A number of my older, single women friends  (as in my age . . . late 50s, early 60s) are having the conversation about how we want to live in our retirement. One answer that keeps coming up: co-housing in an urban environment . . . a group of small, detached cottages plus a larger “common house” (maybe) for gathering. Portland qualifies in my book as a possible site.

Even though I’m not much of a bicycle rider these days, I “hang” with that tribe (that would be my son and his friends). A bicycle assembly station. At the airport no less.

p.s. Be sure to check out more of the Springwise site. Creativity, small entrepreneurship and environmental awareness are blooming around the world. It’s inspiring!

God!!!! My hand looks so old here . . . because it is old. Facing my own mortality is a fascinating journey. To consider ones own death in a society/social context that denies it is a challenge. . . . to look at it square on . . . I’m not sure I’m doing that.

My ex- and I own adjoining properties and he has two houses on his, one built by his great-grandparents in 1892. He thinks it probably needs a new roof this year. It’s a 2-story Victorian with a steep pitch on the roof. This is a job for young guys. It’s actually a job for professionals, but that’s not the way in this family. We do as much as we can ourselves, partly because we’re frugal (cheap) and partly because we like it. We don’t always have the greatest result but, then, neither do some professionals.

But because both of his houses are rented out, the gang will stay on my land in tents and whatnot. And I’m preparing to cook. A bunch.

In the past I could plan a week’s worth of gang meals in a minute or two with good Hungarian fare: chicken and dumplings, goulash (pronounced ghoul´-yash), stuffed cabbage . . . all those things that simmer in mammoth pots (I have some huge ones stashed in the shed) just in case the local Regiment shows up for lunch. But my diet has changed as has Johnny’s. He’s mostly vegan now.

OK. I have two pieces of experience that will work for me here:

1. I’ve eaten a vegetarian diet off and on for years.
2. I’ve cooked for a gang since I was 6 or 7-years-old. Actually, I wasn’t the cook. I was my mother’s sous-chef, go-fer, table-setter and server, but she could whip up dinner from scratch for 23 people in a tiny cottage kitchen, top it off with homemade French Vanilla ice cream and not even break a sweat. What’s more, she fed that gang three meals a day for four days and seemed to love it.

So . . . I can cook vegetarian . . . and I can cook for a gang. I just haven’t put the two skills together. Easy-peasy!

I don’t know if  it has to be vegan (no eggs or dairy) but I’m going to start there just to be safe. So here starts the meal plan:

• Vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie . . . I haven’t made this in years but it uses lentils instead of ground beef. Here’s an online version. I won’t follow this recipe exactly (maybe not even closely), but it’s just to give you an idea.
• Pasta Primavera . . . so simple. Some whole grain pasta and my own “roasted veggie sauce.” And a friend just called as I was writing this. She asked if I knew how to make “vegan Parmesan.”  Nope, but I do now thanks to her instruction. Put nutritional yeast (more) and some walnuts (less, I’m thinking about a 3 to 1 ratio, yeast to walnuts) and a little sea salt in the blender. Blend until it’s the consistency of finely grated Parmesan.
• Indian Style Potatoes and Greens . . . an inspiration from Vegan Dad. Again, I won’t follow this recipe. It’s just an inspiration and a welcome variation.
• Beans and Rice . . . There are endless ethnic variations to this combo but I’m going plain. I’ll use good ol’ organic pintos cooked with onion and garlic, a little cumin, oregano and dried cilantro and a separate pot of brown rice (organic).
• Nori Rolls . . . years ago a friend gave me a great recipe for rolls with a really savory rice inside and not much else. I have to pick up some sesame seeds from the Co-op to make my own gamasio.

Beyond that we need noshes. Homemade hummus though I’m not sure I want to bake my own whole-wheat pita because my place is tiny and it’s hot out these days. (OK . . . it’s the PNW and anything above 72º qualifies as too hot to bake. I’m a temperature wuss.) And of course there will be lots of salad stuff available, both soft leaf and “hard” (the cabbages and kohl varieties).

Then, of course, there is THE BAIT. This is my blackberry cobbler. Beloved Son lures his friends to the island to do hard, physical work just to have the opportunity to try it. Honestly . . . ? I think the build-up is so over-the-top that they think it’s wonderful no matter what. Also honestly . . .? it’s really good. Hand-picked with love and intention, totally pure (pesticide and other junk-free) wild blackberries and a lovely, butter-filled topping. That’s not vegan . . . but if you’re going to err once a year on the side of eating animal products, my blackberry cobbler is the place to do it.

“Recipes” (that would be loose instructions) to follow.

I’m divorced. Twice. Both times amicably as far as these things go. I’ve also been “married” most of my life. Bear with me. This all has to do with money and writing simply for the joy of it.

