Use things; Love people

As promised, pictures from a borrowed digital of the beautiful meal my fabulous friend and colleague brought over Thursday night. It had been a very rough emotional day and I had contemplated calling off the dinner party, but then decided (correctly, it turns out) it might help to have people around.


Post divorce decision, I had been mostly eating off paper plates, because for the past year I could not make up my mind about what kind of dishes to buy. I was completely immobilized. (Check out a fabulous, pitch perfect story about what such immobilization feels like in the New Yorker. It's written by Miranda July. I think it's called Ron Spivey. Robin first insisted I read it just before my trip to the city. Also, since you're going to be reading anyway, check out Robin's fabulous blog.)


Anywho, Thursday, knowing people were coming over in a matter of hours, I ran to le Target and found these turquoise dinner plates on sale. Wonderful, since turquoise is my primary accent color downstairs. I snipped some salvia sprigs and the first blooming black-eyed susan from my woefully neglected garden and stuck them in old spice jars (i heart spice jars) passed down from my out-laws. And there was my Village Cigars print (a gift from Kathleen Piunti) to remind me of the city.


So, "nothing gold" be damned. What does stay is my sense of gratitude. Even in grief, my life is beautiful. I am so very blessed.

The Yellow Room

I was in love with my house when I bought it. I had so long wanted to own my own home. It represented for me arrival, the beginning of a new, more settled phase of a beautiful life I would share with the person I loved. Each day of the past year and a half I've learned, a house can do nothing for grief but hold it. Today, I look at these pretty walls I've painted and they bring me all the pleasure they can. But I can't help thinking of Robert Frost's poem:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

The Need for Blinds Ruins One

As my partner likes to say, having a house is like having a high maintenance girlfriend who is never satisfied. Looking from my desk out into the living room, at first I'm pleased with the view. Even though the paint job in there (like the one in the green room) reflects my learning curve in terms of edges, when to pull the blue tape off, etc., I love the color. (Martha again; Miso Red.)

But then the nagging starts... When are you going to finish those blinds?

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy about my decision to make the window treatments myself. (Have you seen what it costs to have blinds made? It's highway robbery!) It's just, I work very slowly. I haven't been sewing all my life and I'm really fussy--probably too fussy--about the measuring. I should probably not admit this, but it took me all day to make that blind above that (Salvation Army steal) wing chair. Now there's the bay window off to the left, hands on hips, harumphing, and me, three years in, stammering, "I'll get to it tomorrow, I swear."

Disposable Digital

I am one of those people who doesn't have a cell phone. No ipod. No cable tv. What am I doing with a blog?

I blame these peonies.

They came into full bloom day before yesterday, hot pink and stunning. It was one of those wretchedly sticky hot days. Hot like Florida. Hot like, How is this possible? Here? And I'm from Florida. How have I so quickly become someone who writes descriptions like "wretchedly sticky hot?" Anyway, the peonies... they looked so beautiful from the green room window. Then the heat broke and the rain came and beat them to the ground. So, yesterday, I cut them and put them in a vase in the green room, but immediately wanted to share them with everyone I know. (I did give two to friends who happened by when I was out in the garden, but the feeling didn't go away.)

So, today I ran to CVS to grab a disposable digital. (You didn't think I owned a digital camera, did you?) But here's the thing: I'm so in love with my endless project of a house that I did not stop with the peonies. A writing project about my house was already in the works. I've managed, for now, to convince myself to see this blog as an extension (yeah, that's it, an extension) of that project and not the time suck black hole of procrastination I'm afraid it could become.

Writing space: view from my desk, blue daybed

Writing space: detail of blinds I made with my mother-outlaw

Writing space: detail of bookshelf, my beautiful mama

Sleeping in the Green Room

The green room is painted a color Martha Stewart calls Creeping Jenny. If memory serves, it is the first room I painted when I bought the house. How describe it?—It is an almost chartreuse, a green potentially too bright, the kind of color folks are quick to label, either delight or disaster. Three years ago, I had not yet perfected my painting technique, nor discovered the proper tool for corners and edging, so near the ceiling it has an uneven, color-washed look that used to bother me but now I’ve come to like. The ceiling itself, still, as yet, unpainted, has four or five messy splotches of Creeping Jenny where my roller brush slipped. The trim remains the dingy cream color I initially found in all but one of the rooms at purchase. (That room, the master bedroom, was painted half blue, half purple--in shades not even I could love--with a floral paper border between. Eek!) Three years later, I have yet to make blinds for the windows. (Where does the time go?) Though it is not the master, I've recently taken to sleeping here like a loungey B&B guest in my own home.