In the past few days, I have attempted to expand my homebrewing repertoire, venturing into the category of mead. This is essentially fermented honey water and is thought to be the oldest of the alcohol family. My process would have been best viewed through time-lapse photography, so as to actually view progress. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for years. I’ve been talking about it for at least 7 or 8 months. I purchased a 5 lb jug of honey a couple of weeks ago and was mentally ramping up for the process. Most recipes call for somewhere between 10-15 lbs of honey in a 5-gallon batch of mead. From there, I just got hung up in the thinking. Finally, last Friday, I just went to Safeway and bought ten more pounds of honey and determined that I was just going to do this.
Moreso than brewing beer, mead is mainly about waiting. The actual “brewing” of mead is very short and for the purpose of pasteurizing the honey-water and killing off any bacteria. Then, it just needs to sit and ferment. This is where I come to what inspired this post. I cannot quit watching the mead ferment. And this is not the “I just can’t take my eyes off of you” kind of watching. This is my nervous obsessive watching, trying to assess the fermentation, so worried that it’s not going to ferment well. My concern for mead is particularly high, as the supplies for this batch cost in the range of $60. If this turns out well, that will be far more cost effective than purchasing bottles of mead. But, now that I have dived in, there is no going back. As I was sitting at Wits End tonight, I thought of the verse from Matthew (6:27) that says “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” It struck that my worry about the fermentation of this batch cannot add 1/100 th of a percent to the alcohol level. It is so hard to just let go, to know that this is a “first try”, an experiment. And I have good reason for my worry, you see. This has been a difficult year, period. But, particularly so for brewing. I have brewed only 4 batches of beer, none of which properly extracted sugars or fermented. This takes a toll on a brewer. Luckily the one batch that I did for a friend’s graduation tasted okay, despite the low fermentation level. But, I’ve suffered through three other batches that were frankly undrinkable.
My imagination and desire to make this exotic drink has seduced me into trying again. I feel like I am at a point where I’m either going to find my rhythm in brewing and experience more enjoyment and fun making drinks that are good-tasting or I’m going to become a guy who homebrewed for awhile but doesn’t any more. To actually hope that this mead tastes good without obsessing on it all the time is almost excruciating. My life will be very different by the time this mead is ready (minimum 3 months). We’ll see who I am then.
I’m still working on how to more creatively and intriguingly title blog posts. But this one is just getting right to the heart of what I wanted to convey. As my wife and I’s hearts continue to circle around this idea of home, we stumbled across a new piece: difficulty acknowledging that we need home. While this is not disconnected from other thoughts I’ve expressed so far, it really condensed some of the underlying reasons why we have not been able to stay in one place. This became very concretized in the most recent living situation that we left.
We’ve realized that our basic assumption when seeking living spaces is that we can adapt to any situation. And we have. Twice we have lived in student dormitories. Once in a 400 square foot rental that was essentially a cottage. Twice we have shared a house with either another couple or another family. Once we lived in a duplex in a very wonderful, but expensive and highly gentrified part of town. We have adapted to different parts of the city, different routes to where we need to go, different grocery stores and coffee shops to frequent. This rhythm of change is the rhythm that we have adopted.
As my wife and I conversed a couple of weeks ago, it dawned on us that we feared being “high maintenance”–which is what we would be if we admitted that we needed stability. It sounds almost absurd and elementary to type this. And it’s not as if we have had no awareness of this, but it is constantly trumped by our next strategic move or our desire to try new living arrangements. We know a few people that move (or have moved) as much as we do. But, looking around now, there are more and more of the people we know who have lived in the current homes for 3 or 4 years or even more. And, if you’re reading this and thinking that’s a small number, keep in mind that many of our friends and acquaintances are transplants to the Pacific Northwest.
Without moving into rambling, I will sum this up. Wondering if being “high maintenance” is simply tuning into some deep needs for stability and having a stable center in our lives that is our home.
The sentence uttered by my friend Greg that moved this from a casual realization to a quest was actually a quite mundane comment in the moment. Last May we were sitting around and I was talking about our discontent with the housing situation that we were in and with a resigned tone I said, “We really didn’t plan very well for the long-term needs of our family when we made this move.” And his laid-back and prescient response really shed a whole new light: “You guys have never really done that with any of the places that you’ve lived.” While I know that he is a man that does not waste words, I don’t know if he knew the impact that those syllables had. I felt seen in a way that left me feeling cared for and transparent. He laid something bare that was more easily seen by others than by us. The past now appeared to line up in such a way that I could see the various living arrangements and places we had lived and notice that each one was a plan for the moment. And I could swear there was an audible “Clink, clink, clink” as our past housing situations all stacked up on top of each other in the light of the truth he had spoken. Each of these places was a plan, but one that fit the needs of the moment. Where we lived was something that we could always change. That was the view, rather than seeing our dwelling as a place of stability that could then help us navigate all of the other changes that life brings.
