Salem House basement finally loses it's black eye! From blech to beautiful.

Well, it took a while, but we finally carved out the time to finish the last room at Salem House. This last remaining bastion of ugliness was in the basement, at the base of the stairs on the right. It was a room of pink shag carpeting and pressed wood paneling, dark and depressing. With the rest of the house re-dressed in decidedly cheerful tones, this room was the one you avoided looking into at all costs.
So, with a lot of things on the schedule, we took a few morning hours last Saturday to rip up pink shag, red indoor/outdoor carpet and scrape up disintegrated rug pad. We ripped down the ceiling drywall that was beyond damaged and then cleaned up!

I left the girls with "homework". Finishing the clean up, and priming the walls and ceiling. After tearing down the ceiling dry wall, we opted for painting the ceiling boards above and the floor joists that make up the ceiling. This added some head room and visually made the room less cramped. There was very little in the way of electric and hvac left in the ceiling. And paint makes things disappear like magic! 

The droopy wires are to be rerouted and moved up safely by an electrician this week. Meanwhile, they stand as an eyesore. 

The ceiling was a laborious task that required four coats of paint, but it is so much brighter! In between floor joists, the ceiling is painted a pretty blue, making it feel even higher. By day three the place was brightening up!

The window had already been replaced with the rest of the basement windows, so it was just cut out properly and trimmed with 1x3". We added base board in 1x4 and ceiling trim in 1x3, but other than that, paint and elbow grease!

The jewel box color on the floor is the same throughout the basement. With the addition of soft lighting, we were ready to make it into the study. All college kids need a great place to study!

Jute rug, desks, chairs, a place for guests to lay out their study materials, and both soothing light and task light make it a welcome space. 

I love that I was able to do this with my children. That the girls decided to spend their spring break on the project with me was a treasure. I hope they learned some skills and gained some confidence in their ability to perk up a room. Total price tag was less than $200, but final effect is worth so much more! 

Dirty Job, Saving a life.

This morning's plan got started a bit late. I was cranky because there was a mouse in our crawlspace that woke me up at three am, and then continued to do so, until sunup. Mostly with the question "Do I get up and kill it by setting the trap? Then hear the trap snap, ew, and have to empty it of the dead mouse." It was less existential "do I have the right to take a life", (I was pretty cranky) and more the ick factor of dead mouse in the night.
So, after morning barn chores I treated myself to two cups of tea and a bunch of googling about moles and grubs. We have abundance of both and trying to decide what course of action to take. Currently favoring the idea that if we have a lot of both, eventually the one will polish off the other and tunnel elsewhere. Unfortunately, this could mean several years of walking around on ground that is much like a giant sponge, and too treacherous to ride the horses.
By mid-morning, I'd stalled enough, and headed to the main task of the day. I had purchased a new leaf blower and wanted to give it a go. At Cowfeathers we do not need a leaf blower for leaves. We have a mighty wind that does all our raking for us. I bought the leaf blower for cleaning.
Indeed, I do clean my house with a shop vac, but the leaf blower is handy for cleaning the barn. The last one went motor-up some years back, so the cobwebbing  has been done mostly by broom- inadequately for sure. In fact, the last leaf blower was used really only in the loft and mow area prior to our big barn parties, and never down below in the animal areas. So today was it's maiden attempt. I began by getting on coveralls, hat, gloves, respirator and full mask- the kind that is tight as a drum, hurts your face and leaves marks for hours.
I began in the chicken house. Ushered all the birds outside, opened the big door and fired 'er up! Whew! Cobwebs, dirt, straw, poop blown away.
I moved on to the barn, thru the cat area and the goat pens, by this time I can't see much, too much condensation inside my goggles and dust coating the outside. But with all the dirt and cobweb blobs raining down on my head, shoulders and down my back it has to be getting cleaner.

After photo. Covered in yuck, mask marks for sure!

Most of the worst bits are on the beautiful beams above, so even though I specifically purchased the lightest of the powerful machines, I can feel the strain in my shoulders from holding the machine above my head.
When I make it into the main part of the barn, I have an ambitious moment and head to the old sheep stall. This is a large concrete area where we used to house some of our sheep, and was previously the milking barn, with old stanchions. When I milked our sheep these old wooden stanchions came in handy. The sheep left in 2015. The area has been unused since then, still harboring an old steel gate to contain the ram, dried marbles of sheep poop and stacks of buckets that my wonderful father in law washed out when he was here last year.
I was blowing all this detritus out of the stall in a most lazy fashion, leaving everything mostly where it lay, except for the dirt. But laziness sometimes make things more difficult. So, I turned off the blower for a second to try and stack the buckets in the same region, a bit out of the way.
I turned over a blue one and let out a yelp as something jumped out from under the bucket!
A chicken. NO fooling. A chicken. Under a bucket. In the sheep stall I haven't walked into in about a year.
She recovered a split second before me and stalked off, me in pursuit. She looked mysteriously wet, but not dead, which is a miracle. She is one of our Speckled Sussex and has never been one for being handled. Chicken breeds, like dog breeds or horse breeds, have tendency. And the Sussex girls have always been independent adventurers. Willing to walk off, alone, to the creek or back to the apple trees. Hawk bait.  I had decided to not get attached, even though they are most pretty birds.
I got her fresh water (having dumped all the buckets when I was blowing dirt around at 160 mph) and poured her corn and layer ration. She enthusiastically went to work on the food.

