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an everyday life

an everyday life

Category Archives: Home Restoration

Right as Rain

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by Janell in Home Restoration, In the Garden, Life at Home, Mesta Park, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Everyday Life, Home Restoration, Mesta Park, Moving, Oklahoma Gardening, Soul Care

It’s been raining like clockwork — as in spring forward brings spring showers brings Spring indeed.  The lawn is greening, perennials are pushing through soil, bulbs are blooming — or swelling and swooning with bud — while shrubs and trees attempt to steal the lime-light wearing their best feathery green fringe.  Not just in name, Spring is truly here.

What difference a year can bring.

After last year’s drought, I can’t imagine ever regarding rainfall as anything other than the miracle it is.  These days, when I hear the first pinging upon roof vents, everything else gives way.  I can think of nothing better to do than peek out windows and doorways to watch drops of all sizes hit hard scape like a dart board. Dot. Dot. Dot.  The single circles of sound dissolve into a symphony of crackling static; random raindrops swirl to spill liquid, coloring outside of their lines to cover every speck of visible surface.  When it reaches ground, it finally smells like rain — that inexplicably sweet, dampened earth mixed around seed and root that transforms a garden into a dwelling of possibilities.

It’s hard not to look outside without thinking about the changes this small urban property has seen in the last twelve months.  Yesterday marked one-year of ownership.  I no longer think about that uprooting from Mesta Park or the reasons that spurred our twenty block migration north. And while it’s true my bad knee needed a one-story home, I now like to think that this 1950s California Ranch needed me too.

By the time we closed on the purchase, this property had been through a bit of a drought too;  its owners had moved away to greener pastures long before selling it.  And though the house was never ugly to my eye, others didn’t share my opinion.  Why even at first glance, my own dear sister wanted to know what I was going TO DO about those front porch shrubs.  Like every other shrub planted without rhyme or repetition, these were starched crisp at attention in military crew-cut formation…and less I forget, my ‘meet and greet’ plantings were a mismatched set of Mutt and Jeff.

Before - Southwest Elevation

After - Southwest Elevation

To say the house didn’t ‘show well’ perhaps explains why it languished on the market for a year before we came along.  To borrow words of one new neighbor — the same who walks by my house everyday, just to track the transformations taking place — it had a bad case of the blahs when she saw it during ‘open house.’

After - Southwest Elevation - Closer Perspective

No one says that anymore.

After - Looking Southwest from Front Porch

The all too-many-to-recount changes were created through good, old-fashioned elbow grease — what I once thought my grandmother kept under her kitchen sink —  during the worst drought I’ve ever experienced.

Before - Southeast Elevation

Some changes were subtle while others were expansive.  Yet all were important.  And if I were to do it all again — heaven help me —  I’m not sure what I’d do different.  At least, that’s MY story.  Which is not to say this place is perfect or ever will be.

After - Southeast Elevation

But I’ll crawl out on one of my green-leafed limbs to say it’s perfect enough — perfect enough to last me the rest of my life.  And though I can’t point a finger at the reasons why, I know that the gifts of renewal I’ve showered upon this place have somehow strengthened me too.

We’ve bonded, this house and me, project by messy project.

Why to say this place feels as right as rain, after a long hard drought means something to me this year that it didn’t last.  It means I’m home, darling, in a way that has nothing to do with labels.

Everyday Frittering

17 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by Janell in Home Restoration, In the Garden, Life at Home, Writing

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Everyday Life, Home Restoration, Writing

“How was your day?”

This question my husband asks is the most everyday part of my everyday.  With it, he invites me to punctuate the hours with a label.  Good or bad.  Busy or lazy.  Sometimes with an exclamation point or two.

But last Monday, rather than responding with the usual ‘good’ and almost always, ‘busy,’ I allowed frustration to have its say.   For surely it was frustration and a series of sleepless nights which made me respond that I was frittering my life away.  You know, a little time here.  A little there.  With nothing much to show for it.

