Finding your way back home

I am finding my way back home. Home is a strange place for me. It involves an immense amount of reading and the development or refinement of skills. Ah, skills. What is life without an insane repertoire of unusual abilities? Right now, I'm all on fire about fermentation. I'm awaiting the shipment of rennet, koji, and a tofu press. I have a vat of ruby sauerkraut and cauliflower bubbling away merrily on my kitchen counter. A while ago I made an enormous batch of sauerkraut but it sprouted some terrifying looking mold on the surface and I got freaked out and stuck it on my porch. The porch is my liminal space where questionable experiments wait in purgatory to be revived, or more frequently, pitched in the compost or trash. 

The compost itself is just another way station. When something goes awry, it gets composted and awaits its transformation. Right now, the compost is gleefully transforming a pig head into a beautiful clean skull that will probably end up mounted on my wall or chilling in my office as part of my growing comparative vertebrate anatomy collection. Yes, this is science speak for hoarding animal parts. It's all part of this amazing cycle for which I find myself deeply grateful. It's mystifying. Every time I think that I'm insane, I get these little reminders that there is a macro-scale method to my madness. I moved to the country so that I would have the space and freedom to establish a giant compost heap and have a place where my ill conceived projects could go to die, or, um, transform. Sometimes I am so deep in the forest, I can't even see the trees. And then I find my own feet walking the path toward home. Like a horse let off its tether. Or a couple of escaped pygmy goats heading back to the barn at sundown. 

The pig started out as an attempt at taxidermy. Ok, I know, this probably sounds bonkers but bear with me. This pig was not my first rodeo. I've been dabbling in the wild world of self taught experimental taxidermy for a few years and I've successfully mounted a few animals. Visitors to my home are greeted by these cheerful friends looming down from atop a self consciously hip mid-century china hutch or peeking out from behind an ornate bird cage. Those who know me don't bat an eye, those that bat an eye never return. You have to get used to a certain level of unusual to roll with this bad b. But back to the pig. I had this glorious vision of beautiful oak-tanned pig hide or maybe a full furred cape made of bristling wild boar fur. Neither of these dreams came to pass. Instead, I found myself on the kitchen floor at about 11:00 PM on a weeknight with a scalpel in one hand and a filthy, bloody, greasy pig head with cape still attached staring back at me. I was valiantly attempting to deflesh the hide to prepare it for salting but it was damn hard. Every time I moved the head around, the pig would oink at me in this low, threatening grumble. You can imagine how startled I was the first time it happened. See, my friend gave me this pig hide with all the neck viscera still intact and the head attached. Therefore, the throat and vocal folds were functional, and every time air would be forced through the larynx, the pig would grunt. So, I'm squatting there with my greasy scalpel, having cleaned maybe an eighth of the surface area in an hour when my former boyfriend comes into the kitchen and just looks at me.

"What. Are. You. Doing?"

Of all the things to ask, could you imagine a more absurd question? I mean, isn't it self evident that I am defleshing a pig head? Seriously. Again, with the knowing me business. If you have to ask then why are you even here at 11:00 on a Tuesday? Obviously, I am balls deep in a bizarre experiment that involves dead pigs, taxidermy, scalpels, and a healthy sense of optimism about how much sleep I need in order to give a lecture on human skeletal morphology in the morning. So whyyyyyyy are you staring at me? And why are you asking me what I can only assume is a rhetorical question? Clearly, minutes count here! I am on the clock! 

Of course, my only response is to say "Well, I'm trying to deflesh a pig. How was your day?"

In the end, the pig could not, in fact, be taxidermied in the short window of "me time" that exists between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM. He ended up being bagged up and stored on the porch (thank the sweet heavens for cold winters) until I had time to haul him out to the compost pile and give him a proper good bye for now. Retrospectively, it's an amazing allegory for what happened with the boyfriend. METAPHORICALLY speaking, people. The boyfriend is not literally in the compost pile. Lucky for him. 

So I guess this is my process. It is messy. It is questionable. It might not even be legal. There are grand experiments and even grander failures but I am always daring greatly. The path is winding and often obscure but it leads me always, inexorably home.