Someone's Knocking at the Door

Okay, so just a few minutes ago the doorbell rang. I was upstairs, the boys were downstairs. I came downstairs and saw two young people on my porch holding clipboards.

I waved at them, said, "Not today," and waited for them to leave. The young man mouthed, "What?" I waved again, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. I waited a minute, then walked back to the door. They were gone.

Can I just say it goes against my good manners to behave in such a way? I am generally polite and friendly. I am even polite and friendly to phone solicitors--right before I hang up on them. I smiled at the young people on my porch with their clipboard, but I just didn't feel like talking to them. I contribute money to the charities I support, I write my representatives over the issues that concern me, I vote, and I not only buy gift wrap from the Our Fine School Fundraiser, if I'm feeling really generous, I buy a roll or two from my nieces' schools, too.

So, really, I had nothing to say to these two young folks except "No." And then again: "No." And after one more attempt, "No, really, I mean it, no thank you."

But it seems rude not to open the door. It goes against my sense of hospitality. And it was raining. Not that I was going to invite them in, but it does make one feel sorry for them, that whatever cause they're shilling for, they're forced to do it in bad weather.

But when I open the door, someone sticks a foot in. This has happened before. I have subscribed to more than one magazine I didn't really want. Bought nut-filled candy bars for a nut-free house.

So, really, what's a girl to do? Obviously I feel conflicted over this. To open the door or not?

Tell me, what do you do?

This Blessed Plot, This Earth, This Realm ...

The other day Pom Pom mentioned the book Lark Rise to Candleford on her blog, and the title alone made me want to read it. So I put it on hold at the library, and yesterday I picked it up. Now I am afraid to read it.

Just listen to this jacket flap copy: In the 1880s the countryside was on the brink of unalterable change, and the march of progress would soon wipe away the unique idiosyncrasies of a centuries-old way of life. But Flora Thompson was born in time to capture it forever, with her unforgettable gallery of characters--Old Sally, Miss Lane the Postmistress, Sir Timothy, Miss Macey and the rest--and her unsentimental but deeply affectionate account of the humble details of the life she knew.

I think the only way for me to read this book is to stop every five minutes and chant They didn't have antibiotics at least twenty times. Otherwise, I fear I will emerge from the book into the 21st century and be sad for the way things are, the pollution, and the children writing terrible things about each other on their Facebook pages, and the movies that pass themselves off for entertainment, but are so deeply vile I can't believe people aren't outraged by them.

The copy of Lark Rise to Candleford I've checked out is the illustrated edition, and there are many beautiful pictures of the countryside, the flora and the fauna, the children on their way to school. When I look at them I must remind myself: It rains a lot in England. The weather is often dreary and miserable. You think you would be happy there, but you wouldn't. Plus, back in the day, they didn't have antibiotics.

And of course the England of Lark Rise to Candleford--and the England of one of my favorite films, A Room with a View--no longer exists. But I want it to exist, the same way I want a world without Judd Apatow movies (which are very funny, but so spiritually empty I want to jump off the roof after watching them) and children making one another commit suicide with their online smear campaigns.

But we do have penicillin--and that ain't nothing.

So will I read Lark Rise to Candleford? How can I resist? Though I might get my own copy to read at the beach in June, where I will be surrounded by so much insistent beauty that I will be able to bear the beauty of the 19th century English countryside and those children with their rosy little cheeks.

Messes

Mess #1

We've gotten to the point in the school year where I no longer care all that much about combing the boys' hair in the morning. Jack, whose hair is thick and heavy, usually can get by with a gentle hair patting to smooth everything down, except on those mornings after he's had a shower. Then water must be applied. Will, whose hair is fine and light, is another story. It's amazing to me, his hair configurations. What does this child do while he's sleeping to cause such follicular combustions?

The last week or so, if Will's hair isn't too wildly out of whack, I let him walk out the door with various strands sticking out here and there. I've noticed at drop-off I'm not the only mom at Our Fine School who's given up the ghost. It's a regular parade of kids having bad hair days.

It goes without saying that I stopped combing my own hair sometime around February.


Mess #2

So I casually mention to the Man the other day that I might have accidentally torn a teeny tiny little rip in the wallpaper in the living room, oh, two or three weeks a go, and if we ever decide to sell the house we'll have to do something about it. The Man massaged his temples the way he does when a tension headache is in the making, and gently, through clenched teeth, asked me to show him where.

Thus began the Great Wallpaper Peel of 2010.

