Red Cedar

I have a confession to make.

Whenever I hear the news that a friend is pregnant my first reaction is to be really and truly happy for them – but my immediate follow-up reaction is relief that I am not the pregnant one. These things are particularly true if the friend is close to my age (40) because it is likely their last chance to have a child (so yay for them!), but also because I can not imagine spending the years of 40-60 raising young children.

I used to worry a lot about whether I would experience mid-life regret as someone who has mostly chosen childlessness (I say mostly because at the age or 33 I went baby-crazy for about six-months, and once that settled down and I decided I was for sure not having kids, I met my partner who came with a 9-year-old). It’s the threat our mothers make when we first announce we probably don’t want our children — that one day we will rue our “selfishness” — and then it will be too late.

But thus far I have to report the opposite. Having M. come into my life as a stepdaughter was a pretty great addition to things, but it did not make me want a child of my own biological making. My nephew and niece are freakin’ adorable and I am blessed to be their auntie (I could just eat them up, they are the cutest bugs!), but it does not make me want babies. My fertility cycles are definitely a-shifting these days in preparation for the big change in a few years, but even that hasn’t triggered the last-ditch, now-or-never pregnancy that I am apparently at risk for.

At the age of forty I am looking forward to some pretty good years with my partner – years in which we reap the rewards of the good jobs and hard work we have been privileged with. We just bought this little property with friends that we are in the process of developing, we enjoy socializing with friends, we have time for academic study and community involvement, we have a home that is truly and awesomely comfortable and time to make it so. Early retirement is also on the table, though who knows if that will happen or not…. But most importantly? We have time and energy for each other. Lots of it.

As much as I recognize the joy it must be to have a child of one’s own, I would not trade any of the above for a squirming dependent in my arms right now, and I am positive that I in no way want an angry teenager in my life at the age of 55 or 60.

This is not to question the friends of mine who have chosen later-in-life-parenting. I think there are pros and cons to such an arrangement and I don’t have any judgement about when people decide to have children (including folks who have them young, cause I’ve seen that work out well in many instances). But I think it is important to acknowledge that not every woman who chooses to remain childless will end up bitter at forty or fifty, rueful and living a selfish life with regret.

Now we’ll see how I feel in ten years – because that’s when I suspect I might have a twinge of “what if”? But I pretty much guarantee it will be short-lived if it happens at all because I can’t imagine feeling physically “on” for having a baby another decade down the road. Plus “what if” is a problematic way to live.

So let me close by saying congratulations to all my middle-aged-mom-to-be friends! Because I’m sure you will love every second of your parenting experience, and I will crochet little hats for your babies when they are born and see you once or twice a year until your kid is past toddler-age (it’s not intentional, it just works out that way). But I’m also going to say, phew!  because I’m not going to be balancing the insomnia of menopause with the demands of a six-year-old and I won’t be picking my kid up at 3 am at a party he sneaked out to and then got abandoned at as the vagaries of age start catching up to me. (You all think that won’t be your kid – but it will. Ask me how I know this).

Instead I’m going to continue doing what I have been – crafting a life  I enjoy with people who I love and finding meaning in the doings of life – the suffering, the laughter and everything in between. Children or no children, we co-create our lives alongside luck and chance, and so far I haven’t a regret about what mine is becoming.

Coming back from our last summer weekend working on the property, it struck me that this has been a pretty phenomenal, action-packed summer. There was hiking and family visits, canning and gardening, making and meals with friends, and of course – the big land purchase. So here it is, my summer in pictures so I have a record of the awesome.

It’s the end of summer and the dinginess of my office environment has finally gotten to me after ten years in the same damned cube. Ten years! (Fifteen at my job, ten in this building)

The federal government doesn’t really have much of a policy involving sprucing up workplaces beyond providing a carpet cleaning once a year. Hell! We don’t even get a deep clean of our office spaces – ever. Which makes for an accumulation of dust, stains and other assorted sads that cling to the fabric cube walls like the very essence of work itself.

So I’m going to do something which is pretty much unheard of in the environment I work in – I’m going to decorate my cube beyond putting up a new poster or two. I’m going to get an area rug! A new chair for the visitors (that isn’t a derelict rolling office chair)! A covering for the seventies bookshelf that looks like it was made in a prison (it was, too – thanks CorCan)!

