My Great Housekeeping Triumph

After two weeks of procrastination, today I ventured down into the dungeon, I mean basement, to begin the massive reorganization and cleaning it requires. With two hours of work, I produced a couple of bags of clothing and a pile of backpacks and shoes to give away, and a fairly respectable pile of trash.

And I have found a leak in the pipe where the water comes in from the city system. Water water everywhere ~ at least all over the floor in one corner of the basement. I would not have known about it for at least several weeks if I had not been inspired to clean.

OK, so the photo is a tiny bit of an exaggeration. But still:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

This is why our living room has not been painted in 25 years.

Whatever. I am off to the vet to buy that expensive prescription food that has kept a certain dog out of the ER for the last two years, before she calls the Animal Planet cops to report that her cupboard is empty.

I will think about the leak later.

Colors - Third Post, and Almost the Final One

It will probably be no surprise to long-time readers of this blog, although it was to me (isn't that always the way?), that when I began to look at the colors I like now, the words that popped up in the various descriptions were along the lines of retreat and reflective.

Some synonyms for retreat (as a noun), thanks to thesaurus.com:

haven, hermitage, hideaway, hiding place, port, privacy, refuge, retirement, safe house, safe place, sanctuary, seclusion, security, shelter, solitude . . .

and for reflective, via its synonym contemplative:

cogitative, introspective, lost, meditative, musing, pensive, pondering, ruminative, speculative, thoughtful.

The colors ~ all variants on blues and greens and purples, all the colors of the ocean which you may not fully realize, if you haven't stared at is as often as and long and in as many places as I have, offers an endless variation of hue. What I don't know (and as Ruth wisely pointed out in the comments below, I should take my time (even if finances did not mandate a leisurely pace!)) is: do I mean pale tones, colors reflecting the beginning and end of the day? Icier tones indicating a certain degree of reticence and withdrawal? Or do I mean the deeper jewel tones, the ones that work best for my wardrobe?

Wardrobes and homes are different venues for color, of course. Despite my (originally) dark hair and eyes, my skin is quite pale, and so deep colors rather than washed out tones look much better on me. (My daughter's skin is pale as well, but her blue eyes and blond hair practically mandate pastels.) I'm not in the least enamoured of today's multi-print styles; my idea of a great look is something more a la Kate Hepburn ~ tailored black trousers and a cobalt blue shirt. For my home, though ~ I'm not sure. As I was reading blogs the other day, this wonderful mix of colors on Mary Beth's blog caught my eye and I thought: the perfect interior. Then I thought: too much. Maybe the perfect interior would be a paler version of same, with the deeper colors for accents via glass and artwork and the occasional pillow or even chair.

In the everything-is-connected department, the cooler, icier, paler colors are clearly reflective of my personal life and movement toward ministry. The former hostess of Christmas dinners for 40 is no more; these days, I struggle mightily in conversations involving more than a few people (and I say some of the most astonishingly inappropriate things when I get confused about the tenor of the group), but I do love to spend time with a (very few at a time) friends. The preacher and teacher and public speaker are still here, but I am told that I am very present to people one-on-one in a way that I think is not possible for me, at least not now, from the front of a sanctuary or meeting room, and so I feel a definite move toward a focus on chaplaincy and spiritual direction manifesting itself.

And so, I think that I am seeing our home more as a place of refuge and reflection, as a place for quiet conversation and small and simple gatherings, for others as well as our family, than as the place through which soccer players tromped and in which multiple chefs spread massive Christmas buffets. Those days were wonderful, but we have been quite changed, and perhaps what we have to share has as well.

(Illustrative colors courtesy of the Atlantic Ocean off Iona.)

Colors, Part the Second

I can see from the dearth of comments on the post below that no one is interested in my reflections on color. Unlike Portia, who received 14 comments (including mine) on the post that inspired me. Does that reflect something about the age and life experience difference ~ she and her friends are at the beginning, full of optimism, moving from the bridal shower to baby shower stages, while I and mine are in the middle, reeling from life's disappointments and trying to rebuild? There is not a single one of my close group of ten or so friends who has not faced a life-altering confrontation with loss and, in several cases, true disaster, in the past decade. Why would we care in the least about bedroom color or living room decor, you ask?