So, we have an L-shaped living room/dining room area that's not humongous, but it's a nice sized space. The wallpaper, applied by the previous owners, is tasteful but bland--a mottled cream with gold and brown squiggles. It's the sort of wallpaper you can live with while simultaneously hating it with every fiber of your being.

The bad news here is also the good news: it comes off easily. As I found out removing a bit of tape from it a few weeks ago, and as the Man found out Sunday as he began, with reckless abandon, stripping it off the walls. Once he realized it would be an easy job, he took to it with gusto.

Not satisfied to stop with the living room, he soon ventured into the front hall, with its dark blue paper that sucks every drop of light from the foyer and stairway. Turns out that comes off pretty easily too!

So now much of the first floor of my house is littered in wallpaper scraps, and the walls are standing around naked and self-conscious. I'm happy for the wallpaper to come down, but a little scared that the Man will run out of steam before the priming and painting begins.

Messes I Don't Have the Energy to Think about Right Now:

1. Will's room
2. My study (which has become a repository for all the upstairs recycling and the stuff that gets carried upstairs from the living room and family room, but doesn't quite make it to its proper place)
3. Will's room
4. The bathtub in the master bathroom
5. Will's room
6. The mudroom
7. Will's room

Did I mention Will's room?

Eating the Elephant

(I'm making scrappy blocks--i.e. blocks out of leftover scraps--fun and frugal!)

I'm back from my last trip. This time I went to Chicago for a convention. Here's the thing about spending too much time in a convention center: you will slowly lose all bearings until you can't remember where you're from, who your people are, or what your purpose in life is. You just wander around, hoping you can find a bathroom that doesn't have a line snaking out the door.

It's good to be home, but now I have no excuses. Home must be dealt with. Attics and closets must be purged, wallpaper must be peeled off, cupboards must be put back to order.

Oh, when, oh when will I be rich enough to hire other people to do these things? But that's the rub: with the exception of peeling the wallpaper, these are jobs you have to do yourself. A stranger doesn't know which books can be safely shipped off to the used book bin at the library. A stranger can't intuit how you like your pots and pans piled up.

A couple of weeks ago I read something that I really liked. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Dealing with my house is going to be like eating an elephant. A really, really big elephant who's in a very bad mood. My plan is to tackle projects in fifteen-minute increments, then break for iced tea and snacks. It's the only way I'll ever get the job done. Wish me luck.

***

Yesterday the Man and I attended a poetry reading at Our Fine Middle School. Jack's Language Arts class read from the poetry books they've written this spring. The poems were delightful and funny, and a few of them knocked our socks off.

The Man and I couldn't wait to hear Jack's poems, of course. What would this quiet boy tell us about himself through the lines of his verse? Well, we learned that he likes computers and computer games and reading. Oh, wait--we already knew that. But we also learned that he likes the smell of old books, which I always have, too, and that the literary figure he considers himself most like is Sherlock Holmes. We learned that Jack considers his father "funny and kind, but sometimes stern," and that I am "beautiful and pleasant, most of the time."

This, my friends, is what I want on my tombstone: She was beautiful and pleasant, most of the time.

I am not an engineer.

I am not even all that bright.

Here's how you know: When I set out to make 25 star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this morning, it never once occurred to me that there might be more than one way to do it.

My ever-so-brilliant way was to first spread the peanut butter and jelly on the bread. Then I took a star-shaped cookie cutter and pressed it into the bread. The result? Three times out of five, the peanut butter and jelly squirted out of the sandwich, like lava from a little PB&J volcano.

I finally figured out if I chilled the sandwiches before I cut them with the cookie cutter, and if I spread very thin layers of peanut butter and jelly, the volcano action was lessened. Still, the stars came out squished and kind of, well, not so much like stars. More like starfish that had crawled out of the sea onto the roadway and immediately been run over. By a truck.

The good news is, first graders will eat anything (the ones who eat, anyway). They're cute as the dickens, but have a very unrefined aesthetic sense. Had I been the only contributor to the party (in honor of Kevin Henkes, by the way, author of the fabulous Lily's Purple, Plastic Purse and many, many other fine books) of peanut butter and jelly star-shaped sandwiches, I would have never had known that it is in fact possible to make a perfectly civilized looking one.

But no, another mom also made peanut and butter and jelly star-shaped sandwiches, and hers were not at all smushy-looking or unappealing. After examining them a few moments it hit me: She cut the bread first before spreading on the PB&J.

