Tag Archives: Childhood Memories

Remodel Redux

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Home Restoration, Life at Home

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IMG_1909Memories of the first time I walked through my home have washed over me this week…. in small part due to the nearness of my third anniversary of moving here…in larger part, due to the onset of our main bath remodel a week ago.

So what have I been thinking?  Bittersweet thoughts, mostly.  About how starting this bathroom project means that I’ve finally reached the bottom of a very, very long to-do list.  About how happy and fulfilling these last three years in my life have been… whilst fixing and “uppering” this and that.  Even when not actually working on such tasks, I was planning and imagining all the lovely and not-so-lovely details of some succeeding project…one or two rungs down the list.

All this as a way of confessing that I’ve never been happier living anywhere, anytime… and I write this with eyes wide open, at the risk of trivializing all that’s good that has come before.  Who can say where and how such deep feelings are born?  Only that they are, and that sometimes, love and affection for some special person or place or thing… followed almost immediately by a sense of responsibility and commitment towards it…. rises up within us… almost at first sight… often without realizing it till later.

The immense joy felt from the birth of children and grandchildren….is somewhat akin to the joy I’ve felt while remodeling and living in this sixty-three year old house and its surrounding gardens.  It’s as if the love and appending commitment I bear for this home… is weighty enough to live and breathe on its own… very much like children and grandchildren… separate and apart from me.

Surely, the power of such feelings cannot help but redefine and reshape and remodel me… and what I once believed true about myself and my preferences.  How easy tastes can change with times and circumstances.  Up until it happened, I never “in a million gazillion years” imagined myself living in a fifties California Ranch.  Until, that is, my need for a one-story arose.   Until I noticed that lingering for-sale sign, in front of what seemed a well-cared-for buff-colored limestone house situated on a corner.  Until attending its Open House.  Until stepping on the worn marble-tiled floor of the small entry, and hearing for the very first-time, the snappy plop of a sixty-year old spring-loaded screen door closing behind me.  I always wanted to live in a house on a corner, I remember thinking.

“All it needs is a lot of love,” I later told my husband, while walking out the door towards our car.  As I rattled off the many remodeling possibilities on the way home, my husband countered with talk of “paybacks” and “exit strategies” and “economics.” While he spoke of being sensible… of making wise choices… of the do-WE-really-want-to-buy a house only to REDO every square inch of it…. I thought of color schemes… and weighed whether to go retro in style… or bring the place into the twenty-first century, with a small nod to its glorious fifties past.

IMG_1911Economics wasn’t part of the equation… my husband eventually understood.  Somewhere between that sweet sense of nostalgia felt while standing in the small entry… and smelling the not-so-sweet scent of leaking gas from the living room fireplace… I knew I wanted to live here.   It didn’t matter that the house had seen better days…. that much of its fifties fabulousness had been stripped away by previous and (somewhat recent) kitchen and main bath remodels.

Previous owners surely must have imagined their remodel as a step in the right direction…. just as I have with mine.  But what joy I take…. in that no one ever quite got around to undertaking a wholesale remodel of our utility bath.  Would you believe it still has all of its original tile work, including a cute cubby of a built-in shower that reminds me of the very one I used as a child.

Oh, the memories… they do wash over me.

Feather-Weight

04 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by in Life at Home

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The last two months I’ve immersed myself into the part of my father’s life he lived before my birth.

Strange that now, out of left-field, comes another thought — maybe because it was Dad’s birthday not long ago — and the second anniversary of his death not long ago, too —  and Father’s Day coming up making three — a thought about the part of life we did share together;  especially words I finally shared when Daddy laid dying — of how I’d always found him handsome, from the time I was a little girl, and how I always wished that somehow I could marry a man as good-looking as he was — and I think — no, I’m sure — I surprised my father with that wobbly left-field confession.

Why is it, I wonder — I mean, what caused me to wait and sit on these lovely words rather than sharing them with my father in real-time?; why did I instead choose to speak of bank statements and pancakes and old black and white movies rather than speak aloud of childhood dreams which carried the greater weight?

Fast Month

01 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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My young father and me – Albany, I think…

It wasn’t my intention to fast from the blog for a month, though a few weeks ago, I did decide to skinny-down life to better prepare for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

It wasn’t difficult.   One early in May morning I woke up and drew a few lines in the sand to make my sandbox a little smaller.  Inside was everyday life and my father’s story.  Outside the box was everything else — including my beloved home and garden restoration projects — no matter how many fabulous mid-summer plant sales that are bound to come up to tempt.

It’s a case of doing first things first.  Focusing on what I would be most sad to leave undone in this world, in the event I die sooner than later.   Because who would write Dad’s story if not me?  Who knows it or cares to know it in its scattered and torn state?  Who would give it their all and then some?  And really now — as much as I adore home restoration projects, none of them have quite made my heart sing like working on my father’s and aunt’s childhood story.

The fast month of May taught me much.  Not only my growing knowledge of my young father and aunt and their life — but much about me and my life — why the more I cozy up to my young father, the more I see how Mother was right, when she’d so often say, by way of explanation to others — was it with a slight disparaging note? — yes, I think so:  ” Well.  What can you expect? … She’s just like her father.”  Today I respond by saying this state of ‘two peas in a pod’ being, between Dad and I, may become my trump card to taking on this most seemingly impossible task of my life.

So between now and mid-July, I’ve advance work to finish and submit — partly because it’s assigned and partly because I wish to get the most I can from this writing experience my husband is giving me.  And though I don’t intend to absent myself from the blog the entire month of June — I’m here today, aren’t I? — I just wanted you to know what’s up in my not so everyday life at the moment — in case you’re interested.

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Ten years ago, I asked God to give me a story.  As prayer goes, it was childlike:  Short in words — tall in dreams.  And as best as I can now recall, it went something like this:  God, if you give me a story to write, I promise to write it.”

I’m not sure Dad’s story is IT but I think it is.  Because it would be just the kind of answer to prayer that would fit a Godly sense of humor — since the story has been as close as my father’s hip pocket all my life.  I only wish I’d realized it sooner.  I wish I’d realized it before Daddy lost his voice to tell it.  But since wishes don’t always rise to the level of prayer in my life, here’s praying I can become Daddy’s voice.  One more time.  Because life goes fast and some stories were lived to last longer than a lifetime.