Rustic Charm

When I was twenty-five, I knew what I wanted my life to be.  I had just received an Associate’s Degree of Art in ceramic design for lumpy little clay pots I made that were never centered on the wheel, because (I can face it) I was never very good at ceramics.  Oh, I could teach you how to do it, and if you don’t believe me, ask my friend, Lydia from High School.  I taught her how to center her pots and by the end of the year, Lydia was one of the most accomplished ceramic artists in school.  My art teacher even said so.  I was able to pour my wisdom out for Lydia, but I could not teach it to my own hands.  But that never stopped me from loving it. 

            So when I moved to Seattle at the age of twenty-one, going on twenty-two, I moved for two reasons.  First, I was going to go for the boys (being gay in northern Idaho is not recommended to anyone who wants to have a decent date with a decent guy); and second, to get my art degree.  I wanted to be a graphic artist so I could illustrate my own children’s stories.  I even had a binder of stories I had written from high school onward that I was going to use to get myself started.  My friend, Carrie, needed a roommate and I needed a life outside of my home town. 

            The boys came first.  I met Joseph only a little over three months after I moved to the big city.  He had a boyfriend at the time, so it forced us to be friends first, then family, and then when the inevitable happened and his boyfriend left him, partners.  In fact, today is our eleventh anniversary of our first “date.”  It was Joseph who helped me to get into school.  I was accepted both to Cornish College of the Arts and Seattle Art Institute.  Cornish I dropped as soon as I saw the tuition costs.  But the Art Institute was accepted.  Joseph then got me going on a “adjustment” quarter of school in Seattle Central Community College.  It was there in “real college” that I decided I wanted to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art … I know what you’re thinking, the pay checks would be large and plentiful.  So I moved my studies to North Seattle Community College and “majored” in ceramics. 

            My old ceramics professor looked like an owl.  He was short, dumpy, with a little ear hair and a huge set of old army-issue glasses perched on the end of his small, pointed nose.  I had even taken a sculpture class from him and I often heard him say to me, in his sticky, honey voice, “You’ve got to mold it a little pit, and shape it” as he pinched the air in front of him with short, well callused fingers.  My final in my last ceramics class was to make a set of twelve matching dishes.  So I set to work, carefully measuring my cups and trying my best to make them the same.  I also had to produce three jars with lids that fit, and three large plates. 

            My final results were a group of fourteen coffee mugs that had varying sizes, wobbles, and dips in their lines.  Their handles were rather similar if you didn’t look directly at them.  The lids all fit my jars, and I had fun producing them, but if you looked at the jar bottoms and my hacking trim jobs.  My plates were great!  I had one large and two small and I was hoping beyond hope that my professor wouldn’t remember they were all supposed to be large and that the middles of my small plates were bowed.  But after my instructor carefully looked my lumpy little pots over with their multi-colored glazes with embellishments of Alphonse Mucha-esque goddess faces painted into some, he kind of smirked and said, “These pieces have a certain … um … rustic charm about them.” 

Yes, I understood what he meant.  They were no beauties, and they weren’t going to win any prizes, but my pieces could hold water and had had my best effort put into them.  I think my old professor with his owl-glasses and his obsession with me molding and shaping my pieces cut me some slack that day.  But I also took “rustic charm” as one of the highest complements I’ve ever received.  I worked hard for that “rustic charm.” 

            So I got my associate’s degree of Art, which is really just a piece of paper telling me to go back to school if I really want to make something of myself.  But that was the year I was going to turn twenty-six and on that birthday Joseph surprised me.  I received a bunch of little presents from him to throw me off the trail, including a learn-how-to-knit kit.  But the big surprise was this: my own potter’s wheel and a kiln to fire my pieces in. 

But where do you set up these things in an urban apartment in Seattle?  Joseph set to work looking for a larger place for us to live and our search took us to Vashon Island, a little island off the coast of West Seattle.  It just so happens that most of my clay came from Vashon Island, as Vashon Buff is the clay preferred by my old instructors.  On his weekends, Joseph scouted many places, and finally came home one day not long after my birthday announcing he had found the perfect place for us to rent: a five acre farm with a couple of old out buildings.  After much convincing of the property managers to let two people, new to the rigors of island commuting and island life, move so deeply into the island off of the main ferry traffic ways. 

            We set up our life here.  I was going to be a local artist and Joseph would join the ranks of commuting back and forth to a job he didn’t care much for, but we were happy.  I took a job at an island deli, and worked on my ceramics.  But slowly those ceramics fell by the wayside as that learn-how-to-knit kit filled up my days and I began knitting bigger and better things.  That first Christmas we opted to stay home in our own house and I surprised Joseph with a hat and scarf I had knit all on my own.  And he surprised me with a chair he made from twigs and scrap wood for our new life. 

            The farms on Vashon Island have names such as Fox Farm, Fairy Hill Farm, Jesus Barn Farm, etc.  Joseph decided we should name our “own” little rented farm, and he came up with the perfect name.  We’re Rustic Charms Farm, where lumpy little pots are made.  We knit hats and scarves and craft boxes and kitchen islands from scrap wood and twigs.  Our wine and our jelly is made from our own fruit trees and berry bushes, and our stew pots are often filled with vegetables from our own little garden.  And this was the life I had wanted, we had made it for ourselves.  But the farm was never ours.  We’ll be moving out soon when our last lease is up.  I had gone back to school in the mean time to work on another dream of mine and that dream started becoming more and more tangible until I was commuting just as much as Joseph was.  Our life here has begun to wane, but it has been a good life and I will be sad to see it go. 

