Ammi Midstokke: Creating a home for everyone
About 4 minutes after celebrating the completion of our new home, I flew halfway around the world and basically forgot the last year of my life. It was likely a therapeutic necessity, for building a house is a remarkable thing, but responsible for more than a few divorces.
Along the way, one gets caught up in the minutiae of things: walls that don’t quite align, windows that should open but don’t, and my 45-year misunderstanding about right and left. Somehow, all those discussions about trim details and door sizes come together to create a house. And then it remains the job of the family to turn that into a home.
These ingredients are more subtle. The slow replacement of new-house smell with the more familiar ones (wet dog, funky teenager and fresh baked muffins). It’s in the shelves that fill with your favorite board games. It’s in the first memories you make rallying around the house on a razor scooter because there are many benefits to concrete floors.
Waking up from my first jet-lagged sleep on a fine July morning, I looked out these giant windows surrounded by trees and blue sky and the song of birds (the ones that have not kamikaze struck my windows yet) and all the struggling memories of building evaporated, just like that.
It’s a little like childbirth with less gore and more money.
As a means of survival, I’d rather forgotten how much I need to be aware of my natural surroundings, of the rhythms of life that have been set long before me and will continue long after me.
In a city, we manufacture much of that, from street lights that dull the full moon to parks filled with the ecological wasteland of grass. Whether passively or actively, I’m certain the world will return to these rhythms one day, less certain humans will be around to enjoy it.
I read that birdsong carries best in the dewy predawn hours, and that is what woke me that morning. It was so loud, I actually got up in search of whichever cell phone alarm was blaring. “Oh, that’s just real birds,” I mumbled, stumbling back to bed. I remembered how I used to get up at night and yell at the frogs in the pond to quiet down (those mating months are like 104 decibels). How I missed them when they were replaced by trains and sirens!
Then I lie in bed waiting for the sun to rise and wishing I knew what bird makes what song. I was bathed in it, bathed in the morning light, bathed in the slow glow that appeared on the tops of pines.
As the forest and I slowly awoke, I discovered another unexpected gift in the yard.
When I left in early June, our home was perched on a construction wasteland of dust and rock that I was trying to make more homey by arranging those rocks in patterns.
While Charlie is just fine at moving rocks, his real landscaping gift is his willingness to water things. It doesn’t come to much use on rock. At some point this spring, he spread a few billion wildflower seeds around the forsaken dust bowl that was our yard. Then he watered them. Nearly every day. With tenderness and care that tells me he should be more involved in my gardening efforts for they would surely benefit.
When I woke up on that first morning, listening to the sounds of the woods, my gaze drifting down from blue skies, treetops, to the gentle slope of hill beyond our patio, it was met with an explosion of color. The dirt field I’d left behind had miraculously transformed into a Monet painting.
The entire house is surrounded, surrounded by a sea of wildflowers in every color and shape imaginable. It is like walking into a fairyland of oranges and pinks and violets and delicate little white blooms and proud red poppies. It smells like a field of honey and almonds. It hums with the work of visiting bees. It brings curious hummingbirds by from dawn until dusk. It invites the deer to meander through with the same calm awe.
I had forgotten how the sounds and smells of nature are a necessary part of my home.
It’s not just about color palettes and hanging pictures. It’s about inviting nature to make its home here, too.
I’ll plant a garden one day, in some corner of the yard, but I think we’ll leave the wildflower fields for everyone to enjoy.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.