Because everything inches along in my everyday life, in stacks of varying states of “to do,”  without anything ever getting done.

First, the garden.  Never ending.  As I like it.

Then, my home improvement du jour.  Never ending.  As I like it.

Ta-da, my work on Dad’s story. Never ending.  Not at all as I like it.

In truth, I am overwhelmed by that story of my father’s growing up years.  And as much as I wish to work on it, —  or wish to wish —  I fear it’s too much.  And I wonder if Dad’s story isn’t the biggest time-fritter of all —  what with research and re-reading of notes and just THINKING about all those stories floating around without a timeline and gleaning perspectives from others.  It’s exhausting without being exhaustive.  Black holes.  Galore.  My ghostly subjects move all across the map like they are running from the law.  Or from me.

Of course, sometimes they did.  Run from the law, that is.  At least, my grandfather did.  It was part of his ‘get rich-quick-and-easy scheme’  that didn’t pan out.  You know that phrase — crime doesn’t pay — well, it could have been coined by all of my grandfather’s hard-working Greek cousins and uncles who got rich the hardworking way — when talking about my grandfather behind his back.

Have I mentioned — somewhere along the way — that my grandfather did a little moonlighting for the Mafia in the twenties and thirties?  Probably not.  It doesn’t come up too often in conversation.

Anyway, since last Monday, I’ve put Dad’s story on the back burner — to get a few things done.  I guess I had need to point to a few dead and done bodies.  I began by laying my first ever flagstone path … which I’ve thought about all the warm winter long — and found it to be much like putting together puzzle pieces of a different kind.

Then, I got my hands dirty in my new herb garden that once, not so long ago, was the concrete pad of the previous owner’s jacuzzi.  Then, since I’m a gambling gardener —

rather than one who plays in the dirt safe — I planted five tomato plants three weeks before the official planting date — my shy way of living on the edge.  I think they’ll be okay.  Especially since my sister said that our mother said that Granny always said that the danger of frost is over once the Elm trees leaf out — which mine did earlier this week. (Sis shared this bit of gardening wisdom with me while we were painting her bedroom a lovely Carribean blue yesterday and today.)

So here’s the crazy thing.  Six years ago, I would never have imagined that I could have done any of these things I did so handily this week.  Flagstone paths?  Garden designs that required the breaking out of a six inch concrete pad?  Painting crisp, clean lines free-hand at the request of others?

So maybe, if I keep frittering away at Daddy’s story… a little time here, a little there, with a whole lot of living on the edge, it will all come together.  Somehow.  Someday.  So help me God.

Yep.  It could happen.

By the light of the moon

08 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by Janell in Home Restoration, Life at Home

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Death, Everyday Life, Grief, House Painting, Moonstruck, Truth

Is truth told by the light of the moon?

Does it unfold as our dreams play out before our inner eye each night, while we lie powerless to change its outcome?  Or as art emulates life, can it get buried in bits of dialogue spoken on the screen, by one featuring the light of full moons and acting by Cher, Nicholas Cage and Olympia Dukakis?

As I breathe in the shrinking December daylight, I cannot shake off certain scenes from Moonstruck, that dark comedy released in the late eighties, that I viewed for the second time while lying in bed last month.  It haunts me.  And I think that maybe I need to watch it again.  Then I think — no — what’s the need?  Already, the lines of the screenplay, weighted by their heavy subject matter — that fish for truth about our living and our dying –  live within me.

Rose: Why do men chase women?
Johnny: Well, there’s a Bible story… God… God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn’t complete as a man without a woman.
Rose: [frustrated] But why would a man need more than one woman?
Johnny: I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.
[Rose looks up, eyes wide, suspicions confirmed]
Rose: That’s it! That’s the reason!

