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Category: house

Vintage

Vintage

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It just dawned on me that my blog is like my kitchen: both are vintage. Although I cook on a gas stove  manufactured in this century, the cabinetry, Formica and wallpaper hail from the 1970s. 

The template I use for A Walker in the Suburbs isn’t that old (it couldn’t be!), but in tech terms it’s a woolly mammoth, held together by random HTML code and the good will of Google (ahem). 

In both cases, I’m playing for time, hoping that if I hang on long enough, what’s old will become classic.

(Apparently, I take no pictures of my own kitchen. This is from a house we rented at the lake. It’s dated, but not as old as mine.)

Sideways

Sideways

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It’s part of the Charleston allure, the way so many single family homes in the historic district sit sideways on their lots, presenting to passerby not their ample fronts but their narrower sides.  

It wasn’t for tax purposes, but for privacy and tranquility that the airy old manses on Tradd or Legare turned their shoulders to the world.

I didn’t enter one of these homes, but I can imagine the cool breezes that would flow from the portico ceiling fans. There would be rocking chairs, of course, and tall glasses of iced tea, beaded with moisture. 

To enter you’d step through a portal that led from street to porch. A false door? Perhaps, but it provided an extra layer of protection between inside and out. 

The Red Load

The Red Load

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Yesterday, while doing laundry, I realized that I had enough pink, purple, maroon, and crimson clothing to comprise a red load. 

As a kid, I learned to corral my reds into a separate washing machine load, and for many years — with three little people’s laundry to do as well as my own — I often did. 

But it’s been years since I washed that many clothes at one time, so I usually cheat. I tuck a red plaid shirt or cherry-colored tunic into a dark load, use cold water and hope for the best. 

I’m rejoicing now to see all these reds in one place because it means I’ve finally moved beyond my decidedly neutral (gray, navy, etc.) wardrobe into more colorful garb. My laundry style will just have to keep up with it.

Open Windows

Open Windows

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The wind has changed, the humidity has dropped, and I’m about to take a walk in a long-sleeved t-shirt.  I may even pull my hands up into the sleeves.

Our September heat wave looks to be at least temporarily in abeyance. 

The best part: open windows. 

Weed Me!

Weed Me!

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Here in the suburbs, lawns matter. They’re to be green and weed-free, though many of them are not, ours included. 

Driveways, on the other hand, should be as smooth and polished as ebony, well poured and thoroughly sealed. They should not require weeding at all, as this one (full disclosure, mine) so plainly does. 

To which I can only say, as I have for so many other suburban transgressions … oops!

Morning Room

Morning Room

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I write from a room that has no name. Once, it was the dining room, then a playroom, finally an office. For the last few years, though, it was Copper’s room. 

Silly to give a dog a room, but this old house has been most elastic through the years, bursting with children at one point, letting them go, welcoming back when they needed to land here for a while. Now it’s just the two of us, so there was space enough to give our pooch a largish doggie bed here, especially since he was no longer able to jump up on the couch.

So this odd little room with doors on two sides and windows on the third, so impractically sized and now without its primary occupant, awaits its next assignment. Will it be a library, a den, a music room? Perhaps all three. 

But I have another idea. This space with its tall front windows is the first to catch the early light. It sounds like something out of a 19th-century novel, but, at least in my mind, I’ll call it the morning room. 

Unconventional

Unconventional

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When I’m here in this western city, I notice the eccentricities, the differences, how the houses assert their individuality. 

Take the Coleman House, for instance. Owned by psychiatrist, author and gardener Brian Coleman, the place is a Victorian dream, cast of warm rich colors with whimsical touches — an owl, a sunflower, a turret with the Latin phrase quo amplius eo amplius (“more beyond plenty”) — and set amidst a garden that changes with the seasons.

An article in the Seattle Times tells me that this house is featured in Private Gardens of the Pacific Northwest, edited by … Brian Coleman, who does not reveal in the book that the house is his own. 

I know the houses of my northern Virginia suburb can’t be as unconventional as this one. But they could try a little harder, couldn’t they?

 

Springing Ahead?

Springing Ahead?

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Today is our first full day of astronomical spring, though the chilly morning temps make it feel more like winter. We in the mid-Atlantic have been spoiled this year, with snowdrops blooming in January and daffodils in February. It’s been a non-winter. 

Now that we have late light, too, I feel a bit like Punxsutawney Phil, dragged out of his burrow only to dip back in because the sun’s too bright. These late-light evenings, as much as they thrill, can seem like too much too soon. 

There’s a part of me that still craves the lamplit afternoon, the cozy cocooning feel you have in winter, a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, no outside chores calling my name to add to the inside chores that are always with me. 

In other words, winter gives me a pass of sorts. And now … that pass is over. 

TMT

TMT

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While I’ve never been a clean freak, I do keep a relatively neat house. Just don’t open any closets or drawers, and avoid the basement at all costs. 

But even I can experience what I’ve come to think of as TMT — Too Much Tidiness. 

With four friends over for dinner last weekend, the house had come perilously close to this condition. Waking up to a blank coffee table for the second morning in a row, I knew what I had to do. I marched down to the basement and brought up two armloads of magazines. 

Here are two years worth of National Geographics, a year and a half of Atlantics and various other publications, plus a couple of books for good measure. 

Ah yes, that’s better. 

Emotional Minefields

Emotional Minefields

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Last week I went through files in the basement, an ongoing task. I ripped and shredded and came up with two bags worth of trash. It barely made a dent.

A weirder (to me) but also necessary form of clean-up is digital detoxing. In the course of updating my computer’s operating system (one of those pesky to-dos I haven’t tackled in a while), I realized that I may not have enough memory to install the new system.

So I’ve been prodding and poking in the digital bowels of my machine, finding all sorts of hiding places where large files lurk. Many of them are videos sent with text messages. Clicking on those videos yields blasts from the past, old work snippets, footage of dogs (not mine) romping in fields. Those are easy ones to delete. But the other day I found a video with a much-younger Copper dashing around the backyard, giving his much-larger dog cousins a merry chase. 

To see him again in his younger skin brought a tear to my eye. There was our own dear, frisky pup, bobbing and feinting and generally being his own irascible self. I used to think only hard-copy cleanup was an emotional minefield. Now I know otherwise.