Of course I can’t do it all at once because I only have so much money and time — so consider the above my before pictures – and as I go I will post in-progress and “after” pictures. I would really like to cover the beige cube walls with a coloured fabric in addition to some other smaller projects – but I’m not sure yet as that would be somewhat costly and it may turn out that some smaller fixes make the space more livable. Today’s project is to affix some stickable “wall art” to the overhead cabinet (on sale at Rona yesterday for only $5) – and to peruse the office supply shop across the street for something to replace the ugly plastic tray that serves as my in basket. Start small – work big, right?

Last week when we started working on our lot, it started to feel *less* real to me than when we bought it – for a day or two anyway. Like I couldn’t believe that we were actually able to do this thing. That we actually bought this little slice of non-city to work on and were working on it!

It’s hard to describe how much I have wanted to do something like this, for how long I have looked at little properties and thought about a piece of land that could be ours, for just a little cabin and a quiet place to go to. I think the desire has been with me for all of my thirties and half of my twenties – growing alongside my years spent in the “big city”. For as much as I love my East Vancouver neighbourhood, and the downtown in which I work – I also love solitude and quiet and peace and calm and away. It’s what propelled me to try living on the Sunshine Coast for four years until the commute almost killed me. It’s why I work on my little oasis in the city – the garden and studio – to provide a breathing space in between tightly packed houses.

Over dinner last night we met with our land partners and discussed what to do next. Burn the big pile, finish the outhouse, look into the permit-process. But mostly I just want to make a space to put up a tent, so I can be there whenever I want — so I have a place to make mine even if it is just a little flat ground beneath the trees. This place deeply satisfies the itch that I have wanted to scratch all these years – I can imagine creating times both social and solitudinous – once we get our first living spaces in place.

And so, having waxed rhapsodic for a moment – I bring you some pictures of our very first (and most urgent) building: The OUTHOUSE (not yet finished but we got a good start on it).

This hole was dug by our backhoe and is much larger than it looks in the picture. It is also close to seven feet deep. We will never fill this hole. Even my father approved. It is a very good hole.

Because the hole was so big, we had to build a very big platform (8×8) to cover it. This is Brian and Will holding the platform base up so I could measure the rough heights our posts would have to be. Since our lot is pretty sloped, everything has to be on stilts.

The posts were made from logs we cut on our land, put onto leveled concrete pads and stabilized with a “y” formation. It looks a bit flimsy, but it’s really very sturdy.

Will did so much work getting the platform level that he left it up to Brian and I to hammer down the floor. We still need to cover it with plywood to make sure there are no cracks for smells to leach up through. Also we need to cover up below the base so that the hole is well and truly sealed off from animals and things.

After the platform was finished, Brian and Will selected logs to make the outhouse structure from. Obviously 8×8 is way too big for an outhouse, so we determined that the structure would be comprised of an enclosed outhouse, with a washing area outside, and a rainwater collection system to the side of it. I left at this point to go to Keremeos and buy fruit.

The view from the platform! if there weren’t all those trees in the way, you could see the lake.

When I returned a few hours later, the framing for the main outhouse and structure was finished, as was the outhouse bench. Again, we need plywood to cover the bench, plus some metal sheathing where the hole is so we don’t get bad smells leaching into the wood.

This is where things were when we left them. Next we have to:

• Put down plywood flooring
• Nail shiplap to the outside of the outhouse structure and then paint/stain it.
• Cover the bottom of the platform
• Create some ventilation from the hole
• Sheath the hole with ducting and finish seat
• Build a door for the outhouse
• Put up the roofing material
• Put up some guttering and install the rain barrel
• Build a table/shelf to hold a wash basin, put up a clothes line

Quite a lot for a simple outhouse! But I’m confident we can get it done before winter since I’ve got two trips planned in September already. If all goes well, we’ll have a rudimentary woodshed up as well.

Then the big burn in December!

Then we get to start the rest – main cabin, tent platforms, storage shed etc. As I said, I will be happy once I have a place to sleep on the land, but first a place to shit. Indeed.