Right as Rain

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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

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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 in Home Restoration, In the Garden, Life at Home, Writing

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“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.

At Hem’s Place

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Far Away Places, Life at Home

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“I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world — or as much of it as I have seen.  Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it thin.”  — Ernest Hemingway to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, 1933, Selected Letters, p. 397
 
“All remembrance of things past is fiction…” —  Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (Fragments)
 

What began as an interesting side trip, the thing to do just because I was in Key West, has ignited into what I’ll call, for now, an insatiable interest in Ernest Hemingway.

It didn’t happen immediately.  Or if it did, I didn’t notice.  But the thing that was three weeks ago fuzzy has since grown sharp and clear; why looking through the lens of hindsight always helps, especially when far removed from whatever nouns and adjectives are under study.

Hemingway thought so. The pieces he created grew out of memories, out of real people and places he knew spiced up with questions of ‘what-if’, which he attempted to bring to life using everyday words.

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write”, he wrote to Bernard Berenson, in a 1953 letter.  “He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it.”  (Selected Letters, p. 809)

No only do I sometimes need a dictionary.  At times, I like a thesaurus too.  And that I regard spell-check as a “must-do”  may mean I’ve no business in writing.  But… oh well…  Here I am at home. Three weeks gone from Key West.  So why not begin with a nod to Hemingway’s style by boiling that tiny two-day visit all the way down?

I’m glad I went to Key West.  And did all the touristy things a tourist there ‘must do’, like sip margaritas and eat cheeseburgers in paradise at Jimmy Buffett’s place, and tour Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” Little White House and of course, the beautiful two-story house at 907 Whitehead Street, renovated by Pauline Pfieffer, Hemingway’s second wife.  But perhaps surprising of all, I’m glad we stumbled upon a wonderful renovated cinema managed by the local art society, where we took time to view one of this year’s Academy Award nominated films; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is not, I think, a bad description of Old Town’s main drag of Duval Street.

Though Key West was grand in spite of its touristy tarnish, I feel no need to ever return.  To put it all into a coconut nutshell, once a lifetime is quite enough, thank you.  For there are so many other places in this big beautiful world I wish to see more.  And because of my visit to “Hem’s” place, some of them just happen to be where Hemingway worked and lived and wrote about.

Oh-my-gosh did I ever leave Key West with a strong hankering for things Havana — late 1950s please — and of course, Hemingway owned a home just outside that he shared with wives #3 and #4 — and of course they have names — but in interest of boiling it all down, let me call them Martha and Mary.  (As an aside, from what I’ve read, they seem very much like that Biblical pair whose names they bear, since Martha enjoyed her work best and Mary, if not at his feet, at least kept close to Hem’s side.) If not illegal for U.S. citizens, I would travel to Cuba in a heartbeat.  And I would peek through those windows and doorways, yes I would, to see where Hemingway lived for twenty years, the place he left fully furnished with clothes still hanging in the closet and liquor lined up on the cocktail hour table and his beloved fishing yacht in the water because he never imagined he wouldn’t return.

And how I would love to go to Paris again but this time see Hemingway’s Paris and then on to Spain, not to run with the bulls but to walk where Hemingway walked, to see what he saw.  And before that, to re-read his words all over again in The Sun Also Rises  and to remember how in 1926, his way of a writing was the breaking of new ground.  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 

Yes, I’ve got the Hem bug bad. Looking back, my low-resistance was there from first unhesitating footsteps —  why my husband and I had no more parked our car and suitcases before we were out the hotel door and standing before Hemingway’s brick wall.  Ironic how what once was erected to keep out tourists now looks like a gateway drug to me. But that’s a story for another day.  Or not.

In the meantime, I’ve plenty of arm-chair traveling to do since Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure just arrived in the mail.  I’m keen to know what this once Monty Python star saw and wrote of his travels across Hemingway’s world map.  But before I set off in that direction, can I ask whether you remember that opening bit in the film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where horse hoofs were made by clopping together coconut shells?

When the solider says — “Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?” — I must confess, off screen, that mine do.  The contents I earlier put into a coconut nutshell has migrated all over the map.  But then, it’s hard to boil anything down about Hemingway, whether in a coconut nutshell.  Or in a book.  Or in television.  Or in the movies.  Or in a museum.  That’s why there’s so much OUT THERE about Hemingway.  Everyone wishes to take a jab at him.  Because the man who wrote sparse prose didn’t live the same way — all those wives  — all those travels and all those places he called home — well, they had a way of cluttering up his story line  — making it difficult for anyone to put Hem in his place.

But boy hidy, it’s hard not to try.