they get a strong purchase. There’s something for every niche. I have no idea how the seeds arrive to give these things a start.

Speaking of Lilies, this one is growing too. She weighed 6.2 pounds when she went to get her shots last week. She’s four months old now. The state she is in here is deceptive. She is not in a stop state. It is more a recoil state, because in just a few seconds she will spring up and storm down the hall. And speaking of French, she has learned to say, “Je suis terriblement mignon, non?”

Oui. Insupportablement.

The Southern Highlanders: what they ate

This old family photograph was taken around 1921, around the same time the book below was published. It is a family reunion at the home of my great-great grandparents, William Ira Jackson and Martha Marshall Jackson, in Carroll County, Virginia. They are the old couple seated at the center of the table. My father, Sanford Clay Dalton, is the boy whose head is visible just to Grandpa Jackson’s right. The Jacksons were my paternal grandmother’s grandparents.

Here are a few paragraphs from The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (John C. Campbell, New York, The Russell Sage Foundation, 1921). A guest (no doubt the author) stops overnight while traveling through the Highlands. He does not give a specific location. Perhaps he intends this scene as a synthesis:

“One who has enjoyed for a night the hospitality of a more prosperous family in the remote Highlands, carries away with him a pleasing picture of the comfort and simplicity of such mountain life.

“Here, where the bottom land along the creek widens, he sees at the end of a day’s hard ride a cluster of low gray buildings flanked by gnarled and untrimmed apple trees and backed by an imposing row of bee-gums…

“The room they enter is plainly furnished — a bare floor, a few chairs, and two or three beds. On the walls hang large crayon portraits of father and mother, with their first-born in their arms, together with pictures of the older brother or the little sister who died (now twenty years ago) enlarged from some crude photograph or tintype take by a traveling photographer. Often there is an organ, and the guests are eagerly urged to play.

“‘Washing up’ is generally relegated to the porch, and fresh water is drawn from the well or brought from the spring for this purpose.

“By this time the fire has been lighted in the big fireplace, and all gather about ‘to warm.’ Our host, it seems, is getting out some of his timber, and after a time he appears, followed at intervals by the sawmill hands who slip in unostentatiously to join the group about the hearth.

“Desultory conversation as to season, crops, and timber is interrupted by the announcement of supper, and all file out to the long table set in a room near the kitchen. Places are taken without ceremony. The host sits at the head. One of the guests is generally asked to return thanks. The hostess and the women who are helping her wait upon the men and upon the guests. There is an abundance to eat — pork, usually fried, and if it be hog-killing time, the backbone is offered as a great delicacy; fried potatoes, cornbread, hot biscuits, honey, apple-butter and jellies of various sorts, canned peaches, sorghum, coffee, sweet milk and buttermilk, fried chicken, and fried eggs. The meal is not interrupted by much conversation, and there is no lingering afterward. Eating is a matter of business.

“Adjournment to the fireplace is prompt, and the women, after eating their supper, betake themselves to the kitchen to clean up after the meal.”

Some notes out of my own experience of the Highlands, which goes back to the early 1950s about 30 years after the above photo was taken:

Campbell does not specify the season, but clearly it is cold weather. Based on what was served for supper and the availability of eggs, this was probably early spring. In the summer and fall, there certainly would have been fresh vegetables from the garden. So Campbell has described the winter diet of a prosperous family.

The pig’s value in the early South, and the importance of lard, cannot be emphasized too much. Though there was butter, the availability of butter would have varied from season to season, and according to the health and condition of the cows, and according to how many cows one had. Lard was the primary fat for Southern cuisine.

Even when I was a child, it was common for the woman of the house, and maybe one of her daughters, to not sit down for the meal if there were guests. Instead they would bustle around the table, and back and forth from the stove. The men, depending on the season, would guiltlessly retire to another room, or to the porch, after the meal, leaving the womenfolk to clean up the kitchen. I’ve witnessed this cleanup, though. It involved huge quantities of boiling water, either from kettles or from a reservoir in the wood-fired stove.

