Jill and I went to the state fair with our friend Tim this week. Maryland’s state fair — at the Timonium fair grounds, in a Baltimore City suburb — is modest in comparison to the big bruisers in the Midwest. Like other east coast fairs, Maryland’s midway — with overpriced food stalls and dizzying rides — dominates and you’d think that’s all it’s about. But, remember, the fair was — and still is — all about the farmers’ harvest, an occasion to show off their good work.

When walking through the livestock barns and watching the earnest farmers proudly grooming their prize pigs, sheep, and cows, it’s easy to get nostalgic about farming. 80% of Americans now live in cities. But for 300-plus years — from the founding of the colonial settlements until 1950 — farming was the heart of America. If we include Native Americans, we could say thousands of years.

Our farming past persists in the structure of our school year — which lets kids loose for three months only because they used to have to work on the farm. The driving age in most states is low (permits at 16) because teenagers had to drive tractors on their farms. Thanksgiving is a farmer’s holiday. Many of our most iconic images, like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” are of the farm. And we still use expressions like “couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn,” even though most of us haven’t seen a barn except in passing, off the freeway.



Only 1/4 of America’s two million farms are now family operations. And every week, 330 farmers leave their land. Corporate farms dominate, thanks to government subsidies that privilege large operations over small. If you want to support family farms, start by frequenting your local farmers’ market. To learn more about family farms, visit Sustainable Table.

I was amazed to see 4Hers at our state fair. I didn’t imagine that kids still joined this old-fashioned organization, whose motto is I Pledge my Head to clearer thinking, my Heart to greater loyalty,my Hands to larger service, and my Health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

Our 4Hers were holding a fashion show to display the clothes they had made. This include a few boys too. As a hip teenager, I would have mocked kids in 4H as “hayseeds” and “hicks.” But now I stand in awe of their competence and self-sufficiency.

The youngsters who were taking care of the livestock were similarly inspiring. When I was a kid, I could hardly find time to feed my cat. These kids are taking care of one-ton cows and herds of sheep. You can see in the way they handle the livestock that they love and respect their animals. But you see too that these kids are rooted in ways that we city folk are not: they know that animals are food and raw material. They give these animals their best in the knowledge that these animals will give their all in return. That’s an honest approach to life.

The pre-teen cowgirls broke my heart. Talk about competence and true grit! As they galloped through their routines in the dirt ring, they appeared strong and confident and destined for good things. But I fear for them because their older counterparts on the midway –the teens who dress like ho’s and center their lives around pleasing men — forecast what awaits them. Mary Pipher got it right in “Revising Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls“: we live in a “girl-poisoning culture.” I’ll spare you my rant but it’s clear that, once girls reach a certain age, their options fall away. Good bye, cow girls.

Jill and I wanted to try the bumper cars but the line was a quarter mile long. As I watched the carnies work, I wondered what becomes of them when the fair season is over. Speaking of which: the best essay you’ll ever read about state fairs — and carnies — is the late David Foster Wallace’s Ticket to the Fair. Wallace got it right in every way and he’s hilarious.

Our state fair is neither large enough nor diverse enough to encourage repeated visits but this year’s did give me a nudge to consider visiting one of the legendary fairs — Iowa or Kansas or Nebraska. Places where the farmer is still a common sight and the broadside of a barn is something we can find easily. Click here for more photos

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This year marks the tenth that Jill and I have been working on our old house. When we took on our Queen Anne, it was a wrecked frat house — condemned property that had sat empty for nearly a year. Jill loved it at first sight. I said, “No way.” She was absolutely convinced that we could bring the house back from the brink. Never mind that we knew nothing about fixing a house. Painting — that’s all we knew. We could paint really well. Let me say it again: condemned property — no electricity in half the house, no plumbing, no ceilings in three rooms, no lights, garbage piled high in every room, and so on ad nauseum. It took three 30-yard Dumpsters and 79 industrial-sized garbage bags just to clean the place out. Still, we didn’t imagine that it would be two years before we started painting the walls.

I have always loved old houses. But I would not have bought this ruined frat house had Jill not wanted it so badly. That’s how far gone in love I was with her. We had been dating for only six months at the time. Call me impulsive. Is it remarkable that we saved the house and stayed together through all that mess? A sense of humor helps. The ability to live with chaos helps too. As we share the house with two dogs and two cats, chaos has become one of our specialties.