Well, after reading Portia's post, I spent several hours playing around on websites related to color choices. (Where did I find the time? As it happens, I accomplished a great deal earlier this week but, as I have related and has been repeatedly affirmed to me, grief is exhausting. I have spent the past four days in something of a stupor, recovering from the previous three. Online playtime was practically a necessity.) The information was fascinating and, indeed, therapeutic. Possibly also boring to others, since it's about me me me, so I'll shave it down to three quick observations, with some conclusions in another post.

When we bought our home 25 years ago, the decor consisted of then very-fashionable colors and wallpaper in muted country colors and patterns: rusts, beiges, and sage-type greens found in an endless sequence of tiny prints. (You might notice that none of these colors are featured in my previous post, except as rejects.) But during those early years, as we began to recreate the house in our own image, we deepened but did not steer far from those colors, going toward yellows and blues and some reds. Not being Portia, I gave no thought whatever to any of this, but it seems clear now that my subconscious was steering me toward the creation of a home that beckoned with warmth and welcome. My personal wardrobe, interestingly, was based upon navy (interestingly, attorney Portia's favorite ~ and yes, I know the origin of the name Portia). A website tells me that "Navy carries the blue symbolism of importance, confidence, power, and authority. Darker blue, like navy, is associated with intelligence, stability, unity, and conservatism." Leave out the conservatism and you've got it ~ my approach to life as a young lawyer and then stay-at-home mom and community volunteer.

A few years ago, having recognized that our home no longer reflected our lives, I did a previous set of those House Beautiful type quizzes, one that asked about favorite clothing, geography, art, etc. It became clear that the beach and its colors should be my decorating focus. I thought that perhaps my ideal would be something light and airy and colorful: think Carribean and the covers of Coastal Living. However, we live on the Great Lakes in a home closing in on 100 years old, a home which features dark mahogany and oak woodwork and brass fixtures. I decided we would be better off focusing on the blues and greens of the coasts and waters of the north, Maine and Oregon ~ and even on the interior woods and lakes of Algonquin. I was still thinking warm and welcoming, however, as I was beginning to imagine the utility of this far-too-large-for-us house in terms of adult children and their spouses and children.

The past year has been an excursion into another realm entirely. I wrote a post last winter, I think, about my difficulties in choosing clothing, a dilemma echoed by one of my newly-widowed best friends. Who are we now, we wondered, a son and a husband missing from our lives? The houses raise the same questions as our wardrobes do. Our living room is the one room in our house that has undergone no changes at all in the time we have lived here, and I've been gazing at the walls in increasing desperation. That tiny rust print has no place in my current identity, and it's out of date and dark and not clean. This past week, unable either to stand it or to trade it in for a beach cottage, or even to afford to paint it (maybe soon), I went off to Pier One and purchased some dried plants to add some height and interest to the mantle arrangements. It now looks like someone gives a damn, but the colors are still all wrong. What am I to do? I don't think I'm a warm and welcoming person anymore. What kind of person am I? What kind of home should I keep?

Enter Portia's post, House Beautiful, and this week-end's obsession with color. More to come later, but let me add one thing: if it seems as though I am channeling QG's daughter, I want to say that that girl, without a word about church or prayer or God, has performed a serious ministry to me this week. In writing about something that at her age I would have found baffling and somewhat frivolous, she has opened the door to some serious reflections about identity, loss, and self-expression. Who knew?

In Which Changes Are Recorded

We have lived in our house for nearly 23 years.

When we moved in, I loved that wallpaper with the little country pattern, rust on cream.

What was I thinking?

Who on earth was I?

I was a lawyer, with twins on the way (I didn't know that there were two when we moved in on the coldest day of at least the decade) and plans for the perfect suburban life.

Needless to say, that life did not exactly materialize.

And so now I want bold color, I want the ocean, I want a background for photographs of Iona and Chartres.

We haven't unearthed the chairs and dishes yet. But we'll find them today.

Advent 7, 8, 9 ~ It Goes By Too Quickly

Christmas Eve 2004

It has occurred to me that this is the last year in which we can count on all three of our children being home for Christmas. The guys will probably (one hopes!) both be employed by this time next year; the Lovely Daughter hopes to be studying in Europe. As Jobs and Significant Others and Spouses and Grandchildren gradually become realities, the committments of these past two decades will be transformed. Already we are abandoning our family tradition of choosing the tree together, and instead making plans to get a tree tomorrow night and set it up before the kids come home next week-end, so there will be more time to enjoy and less need to run around once they are here.

