Junk and jumble and feng shui
My sense of feng shui is not well developed.I admit that the ancient Chinese art of arranging objects in order to create harmony might have reached low ebb on my Appalachian farm. I wish someone would explain why the painting of a rock and reed balanced in delicate juxtaposition exhibits feng shui, and why a rusty wheel barrow loaded with busted flower pots behind my barn does not.
This is the time of year when the creative spirit is sorely tested on farmsteads. Junk piles formerly hidden by vegetation are revealed in the dead of winter. Everything is brown and gray. The eye seeks anything colorful to relieve the spirit. Harmony is difficult to attain, feng shui fleeting.
Old lumber stacked helter-skelter needs to be burned. Better wait until the grass greens new, however. A conflagration might result in a wild fire that would burn down the tool shed. Bad feng shui would result, I wager.
The mud is too thick and slippery for general barnyard cleanup. Pasture squishes under rubber-booted heels, and the tractor will bog down to its axle if driven across the clayey soil.
I experience brief feng shui-type stirrings, wanting to clean and rearrange before spring causes leaves to sprout and tender blossoms to flower. But, it rains, snows, freezes, thaws, and rains again. Early March in Appalachia is the last high-ho of winter, too early for picking daffodils and too late to feel any sense of wonder about the giant icicles clinging tenaciously to the barn’s eves.
My blood rises with the sap, but it will be weeks before I can plow and till, lay off rows, and plant seeds. I want to do something useful, create feng shui on my 40 acres, before spring’s hectic schedule presses me down by the neck.
Ah, I can clean out the barn!
In the musty, dusty stillness it is cold. Frozen dirt and gaps between the boards chill feet and hands. I fumble with the dangling light over the work bench to illuminate projects, new and old, that were never completed.
I wonder if finishing a bluebird house begun two years ago might appease the feng shui spirit of the barn. My fingers, like pale spider legs, walk over wood and metal, sensing possibilities. The tools seem to beg me to pick them up and work.
Here are coffee cans full of rusty nails and screws, needing to be sorted. Hanging from a hook is a broken lamp that I promised to repair… how many years ago was that? Scraps of stuff I was loath to discard appear from the jumble. What type of resurrection did I have in mind when I saved a chewed leather dog’s collar and this section of ruptured garden hose?
Maybe I hoped to invent a marvelous new mechanical contraption, but I’ve long forgotten the germ of the idea for using dog collars and plastic hose to construct a perpetual motion machine. I am sure it would have made me a million dollars, but would I finally have found feng shui? I don’t think you can buy it.
A can of liquid sloshes ominously. I can’t remember what it is: paint, gasoline, moonshine? Much of the stuff leaning in corners and piled on the floor was inherited when I bought the place… one man’s treasure, et cetera, as the saying goes. I’d be better off loading and hauling it to the dump.
If I had a feng shui farm, the junk in my barn would become an inspiration. A cracked toilet seat, nailed to the planks so it could be seen from the road, would communicate a soothing welcome message: “Come and sit, relax, meditate with me.”
The rusty wheel barrow, with its flat tire and freight of cracked flower pots, would become a gentle metaphor for the fleeting nature of beauty.
I find a broken plastic lawn chair and sit to contemplate feng shui possibilities. The cat rubs my leg. She stalks in the shadows, hunting mice. I hear a squeak and growl. She leaps into the light and deposits a rat at my feet. It runs up my pants leg, and I sprint across the barnyard, slapping at my thighs and wriggling out of my britches.
Standing there in the cold mud, unclothed from waist to sock tops, I finally realize that feng shui – harmony in arrangement – means having to remain still too long. It’s nice to sometimes sit and think. But when a rat runs up your leg, it’s time to move quickly.
And, besides, a farmer takes comfort in his aimless collection of junk and jumble. One never knows when a splintered ax handle might come in handy… especially if you need to wham a rat.