Another in my series of reflections about home. Furthering my thoughts from the last post, I have been struck by the thought of what a restful, steady home can allow to develop. Creative thoughts, dreams and hare-brained ideas are often fleeting–one has to be listening well to catch them. And one has to have a degree of stability and rest in order to be able to follow up on them. Reiterating what I wrote yesterday, what if the energy spent in all aspects of moving could be directed toward hearing the faint whisper of creativity? This is not be mistaken as a cop-out, but a recognition the role that “place” plays.
In talking to my friend Dave about this, he noted that there is an important role that place has in developing creative rhythms and discipline. Maybe a favorite spot or desk where one has a history of responding to the impulse to write poetry or paint watercolors. Or a space that one has crafted to suit their creative endeavors hobbies. I am constantly amazed at the “scrapbooking” spaces that my wife continues to create. She has done this at our last five dwellings. She loves to create a little nook, sometimes even in a small closet that would serve better as a solitary confinement cell. I marvel at these spaces and hope that eventually we can get to a place where she can enjoy one for several years.
My equivalent creative hobby would be homebrewing beer. As my collection of homebrewing gear has grown, I have continued to tote it along to each of last four abodes. However, I keep having to reinvent my process as storage, drainage, access to water and size of outdoor spaces have varied. I enjoy doing it enough that I keep at it, but I would love to not have to do that.
Moreover, I wonder what desires never even reach embryonic stages because there is simply no psychic room for them to flourish. Looking back, that is something I grieve. We have prized mobility and the desire to attempt alternative living situations more than stability. These aren’t inherently bad, but we have exhausted ourselves. This “superhuman” pace of moving around has finally caught up with us.
An element of our situation that I was thinking about today is how we are nearly constantly over the past 7 years either going through the process of settling in or the process of gearing up to move. I noted yesterday that one of our consideration regarding possessions that we keep is often how well we can pack it around.
Most people can attest that the process of really moving in to a new place, unpacking, hanging pictures, decorating takes several months. And then there’s however much time it takes to make the space your own by purchasing a few new items or a piece of furniture that really fits the space well. Andrea and I really only did this in one of the spaces that we lived in, really allowed ourselves to unwind and made the space our own in several ways. We creatively painted the walls in several rooms, I customized an office space to fit my grad school studying needs and my hobby of selling on ebay. And we really began to live in such a way that lacked worry about the things we owned and how difficult it would be to move them.
Tying back into my original thought, moving out of somewhere takes its own time to happen as well. The searching for a new place to live, acquiring boxes and packing. In a couple of our cases, we attempted living with other couples/families, so there was the time and energy spent planning those mergers. In several cases, there has been an overlap of these two processes, the settling in and the gearing up.
The other day Andrea was talking to me about a couple she knew that intentionally moved into difficult neighborhood and have made efforts to connect with neighbors, to clean up the area and act with others to improve the area. I had a flash of envy and wishing that we could have that kind of impact–then it clicked internally that we don’t live in such a way to facilitate that kind of interaction. That seems to dovetail with the above thoughts. If the time and energy spent moving in, settling down, gearing up and moving out were spent elsewhere, what could our life be like?
Andrea and I are settling into our new apartment which we have now inhabited for 26 days. Wow! Almost a month already. The process of moving in, unpacking, getting settled, figuring out where this and that should be placed or stored–all very familiar to our young, renting and mobile friends. We, however, have a unique relationship to this process. And we anticipate that the next several months will be spent reflecting and seeking some clarity on this. You see, in our nearly seven years of marriage, we have lived in nine different places. And if you take out the one place that we lived for two full years, that’s eight places in five years. We never really stopped to consider this until the last year or so. Each of the times that we have moved seem logical and necessary for its own sake. Some of our moves were out of necessity, others for cheaper rent or the need for more room for a child on the way. But, somewhere along the line, I realized I was asking friends to help load and unload furniture for the fourth or fifth time. And oddly enough, I have never had a friend balk at this. We have developed a lifestyle of moving. Just the other day, even as we are really wanting to stop this habit, we caught ourselves looking at a decorative piece of furniture and deciding that we needed to get rid of it because it was too difficult to “keep carting around.” That’s quite emblematic of our viewpoint–it’s not the “carting around” that needs to be scrutinized, it’s the possessions that can’t stand up the constant moving. In following days, I will post more thoughts and also reflections on the various places that we have lived.