This time of life reminds me of when they were tiny: as soon as you thought you understood what was going on and found routines and systems that more or less worked, everything changed and you had to devise a new plan. Next year may see them in Chicago, France, and the Czech Republic. Or not. And the year after that? Completely unpredictable.

*****

On the I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas front: the plastering is completed and looks great, but the thin layer of dust covering walls, furniture, poinsettias, piano, and Baby Jesus and entourage? Not so much.

*****

On The Friendly Beasts front, the following conversation took place between my neighbor (on the other side from the previous neighbor) and me this morning:

Neighbor: You know your soffit is falling down on the front corner.

Me: Yes, I know.

Neighbor: That's how the squirrels got into our crawl space. We can hear them up there. They've made nests in the insulation.

Me: Sigh. I had, actually, been thinking about the squirrels.

Neighbor: We chopped all the branches away from our gutters. I was watching today, and the squirrels seem unperturbed. They just ran up the trees by your house instead, and into your attic.

Me: Actually, I couldn't think of anything else to say about the disturbing presence of the squirrels. My neighbor's daughter, who lives in Germany, is in the same condition that I was 23 years ago, expecting twins, so we turned to that much more cheerful topic.

*****

I notice that the lyrics to The Friendly Beasts are not inclusive of squirrels.

The Saga Moves to the Exterior

If you have been following this distressing but scintillating tale, you know that my husband thought that plaster, paint, and dining room would make a good Advent combination.

So.

Today I'm standing in the drive giving my neighbor some mis-delivered mail and he points upward in the general direction of our roof and says, "Have you noticed that?"

Ice pulling down soffit and flashing. Rotted wood dangling from what was once a portion of the corner of the gutter.

Hmmmm.

"No," I said. "I have not noticed that, and I plan to continue not noticing it."

*****************************

I'm trying to remember the year we came home from an extended family holiday week-end to discover that the entire front gutter had come down. The first call was to the electric company, since it had brought wires down with it, and said wires lay waiting in live and murderous wait across the driveway. The next call was to the insurance lady, who said, "If you call again, you are going to lose your coverage." To which I said, "I am not responsible for the tornado last summer or the tree limbs that landed on the car, and I did not knock the second floor bathroom into the kitchen, and I did not spend New year's Eve pulling the gutter down onto the porch."

What I can't remember is whether we found anyone to replace the gutter during the winter or whether we had to wait it out till summer.

******************************

The theme song for this particular Advent episode is In the Bleak Midwinter.

Advent for Atheists (or, Dining Room Saga II)

I am not getting involved with the dining room, except for choosing colors.

In case it is not clear, I think December is sufficiently full absent any major projects, especially major projects that have already waited at least a decade for anyone to embark upon them anyway. I was thinking that just cleaning up and decorating the house and planning the annual meal extravaganza and interacting with our kids, plus taking time for a couple of movies and concerts, would constitute a full plate for one little holiday month.

As far as the colors are concerned, I am hoping it will look something like this blog. I am thinking about the colors of the Maine coast and the Algonquin wilderness. Two of the little jars on the kitchen counters have Yarmouth Blue and Nantucket Fog as names ~ maybe I will choose on that basis alone.

In the meantime, I have to say I got a chuckle out of QG's thought that we couldn't do Christmas if the dining room were torn up. We live in the City of Homes Under Demolition. A couple of years ago there was a full page spread in the New York Times Home section about a woman who was writing books and making LOTS OF MONEY off the fact that her house was not "done." "Most people wouldn't put up with this," she said. "The exposed ceiling, the wall knocked down to studs and lathe, the second floor leak down the newly painted first floor room."

I laughed hysterically as I called all my friends. "We could be RICH," I said. "There are people who think the way we live is noteworthy. Unusual, even. They pay good money to read about it. Money that could go to contractors."

So I'm probably going with the idea that someone at work floated this morning. "Bare plaster walls?" she said. "Tell everyone it's a Tuscan villa."

OK, Paul. I need to find those Italian cooking babes you wrote about, Rachel and Francesca. I'm thinking that this Christmas dinner will be one for the record books. We all know I can't cook, but I bet I can persuade my friends to bring stuff that matches the Tuscan walls. Lots of Italian food and lots of Italian wine.

