Mutable Fate

From the stars at my birth to my socioeconomic bracket, it was written that I would end up a cranky old lady, notably spindly of build and plump of stock coupons, who teetered about in red Converse high tops with the aid of a slender ebony cane, making the lives of others deliciously, endearingly miserable.

My center of operations would be a mossy and moldering Arts and Crafts mansion, like this one in Rockland County, designed, hand built, and lived in by Henry Varnum Poor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Varnum_Poor]:

The main house

The art studio in the main house

The potter's shed

Corner of the kitchen

Instead, I am living in a raised ranch basement apartment. 

. . . And, to make matters worse, This outrage to my socio-aesthetic sensibility is contaminated by the fact that I'm happy here. Hence the natural segue to issues of entitlement, bitterness, rage, and depression is ruptured.  Furthermore, I no longer suffer any of them (all so very much very often), so our visit to this terrain is over.

It's bracing to grow up.  At any age.

(As if it suffuses my genes, though, there remains a part of me that wholeheartedly knows I crave my own house--my own terraine, my own timbers--a mossy old house where the rooms are suffused with the scent of wood smoke;where at night the peacocks and peahens shriek on the roof; where the chickens peck and cluck around the door; where the canes of the bamboo grove clack in the wind; where border collies follow me about the property and snooze at my feet while I write. (Along with my actual present fellow, Wolsey the Cairn.))

So what has this to do with mutable fate.  Well, three years ago, when I was still getting my garden here into some fundamental order, I piled seven bails of straw into a little alcove behind the bean vines. My hands and coordinate body parts did it. It wasn't clear to me why, really, so I decided to dub it my meditation nook. I did, in fact, meditate in it twice, and it was good. I especially liked it as a place to get out of the hot sun and hide. 

The thing of straw

 (from the outside, bean vines climbing it)

I decided sometime this winter that the nook occupied a patch of garden that would serve well as a part of the garden, as it receives a lot of sunshine.  This spring I piled on eight more bails and bought lumber to make a green roof to set atop it all.  I've lined pocket beds of the roof with chicken wire and that black, unwoven cloth you use to suppress weeds. I've so far filled one corner of it with garden soil, vermiculite, and manure.  Now I'm taking a brief rest.  

Heirloom tomato plants, which are, after all, vines, will hang down from all around the edge of the roof. Leeks shall sprout up around the cupulla, or turret. Inside, the old bamboo love seat is already in place, for taking in an unsullied view of the woods. And for planning construction of the cob stove for baking bread, which will also warm the dear hovel in the winter. . . .

Mutable, mutable, mutable fate.