Notes from Maine - 2023/08/20
I’m starting to look forward to autumn. It was a little cooler today and I think it will be a nice autumn this year. We’ve had plenty of rain for once. The hay is already done. I load up with “first cut” hay when I can so that the horses will have good forage all winter. The surplus doesn’t mean that I won’t have to go out and continue to bring home truckloads of hay every week, but it takes away the panic in case there’s a storm and I can’t get out. Last year I didn’t use any stored hay until January. It was nice having that buffer.
My hay person was terribly pessimistic about delivery decent hay this year. They kept saying that all their suppliers were reporting bad yield. Too much rain was making the hay rot in the fields. Then I went and checked what they had in the trailer. It was perfect. Not dusty or moldy—this hay was sweet, light green, grassy first cut. It came from Canada. I bought as much as I could fit in the loft. My sister and nephew helped me throw and stack it. It was the easiest hay year I’ve had in a while. This is very exciting news in my world. Can you tell?
It’s still August and I’m already thinking about autumn. I’m as bad as the grocery store. When I went inside a couple of weeks ago, they had their Halloween candy on display. It’s a joke, right? They’re just putting out that stuff as a joke. Who would buy their candy three months early?
If I can, I will get the kitchen done before November. My friends have an annual Thanksgiving party that was here for many years in a row. We missed last year because of Finn’s surgery. More accurately, I missed it. They still had the party, but it wasn’t here. I would hate to miss it again. I suppose that I should focus on returning the functionality to the kitchen before I worry about the finish work. The floor is key—I have to finish that properly, of course. After that, it won’t matter if the cabinetry is final, or if I’ve found the perfect sink. Those things are relatively easy to swap after the fact.
Right now, the floor consists of wide, soft pine planks from the 19th century. They scar if you look at them wrong and it’s impossible to make them look clean. After I burn them, I intend to make little baggies of the ashes. Whenever someone asks, “What happened to those wonderful old floorboards you used to have? I loved how rustic they looked?” I will hand that person a bag of floorboard ashes so they can mourn privately over the loss. I’ve lived with these floors for twenty years. I will not miss them.
My sister sent me a quote yesterday. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the original author, but the earliest I’ve found is “human aaron” from 2020. “Behind every great man is the drawer I need to get into. Why are you even in the kitchen right now?”
That’s one of the issues I hope to solve with my new kitchen. There’s nowhere you can stand for more than five seconds before someone has to get around you. Everything was blocking something else. The refrigerator door was a “summoning portal.” Because it blocked the door to the dining room, if you opened the refrigerator door during a party, you would guarantee that someone holding a steaming hot dish would need to slide by you at that very instant.
There’s one issue that no renovation can fix—why do people show up at a potluck dinner with ingredients? There will be two-dozen people here. Does everyone think that there will be ample time and space to whip up a side dish? Perhaps I’m being a diva, but I think that everything that comes through the door should be ready to eat. Maybe we can find enough space to pop it in the oven or microwave to heat it up a touch, but that should be it, right?
Maybe it sounds like I’m already “pre-irritated” about the future parties in this future kitchen. I’m not. I’m just hoping to ease some of the issues that we’ve had in the past by creating a more functional space. Today, I’m sitting at a folding table in the middle of a gutted kitchen. There is something nice about a table-height table instead of a bar-height island. But table height isn’t at all conducive to prep work. I would rather have an island that can double as a counter when needed.
I’m going to leave the sink and dishwasher in place until my family leaves. That’s when the demolition of this room will be completed. Wish me luck.