And so far it seems that we are inviting atheists who don't celebrate Christmas, Jews who can't celebrate Christmas, members of the Church of Christ who won't celebrate Christmas, secular Christians who celebrate Frosty and Santa as Christmas . . . OK, par for the course. Bring on the wine. It all sounds exactly like the kind of gathering Jesus would attend.

The Dining Room Saga

No tree yet. No lights. No gifts. No menu plan. I am beyond proud of myself for having picked up and vacuumed the living room today so that I could plunk poinsettias on the mantel and put the nativity set out on the piano. A touch of the season: a bit of living green, red, and white. My little carved figures, including shepherds with all kinds of instruments and sheep, as well as ducks, geese, and a turkey. I could invite someone into my front room and not pass out from embarrassment.

While I was foolishly engrossed in a Desperate Housewives rerun tonight, my husband ripped all of the paper off the dining room walls.

I am speechless. Perhaps I will simply remain in that state for the next 22 days. I think that might be best.

Baffled

I cannot figure out what to do about the house.

We do not, thankfully, live in any kind of a mansion. We live in a large, older (1917) center-hall colonial home. We would like to live in a much smaller, bungalow-type space, but the expenses of moving are too much to contemplate, and so we don't. This is it.

I'm trying to remember why we bought this house. We had a perfectly acceptable three-bedroom, immediately post-World War II colonial on a larger lot on a side street, five houses down from a wonderful elementary school, and we got some kind of idea that we wanted to move to the country. About 100 house tours later, each of them reminding us of the driving time that would be sucked from our days by such a move, we actually relocated to the other side of our suburb, the side on the border of the city.

The location is fabulous. A twenty-minute drive from downtown, where we have both worked at various times. A thirty-minute drive, parking included, to the airport. A ten-minute walk to two different shopping neighborhoods, with restaurants, bookstores, funky shops (City Buddha, anyone?), and interesting people. A couple of walks to a 300-acre arboretum disguised as a cemetery, or a pair of lakes inhabited by all the local birds and visited by all the transients. A few minutes drive to the Montessori schools our childen attended, one for preschool and another through eighth grade.

The personality of our little city is incomparable. Everyone reads. Politics tend to be liberal (but not invariably so, as our squabble over domestic partner health insurance demonstrated ~ the insurance remains a mandate, but only after a court fight). Religious practice is evident everywhere ~ all kinds of religious practice. The schools are a constant source of controversy, the public schools with all the attendant issues of inner-ring suburb diversity vying with Catholic, Lutheran, fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, charter, Montessori, and Waldorf schools for the dwindling number of students.

Our house represented a fantasy at one time, some of which we actually lived out. Mahogany and oak woodwork, glass-doored cupboards in the dining room and library, fireplaces in the libray and living room, a small sunroom (standard-issue here) off the kitchen, front and back stairs, and a huge kitchen that at one time emerged out of a combination of much smaller kitchen, breakfast nook, porch and pantry. The tiny bedrooms, closets and bathrooms (none of which are fully functional) that mark aging colonials. A place where a family of five could spread itself out: where Legos once splattered across the floor, where children's books tumbled from every available surface, and where fantasy dramas with neighbor children played out up and down three floors, under bunkbeds, into the back yard, and over the fence.

But more than two decades have passed. The children are gone. And so are the parakeets, the guinea pig, the cats, the big dog. The wallpaper is dreary, the paint on the woodwork exhausted. Various plumbing and plastering jobs await the ever-elusive contractors, the ones who probably make far more money out of this city than any lawyer or doctor and are, therefore, probably on the golf course at Hilton Head at the moment.

What are we supposed to do with this place????? It felt like a home when we had young children, simply by virtue of their presence. Now it feels like a mausoleum. A couple of rooms sport fresh coats of bright paint -- the kitchen, where we do most of our eating and talking, and a tiny space upstairs that I have just turned yellow in an effort to cheer myself up. But other than that? We have our computer spaces, and we read in bed, and the dog has commandeered the living room couch. The library stores books and the living room stores the television.

I know that what we really need to do is re-think our lives. They no longer center on children, and they haven't in a long time. Our work lives don't impinge into our home life -- well, the work itself does, but we don't socialize with our colleagues. But we have a wonderful circle of friends, many of whom will fill the house on Christmas Day with laughter and music and without regard to its dilapidated state. And we have an increasing number of involvements outside our home, most of which would offer us opportunities to host events and occasions, if only we started to think that way. I guess some kind of conscious assessment and plan is in order. Maybe even a timetable.