I eventually headed back to my dirty task marveling at the God moments that led me to try out the new leaf blower, decide to tackle the sheep stall, and move that bucket. Poor kid would've never made it, as they are silent in the dark, and she hadn't made a peep.
Still a mystery as to how she got under there. I had another chicken get under a bucket years ago, and she, too was found alive and kicking. But that was in the chicken house, in a high traffic area. I still think she was there for more than a day.
A few years ago I stopped counting the chickens every night before finishing chores. For one, not sure I can still count that high, and for two, if I was short a bird, I went on a hunt for an animal that hunkers down when it's dark and doesn't come when it is called (mostly).  I'd be stressed out and wondering which bird was missing. We rarely lose a bird to anything but old age, so I gave up that stress of counting and occasional searching. The bird was nearly always back in the morning, no worse for wear.  Would not have been so with this little chicken.

Thanks for this save, God!

Clementine Paddleford - a spoonful of the past.

When I was in third grade, I found out we were moving. Leaving the tidy lawns, sidewalks and child-packed suburbs of New Jersey and headed out to the Connecticut wildness, of tall, mysterious trees and aggressive old rocks.
I was the youngest child, and "helped" choose the house. At least I was taken along on the house hunt adventure.  I really liked a red house that was dollhouse-tiny, with dozens of other red, dollhouse-tiny outbuildings. It had a rope swing. I still remember that house, from a short visit in 1976, although I don't think I ever saw it again, and have no certainty of where it was located.
The weight of my favor rested lightly on my mother's shoulders, so we instead purchased a house on a hillside that featured mysterious tall pines that had their own wheezy conversations, and lichen splotched rocks that pushed out of the earth like crashed spaceships. Best of all, it had a river, so I had a friend. Although I'm sure these features also appealed to her, she liked the location and the potential of the place. We moved in and called it "Puckihuddle".
I don't have an actual definition for the word, Puckihuddle. A somewhat thorough search of the oracle of Google shows a preschool by the name, and a reference in the Great Bend Tribune newspaper of Kansas,  March 25, 1975 of "Puckihuddle" being chosen for a unit name in a Lutheran Holy Week program. Also, there was a store by the name that placed an advertisement in the Ulster County Catskill Mountain News on November 9, 1972 in the great build up to Christmas that asserted that "Santa comes to Puckihuddle for"....such intriguing items as patchwork elephants, feathered vests and the enthralling enigma; "Plumnutty".  If I could just go back to Christmas 1972. Did I get a Plumnutty and just don't recall? I think I certainly would remember a feathered vest.  It appears both Plumnutty and Puckihuddle went out of vogue in the 1970s, as there were no more modern references.
My mother said "Puckihuddle" was an Native American word (I'm sure she said "Indian", as it was 1976) that meant "A happy place to live and work". I've long been suspicious that she picked the meaning and then the word. Because live and work there, we did.  A search of a database of dozens of Native American languages is missing the word.
So, we moved into Puckihuddle, it was our homeplace.
Puckihuddle possessed layers of life.
According to a stranger that came down the drive one day, the mysterious whispering tall pines were a beacon to the child he was during WWII- where their family planned to meet if they were ever separated by war.
One year, best pal Tommy and I, stumbled- literally, over stones in the myrtle that turned out to be stairs from the house down to the Little River. We showed mother and dad, and they were revived for delightful use and mom planted daffodils all down the hill through the wood so that using the steps in early spring was covered by a canopy of trees spurting yellow-green buds and carpeted by purple myrtle and yellow daffs.
There was a foundation of stone that used to hold up ____ice house? barn? root cellar? that now grew a small sample of Marsh Marigold whose bloom my mother treasured, and would call us to come look, expecting our equal awe.
On the property was a little garage that, first priority upon purchase, was turned into a barn to house my sister's horse, Frosty. In that garage was a small treasure trove of things. Kitchen-y things that were grand, and crude and special and exotic. In the landscape of 70's cuisine, Pyrex and Tupperware, these were things I'd never before seen. My mother said they had belonged to Clementine Paddleford. That Clementine Paddleford had lived in the house a long time ago, and she was the first female food editor for the New York Times. (Or so my 8 year old brain retained.)
Clementine Paddleford always hung around the edges of my imagination. She was eternally the full, rich, lovely name of "Clementine Paddleford", never another version. The steps we discovered to the Little River were probably made by Clementine Paddleford and her servants to fetch water. The beams of the small study with the soaring ceiling surely once had a loft where Clementine Paddleford slept. And, undoubtedly, she cooked over the stone fireplace in the dining room with a large cast iron pot.
I have no idea why in my imagination, she lived in a loft but had water-fetching servants and cooked on a open fire. My Clementine Paddleford wore a long calico dress with high collar trimmed in lace, and a bun. She was rich, but cooked on open fire. And, she was a newspaper woman. Revered, but long forgotten, having tragically left behind her kitchen accoutrements. Clementine Paddleford was a cross between Ma Ingalls and Susan B. Anthony.
Sometimes, I would try to figure out the purpose of the more unusual kitchen-y things left behind by the esteemed Clementine Paddleford. Mostly I  was wrong. But sometimes I would be let in on the true identity of an item by an older, wiser cuisinier. I guessed for eons what a little iron press with intricate design and two sides hinged together could create. I was eventually informed it was an ice cream cone press with a wooden mold to wrap the warm cooked cone around so it could cool in the proper shape. Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Cones came from the store in a box, right? There were mixers, mashers, strainers, mallets, beaters, all of odd shapes and sizes that made the art of cooking seem difficult and potentially violent.