Technically, the musical instrument Campbell refers to is a harmonium, not an organ. The harmonium was a reed instrument driven by pedal-powered bellows. Harmoniums were quite common in the mountains. They were lighter than pianos, less expensive, easier to move and maintain.

Gothic weather

Reuters

East Coast gothic weather and West Coast gothic weather are very different. The best West Coast gothic weather, to my taste anyway, comes with high wind and high waves off the Pacific, with waves crashing against the rocks and seagulls fighting the wind.

It’s very different here. East Coast gothic weather is about a chill wind in the trees, and clouds skudding across the moon, or the stars.

In late September, gothic weather returns. I got up during the night to read the president’s speech on the gothic economy, but the gothic weather is keeping me awake. The windows are all open. The wind is whooshing through the woods and making the curtains billow. Some noisy nocturnal creature blundering in the woods got the cat into a frenzy. She was growling and running from window to window to look out into the dark.

I wish I understood how the rich adjective “gothic” came to represent what it represents. According to a Wikipedia article, it was an insult to gothic architecture during a period of history in which people saw gothic buildings as barbaric. On the other hand, R.A. Lafferty, in The Fall of Rome, which I just finished reading, says that the descendents of the Goths helped to design and build the gothic cathedrals. Lafferty doesn’t give his sources, though I suspect he was relying on Gibbon. There’s some research to do there.

The tree above my trailer, in a gothic mood

Gothic weather approaching from the Atlantic

Gothic music

Cat pictures

The Princess Lily state — L’état, c’est moi.

What’s the matter? Don’t all y’all get enough cat pictures? The Internet is flooded with cat pictures, but people keep asking me for cat pictures. This is Lily at four months old. I have been calling her Princess Lily. She was found in the woods, scrawny and pathetic, but now she thinks she owns the world and that, at four pounds, she can tell the world what to do. Oh well. I tried to raise her to be confident.

She has four states. Asleep, run wild, the Princess Lily state, and the state of indignant that I won’t immediately grant her wishes. Who knows. By the time she grows up we may discover a fourth or fifth state. That wouldn’t surprise me, because she is very smart and can predict my behavior as easily as my old colleagues back at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The run wild state

Two Souths, two versions of pancakes

Lise’s French version

I’ve been having a discussion on-line with a friend in the south of France about the local in-season fruits and what to do with them. Lise sent a photo of a French version of apple pancakes with apples. Isn’t that so French, a tall stack of tiny pancakes with the edges perfectly browned? Whereas my American version takes time only for three middle-size pancakes, not so perfectly browned.

Lise was taunting me about the abundance of figs in the south of France. We don’t grow them here (as far as I know). Since my attempt to send by email a photo of an American persimmon tree failed, I’ll post it here and wonder whether they have persimmons in the south of France…

Humble Stokes County apples from the Danbury farmer’s market

My American version

American persimmon — Wikipedia

The color of apples

One of the things I know as a country person born and raised is that, when you see an apple in the grocery store with perfect skin, the apple will cost too much and will have no taste. But when you find apples with honest skins like this, the apple will be good, and cheap. These are local apples from the Danbury farmer’s market. These particular apples are tart pie apples, but I eat ’em raw tossed with honey and cinnamon.

Colors: windows, doors, roof

The framers have left for two to three weeks to frame another job. The roofers should start this week. The roofing material was delivered this morning. Please keep in mind that, because of hard-to-control variables having to do with the camera and with different computer monitors, the hues you see in these photos are at best approximate.

Most of the windows have been installed. However, the bedroom windows, including the gothic window, have not yet been delivered from Andersen.

When the framers return, they’ll put the siding on the house and build the porches and deck. At that point — three to four weeks away — the exterior of the house will be done.

By the way, the windows and doors in these photos are made by Vetter, and they’re top of the line. The building supply company had them left over from a canceled job, and the contractor got me a great deal on them. The house is small, but it has 21 windows and four doors, counting the basement door. Grappling with the window budget was one of my biggest problems.

The Vetter doors have four hinges and three latch points. Nice doors.

