MindSpinner

I am quite finished with school.

Alas, school is not finished with me.  I should be grading papers now, should have been grading them for the past three or four hours, will grade them sometime - perhaps - at gunpoint.  If you’d like to be helpful, you may lock me in a dark dungeon with a single candle, no garden, and no Internet access, and tell me I can’t come out until the entire stack is conscientiously marked.
I’ve puttered in the garden more often than in the house or at the computer this May.  The results are modest but measurable - six raised vegetable garden beds planted, two left to go, a smattering of vegetables slipped in among flowers and herbs in the kitchen garden, a bean support built today of bamboo and twine.

Though it is green, colorful, and alive, the garden is eerily quiet. Wild honeybees are hardly to be found this year. They are not plundering the blackberry blossoms, where the air should vibrate with their buzzing. They do not cling to slender stems of purple lavender.  As closely as I scan the white clover in the front yard, I can find only two.  I’m relieved to see any at all.  The late frost may have taken the honeybees, or the deep cold of February, or Colony Collapse Disorder, whatever that actually is.  Their work among the flowers is left to others - the tiny insects, the occasional bumblebee or wasp.  I wonder how long the population will take to recover, if it does, and what could be done to help.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must light a candle and make my way down to the dungeon.  If I’m not out by morning, please send a cup of water and a crust of bread, and tell me to hurry up because it’s going to be a lovely day ;->.

I discovered today that my sun oven will heat pre-baked rolls for dinner even when its 5:30 p.m. and partly cloudy out. On sunny or partly sunny weekends, I can slow-cook a meal or bake brownies, muffins, or cookies - these things I have done. This weekend I will try baking my little loaf of bread out on the deck. If the bread is good, I will be pleased and relieved.

When the kitchen oven burns out less than a week after the clothes dryer does, it seems best to consider the situation an invitation to experiment and adventure. Perhaps I am ultimately to pursue Thoreau’s quest to live simply, and my appliances are giving me a nudge. It has to be said, however, that the simple life, however romanticized, is not actually simple.

There are noble reasons to eschew the use of an energy-guzzling appliance - reducing one’s carbon footprint, slowing the frightful pace of global warming, saving on the frightful bills. And then there’s the operative reason at my house: one morning you get up, throw a load of wash into the dryer, push the “Start” button, and … nothing. Almost nothing, that is. The dryer does buzz. I have a 27″x43″x28″ buzzer in my laundry room.

It is important to know that my laundry room is not really a room. It is an amateur architect’s afterthought, tucked at an angle under the stairs and next to the garage. It is, at best, half a closet. Squeezing a full-sized washer and dryer into the space was no small feat. I think the movers who did it were genies; one of them looked like a genie, if he’d only been blue. Getting the dryer out again looks to me to be nearly impossible, unless I call upon genies a second time, and these days, I can’t afford them. If I could afford genies, I’d have new dryer. One thing is clear: the washer would have to come out first.

So I think Big Buzzer will have to stay put for a while, especially since it will not be replaced in the forseeable future, at least not until teachers get real cost-of-living raises or cows fly, whichever comes first. It might be possible to repair Big Buzzer, but I think sixteen years is probably a better-than-average lifespan for a dryer. This dryer is the one my father bought to help me out when the children were still in cloth diapers.

Big Buzzer is now occupying coveted space. I could have a pantry in that space if I didn’t have a dryer. What to do with a dead dryer? I can put things on top of it, but I do that anyway. There’s a lot of space in the drum. Surely something could go in there - extra blankets? Sleeping bags? If I could only get Big Buzzer out, what could an old dryer drum be good for? Could one plant potatoes in it, minus its boxy white shell?

When you come to my house, you will likely find clothes drying on a folding rack designed for that purpose, and if you stay for a day or two, I will give you your own cardboard towel with which to pat yourself dry after your shower. It will be as rough as the cat’s tongue.

We are powering down in the laundry room, reducing our carbon footprint, slowing the frightful pace of global warming, trimming our electric bill. But I can’t pat myself on the back, now can I? Virtue, to be virtue, ought to be voluntary.