The 80's came, I grew up, Puckihuddle became someone else's homeplace. And another layer added to it's history. Clementine Paddleford took a step back in the mists of time, but her collection lived on, at least in the wooden spoons I took with me to college and in each move since.

The wooden spoons- with a regular spoon to compare.  

So, imagine my neck snapping around as I ran my bathtub water on Sunday and spotted out of the corner of my eye, nearly buried in the spine of my favorite magazine, Country Living, the words "Clementine Paddleford".
It was as if after 40 years, bubbling forth, there was proof of her existence outside of the kitchen treasures and the stone steps to the river. I greedily read the small blurb that included this name from my past.

It read;
" In the case of fire, after safeguarding my family, I'd run back for my vintage copy of How America Eats by Clementine Paddleford. My husband picked it up, almost as an afterthought, from a used bookstore while on a business trip in 2000. When I cracked its spine, I discovered a kindred spirit- a woman who, as food editor of the New York Herald Tribune for 30 years, had traveled thousands of miles to answer the book's titular question. It was the first time I'd read a food writer who paid as much attention to the stories behind the recipes as to the recipes themselves. I set my mind to learning everything I could about the author, and went on to write her biography, helping to reinstate her name into the annals of American food history. (She, in turn, helped shape my career as a food writer.) And all of this came from a husband's hurried $14 purchase. (Good thing it wasn't jewelry.)"

Well. I was like a beagle who caught wind of a rabbit. A beagle who was in the bathtub. But had access to Google.  Good thing my cell phone has a water proof cover!
My main question was "Did Clementine Paddleford really live at Puckihuddle?"

My research belied my childhood persona of Clementine Paddleford, and replaced her with someone even more excellent. She was an adventurer and a pioneer, but of the 1940's and 50's, instead of my imagined 1800 model. I guess that tells you what my childhood brain thought of the timeline of when the first female food editor would have been hired. She wrote her seminal book in 1960. She flew her own little Piper Cub plane, spent time on a submarine cataloging the food made under the water, travelled the country learning about tacos and oysters, sticky buns and rum pie. At age 33, she had surgery for cancer that left her with a permanent laryngostomy, but didn't stop working, learning and writing. Also, evidently, not only did she not cook over an open fire in a cast iron kettle, she didn't cook much at all. She had two maids that did that for her (and, therefore, potentially used those stone steps to fetch water from the river? Okay, wrong century again.) I read and read and read, and learned a whole lot about Clementine Paddleford. And then, buried in a bio on cooksinfo.com  was the following sentence; "In 1938, she purchased a summer home on 17 acres in Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut. "
Good enough for me.
 I believe.

Clementine Paddleford was real! She lived at Puckihuddle before it was ours and probably truly left behind her wooden spoons and ice cream cone creating capacity. When I stir my chili, she stirs with me.

And, as another truth becomes evident,  I would guess that the Native Language data base is missing a word. My mother knows it.