We have a website dedicated to our ongoing adventure: houselove.org It’s a big site because it tracks ten years of renovation. A decade seems a long time until you find yourself at the end of one. When we moved into our wreck, our new friends down the street kept reminding us that their spectacular home was the product of twenty years’ work. Twenty years? I thought. I’m not working twenty frigging years on a house. But I’m halfway there already.

Jill and I got married in our old house, by the way. That was the third year in. At the time, we thought the house was looking pretty groovy. But, the truth is, it was just starting to look livable. NOW it’s looking groovy. But you see how it goes: it’s all relative. You start with an Animal House wreck and pretty soon you’re willing to give yourself a lot of credit for living in something that looks only somewhat wrecked. There are people — a few of my in-laws, for example — who think that we live in a slum because all of the houses are old. Only in America will you get that attitude. Did you know that strip malls across the nation are being abandoned in favor of newer strip malls? We’re creating a landscape of deserted — zombie — strip malls. Something similar is happening with subdivisions.

But I digress. Is 113 years really old? Relatively, I mean. Think England, think France. Think George Washington.  Apparently, Jill and I will grow old in this oldish house, tinkering with it and improving it. I should confess that the only reason we keep working on the house is that we keep learning how to do this work better. We could have stopped years ago and the house would have been good enough. But, if you believe in progress and the advancement of humankind, good enough is never good enough. Take a peek at houselove.org and you’ll see what I mean.

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I brought home a doorstop from an auction recently. Jill doesn’t like the doorstop but I’m not sure what her doorstop aesthetics might be, since we never see doorstops anymore. Who’s to say what a doorstop should look like? Mine is cast iron, probably made about 1920, and in the shape of a clipper ship — an adventurer’s ship, apparently. It’s hand-painted, as they all were back in the day.

It used to be that every household had doorstops. From 1850 to 1950, hundreds of varieties were made in cast iron, most of them of animals, but also in the shapes of light houses, baskets of flowers, stage coaches, gnomes, soldiers, Southern belles and so on. My country grandmother had three doorstops in her rickety, little house: a terrier carved of stone (maybe chalk), a fabric-covered brick, and a pale oblong stone that, for reasons no one could explain, smelled of rot. The “rotten rock,” we called it.

A few years back, I gave Jill a doorstop as a gift. It’s a Boston terrier of cast iron, made about 1900. It must have been the most popular doorstop ever made because it is, without question, the most numerous in antique shops and online and, even now, reproductions of it are coming in from China. The appeal of the cast iron Boston terrier resides in its startled, slightly disturbed doggish gaze. The reproductions don’t capture this expression, but the originals are quite fetching.

You may wonder what ever happened to the doorstop. Or maybe not. The explanation is simple and twofold: 1) In the 1950s, people grew less inclined to lug doorstops around because Americans started moving more than ever. Cheap, lightweight, and unobtrusive doorstops came into fashion–those springy pegs jutting from baseboards, those rubber-nubbed kickstands on the back of doors, and those bulbous bumpers screwed to the wall. In short, those quaint, heavy, often garish doorstops seemed way too old-fashioned. 2) Then air conditioning all but eradicated the need for doorstops because, thanks to air conditioning, we now seldom open our windows wide for a breeze. It’s the breeze, of course, that makes the doorstop necessary.

A brisk breeze reduces the air pressure on the exposed side of the door. This causes the stronger air pressure on the unexposed side to push the door shut. Or slam it shut. Since Jill and I have only window unit air conditioners, we avail ourselves of mild weather more often than not — and then we “open the house.” All the windows up, all the doors open wide. You better believe you hear doors slamming in our old place. So we have need of doorstops.

I’ve installed my ship at the most problematic place, against the third floor guest room door, which often slams shut with a thunderous crack! as a wicked breeze banshees its way from the top of our house to the bottom, finding egress at last through the kitchen door, which we open wide to our back yard.

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Jill woke me at dawn this morning. She said, “We’ve got a house full of mice!” Our cats had already gotten two of them. As I stepped groggily from the bed, Simon chased another down the hall. Sofi had yet another cornered in the living room. Fortunately our two cats are good at catching mice. Unfortunately, mice are smart about getting caught. Instinctively, mice know that if they play dead, the cat will get bored and walk away. Our cats did exactly that. “Let’s focus!” I scolded them. Jill wasn’t exaggerating, there seemed to be a lot of mice in the house. Early morning happens to be the cats’ breakfast time and we couldn’t put off feeding them, which, needless to say, was a great distraction from mousing.