I have never had any interest in home decorating. Oh, I like to look at magazine pictures and imagine myself as a person interested in home decorating. But the actual activities involved -- things like looking at wallpaper and fabric designs and thinking about style? I'd rather scrape my fingernails across a blackboard. So this may require a major personality transformation. But I'm thinking that a couple of years of life invested into the appearance and comfort of our home may pay off in a new way of interacting with friends and family.

And surely those children will return someday, with another generation of tiny blondes holding their hands?

New Year's Musings: Whimsy

I spent a morning right before New Year's trudging around Chautauqua, the summer community where we have spent time for so many years. Trudging is the only word for it -- most of the snow had not been ploughed or salted, and the roads were alternately slushy and icy and always treacherous. I had my moments though -- a Cooper's hawk sitting high in a tree and calling back and forth to someone it eventually flew off to join (Do Cooper's hawks mate for life? I was astonished to hear what seemed like a courtship ritual in late December --) , and a pileated woodpecker. Chautauqua is one place where you are almost guaranteed a pileated.

And this house! Arising in the 1870s as first a tent community and then a village of summer cottages built on the old tent platforms, Chautauqua was a dilapidated shell of its former self a century later when the nouveau riche descendants of its early teacher and minister families rediscovered it. Victorian rehabs and new construction popped up all over the place and, sad to say, Chautauqua is no longer a place for the financially faint of heart. I expect every visit I make to be my last, as those of my generation having the wherewithal to build summer homes in the range of the high six figures have crowded out the more modestly monied population that built the Institution in the first place.

But the houses are irresistible, and thinking about this one has reminded me of the romance and whimsy and quixotic features that have all but disappeared from my life over the past few years. In my case, small children brought with them years and years of joyful explorations of the natural world, hours of reading fantastical stories, and long afternoons of creating bizarre architectural structures in the house and yard. Adolescence brought with it a period of much pain and sorrow, and drained away most of that joy.

I'm ready to grasp the pleasures of life again, and to start letting go of the things that don't work. Easier said that done -- I think our brick colonial house could best be described as "ponderous," and light and openness and joy are what I want to be about. Financial constraints will deprive me of purchasing a different house, but this one could stand some emptying, some improvement -- and some COLOR.

Procrastination

Ohhhhhh....I have these papers to write. They are all due by Monday, December 12 at noon, at which time I can start thinking about Christmas. Not one moment before -- well, that's a lie. I got home from the grocery last night 45 minutes after I said I would because I ran into a friend and after we discussed all the kids, we had to puzzle out Christmas Dinner. Christmas Dinner is usually here, but this year her husband is having hip surgery on December 15. So . . . will he want to come here? What if it's snowy and icy? Should we move it to her house? Will he even be in the mood to talk to anyone? I think we left it that we will both clean our houses and we'll decide where to go on Christmas Eve. Or Christmas morning, if we have to. Everyone brings food so it doesn't much matter where we go.

ALSO, I see that my friend Marian has her tree up. AND we got our first Christmas card yesterday -- from Marian. All I can say to that is that we have a LOT more snow than she does, but no one had a snow day around here.

Anyway, while I am waiting for my pasta to cook and avoiding my papers, I thought I would share the first thing I see in every room of my house (first floor only) to remind myself that it all has to be transformed, and SOON:

Living Room: A couple of my son's projects from an architecture class last summer, stashed on the mantle out of the way of a certain dengerous feline;

Sunroom: The box from the Home/Office Toolbox that one of my friends gave my daughter last June as the best high school graduation gift ever. Of course, given how things go, the box is here, the actual toolbox is in New Orleans, and the daughter is in Oregon.

Back Porch: Eight inches of freshly fallen snow.

Kitchen: A newspaper with the headline: IRAQ: WHAT'S NEXT?, an atlas open to Chicago and a guidebook to Scotland -- YES! Next July! Iona, here we come!

Dining Room: Little piles of books and papers on Ignatian spirituality. Those pesky papers.

Front Hall: The approximately 200 catalogs that have reproduced themselves in the past week.

Front Porch: The Adirondack chairs under that eight inches of snow.

Rudolph, this would be a good day to put in an appearance.