Reading the Furniture

Up in the green room there's this wooden desk. It's filled with stationery for writing letters I never get around to. It reminds me how important learning is to me. For some reason I'm embarrassed to write how important the student aspect of my identity is. I broke up with my therapist in part because she never gave me assignments. This morning at my first acupuncture treatment, when Dr. Wang said, "Your homework is...," I know I lit up like a bulb.

There is a bed in almost every room of my house. I envision the house filled with people and my best times are when that vision is the reality. I hosted a poetry retreat the week after I bought it. My friends slept on air mattresses. Last summer they returned, to more beds (and record heat!) We bought plastic fans for the windows. Andrew filled a vase with ice water and placed it on a table in front of one of the fans to blow across him as he wrote. Swamp AC, he called it. I thought, this is what the house is for. My three best friends from college came--Kelli with her husband and kids in tow--and endured heat and humidity too. We drank mint juleps and groused. Kelli: Ok, it's 98 degrees in my kid's playpen!

I imagine the house filled to capacity: coming down to make breakfast, walking through the tv room past whoever's sleepy-eyed and bed-headed in the antique twin I bought from the Salvation Army. Pancakes with blueberry compote. Poached eggs over fresh greens.

And in the living room there's this wholly debauched lady in red:

Red Whorehouse Sofa

If I stuck my tongue into these old grooves
the furrowed wood of the red whorehouse sofa
I might find a splinter and fill my mouth
with the taste of blood and old dust
It curves scoliotic sags like a shoulder
I follow its lines a lumpy terrain the almost rust-grained
nap of velvet It hides rips held together
with safety pins like the worn gown
of an old woman who refuses mirrors
whose seam split a slit run too high
revealing pale varicose thigh
It keeps the smells of marrow the memory of fire
and dead wood I could strip it find it animal
a skeletal patchwork of horse-hair stuffed boards
its black iron lion’s paw feet screwed deep
into its splayed legs In my lust for texture
I am afraid to leave its broken lap
It offers a layered history of lives I slip
into like shadow familiar as family
I have built my living room around the beauty
of its battered curves the creak of its belly when I twist
or turn its bawdy sinking the thought of recovering it

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, "Red Whorehouse Sofa" from Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press) Copyright © 2002

I Heart Pitchers

Yesterday I woke up to weather in the 50s, a lovely cool breeze, the grey sky I've strangely come to love. Though, perhaps not so strangely. I've always loved heather grey as a color for clothes--cashmere turtlenecks and ribbed tights and over-sized sweatshirts. I just never payed attention before moving here to the way grey makes other colors pop. (Thus, my choice of background colors for this blog.)

I still feel like a Southerner. My southernness is integral to my identity in ways I find difficult to tease out. Yet, since moving here, I find myself wistful for winter in the middle of spring. I recently bought this cocoa pitcher from an antiques vendor at one of those random little tables full o' junk that sprout up in the center of the mall. I can hardly wait for a true chill to put it to good use. I'll fill it with steaming white hot chocolate, served with marshmallows and a little sprinkle of cinnamon, perhaps a nip of some fabulous liqueur. So many months to wait....

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.