Allegro Confusione

Nighttime is always a journey. I wake at 2 AM and spend the rest of the night obsessing and worrying about our Democracy. Climate disruption. The cats and chickens. All over which I have about zero control. And then there’s the homesickness that I have lived with all my life. That upset, anxious fear, and panicky longing for home of my thirteen-year-old self. It lives in my chest and throat and is in its heyday in the wee hours of the morning when dark thoughts burst forth like the spewing hot lava of a volcano. Hell.

I woke last night with the Eagles’ The Last Resort endlessly looping in my head.

I had listened to it the previous day when I was, once again, reorganizing my office. I had first listened to the song at boarding school, thirteen, homesick, and weeping. Its recognition of the damage people have wrought in the name of Destiny and Paradise and God still speaks to me and points a finger at how my own actions, needs, and best-of-intentions have also caused harm. How much damage have I wrought in the name of sustainability and off-grid? And now, here I go again.

Allegro Confusione. That’s what Carl’s mother dubbed their home when she was raising him and his three siblings. I find it is an apt name?

As we prepare to jump into the revisioning and rebuilding of Allegro Confusione, I get that too-familiar feeling in my chest because major renovations—floods of money going out to fulfill wants, not needs; too often using non-repurposed nor reused building materials; extractive energy systems—are out of sync with my values.

True or false?

Most people wouldn’t do what Carl and I do nor how we do it. But we have the money and the will: massive demolition to make way for rebuilding what’s possible: an as-close-to-off-grid home as possible. Sustainable…once the renovation is done.

In the past decade and a half, Carl and I created Darwin’s View, our forever home. As it turns out, forever lasts only so long, at which point the reality of aging and mortality dawns on us, and so another house project that is closer to community, walking distance to a grocer or restaurants, and, perhaps, not so windy.

We will demolish (what a violent word!) the 1960s part of the house because its cement foundation is, to be generous, on the quaky side. And, yes, it’s in the way of our southern exposure. We will put a timber frame addition onto the 1840s cape, and retrofit it all to be up-to-our-standards energy efficient and off-grid. Assuming the town allows that. This state is live free or die only up to a point, and it’s looking more and more like the current euphemism of a government wants people to die rather than live free.

Which brings me to this parallel: we plan to do a MAGA move and destroy the old. The difference being we aren’t taking out what’s still good and beneficial, and we have a plan for the rebuild.

That’s it. I’m done. No more politics, I promise. I was trying to get to my point: will we do more damage than good with this renovation? Will my values and hopes align with reality? And—bonus question!—will we bring the chickens with all their dust and kerfuffle?

Lately that has been a distracting question because of the Snowball situation...and a stubborn Broody hen, and then, potentially, another hen with an impacted crop. They have sent me spiraling, unable to focus on writing that is requiring me to go “deeper” and so I move the furniture in my office, all too aware that not only am I avoiding writing but also the cleaning of the chicken coop. And the kitty litters. And with luxury whining like this, who needs another renovation?

Apparently, I do. And, even though he is outside in the orchard, fighting with peach leaf curl, plum curculio, and ticks, so does Carl.

If Carl and I were dogs, I’d be an Irish Setter minus the red hair. (I mean, I wouldn’t be bald. I just don’t have red hair.) And Carl, well, I have always thought he’d be a Golden Retriever but more recently, I have begun to suspect he is a Border Collie. Because he needs a job. Thus the gardens and the house’s double and triple redundancies. Darwin’s View has been the perfect 24-7, 365-days-a-year job for him, but looking to the future? It is getting hard—the winters, especially. In ten years, it will likely be too much.

Nine years. Because we had that conversation a year ago. Time flies.

The steady beat of our hearts, our feet marching forward, our arms pushing a wheelbarrow and a pen, all with the future in mind, planning as much as one can plan, anticipating, preparing for. As mentioned in my book At Crossroads with Chickens, sometimes Carl and I will do something that looks like spontaneous combustion, but it isn’t.

Just as they used to ask me, “Do you love it?”, people now ask me, “How can you bear to leave Darwin’s View?" I am getting to the point where I can say this without that dark, homesick feeling choking me: Darwin’s View has taught me many lessons, not least how to let go. Like our beautiful Victorian house in Providence. Like our Beachmont House with its fallen arches. Like the over 60 hens who have come and gone from Darwin’s View, they still exist in my heart.

I still hear their creaks. And the sensation of falling as we sold them. The pain of letting go. The regret and love.

And yet what good fortune to have had them, to have created such amazing homes where now others live! More significantly, if we hadn’t let go, we would not have created the next one.

The future of Darwin’s View and Allegro Confusione—for a time we will balance both. At some point, quite abruptly if the past serves as an example, it will be too much and then, in a seemingly spontaneous combustion way, we will let go of one.

I am not placing bets on which one that will be. Because I don’t give up on what I love. I still hold out hope…but I promised not to get political again.