The mice got in because I had opened holes in the walls on two floors to run some new electricity. (If you’ve got an old house, you’ve got mice in your walls.) I had left the walls open for nearly a week because it’s too hot to work. We’ve stopped doing all of the chores we normally do around the house in the summer. Our window-unit air-conditioners aren’t especiallly good. They sort of keep us cool, the house temps hovering about 80-84 degrees. Outside offers no relief, even at night. Last night I was watering the front yard at 1:00 A.M. and one of my neighbors trudged by walking her four greyhounds. “It’s the only time we’re comfortable,” she said, “and even this is hardly good enough.”

Jill and I have cabin fever, I’ve decided. Sure, cabin fever is usually associated with being cooped up in winter. But it applies to a bad summer too. We got so desperate for relief that we took the dogs to the woods late yesterday and went wading in one of the Gunpowder creeks. Frieda, our basset hound loves to swim. All of us got plenty wet. Then we stopped to pick raspberries. When we got home, despite the heat — or, rather, to defy the heat — Jill and I made raspberry pies. That’s not exactly ideal food for this weather but we didn’t complain.

There’s no relief in sight for this too-hot Baltimore summer, I’m afraid. And, for the next couple of weeks, you can bet that Jill and I will be a bit jumpy in the house — until the cats evacuate all of our little visitors. Just now we caught another: I chased it into an empty tomato sauce can. Jill was going to help me bag it but then it leapt away when Jill recoiled at the sight of its tail draped over the can edge — Eek!  ”Oh, well,” I said, “we’ll get it eventually.” Jill laughed and laughed. I love a woman with a sense of humor.

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Jill and I went to Phoenix last week to see my mother, who is 83 and “still on foot,” as she likes to say – and smoking Pall Malls. She said, ,”Nobody comes to Arizona in July.” It was 110-115 degrees every day.   It’s remarkable that people live in heat like that. More remarkable that they did so before air conditioning.

We visited a couple of friends in Tucson. They live in an adobe-style house on a rise west of the city. You take a dirt road to get to their place. Their yard is a wilderness. If you haven’t been to the saguaro desert, where cacti grow twenty-feet high and the creosote bushes are as tall as you, which means it wouldn’t take but a few missteps to get lost, you don’t know how wildly overgrown these places are. It’s not just sand and rock.

Our friend’s mom was a nature-lover. She had a few dead curiosities in her freezer — animals she’d found, like the gila monster that drowned in her pool. We petted the monster and a frozen rattle snake but not the bat.

Our friends’ house has evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. It’s old technology, patented in 1906, and consists of a fan blowing air cooled by evaporated water — a system that costs about 1/5th as much as air conditioning.

We shook our head in wonder at how our friends were living in that hot, wild, prickly place. They collect rain water in a cistern and raise chickens for eggs but they’re not anywhere close to being off the grid, though they dream of it. A bobcat got their first brood of hens not long ago. Coyotes and hawks and great horned owls will pick off incautious housecats, they told us. They had dwarf owls nesting in the car port recently.

You’ve probably seen one of those cheapo horror movies from the 1950’s that features a giant tarantula or mantis or ant. The story always takes place in the desert. There’s a reason for that. We were walking to a Tucson taco joint and encountered a monster insect on the sidewalk. It was dead but totally intact and worthy of its own horror show. Jill didn’t flinch when I placed it into her cupped hands. You go, girl!

When we returned to Phoenix, we told Mom about the critters but she didn’t seem impressed. She’s a country girl from an Appalachian mill town. She’s seen plenty of critters in her time. We couldn’t leave Phoenix without going to Pizzeria Bianco. It is, believe it or not, one of the best pizzas you’ll ever eat. Go later rather than earlier to avoid the crowd. And ignore the heat: coal-fired crust is good no matter how hot the pavement is outside. At dinner we talked about living off the grid, which seems appropriate to Arizona’s quirky inclinations. Then Mom revealed that when she was growing up she didn’t have a flush toilet until she was ten. I never knew.

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