Fall: the season of perennials, porch lady, and propane
A large, vibrant red leaf just went swirling by my head while I bask in the sun on my deck....the rich-toned Corinthian Bell wind chimes resonating a short distance away. I’ve been keeping busy with fall projects...tossing out tired, leggy plants, transplanting perennials, and even squeezing in a little painting. My garage cleaning project is being postponed until mid-October or early November, included in that mess is none other than the “Porch Lady.” Many locals have been asking where she has been, and I’ve had to break it to them gently...“She is in a heap on a table in the garage with a broken back... still wearing her rumpled clothes after being ripped from the porch during a horrible storm last June.” It makes you wonder if she might be headed to the dump? I know the thought of it is nearly unbearable, but in reality, she needs to be rebuilt and I’m feeling that dressing and caring for her over the years ......shopping for her prom dresses, hunting gear, and patriotic costumes is something this empty-nester has gotten tired of despite her popularity. Being of a spiritual nature...I wouldn’t rule out a resurrection, however you ought to be prepared to watch for her eventual obituary in this newspaper. I can hear the deep sighs from the masses.
Other projects are calling, like installing a new insulated door I’ve been painting for the past two weeks. It’s a nice deep red to match my shutters, and I’ve applied three coats, allowing 48 hours in-between like the directions have suggested. My son was going to come over last Sunday. He and my handyman, “the Horse Whisperer,” planned to tackle the door replacement project but it suddenly got put on hold because I made the fast decision to replace my fuel oil furnace with propane. H.W. suggested they not put the new door on until the 300-pound furnace gets winched up the stairs through the doorway, so nothing on the new door or frame gets damaged. “Good call,” I said. I bought 100 gallons of #2 fuel oil in mid-March to get me into the fall and was thinking maybe the price would go down from $5.09 per gallon. To the contrary, it has been climbing in the opposite direction. Unless I want to abandon the house and live in that cardboard box under a bridge, I decided it was time to take action. The new furnace is getting installed in late October, which is as soon as my propane company can schedule the tank installation, plus I want time to burn up my fuel oil reserves.
I will have to adjust to having propane, and in time I may even end up getting a gas cooking range, although a bad experience I had years ago comes to mind. It was the spring of 1981, and my then-husband Nick and I had been living in Fairbanks, Alaska, but we started traveling home so he could attend a log home building school in British Columbia for a three-week course to learn the skill, plus my brother was getting married, and I was a bridesmaid....so mother was sewing my blue dress while I made my way across Canada. We had previously started building an 8’x10’ log cabin on ten acres in Cherry, Minn., gifted to Nick by his grandmother, and planned to live in it until a larger cabin was built, and then use it as a sauna. We poured our own cement slab using a portable mixer, then with his new log-scribing skills, he began putting up the walls from logs we had cut and peeled from our property prior to leaving for Alaska.
I remember sitting on the cement slab, building a 14-inch rock foundation all the way around the perimeter to fill the gap between the slab and the first round of logs, using rocks we picked from a gravel pit nearby. It was a fun project, except the army worms were bad that year, and I sat there flicking them away with one hand while I held my cement trowel in the other. The wall turned out beautiful, and after finishing the little cabin, a sod roof was laid on top of four-inch diameter poles covered with heavy plastic, then a door and two windows were added. It was a charming, rustic dwelling in the woods but needed a cook stove.
My parents had a summer cabin on the Raps Road north of Cook, and old Mr. Rap was often seen driving his vintage red tractor as he tended the three-mile road named after him. One day we were visiting with him, and Nick asked if he had any gas cook stoves to sell. He said he had one over on his island he would sell to Nick for $5, but he had to go get it. It was very charming, with white porcelain burner knobs on a black cast iron frame, about 28” wide. Nick and a friend retrieved it, and we soon had it set up outside the little cabin in a sheltered corner under the front eave. Sometime during the summer Nick received a phone call from the owner of Rustic Alaska Homes near Fairbanks, and was offered a construction job building log homes. He desperately wanted to go, and within one week he built me a summer kitchen off the end of the small cabin with a wood floor and screened walls, then packed his clothes, chainsaw, and tools and headed north to Alaska in a red Ford truck his grandfather gave him. I can’t recall the original plan for how long he would be away, but there I was in the log cabin with my dog Fairbanks and her six puppies, she chose to deliver on the bed. I fixed up the cabin, adding pictures on the walls, a rug on the floor, and shelves up higher on all the walls to hold dishes, books, and the cardboard boxes for folded clothes. He had even added large leather straps to the ceiling to hold his guitar case. The hide-away-bed could be folded into a couch, and in one corner was a small fuel heating source. A charming small blue and chrome kitchen table was in another corner, and the large porcelain sink with a slop pail to catch water was in the other. Food was kept in large plastic bakery pails to keep it free from bugs and rodents. We didn’t have a fridge, but used a cooler or two, and did not buy too much to store. The rustic outhouse was a bit of a hike up the hill, and our water came from carrying buckets from a well and hand pump. To take a shower, I mixed half a bucket of hot and some cold, stood on a piece of plastic in the woods and poured water over myself with a small kettle. I’m not sure what money I was living on...I know I wasn’t working except to run to town to do laundry, and to stay busy I baked, cooked, read, and cared for the pups. Once Nick got up north, he did send money back to me, and my dad would slip me bills when I visited him in Hoyt Lakes. Dad worried about me “living in that shack in the woods,” he would say.
One day I went out into the summer kitchen to light the oven...squatting down low to turn on the gas, I reached in with a stick match. It was breezy, and I couldn’t get the stove to light, so I tried again and there was a loud explosion that sent me flying across the floor in an instant, slamming my back into a screened wall. What a shock....but I could still see...so that was a plus and I was feeling myself to make sure nothing else was on fire. My face felt hot, and I quickly shut off the gas and ran up over the top of the hill to the other side of the property where our friends were living in a school bus they had fixed up and winterized. I frantically called my friend Connie, and told her what had happened as she studied my face and then gave a wry smile and held up a hand mirror. My eyebrows were singed, and I had irregular choppy bangs across my forehead where there had not been any before. We broke out in laughter, but from that day forward loud or small pops from balloons, twist-open tubes of dinner rolls, and even an eye doctor’s glaucoma test with the burst of air...get me rattled. I have lit a gas stove since then, but only if nobody else will do it. I can see I will need to educate myself on the rare incidents of propane explosions if safety measures aren’t taken. Ms. Scarlet of the far north can and will conquer to get affordable heat.
