Everyday Life

Posts might get scarce around here for the next month or so – because I’ve got quite a spring cleaning project to work on.

A peek inside the trailer’s back door – after two afternoons of work

We’ve got a rolloff out on the land and my task is to empty the trailer into the rolloff.

One hour’s worth of trash

Since Daniel is still needing to work mega-overtime, Tirzah Mae and I are mostly on our own for this project.

My cleaning buddy

Which means we’ll be busy – really, really busy in the next several weeks.

Custom: adj Made to fit the needs or requirements of a particular person. (Definition from Merriam-Webster.)

When I think of the term “custom” (as an adjective), I think of something with a unique pattern created after a person’s needs. For example, if I were to say I created a custom outfit, I would mean that I had drafted a pattern for myself and created an outfit to my own specifications. If I were to adjust a pre-existing pattern to fit my body dimensions (by using one size bodice and another size skirt, for example), I would call it a “customized” dress.

I am beginning to believe that I may be the only one that makes this distinction between “custom” and “customized”.

The reason I think so is because my husband and I have started interviewing builders.

We’ve explored the floor plans builders have online, have walked through dozens of homes in the Parade of Homes (both last October and this month). And we’ve discovered that the current popular house plans are not our forte.

We have pretty specific ideas about flow (no traffic through the work triangle in the kitchen please!), lighting (get those living areas on the south side by all means!), placement of garages (we have an acreage – we don’t want the first thing you see to be a garage.) And pretty much every plan people are building in Wichita defies our specifications.

So we want a custom home.

We walk into the home of yet another builder and ask (usually the realtor, but sometimes we’re lucky and the builder himself is hanging around) a couple of quick questions: Does the builder build custom homes and does he build homes in our price range?

The response to the question of whether a builder builds custom homes is telling. One builder assured us that he did, turning to a plan he’d made (and could show off) that could be customized for a larger lot. Another talked of walking homebuilders through a half-built home and letting them choose where they wanted electrical outlets. One showed us how he’d done pillars instead of a solid wall in one of his stock plans.

Now, I’ve looked at thousands of houseplans (I’m not exagerating, people), and messed with quite a few. And while I’ve used some other plans as a jumping off point for my own plans, I’ve only once ended up with a finished product close enough to the original for me to consider it “customized” rather than “custom”. And I’ve found maybe three plans out of the thousands that comes anywhere close to meeting our specifications. Which means the chances that any builder in town has a spec that can be customized to meet our needs is virtually nil.

We’re looking for a builder who’ll build a custom home – and I’m discovering that one of the difficulties is sorting out which builders understand “custom” as I do.

“You have pretty eyebrows,” she told me. I carried that compliment around with me for years. She was an older girl, one of the cool girls. I was surprised that she even deigned to talk to me, much less to compliment me on the eyebrows I worked so hard to obtain.

That was when I was much younger, when I read beauty books. When I balanced pencils at just the right angle against my nose so I could arch my eyebrows just so.

Even as I plucked my eyebrows, I kept in mind the injunction that sometimes eyebrows don’t grow back after plucking. I needed to be judicious, to only pluck what I was willing to have never regrow.

I left the perfect arch behind with my teenage years (probably before), but plucking is still a part of my life.

This time, it’s trying to get rid of that ONE WHITE HAIR.

I can feel it when I smooth my eyebrows. It feels different from all the rest – coarse where the others are smooth.

I can see it when I look in the mirror, a blank spot amidst the otherwise dark hair, a disproportionately long hair amongst the normal-length hairs.

When I see it, I pull it, hoping that the books would be right, that continued plucking would cause that hair follicle to give up. But it never does. A new mutant hair springs up overnight, twice as long as the others.

I don’t remember what got us talking about it when my brother and his wife were in Lincoln at the same time as I, but we got to chatting about our eyebrows and my brother confessed that he too has the mutant hair. His hairdresser clips his every time he gets his hair cut – and it regrows to double length with surprising speed.

I seem to recall that my sister and I have commiserated over the hair as well.

One case, two does not a trend make. But three in the same family? Maybe there’s something in the genes. Within our otherwise perfect* genetic code lies a gene for that incredible mutant eyebrow hair.

*Okay, maybe our genetic code isn’t perfect. It seems that to perfect the mind, one must sacrifice somewhere. Our family’s genetic defects include not only a mutant eyebrow hair but persistently crooked (non-squishy) noses. :-)

There are a couple of families of my ilk at the ALDI I frequent.

Frugal women with long hair, wearing skirts and with children in tow.

I silently appraise them, count their children (oh, yes I do!), and note all the daughters also in skirts. I sort through the possible categories in my mind. Gothardite/ATI. Biblical patriarchy. Quiverful. Every category I try to place them in has negative connotations in my mind – but every time I see them, I smile. These are people like me.

I see them silently appraising me. Mentally calculating. Am I one of them? I have the hair, the skirts, the frugality. But only one child at my age? And the skirts that show my knees? Occasionally, a bra strap peeking out? I am a woman not like them.

When I see these women, I assume that they love children and family. I assume that they haven’t bought into our culture’s maxim that children are too expensive. I assume that they love their husbands and submit to them. I assume that they think there are differences between men and women and that femininity is something to be appreciated. I assume that they are like me.

When I see these women, I assume that they don’t use birth control, that they went straight from their fathers’ homes to their husbands’. I assume that they think that femininity means always wearing skirts and modesty means making those skirts long. I assume that they’re not like me.

Every time I see them, I rejoice to find women like me. Every time I see them, I sorrow that even in this I have found women not like me.

I very clearly don’t belong to mainstream mommy culture – my values, beliefs, opinions, and practices are frequently in opposition to theirs. I feel a great kinship with these women I see in the grocery store, these women who are so counterculture.

I wish I could be a part of them. Not because I want to take up the things they believe and do that I do not – but because I want to be a part of their group. I want to have friends, even just A friend who feels like I do or acts like I do.

I’ve probably seen her before, the woman who was in front of me in line with her two little girls. We’ve probably appraised each other before. But this time, after the appraisal, she turned to me and struck up a little conversation – the small talk we have in stores, about leaving our reusable shopping bags at home in a neat pile. It was ordinary and extraordinary.

And it made my heart yearn, like running into these women so like me and not like me often does. It made me yearn for a friend.

Spring Break in high school and college almost always fell over my birthday (before the official start of spring!) – and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t realize how much I took it for granted until I moved off the academic calendar.

Then summer break became a week-long vacation or a 5 day weekend, a day instead of a week for Christmas the norm, and Spring Break nonexistent.

Except that this year, Tirzah Mae and I took a spring break.

My brother and sister-in-law and nieces were taking one of their biannual trips to Lincoln – and we’d promised to work on our parent’s basement as a Christmas gift.

So we spent a packed week in Lincoln – driving up Friday March 27 and coming back just yesterday, April 5.

Between there, we painted two rooms, moved some furniture, played with cousins, went to our favorite only-in-Nebraska restaurants, were completely spoiled by aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, and cousins, and ate way too many jelly beans.

Also, we put on a Seder meal for twenty and visited with Tirzah Mae’s great-grandparents.

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