I love Rustic Charms Farm for what it meant to us when we found it and what it means to us now.  It is home. 

Joseph's a Better Crafter than Me

Christmas of 2005 was the year that my knitting flourished and I made hats for everybody in my family.  Everybody.  And I don’t really have a small family, especially on Christmas when the lines everybody drew for themselves dissolve and open up to reveal that they still need those people who can aggravate them like no other people can.  So I had hats with cables knitted into them, hats with ear flaps knitted on them, hats with stripes, hats with checks, and even hats with sparkly, ruby red yarn.  I wrapped each had in wrapping paper I made from collected paper grocery bags and hand stamped and colored for each individual.  And I tied each one with a different bow I made from yarn, hemp twine, and other crafty things. 

Christmas of 2005 was the year that I drew a line in the sand and said enough with commercialism; Joseph and I would only give what we could make.  And this meant for another year or two that Joseph and I would only give what could be made by me.  Joseph just had to sit back and occasionally drive me to get yarn or other supplies for our festivities. 

It was a nice little set up until I started to feel like I had taken on a chore, not something fun to do in my spare time, and then used my self-inflicted punishment (creating Christmas gifts) to complain to Joseph that he “never does anything for Christmas, and shares in the glory.”  This complaint was lodged the year I had begun my pre-required classes for nursing school and was feeling a little put out studying to really get into knitting or canning for long periods of precious free time.  And like most of my complaints about my role in the relationship, this one back-fired. 

First of all, I am going to tell you a little about my role in the relationship and Joseph’s role in the relationship.  And it is going to sound very much like sexism and a little like feminism in places, but please hear me out because whether or not you believe in anything I am about to say, it works for me and has kept me and Joseph together for eleven years now. 

So, I believe that a successful marriage must have a husband and a wife.  This does not mean that every successful marriage has a man and a woman, please read my words, I said every successful marriage has a HUSBAND and a WIFE.  In the “good old days” the words husband and wife were synonymous with man and woman, because society left little room for any other genders to fill either roles.  But after World War II, especially in the 1950’s when those ideals were getting shoved down our throats, the roles were never quite the same.  So for me, a Husband is the person in the relationship that has that steady energy.  He or she is a little more logical, a little more practical, and a little more in tune with the outside world.  The Wife for me is a little more emotional, a little more idealistic, and a little more in tune with the world inside the home.  Neither one of these is better or worse, and yes, I think the bits of these roles can be shuffled to produce a Wife who is practical and a Husband who is more emotional, but there remain spaces that need to be filled and the successful Husband and Wife will compensate for each other and fill them. 

I am the wife.  Joseph is the husband.  I expect Joseph to watch the news, tell me what’s going on in the outside world, and to generally ignore things like cooking and cleaning even though I hate cleaning and think Joseph’s cooking is amazing.  We have been successful because I do not rebel at being the wife.  In many gay relationships, men rebel at the notion that there could be a wife, as they are two men.  And in many straight relationships, women balk at the idea that household work is a woman’s prerogative.  But I think that the negative connotation that comes with being a wife is just a flavor of the day peppered with liberal and feminist thinking.  I think wives are a vital part of every culture.  The world would collapse upon itself if everyone decided that they were husbands and nobody wanted to be wives.  A case could be made that either role has its benefits and its downside.  Joseph has to balance our check book.  Joseph has to worry about paying bills.  But Joseph also has his lunches packed for him and in his truck when he drives to work each morning with a to-go mug of coffee made lovingly by me in his hands. 

But I digress.  Suffice to say that we have come to identify ourselves with roles in our relationship that correspond to Husband and Wife and we are both very comfortable with those roles. 

So you could imagine that I was not only a little surprised but also a little threatened when Joseph taught himself to use a knitting loom to pick up my knitting slack.  Not only that but his precise, even stitches (Joseph is nothing if not precise) put my homespun knitting to shame.  I started telling people who saw his work that he “cheated” because he uses a knitting loom and not knitting needles.  And you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, either.  Joseph has been the primary knitter for all subsequent Christmases, and it pains me to say that he has taught himself a new craft this year and has begun making gifts which I will blog about in the post Christmas blogs so as not to spoil surprises.  I am beside myself.  As the wife of this relationship, the crafting and the Christmasing should come more naturally to me than to him, but that is not the case.  Somehow every time I complain, the Universe fills Joseph with the very skill I complain about and makes the case that “anyone” can fill my role and my duties.  It’s gotten so a guy can’t complain around here. 

(Yes, I said “Christmasing.”) 

So now I have to find a way to elbow myself back into the Christmas preparations this year, because I will not be upstaged by a know-it-all, Johnnie-Come-Easy like my Husband!   I’m bound and determined to pull something even better than his new craft out of my sleeve!  Just you wait.  Joseph not only crossed the line of Husband work into Wife work, he has threatened my very theory on what makes a marriage successful!  He’s going down!