No, my husband of twenty-five years is not chasing another woman, unless one counts his dying mother.  But if Johnny and Rose are right that men chase women out of fear of death, it makes me wonder whether “chasing women” is another way of saying, “chasing life.”  That is, as long as we’re on the move, as long as we don’t become too settled, too set in our ways and likings, that as long as we make whatever changes we can to keep life from going stale  — all will be well.  Because we will be.

And when the time comes when we’re not, as for my mother-in-law, Janice, then what?  Perhaps then, we answer the question in our own ways, maybe we feel for the answer in the dark until we know its rightness. Because unwell and far too settled, last week Janice was unhappy at being home and wished to return to the hospice center — and after arriving at hospice, she wanted to know when she could go home. And lying in a physical state of in-between — not well enough for one yet too well for the other, Janice now lives in a nightmare;  it began Monday, with her move to a nice nursing home — if such a thing exists.  And yesterday, she looked at my husband, her son, and wished to know what in the world she’d done to deserve THIS?  And after uttering her line, and listening to his too rational reply, she asked to be put into a wheel chair so she could move about — and not done with her asking, she requested a chance to stand upon her own two legs — maybe to prove once for all that she was strong enough to return home for Christ’s sake — in spite of not having done so since the sun shone last September.

Loretta Castorini: [after seeing La Boheme] That was so awful.
Ronny Cammareri: Awful?
Loretta Castorini: Beautiful… sad. She died!
Ronny Cammareri: Yes.
Loretta Castorini: I was surprised… You know, I didn’t really think she was gonna die. I knew she was sick.
Ronny Cammareri: She had TB.
Loretta Castorini: I know! I mean, she was coughing her brains out, and still she had to keep singing!

We live a life of do or die, even while dying, I suppose.  We keep busy, we keep changing, we keep pushing the physical and mental boundaries of what’s possible, because to do so signifies life.  We move on  — if not to a new woman or man of our dreams — then maybe to a new house or to a new garden  — or even, a new shade of paint, as I’m doing in my dining room this week.  In the months leading up to our move, I painted this room three different shades of blue.  Had our moving date allowed, I would have painted a fourth time — because I knew then number three didn’t suit either me or the house.

So what does painting have to do with Janice or thoughts on life and dying?  Oh, who but God knows, except that for some reason, painting and mourning have gone together in my life ever since I lost Mother four years ago.  And as it continues to be my chosen form of grief therapy —  this time around the dining room — I’ve settled upon a dark shade of paint to compliment the antique china Mother gave me long ago  — a midnight, bluish gray complemented by a soft white trim– and tomorrow, when I finish the room, my husband and I will fill our china cabinet for the first time since moving in last June.  And to do so will make me feel as anyone unburdened by thoughts of life and death would feel — as long as the distraction lasts.  And the room will be finished.

Ronny Cammareri: This was painted by Marc Chagall. And, as you can see, he was a very great artist.
Loretta Castorini: It’s kind of little gaudy, don’t you think?
Ronny Cammareri: Well, he was havin’ some fun.

Yes, it’s about having fun, all this changing and fussing with paint shades and moving into new houses and growing up as an artist or growing up as a person — it keeps one young, it keeps one from growing old in spirit.  It keeps life vital — and not just on the surface, I think — and it works until it doesn’t, until reality rips away our protective bubble-wraps of doing.

Rose: I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.
Cosmo:  Thank you, Rose.

Though Rose is right, who wishes to hear it. Who wants to talk of death while living it up?  Or even living horizontal.  Watching the scene play out, it doesn’t take a mystic to discern Cosmo isn’t grateful to hear Rose’s truth.  Nor was Dad, as I think about it, when he first heard the idea of dying linked to himself — a few days before he passed.   Are you kidding me, his eyes seemed to shout, growing big in his sunken face.  Perhaps the closer we get to death, the less desire we have to talk of it.

So about painting — did you know that where one wishes to be spot on and true, it’s best never to paint by the light of the moon?

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-- Thornton Wilder, "Our Town"

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