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Screen Door

Screen Door

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The air is soft, the birds are singing, it’s time for the screen door.

A screen door breaks down the barrier between outside and in. It lets the air move freely between the two worlds.

Out go the dim lights, hot soups and thick socks of winter. In come the bright sun, cool salads and bare feet of summer. 

This is not our screen door; it’s the screen door of my brother- and sister-in-law in Portland.  We haven’t used our screen door since we got an energetic dog. Copper also sees a screen as a way to break down the barrier between outside and in — but in a more direct and less metaphorical way.

So I keep the back door open (no screen at all) and remember a time when the slap of the screen door closing meant summer and all of its freedoms.

On the Line

On the Line

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It’s retractable, and when you extend it as far as it will go and latch it to the closest sapling it barely holds a light kitchen towel. But it’s there, our clothesline, something I’ve always wanted, albeit a crazy anachronistic desire.

Maybe it’s harkening back to my childhood, to hanging sheets on the line, seeing them billow in the breeze, bringing them back in the house, inhaling their perfume of sunshine and fresh air.

Or maybe it goes even farther back in time, to some ancestral past, pounding clothes with a rock in the stream, drying them on grass or shrubbery.

Mostly it’s just a foolish romantic notion. I appreciate modern conveniences as much as the next person. But on a hot July afternoon, when laundry dries more quickly outside than in, surely there is something to love about a clothesline.

Squeaky Stairs

Squeaky Stairs

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The house is usually silent when I wake, walk downstairs, fire up the computer and write my post. So it’s important to be quiet.

Those squeaky stairs, for instance, how to avoid them? The girls had this down pat. Because it was to their advantage to ascend and descend without sound or detection, they memorized which steps were noisy and which were not. Even the two daughters who no longer live here, I bet they could tell you exactly which steps to avoid. And the one who’s still here, well, it goes without saying.

So why is it then that every morning I put my foot —not in — but on it?  It’s not from lack of knowledge or sensitivity or caring. Perhaps a stubborn fondness for transparency?

Once again, then, I vow to count the stairs, to remember which ones squeak and which ones don’t, to move silently through the house.

(Not our stairs — I wish they were.)

Up Close

Up Close

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There were fewer people then, but they huddled together. Eleven souls once lived in this tiny house, which consisted of one room downstairs (a bed, a hearth, a table) and a cramped stairway to the second floor. There, scads of islanders were born — including the mother of an old woman I met the day I visited this place, the oldest house in Chincoteague, Virginia (circa 1795).

Meanwhile, there are only three of us now in a once cramped center-hall colonial that is ever more roomy as the children move out. And we are one of the smallest houses around. Nearby neighborhoods are filled with McMansions, their two-story foyers and three-car garages of a different heft and scale than the houses here.

What sort of people does crowding create? And what sort of people emptiness? I re-charge in solitude and would probably have been driven crazy by the cheek-to-jowl existence of my ancestors. But still, there are times when I feel a deep-boned loneliness that’s not so much personal as evolutionary. Maybe it’s the crowded rooms of the past that I miss, the intensely shared life that never let us forget that we’re in this together.

Home Alone

Home Alone

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The house at rest. Counter tops are clear; cups, plates, books, important envelopes that need to be mailed — they all remain where I put them.

I fall into the quiet slowly. Silence becomes a place I long for. Because it’s not really silence. Like the color black that is all colors, it is the presence of all sounds.

Our raucous family dinners on the deck; they are there. And so is last Thursday evening, when Suzanne and I  talked at the kitchen table as the room darkened around us. The girls’ younger selves are there, too, flitting around like house sprites, keeping me company.

I’m home alone.

Or am I?

New House, Part 2

New House, Part 2

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“Our house, is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard,
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy ’cause of you….”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

They said it would be finished by June 1, and, except for some trim in the back, largely invisible to the untrained eye, it is.

Even though I was here for most of it — shuddered as the old siding was ripped off,

got a headache when the new windows were pounded in, took our poor beside-himself dog Copper for walk after walk to get him out of the place as the work continued — it still seems miraculous that from this

 … there came this.

Perhaps there was some magic fairy dust involved…

New House, Part 1

New House, Part 1

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They are stripping our house, skinning it, peeling off panel after panel of dented aluminum siding. How inconsequential it all seems now, this pile of discarded metal.

But this shell is what has protected us from wind and rain and snow. It has been our barrier, our boundary with the outside world. It has held in the giggles and the screams and the slamming of doors. It has kept out the snow and the wind and the withering heat.

Seeing it now in piles upon the ground it hardly seems possible it has done all of these things. But I’ve been here. I know it has.

To be continued.

(Photo by neighbor John DeVoe of an earlier phase of reconstruction: the new roof we got Tuesday. Due to current camera glitches, I’m one day behind in photo retrieval.)

Through a Glass

Through a Glass

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If eyes are windows to the soul, then windows are eyes to the world. It is through them that we see what goes on beyond the house and family.  If they are old, scratched, unable to open smoothly; if their vapor lock is broken — what will we then make of the world?

Probably much the same as if they were crystal clear, in all truth. After all, we aren’t hermits hibernating in this house. We leave and return to it every day. Our view of the outside isn’t limited by what we see from the inside.

And yet, as I look out a pair of brand new windows, the world is new born. The recent arrivals slide up and down in their casements. They are so clear and unsullied that they are invisible.  May’s green grass and leaves explode outside them.

For years we have been silting up and clouding over, but the transformation has been so subtle and gradual that we haven’t noticed. Now that the old windows are out and the news ones in the scales are off. We no longer see through a glass darkly.

Decluttering Mantras

Decluttering Mantras

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Yesterday’s presentation was for wordsmiths, so the organizer tailored it to her audience. “Think of it as editing your stuff,” she said. You’re creating white space. Less is more. She didn’t actually say “kill your darlings,” but that’s what she meant. “You want white space,” she said. “You don’t want to walk into a study that’s like a bad article.”

Clearing clutter is a mental game, of course, so what I appreciated most were the pep talks, the encouraging language, the mantras. “Think of it as breaking up with your stuff,” she said. Sort your materials into past, present and future. “If 99 percent of it is from the past then you are keeping the future out. You don’t want to turn your home office into a museum.”

Or this decluttering mantra: “You are not your stuff.” You’re not your books or your file folders or your hard-won interview notes. “Learn to detach.”

For longtime pack rats like me, these are hard words to assimilate. But the organizer also had this practical, benign tactic. Cull your files. Put the refuse in a bin and move it from the office to the hall, from the hall to the garage. If you can live without those papers for a few weeks, then out they go.

Deep breaths. I’m going in …

Photo of a cluttered garage will have to do. I have no photos of a cluttered file cabinet.

Moving the Couch

Moving the Couch

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Last weekend, in a fit of home-improvement fervor, we went couch shopping. There had been a near fatal injury to the old futon in the basement, and if it goes, I reasoned, then we can move the office couch down to the basement and buy a new couch for the office.

So we found a couch last Sunday. It was a rich chocolate brown, comfy for sitting or lying down — and within our price range. We didn’t buy it right away, though. We wanted to measure the basement stairway angles. “It will be tight,” Tom said.

Today, we decided to see just how tight it would be. And the answer is: impossibly tight. But it was interesting to see our old sleeper sofa upended, and it gave us a marvelous excuse to vacuum and dust.

Meanwhile, the futon in the basement may have life in it yet. And the sofa in the office is once again ensconced in its tatty old slipcover. We’re back to shabby chic.