Begin with the Backstory

Begin. Begin with the backstory. Again. Begin with the backstory again because it repeatedly eludes me. Begin again with the backstory and don’t let go until…

Some updates won’t be tamed no matter how willful and persistent I am. They won’t be tethered. They won’t be paraded upon a leash. Untrainable. Wild. Today’s attempt at a daily dispatch has insisted on its own sovereignty. “Do it me-self,” Susan allegedly told her parents and her sister as a child when they tried to help her. “I can do it myself,” I insisted hours into projects — building a block fortress, disassembling and attempting to reassemble a bicycle, a formaldehyded frog, a transistor radio — when I too was young. This fierce independence we share. This willfully wayward bent is woven into our characters. And, it would seem, Rosslyn Redux is asserting a similar strain of independence this afternoon.

Begin with the Backstory

Begin
with the backstory
because
it's the foundation
for what comes next,
the substructure 
that will soon support
the story itself.

Begin
before the story 
and the teller
became acquainted,
before they saw 
something special,
something intriguing
in one another.

Begin
before they flirted,
feigned disinterest, 
secretly smitten, 
starting to succumb
to the beguiling
braid entwining them.

Well, friends, as you know by now, our story and storyteller are so totally entwined that it’s practically impossible to unbraid them. Is Rosslyn our home? Or is Rosslyn our story about our home. Is she anything at all, maybe a mere moniker employed to stand in for the Ross Mansion? The McNulty House? 2783 Essex Road? Or is she the very soul of our small family’s sanctuary on the Adirondack Coast of Lake Champlain?

Begin with the backstory. Begin with the foundation. It’s the backstory. The found story. The origin story. But it’s her story, not my story.

Just begin. Again.

So, circling, stealthily, slowly corralling the backstory like a herd dog or a constrictor, I grow confident. Overconfident.

Thanks for tuning in to today’s patchwork quilt of pictures, prose poetry trifles, and another installment of a slowly emerging backstory… (Source: Ferry Test)

I return to Homeport or The Farm again and again when I begin with the backstory. When I try to begin with the backstory.

Backstory barns…

Undoubtedly my affinity for barns is rooted, albeit subconsciously at times, in early to mid 1970s recollections of a tumbledown farmstead tucked into a wooded holler in Cossayuna, New York.

[…]

Recently I’ve been sifting through memories and mementos of those few-but-formative years, and I’m coming to suspect that my association between barns — especially old, weathered, rural farm barns — and “home” (as well as “homing” and basically all matters related to “homeness”) is intrinsically rooted in my early childhood adventures at The Farm. (Source: The Farm Backstory)

Such deep-seated and longstanding affinity for barns. A barn-ish backstory evolves.

Rosslyn Redux habitués will note that my barn-ish palavering occasionally borders on obsessive. My interest undergirds not only our Rosslyn backstory, but also an enduring architectural bias that inspires my brainstorms for a future homebase, a successor to Rosslyn.

I’m not a barn expert, an agricultural architecture preservationist, or even a particularly astute student of barns and farms. But I am a barnophile. (Source: A Barnophile of Bygone Barns)

And as an unabashed barnophile my morning bike-a-bouts provide plenty of ideas and ingredients — bygone barns pop up everywhere along the Adirondack Coast — to inspire my barn brewing.

Barn vernacular,
so utilitarian
and so efficient.
— Geo Davis, “Barn Vernacular Haiku” (Source: Toward a Barn Vernacular)

[…]

It’s tempting to explain my barn attraction as being rooted first and foremost in the utilitarian practicality. That’s *part* of the puzzle. But there’s more. Wabi-sabi wonder, ample volumes, tantalizing textures, and — full disclosure now — not an insignificant endowment of nostalgia. Woven into the earliest tapestries of my childhood are fond associations with barns. (Source: A Barnophile of Bygone Barns)

I’ve waxed wordy on my youthful associations with barns elsewhere, so no redundant recap now. (Source: Barn Brewing)

Tethering. Re-tethering. Attempting re-tethering. Essaying..

My post drifted into a milk toast muddle more intent on understanding the backstory than leaping boldly into a new adventure. (Source: Untethering Revisited)

Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m foundering. Let’s return to yesterday, to begin with an ending. End with a beginning.

Baked into our Rosslyn backstory and eventual decision to purchase the property as our home, is a significant appetite for (and comfort with) creative risk-taking. Both Susan and I are comfortable with change. Often we thrive on change. Our co-creation, co-navigation, and collaboration (in general) isn’t always smooth sailing. We’re both strong willed and confident. Sometimes there are fireworks. But we’ve both learned to respect one another’s creative strengths, and we’ve both learned to back down. Eventually. Not usually to admit that the other is right. That we were wrong. But that the solution born of our discord is better than what either of us had envisioned at the outset.

[…]

We came to Rosslyn when we were both in need of rebuilding after loss, in need of creativity after destruction. It was a regrouping. A reboot. A leap of even larger proportions and implications than either of us understood at the time. We were struggling and confused and not a little bit lost. So we… uprooted our life in NYC and moved to tiny Essex with the notion that we’d transform four dilapidated historic buildings into a home. Why not? What could possibly go wrong?!

Friends and family worried. We worried. But mostly we raced into the adventure. We’d make sense of it all later!

Susan and I still rely upon this mysterious impulse [creative risk-taking] to cope with confusion and chaos by throwing ourselves into creative adventures. Rosslyn wasn’t the first, nor will it be our last… (Source: Rosslyn as Creative Incubator)

When I begin with the backstory I hasten to barns. I hasten to The Farm. I hasten to Homeport, though we didn’t even call it Homeport. We called it home. And yet I sidestep basic background like Christopher and Carter… Why?