Vocation

Here at the Window lately we've been talking about passion,

living your life with passion.

The lucky ones among us

have a vocation that is a passion.

I thought you might enjoy learning what R.H.'s vocation is.

He and two of our sons have a roofing and 

siding business,

and we specialize in historic homes.

Such as this beautiful old farmhouse that has been
in the same family for four generations now.

We completely reconstructed the roof and
then installed Classic Rib 24 ga. steel roofing
in Burnished Slate baked-on enamel.

We also replaced the roofs on 5 outbuildings
in Patriot Red.

There was the Cabin House,

the Chicken House,

and the Carriage House...

The 4th outbuilding was the Springhouse;
our client said that the spring has never gone dry.

R.H. truly enjoys his vocation but never more
than when it means helping preserve
historic homes.

I don't want to forget the 5th outbuilding--
it's the Outhouse!

And what does my husband do when he's not working?

He's dreaming up a new project at home, of course.

Such as turning our old chicken shed…

into a picnic shelter and giving us a view to the valley...

And adding a carport for his truck because the
barn, garage, and another carport are full.

Over the years we've added rooms onto
our own 1920 farmhouse,
often higgledy-piggledy,
as we've needed them,
just as the original owners did
when it was a hog farm.

but it looked right pretty here this morning…

This poem by W. H. Auden reminds me
of my husband:

You need not see what someone is doing

to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes;

a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function.

W. H. Auden

They're the lucky ones, aren't they?

Oh, and did I mention that this hardworking

man of mine is in his 70s?

[Please visit another member of The Passion, Purpose and Productivity Project--

        Linda at the Sew What Blog. I just read her post and it brought back so many

        memories of young motherhood all the way to and through the empty nest time.]

Monday 26th: Here is a link to today's post from Jemma of At Home With Jemma, who is the host of our project. Jemma explains this whole project again and why it is important to us, and we hope to some of you. It is a path that we hope will continue to lead us to that last part of the project, the Productivity that we all hope to accomplish.

"Danse Macabre"

"It's farewell to the drawing room's mannerly cry,

The professor's logical whereto and why,

The frock-coated diplomat's polished aplomb,

Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb….

So good-bye to the house with its wallpaper red,

Good-bye to the sheets on the warm double bed,

Good-bye, dear heart, good-bye to you all.

W. H. Auden

When Auden wrote this in the 1930s, already the diplomat was becoming obsolete. The statesmen of old? What use would they be now? Can you reason with a terrorist? 

I try to keep Dewena's Window positive, try to keep its issues within my sphere of influence. But how many years will pass before any of us awake on September 11 without immediately thinking of that day in 2001? 

The day the World Trade Center collapsed into ashes, part of the Pentagon was destroyed, and major airlines were hijacked as weapons of murder. A day that changed our lives forever even if we were not among the day's victims.

That morning here in Tennessee began as a lovely early autumn day with our windows open to a refreshing breeze and the sky intensely blue and cloud-free. It turned out to be similar to another day that Richard M. Kitchum wrote about in The Borrowed Years, 1938-1941: America on the Way to War.

"The one thing everyone in Europe could agree on was the weather: it was the most hauntingly beautiful springtime in memory--soft, radiant, dazzling days stretching on one after another as if to blind people of what was to come."

These are the things we remember after catastrophe strikes: how we stretched when we awoke that morning and threw back the covers in anticipation of the day ahead, what we had for breakfast, waving goodbye to the children before they got on the school bus, the grocery list the most important thing on our mind. 

And all along, if we had known, "It's farewell to the drawing-room's mannerly cry."

That is what I'm thinking of today. That farewell to a life of reason. Of being blind to what is to come. Tomorrow I will move on and cope. Today I will mourn as W.H. Auden did in "Danse Macabre" and pray that we heed his warning.