Tag Archives: Home Restoration

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.

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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.

Hovering at Half-Mast

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Far Away Places, Home Restoration, Life at Home, Soul Care

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On the road to Utah

As morning temperatures hover at half-mast of summer’s high, I’m wondering how we’ll remember this hottest season on record.

Will it be for the sixty-five days of triple digit temperatures endured since June?  The crop failures?  The cost of hay this fall?  The lawns that look like hay?  The water rationing and surprise visits of city auditors — to ensure we play by the rules?

Or will it be something of a personal nature, hitting closer to the heart?

I imagine the year’s extreme weather patterns will serve as mere backdrop for me, given the upheaval from changing residences.  All the accompanying renovation work, both inside and out, would be a worthy contender for defining this summer — were it not for other half-mast matters closer to life’s quick.

Do I write of them?  No, better not.  Best to skate across their surface and leave them undisturbed.

Needing a change of scenery, we got away last week, though not to either of our original  destinations.  About this time last year we booked a Mediterranean cruise.  Then there was that vacation I dreamed of last autumn and into winter, which would have whisked us to upstate New York — the place of my father’s birth — and to Vermont, where I had just discovered three eighty-something year old cousins.

Interesting how plans — and even people — can shrink and stretch in importance, as we wear out our days on earth.

Without so much as a backward glance, I tossed Greece aside when we purchased this new house, while the trip to New England lost gas as it drew near for take off.  And when it came time to commit, the only vacation I really wanted to take was to Utah, to visit my father’s only sister.

I told my brother in July I had a hankering to see her one more time.  But it was more than that.  Way more — since some mysterious something was urging me toward Utah. One minute I had no desire to go.  And in the next, I was calling Sis and asking her to come with me.  Then asking my husband if he’d like to go too.  And when they both said yes, I called Aunt Carol.  And then before another dream vacation could die stillborn, I shored it up with seven nights of non-refundable accommodations.

This hurried response was born out of ignoring two similar calls before.  The first, four years ago, came the weekend before Mom’s unrecoverable stroke.  Out of the blue, I began to feel uneasy, began sensing a mysterious urge to drop everything to go see her.  But rather than give into the unexplainable, I pushed back with rationalization.  Then, three years later it happened again.   I felt a pull to visit Aunt Jo, a few weeks before her death.  As I drove by her house without stopping.  I had no desire to ignore this thing a third time.  And though it had been years since I’d seen Aunt Carol — until last week, almost a biblical forty — I had to go and see her, even at the risk of a little awkwardness.

Yet, how comforting and safe it feels when we’re around those who’ve loved us from birth.  For in spite of its eternal nature, there’s a tenderness about their love; no matter how many times we fail at life, no matter how long the separation, their love of us endures without judgment.    

On the night of our arrival, she welcomed us with a home cooked meal.  When it came time to leave, she asked us to stay ‘one more day.’  As for the not-so-gooey middle, we filled our visit with stories and photos.  Old ones.  New ones.  Hers.  Ours.  Funny ones, sad ones.  The three days together made the years apart  unimportant — and the visit unforgettable.

Of course, Aunt Carol was far from hovering at half-mast as I feared.  So who knows where that urge to go see her came from or what it was about?   Because she looked good.  She looked happy even, in spite of  many, many reasons not to be.

And what’s more, since coming home, I’m begun to feel a little more like myself — in spite of those few unmentionables flapping in the wind.