by Leah Nagely Robbins
What is home? What is utopia? I may as well ask myself.
I’ve been asked to interrogate myself, to consider is this an idea, a place, a feeling? I think I know, but I follow the path my pen makes on the lined sketchbook. Blue loops and furls. The fragments pause, interspersed with repeating question, “what’s under that?” I hear Ariel’s voice, asking. The words pick back up with literal answers, going deeper and retreating, ebbing and flowing. I hope the thread on the page is a thing I can follow to make a whole from the sum of the parts.
I place a high value on craft, and I am unabashedly uncrafty.
I miss the craft my dad displayed. I miss his demonstration of competence and creativity more. After he died, we looked at his computer files. He had a folder titled “writing” and it was empty. But he had stacks of manila folders filled with graph paper and dimensioned plans.
The objects he crafted from those ideas are a lifetime of meaning, love and beauty.
- The chopping block that sits on a frame of cherry wood holds a narrow drawer (for all the sharp knives of course) and a sliding platform that is perfect for pizza stones.
- The black limba bookcase made to my requested dimensions and complete with notations on the underside of each shelf to explain its proper orientation.
- The corner shelf made to fit my daughter’s nursery, with an integrated bookend that slides to fit and keep her first books standing straight
- Frames he made of carefully selected wood to complement the art he gifted to each of us.
- A garden cart with generous platforms and shelves and soft rounded handles to roll into place.
We want what we do not have. We value what we cannot do.
His basement workshop was infused with the finest dust, embedded into the work surface around the table saw. Particles of every wood project: cut, sanded, swept, vacuumed and still circulating in the space he used to bring his ideas to life. It was always tidy, you could see his labor in sharp pencils next to graph paper.
The low ceiling in the basement doubled as storage with wood pieces stacked in between joists. The light switch toggles on and the craft space broadens. Unfinished sketches of dimensioned rectangles with notes about wood choices dangled like participles. Anything is possible here.
My folder of writing may be full, but my graph paper, plans and sketches with dimensions could use his help. Do I know how to make a home of craft and care?
*
The 22 x 34 sheet of paper unfolds, filled with colorful shapes that help me tell the story of the Nest, my planned cottage community. The skilled landscape designer took my words and tangents and dreams and returned with a picture of my dream. With each telling it manifests with more solid lines, more color and texture.
My utopia, the Nest, is a co-housing space, a sort of commune without the crazy here on this land. With my house, a converted shop building and a tiny house situated around a common courtyard surrounded by stately century-old fir trees as well as upstart urbane plantings. There is space for public and private gatherings. There’s space for a hot tub, space for a catio, space for a bitch barn. This is where I will age gracefully, in community with my artist friends, making raucous music and eating beautiful meals.
*
Home is the land, the green, the plot, a rectangle in two dimensions that comes alive only in three or four. Space, time, the translation of energy going INTO the space bounds back on the inhabitants.
Home can be a buoy. It can be an anchor. Home can morph, the space changing, almost alive as it responds to the touch of its people, its animals. It’s a symbiosis of all the interplay.
I learned a new word, umwelt, reading the book “An Immense World” by Ed Yong. An umwelt is the environment as it is understood by each animal with their boundary of senses. Different animals experience the same place with different scale and perceptions. Touch, sight, sound. Animals use all their sense and scents. The squirrels and cats scamper along the fence lines as if they’re a grid of avenues and streets, literal highways. The trees have an interlocking root system underground that stretches across imaginary boundaries called property lines. The ants . . . the ANTS, the goddamn ants! There’s a megalopolis of ants under this neighborhood of fir trees.
The trail of ants march, following the signals they receive, their umwelt all pheromones and messages from their legion. I watch their patterns and concoct a defensive strategy.
*
What’s under that? I hear Ariel’s voice and yet it’s the head of an ant I see pausing, popping up, tilting, using its black antenna to decode my response.
The ground, the soil, the clay is under this surface. The quality is telling, its hardpack of little utility. The rocky flatness craves undulating surfaces and moisture to welcome living creatures like long earthworms and ladybugs.
As I prepare to break this ground, to bring momentum to this project, I know the rocky flatness is as much my home as the future utopia will be. It is perpetually home. I have remade, reshaped, retooled this place many times in my 18 years here. It has been broken and healed and is ready for a sharpened focus.
My vision is coming into focus. My “Umwelt” can be explained, experienced, exposed.
What bodies lay below? Exposed and vulnerable bodies lay below. The ground breaks open and I will welcome all that comes out.
*
“Mom, we are getting Betsy her catio, right?”
I stew and fester. Perfectionism and vision and translation are all bumbling stumbling blocks. “I need to talk with with a contractor,” I say it like it’s a plan but it’s only one step.
“Do you have time to do a deck project?” I texted my woodcrafting friend. He tells me he let his contractor license go. Does that matter to me? I stew and wonder. Does the house painting contractor have the skill like my friend? Skill sure, maybe, but craftsmanship?
“It’s going to happen this year, Rose.”
I want craftsmanship. I want beauty.
Leah Nagely Robbins is a writer, civil engineer, musician and mom based in Portland, Oregon. She spends her days imagining a livable future, implementing public infrastructure projects and peppering people with ’80s pop culture references. Her work has been published in Tangled Locks Journal, Open Secrets, and Reading and Traveling; Civil Engineer into Pavement