I’ll be 63 in a couple of weeks. My first husband was my high-school sweetheart. We were legally married for 9 years and together for 14. My second husband is the father of my beloved son. We were legally married for 17 years and mostly lived together for 22. Add up those committed partnership years and it comes to 36.

Do the math: 36/63=57% of a life and that includes my childhood years that aren’t technically eligible to be included. “Married” more than half of my WHOLE life.

Obviously, I find being in this kind of partnership attractive. But being single also suits me. There are  joys and challenges in each of these ways of living. And they’re different.

For me, the biggest challenge of being single is the economics. You have one person’s energy devoted to maintaining a household rather than two. And my household sprawls over several acres. It involves vehicles that need oil changes and tires rotated, grocery shopping, roofs that need redoing, mowing, laundry, property taxes . . . when you have two people kicking in to do these jobs, the load is lighter . . . by half. That’s the part that I miss most. I never felt financially fragile when there were two of us pulling the material, every-day-living yoke. How unromantic of me.

I don’t want you to think I’m a wretch when it comes to romance. When I was in those marriages I thought more about being in love that in a financial partnership.  And in my “in-between-marriages” times I’ve enjoyed the company of some lovely men. But that’s different. Those relationships are non-economic.

But back to how this relates to my writing a blog. I feel an urgency to make this blog about business . . .  to promote my knitting classes and book right now,  just an urgency to create enough income to live without debt and that’s a modest proposal. Except for travel to family and friends, I live a VERY modest life by North American standards. I drive a 1987 Toyota Celica, for Heaven’s sake!

I have an internal voice that says if I’m not “promoting business” I’m “wasting time” . . . because I’m feeling financially fragile. For the first time in my life I have a credit card balance that I don’t pay off every month.

But serving my finances is not where my heart is. My heart says to tell you about the amazing places I’ve been in the past two months, physically and emotionally . . . to tell you about the amazing places I’ve visited in the past 63 years. To tell you stories that will make you cry. Those are my favorite kinds of stories to read . . . and to tell.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is Mark Twain’s: “When in doubt, tell the truth.”  The truth is that I only want to write from the heart here.

I guess that blows my chances of getting rich quick.

Maybe blogging is not my gig.

The doctor came to the house midday to try to figure out what it was and by that evening my family drove me to the emergency room of the big hospital downtown (Detroit). I had a spinal tap and was diagnosed with “Infantile Paralysis” (polio) and hospitalized and quarantined that night. They didn’t let my parents hug me before a kind man wheeled me to the isolation ward. I was 7-years-old.

They thought I would die. The Red Cross brought my 18-year-old brother home from Fort Knox, Kentucky where he was newly stationed in the Army so that he could say goodbye and be with the family.

A few days later I was out of quarantine. A nurse taped a handwritten note at the head of my bed, “Do not feed by mouth.” It was written in red pencil. I remember asking, “What am I, an animal?”

I had an IV for nourishment and they tied me in restraints so that I wouldn’t pull out the needle by moving. This protected me from choking. A major danger of polio is choking. It has to do with our tiny throat/swallow muscles. I have to pay attention, even now, to swallow my regular saliva production. If I get too tired I aspirate spit and start coughing like crazy.

When I didn’t die they said, “but she’ll never walk.” Wrong again. It took a long time, a lot of falls and scabs, exercise, rest, physical therapy and epsom salts baths before everything came together and I could aim and walk straight and strongly. It wasn’t until I was 41 and my own son was 6 that I discovered that not everyone fell off of his or her bike a dozen times a day until he or she was 13. Every day my parents conned me into thinking I was normal and if you saw me today you would never guess my health history. I’m healthy and active. Not a marathon runner, but I get around.

Why am I writing this post? I’m not exactly sure. But it has something to do with a deep gratitude and reverence for life. That and I’m totally pooped from a recent, wonderful, 2-week trip to SoCA and am leaving again soon for a similar trip to MI.

I may need to get serious about honoring my stamina as I plan these things.

p.s. Robbers and other disrespectful characters. Don’t think of coming onto my property while I’m gone. It’s monitored from North, South and West by friends and neighbors and there’s a 27-year-old man who lives on my property in his own space. And to come from the East? You’re going to have to take on several hundred yards of open pasture occupied by some Black Angus characters. Ever dealt with a really, really big bull who does not know who you are or why you’re in his territory? Good luck.

But today, after 4 hours of wrangling with my printer to get it to take new, refillable, non-Epson-brand cartridges and it still won’t print the black despite every software and physical solution I could devise, perhaps it’s not exactly true . . . that I’m patient . . . although I had several thousand high school and junior high school students in English class and we all survived well enough.