Garlic as a vegetable, and as medicine

Garlic and broccoflower pasta. They probably smelled it all the way to Danbury.

Last night I went to bed at 10 and fell asleep immediately. I woke up and looked at the clock. It said 6:10 a.m. I thought the clock was wrong, because I thought I had just gone to bed. Deep sleep like this is not the rule for those of us of Boomer age. I used to think I would never sleep through the night again without getting up, but now I often sleep through the night. Partly, I’m sure, it’s because it’s so quiet here. And partly it’s because my stress level is a tiny fraction of what it was in San Francisco. But I’m beginning to suspect there is another factor — garlic.

I ate an entire head of raw garlic with my supper last night. If you Google for “garlic and sleep,” you’ll find that there is indeed some evidence that garlic promotes sound sleep. Last night’s garlic was in a pesto that I made from fresh basil from my garden. The tomatoes are gone, and their old vines have been sent to the compost bin. But the basil is flourishing. Still, who wants pesto every night. It’s hard to think of dishes that can tolerate raw garlic in large quantities.

I’m running an experiment tonight. I had another entire head of garlic with dinner. In the fridge there was a head of broccoflower that I bought at the Food Lion in Walnut Cove. I sautéed the broccoflower in coconut oil, to which I added a bit of white wine mixed with vegetable boullion to control the temperature. I’ve gotten in the habit of tossing cooked pasta in brewer’s yeast before I add the pasta to whatever it’s going in. I threw in some olive oil and some pepper. I ate it all, with no guilt.

Remember that garlic needs to be crushed or minced and allowed to sit for a while before you eat it to allow that magical garlic chemical reaction to take place. I like to add salt to the garlic during this process. It helps make the garlic sweat, and the salt zings the garlicky flavor. There’s no reason in the world why garlic shouldn’t be treated like a vegetable, instead of as seasoning. Except for social reasons. Around here, there’s only the cat to notice, and she seems to like garlic breath.

Maybe you have to be an old hippy like me to appreciate dishes like this. Google for terms like “garlic and health.” It’s fine medicine. Cheap, too, even if you buy the good garlic from Gilroy.

Concept vs. reality: how are we doing?

At this point the framers are taking care of detail that doesn’t make for very interesting photographs. But now is a good time to stand back and take a look at how the architect’s concept compares with the reality. In the reality shot above, the colors aren’t yet correct, because the roofing underlayer makes the roof look black (though its finished color will be green), and the house wrap makes the siding look white (thought its finished color will be a natural white pine). And of course the windows and doors aren’t yet in (they will be green). The photograph above was taken late today, and I applied Gimp’s “oilify” filter (Gimp is a photo editor like Adobe Photoshop, except that Gimp is open source). Ignore the blue blob at the lower right. That’s the tarp covering the trailer on which the exterior siding is packed and waiting.

Here’s the architect’s front elevation, which I first converted to black and white, then splattered on colors to simulate the final finishes. If you merge these two images in your imagination, you can see where we’re going.

The interior framing is impressive. It’s also hard to photograph. In this photograph, I’m standing in the living room on the first floor and looking up at the window in the upstairs bedroom that overlooks the living room. That may sound strange, but it’s not strange in a gothic revival cottage. It’s very much like the upstairs nursery in “Nanny McPhee,” which also has a window overlooking the living room. The architect, Rodney Pfotenhauer, knew quite a lot about historic gothic revival homes, both the interiors and the exteriors. The walls of my upstairs bedroom also follow the roofline the same way as Nanny McPhee’s gothic upstairs nursery. The bedroom walls are vertical for 5 feet or so, then they follow the roofline to a height of 11 feet 8 inches.

Nanny McPhee

There are some good ideas for interior finish and lighting in this still shot from Nanny McPhee. There is wainscoting, some of which I hope to be able to afford, with bold colors above. Notice also the hidden lighting accenting the walls’ change of angle. I am probably going to go for bold colors for the walls in this house. Having built such an eccentric house, why diddle around with timid neutral colors on the inside?