I’m taking my house into my own hands. My house is falling apart, I’m on social security disability, and I’m tired of getting useless advice—every time I ask men (or a library book) how to fix something wrong with the house, they tell me a solution that requires money, energy, and capabilities I don’t have.

For example, I have a couple of walls covered with walnut boards milled locally by the Amish. But they were put up green, and shrank as they dried, and now you can see right through the cracks between them to the four-inch poplar logs that make up the outside of my cabin (also green and shrunk)—and I can watch the bugs crawl right through both sets of cracks, right out of the forest and into my house. And in the winter, no matter how much I pay the electric company, I freeze. The problem is bigger than caulk and putty can fix.

The manly solution: “You need to take all those walnut boards off—although it’d be hard to do since they’ve been hammered up using nails with no heads, that have rusted in there. And then you’ll have to plane the boards on all sides so they’re nice and even, and then nail them all back up. Or, you could cover the walls with plywood, although that would mean you’d have to move the kitchen sink or cut around it. Plywood costs $40 for a 4 x 8 sheet….”

These are non-solutions for me. Who are they kidding? Do they know who they’re talking to? But I’m tired of being bug-bitten and freezing, usually alternately, often concurrently.

So I decided to forget that I live in the United States and become a citizen of the Earth. Rural Tennessee is more like a Third World country than like anything else, anyway. So what does a woman living in poverty do, anywhere in the world, if she has holes in her house? She plugs them with whatever’s at hand that bugs won’t eat. So, I’ll let you know how that goes as soon as I get a minute to do some experiments.

Meanwhile,  yesterday I made progress towards fixing another house problem: When the woodstove was removed, the leftover hole in the roof leaked. Manly solution: “Yeah, someone needs to go up on the roof and fix that.” My roof is really really tall and it’s not strong enough to be leaning ladders up against perhaps, and probably scaffolding would be involved, and anyway the upshot is it’s never going to happen. So I decided to make lemonade.

Here’s the set-up. See the leftover stovepipe at the top? It would be  leaking water in front of Jessica Simpson, and  onto the pink square, if it was raining outside. I know it doesn’t look like Jessica Simpson. I am just starting to learn to paint, and she was on the cover of Vanity Fair, so she was easy to look at and try to copy. I hadn’t gotten very far when this was taken, so please don’t hold it against me. I know her arms look like T-Rex arms in this picture, but that’s just the way art happens. It looks like sh*t until sometimes the very last minute when it all falls together and becomes brilliant, maybe transcendent. And then after the glow, the artist starts wondering if it’s really sh*t after all. Like a religious experience, perhaps.

The pink square on the floor is where the woodstove used to sit. It’s just painted-pink tarpaper, or whatever the stuff is that goes over the bottom rafters or whatever the things are the house sits on. My daughter Molly painted a sort of lovely hearth rug around it the other day.

But it can’t disguise the fact that there’s no floor there. I figured that couldn’t be good, to have water dripping right onto the floor supports. (Or onto the particle board floor, for that matter, should I manage to patch it—a longshot project sure to leave new icky cracks in my house.) So I decided if I was going to have water coming into my house, I was going to put it into a sensible environment. One of those simple Japanese fountains would be nice, but I can’t afford it, and I don’t have the time to mainfest one from scratch—some other time perhaps—so right now, if rain is coming into my house, it needs to water some plants.

I looked around my yard, which has a couple of piles of junk left over from manly-man exploits of past residents, and found just what I needed. Or, as my first ex-husband used to say, “Good enough for the girls we go with.” I found a little piece of sheet metal, and a leaky plastic tub. I also got some rocks from the creek….

The rocks hold the sheet metal down, and keep the sharp edges covered. (I still need more rocks.) And I very simply laid the foundations so that our, let’s say, atrium (open-roofed central room) can have plants one of these days, when I figure out how to get enough dirt to fill the tub. I’m not keen on digging, since the ground here is cherty and hard. I got a book from the library today on container gardening. Perhaps it will give me some ideas. I can always make compost if I have to! (I once heard a wise teacher say, “If you don’t know what to do, make dirt.”)

So our container garden is taking off, let’s say. But at the moment it looks like a Jessica Simpson wannabe is rising out of a plastic tub, which I find disturbing. But now I have to leave; I’m out of time. I leave Molly a scrawled note on the wall: “Molly, we need flowers.” Flowers rising up out of the tub would de-weird things, somewhat.

When I got back to the cabin this morning, I found that Molly, sweet girl that she is, had painted us a lovely nekkid (as we say in the south) angel silhouette. Either she’s rising out of the tub, or about to stub her toe on it, or blessing it, or all three; interpretation varies by angle and inclination. Anyway, the project is far from finished, but it’s definitely an improvement (as measured by my ability to stand my environment), and it’s going to solve my hole in the roof problem, assuming all the water can be taught to go in the tub. Well, it’ll solve that particular hole in the roof problem. There are others, for another day.

A nekkid angel.