Of course, she's a former Supreme Court law clerk, so she's going to have the jump on the likes of me when it comes to, well, anything. But still. How could I have been so clueless? Of course you cut the bread out first. Of course.

Well, bless the little children for eating my stars anyway. Bless them for sometimes reaching over the other PB&J stars to pick one of my ooey, gooey ones. Bless Will for not caring that his mom is a total goofball.

And bless Kevin Henkes and his wonderful Lily, who wears red cowboy boots, just like me.

My House is in a Funk (and It's Not My Fault)

(The finished quilt. Note the wallpaper--not terrible, but not what a girl wants to live with for the rest of her life, either.)


When we moved into this house three years ago, we came believing we would make enormous changes. And at first, we did. Out went the moldering shag carpets in the family room and the downstairs office. Down went the deck, in came a beautiful screened porch. Brown paneling in the family room was transformed by two coats of professionally applied Summer White Paint.

But there were other jobs to be done, jobs we'd get around to just as soon as we had time and/or could afford to pay people to come do them. The mottled gold wallpaper in the dining room and living room--not to our taste, but we could live with it until we got the funds to have it removed. The colonial blue wallpaper in the foyer and stairwell--again, not what we would have chosen, but it would do until the gravy train with big piles of money pulled up in front of the house.

Bathrooms could be sanded and repainted ... when we found the time. The master bedroom--also in need of a paint job, and maybe one day we'd find the time to do it. Maybe one day--when those piles of money arrived--we could add some windows in the living room's south wall so we could get some light into the house.

Three years later ... well, the Man painted the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen, and both look fabulous. He got the boys' bathroom painted right before my parents came to Christmas, thank goodness. I painted the upstairs hallway and Will's room (with the Man's help). But we are a busy, cash-strapped people, and so much of the work has gone undone.

Frankly, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by our house right now. Every time I turn around there's something I want to change--and sometimes I'm frustrated by the things I'll never be able to change. There's not much I can do about the lack of light in the upstairs hallway, for instance, other than dream of windows and paint it Apricot-Mango-Sunshine.

Anyway, one of the things we've been contemplating is whether or not to move in the next year or two. I thought we'd be in this house until the boys were out of college, but now I don't know if I have the energy to do all that needs to be done to get this place up to snuff. I think I underestimated the amount of time we would be giving to raising children and working and taking the boys to Scout meetings and lacrosse practice.

So if you could change one thing about your house, what would it be? Do you love your house? Hate it? I don't hate mine--in fact, there's a lot I really like about it, especially the screened porch--but I'm starting to wonder how much longer I can live with it.

I Am Being Very Quiet Right Now

I'm back. Went on tour three weeks ago, was home for a week, and then last week I went to upstate New York for four days to do a flurry of school visits. It was all good, although whenever I got on an Express Jet I couldn't help but think of a bus filled with all the locals carrying chickens and baskets of bananas on top of their heads, everyone crammed in together. Except I bet the bus rides through the perilous mountains are a lot more fun and humane than flying.

I thought I would post--and go blog-visiting--in the interstices of my traveling, but my brain just needed to rest. This has been one of the busiest months of my life, and it's been overwhelming. Not horrible--the tour went well, I was put up in very nice hotels and had a driver in every city, I got to order room service every night on somebody else's dime, people were lovely and enthusiastic about the new book--just too much.

So I am being quiet. In spite of--or because of--all the busy-ness and travel, it has been a time for thinking and re-evaluating. The Man and I are pondering all sorts of things right now, looking over decisions we've made in the past few years and wondering if they were the right ones. None has been catastrophic, but is it time to make changes--about church, about our house, about how we're spending/investing our time and money?

It's exciting to re-evaluate and re-examine, especially because we don't have to change anything if we don't want to. But it's also a little scary--are we on the verge of great change? Huge mistakes? Who knows?

***

Today's picture: Welcome to my design wall and my new quilt, which is not quite done (I need to add two more borders and quilt it; when finished, I'm going to hang it on the wall in the foyer), but I hope to have finished in time for the guild meeting next week.

The design wall is a big piece of flannel tacked to the dining room wall. I was doubtful that a flannel sheet would actually work, though lots of folks online claimed it would. And amazingly enough, it does. As I finished each block, I popped it on the flannel, and when I'd finished all sixteen blocks, I had a field day arranging and re-arranging them until I was satisfied.

I still can't believe I'm making quilts, after so many years of wanting to but believing I couldn't. Let that be a lesson to you! What have you convinced yourself is impossible?