Hillery Occasionally

Most of my trouble adapting to life here is that almost nothing is available, ever, much less at the drop of a hat. Coming from Brooklyn to a place that isn’t even a small town, merely a gas station/convenience store on one side of the street and a natural foods store/café on the other…well, it requires a radical reconstruction of one’s expectations. You cannot buy anything after nine at night, except on Sundays when you can’t buy anything after eight. Buying something like decent olive oil or shoes necessitates a 45-minute drive to the nearest small town, which may or may not have what you’re looking for and you may or may not be able to make your purchase depending on the day and time. Every store in said metropolis closes by five PM, except on Fridays when they close earlier or on any given day when they just decide to close or on Good Friday when the entire town shuts down. Who knew that all commerce halted for some random pagan-Catholic holiday? Having lived my entire adult life in New York City, I missed that memo.

When you do get to buy something good, since someone had to take the trouble to get it to the middle of nowhere, it is extremely expensive. Add the expense of getting it to and fro in The Man’s gas guzzling pick-up truck and the time you spent ferreting it out and you come to appreciate the notion of self-sufficiency. This is why I bought a sewing machine, stocked up on quick-freeze meats, and quickly expanded the parameters of my garden.

The Man and I considered planting outdoors, but since we’re leaving town for a couple of months and there are plenty of deer and other animals on his twenty acre parcel we decided to put some planters on the deck where our crop would be warm and safe. No one had any planters to sell us, so he made me some…is in the process of making me some. 
Of course, there are no pre-fab liners for our DIY planters, so I’ve been staple-gunning loose plastic sheeting to the inside and punching drainage holes through. I mix the soil with peat and worm castings and then I transplant my seedlings. This takes so much more time and energy than I ever could have expected. This is why I was so righteously tired last night.

It took me all afternoon to fit out and fill just one planter and there are four more to go, plus tomato plants to be situated in their own pots. I don’t have four more afternoons, period. I tried to explain this to The Man—how my life is even more impossible than before…now that I am actually accomplishing something—while he was trying to finish painting two major shows. He promised to build the rest of the planters in the morning and came up with some scheme to finish everything in time.

Then he took me up to the sauna he built last summer on the hill behind the house and made me relax. This is one of the great things about the no place. After nine PM, when you can no longer buy anything, you can stand warm and naked outside looking at the stars and the lights on in your house. If you’re me, you are afforded the thrilling opportunity to practice peeing standing up…because no one is going to see you, or stop you, or even care.

I think it’s been almost as difficult for The Man to adapt to me being here as it’s been for me to get used to this place. Friends, used to dropping in at all hours for a drink and a chat, have had to be reconditioned to call first and keep visits to more reasonable hours. With just the one car, we’re tied to each other almost all of the time. Furniture has been cast out and entire rooms reorganized. But for all the stress of change, our life here seems to be coming together…just in time for us to take off.

In four days I’ll be leaving my bounty in the hands of our house sitter. We’re keeping the planters inside due to the unpredictable weather. Fortunately, we have a large room with floor to ceiling windows lining a southern exposure. When freezing temperatures finally move on, the sitter will move the planters out on the deck. He’ll have to put up pea netting and tie the tomato plants to their sticks, but otherwise regular watering should do the trick. Then again, they might all drop dead…I don’t know.

Even if everything does live, who knows how much of it we’ll be able to eat. The Man’s stove died on me. I managed to get a lopsided birthday cake and a roast chicken out of it before it went on strike. Then there was an arduously stuffed puff pastry, soggy on the bottom and burned on the top. One night it presented me with half-baked potatoes when the rest of dinner was all ready. In a fit of rage, I threw the potatoes at the oven door as hard as I could. It’s given me nothing since.

The Man, sympathetic as ever, rescued the potatoes and fried them. Then he bought me a new propane grill with a side gas burner and everything. I bake potatoes on the top rack, but I’ll be damned if I can fit a pie pan up there. Is a Hillery a Hillery if she can’t bake? I guess we’ll find out this summer. I’m bringing my ice cream maker just in case.