Frankly, it would be cheaper to buy a new printer than to spend all this time on it and still be frustrated.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s the incessant rain. But patience isn’t my long suit today. I believe that makes me virtue-less . . . except I haven’t yet thrown the printer out into the rain and the slugs.

I wonder if slugs can digest useless plastic? They’re pretty good at devouring other detritus.

Two weeks ago I went to Seattle with my “big” camera (I have 2 smaller ones) and shot video at the Urban Assault ride. Here’s one of the programs I cut together out of the footage. Coast.ies is my son Johnny’s business. I cut together a shorter “spot” for him and one for UAR. I’m still working on a slightly longer piece for UAR.

Coasti.es . . . Leading the Coaster Brake Revolution

Shooting video happens in real time. I was at the event for 5 hours and took an hour and 43 minutes of footage. Logging, capturing and editing takes 10 to 20 times the amount of footage for the first (36 second) program. I don’t know why I always forget that.

Still, it was great fun.

p.s. for the geeks among us . . . I output this from Final Cut to a self-contained Quicktime movie and  let YouTube do the compression. I don’t like it. It’s too jerky, although they go for good sound. I need to research how to export full digital video files with the best codec at my end. I suspect YouTube isn’t set up to compress DV quality video files at their best settings.

I worked one day a week at my beloved Dinah’s Yarn Shop and wrote articles for the magazines that supported the BOND in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. This led  people to come from as far away as Alaska, Colorado and Arizona to take my funky little workshops on a small island in the Pacific NW. I threw a lot of hand-knitting workshops into the mix. My students were hard-core and I loved the whole experience.

But I hadn’t taught knitting in a very long time until . . . Sweater 101 went out of print after 15 years. When I decided to take over its publication myself (because I researched and found a whole new generation of knitters which surprised me because I hadn’t been paying attention) I landed back in the knitting business.

I didn’t really plan to start teaching again . . . but the local library called and asked if I would talk for a benefit to collect money to expand their knitting and craft collection. So I developed a little one-hour lecture class that teaches a couple of useful skills. We had a silent auction and raised some money and I’ve given that same talk to some guilds and at shops. It turns out that we’ve all enjoyed it. (Click on this link and Charisa, the President of the Snohomish Knitters’ Guild, will talk to you . . . for less than a minute.)

Charisa Martin Cairn

Then I moved to Oakland for 10 weeks, and sublet a place practically next door to Piedmont Yarn and Apparel. If I believed in coincidences, this would be one. New neighborhood, I knew no one but my landlady and the woman down stairs. . . I visited the yarn shop the very next day and was embraced by Bente and her knitting community.

What can I say? If you knit, you can go anywhere and find instant community. Even if you can’t knit and just want to learn, they’ll embrace you. There were tons of coffee shops in the neighborhood and I frequented several of them, but it’s not the same. In coffee shops people are all working on their own computers or reading their own books–parallel play. In the yarn shop, we all knit and chat. But I’m off course, once again (It’s that lateral thinking thing.)

So I taught a class there, and joined the Friday evening knit group, and helped people . . . and they convinced me that I should do some teaching again, so here I am . . . back at it . . . but in a very limited way. I have a few classes in June and July and I invite you to join us if you’re in the neighborhood and so inclined:

Saturday, June 19, I will be at Clever Knits in Vista, CA. I’m doing an afternoon workshop: How to Make Sweaters that Fit You and Your Loved Ones and that evening I’ll be giving my lecture/class, Knitting, S.E.X.*, Chocolate, and a Couple of Math Skills.

July schedule to follow. I’ll be in Michigan then.

My life is blessed and beautiful. It’s also privileged. I’m a white, middle-class, 62-year-old female citizen of the United States in the early 21st century. Ugliness seldom appears in my everyday world.

Like you, I choose what I do every day.  I read, hang out with friends and family, make soup, do some business, mow the lawn, knit, weed the garden, go to a Long Now lecture (if I’m in the SFBay area), scour the sink, watch TED movies, split wood, study marketing, do the laundry, laugh, walk, study spirituality, eat good food, etc, etc, etc . . . I’d rather do almost anything else on earth than contemplate date-rape . . . but I have to . . .

because I know and love so many bright and beautiful young women. And I want them to claim their power . . . to bring forth the gifts they came here to contribute and to protect themselves and their friends. Because they can. And we can help them. But only by planting our feet firmly on the ground and challenging this threat to their well-being.

I went to a conference last December and one of the people I met there was a beautiful woman who is a  counselor and a safe-dating and date-rape expert. I talked to her, and listened to her . . .  a lot. If you have direct contact with a teenage or college-aged girl, go to her site. Get her books.  Empower your young women and keep them safe.