The Naked Gardener Read Free

canoe. For Maze this was a new adventure. For me it was old news. My father taught me how to swim, paddle, fish, and scuba dive. So I took the stern and gave Maze lessons on the Trout River to our north. We started with quick water and moved on from there. Maze became comfortable but never as adept as I was. I have an innate feel for water.
    The chicken coop turned out to be the most intact structure on the farm. Chickens don’t stress a building the way cows and people do. We tore out the roosts. After two weeks shoveling what the chickens had left behind and scrubbing every surface and crevice with ammonia, we moved in. The combined scent of chicken droppings and ammonia fumes almost put me off task any number of times but, when we finally got the place cleaned, it was a pleasant single story space with a low ceiling and wide windows on three sides.
    I painted the inside of the coop with bright, bold colors – scenes of birds and ferns and flowers and insects reminiscent of Mexico. Maze lined the low walls with bookcases and built small bedside tables out of weathered walls from a half crumbled shed. This was not cabinetry. It was sawing and hammering and nailing into place. We did buy a drill. And some garden tools.
    We built a bed frame and platform out of old wood, carried a new mattress from our ancient Subaru, hung a screen door and stapled screening in front of the wavy old windows that pulled up from outside. Why did chickens need windows? Did they lay better eggs if they had a view to the outside? Were windows necessary for gathering eggs? All I know is, I’ve never seen a windowless chicken coop. We nailed leather belts from Goodwill to the coop’s eaves and attached these by the buckles to hooks at the bottom of each window frame to hold the windows open. When it rained, at least we could thank the chickens and lower our windows against the weather.
    Electricity was a challenge. Maze got a how to book on do-it-yourself electrical wiring. He dug a narrow trench from the back of the house, took apart a conduit that led to an outlet inside the back wall of the house, spliced into it, and ran it to the back of the coop. He drilled through the wood and installed a new outlet inside. He patched around the hole and covered it with wood scraps. I painted over the patch. From then on we got by with one lamp and one extension cord that we plugged into whatever else needed electricity.
    We scraped the dirt floor flat, laid planks over it, and caulked the planks to control the dust.
    “It’s not a perfect solution but for summers, I think it will be enough.”
    I was impressed with Maze’s equanimity throughout the whole project. We worked well together. Giving the farm new life, uncovering unexpected uses from worn relics of past lives. Every time he nailed a board in place or dug another foot of trench, I could see the tangible result. It was satisfying. This sense of completion.
    We ate most of our meals in the barn at a wooden table with mismatched chairs we found here and there at secondhand stores and garage sales. This part of the barn had small square windows at seated eye level that looked out on rolling green hills beyond the barn. The space felt intimate and I could imagine docile cows in this space munching away on their cud. Occasionally we would find a black snake curled up in a corner in the sun by the barn door. We ate early salad from our own garden, and pickled beets I had put up the previous summer. Maze grilled a fat pike on a steel rack over a wood fire in a stone pit he made the first summer. Every year he restacked the stones in a small circle after winter snows, freezes, and thaws shifted them out of round.
    Before we could move in we camped near the barn. Most clear nights we slept out under the stars. Sometimes something would waken him or me in the middle of the night. One of us would reach for the other and then whammo, we’d be rolling all over the grass, moaning. The nighttime creatures