Today I cleaned for ….let’s
see what name should I give my friend with all the little chairs around her
house. I’m tempted to call her the chair
lady. Sandy-that will be her name. Oh I was so determined not to clean a window
today and I ended up cleaning two. Sandy has some of the coolest decorating ideas. One of my favorites is paper taped to
windows. Or leaves. I don’t know where she finds the paper, the
edges are soft instead of clean as they would be if the pieces were cut with
scissors, and there are usually specks of something mixed into the translucent
fibers. The windows I cleaned today had
paper on the lower full sized pane, and a whole leaf taped on each of four long
skinny panes for the upper window. Sandy lives in an old house in the same neighborhood where
the Anthony’s used to live.
Ok I just remembered, I
already gave Sandy another name.
I’m off to look that up. Ok Liz
Hunt is now Sandy Hunt. I like Sandy
better. I started cleaning for Sandy not
too long after she moved from the hood near the Guv’s Mansion, where we (more
about ‘we’ later) used to live, into the other old neighborhood where the
Anthony’s used to live.
I think I write better when I
don’t feel good. Today I felt great
cleaning Sandy’s; that’s why she got two windows cleaned. But I did skip dusting downstairs and
cleaning one of the bathrooms that never gets used. I never used to leave anything off. If I took extra time because of a project I
still stayed until I got all the usual things done that I would normally
do. But I’m getting so much more
relaxed. It took more than 25 years to
break me, but I am definitely now leaving things undone that I would never have
walked away from 10 years ago. I used to
turn around and go back to a house to finish something I realized I had
forgotten. Now I just send an email.
So now Sandy lives in the more scrappy historic neighborhood. I’m getting into the local politics here
which I know nothing about, but that won’t stop me. There are two historic white (as in
Caucasian, not the color of the houses) neighborhoods, one has a candle lit
tour of houses decorated for Christmas every year and the other has an Art Walk
where local artists sell their wares from porches and yards of the houses. I don’t think I’m the only person who would
call the Art Walk hood scrappy compared to the Candle lit hood. The Art Walk neighbors can turn out an
excellent party and get some serious music going. The Candle Light neighborhood suffers from
being too close to the governor’s mansion.
Oh. I’m going to regret this. Both neighborhoods are way too fixed up for
their own good. I could certainly never
afford to buy a house in either of them now that they have become such popular
areas to live. They used to be great for
low rent dumps- old houses that had been divided into apartments. That had always been my style. But then I’ve got no ambition and no desire
to fix up a house like the people in these neighborhoods do. It is amazing these houses.
Yes, feeling good today and
full of myself. Some days I wonder why I
can’t be more like my customers and fix up my house and wear nice clothes and
cut my hair and take care of the fleas eating my dog, like exterminate them take
care. But today I just wonder what
drives people to have such big houses and put so much work and money into
making them so beautiful. I’m glad they
do, because it is a pleasure to clean them.
It just seems like an awful lot of work and I go back and forth between
feeling like a slug and feeling like a slug.
Now I am thinking of the
snail in Pinocchio who took FOREVER to answer the door when he was desperate
for some kind of help. I guess that’s
how I feel in my own home. The house I
live in will probably be rotting from the ground up with the roof sagging and
leaking when they find my body a few days after I die. Why do I think this is so funny? How many days do I cringe at the thought of
what a failure I am because of the pile of tree trunks in the front yard and
the paint peels about to fall from the ceiling?
But today it is funny.
Will I have the guts to hit
the publish button on this post?
Back to Sandy’s cool decorating ideas. The theme for today is windows. In her main bathroom she has three frames
that look like they came from beside an old door-they each have four small
panes of glass. Each frame is just one
set of these four small panes from bottom to top. There are three of them hung side by side
from a pair of hooks screwed into the top with a wire run through them attached
to hooks in the casing of the fixed bathroom window. These are old frames with generous thick wood
trim. Then on each little pane Sandy has taped cut outs from a collection of pictures of
front doors. Each frame has a picture of
a completely unique door with its own bit of surrounding wall and
landscaping. There might be ivy, or
potted plants, or flowers in bloom, or just bare brick. Today I dusted each little ledge of trim
between the glass panes and did not even look at the pictures.
Now that would bother me if I
had not gotten so much delight from each well preserved leaf that was encased
in some kind of laminate and attached to the slender upper panes in her
bedroom, and the delicate paper that covered a lot of the lower pane but did
leave several inches open to full sunlight at the bottom and had fair margins
on the top and sides. Sometimes I take
the paper down and then replace it.
Today I just cleaned up under it a ways, and did not worry with the
rest. What had bothered me was the black
ook that deposits on the storm windows and frames from condensation. I had to get rid of that.
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I stopped writing at about midnight and went to bed.
I still feel good this morning and eager to return to telling my
story. There were so many things on my
mind to write when I was putting peanut butter on toast for my son before he
goes off to school. I offered potatoes
and eggs because I wanted to finish off a pot of lentils; my husband builds
meals around beans, but I tend to use them more as a compliment with grains or
potatoes. When I imagine myself in front
of a bowl of beans with a spoon in hand I just loose all desire. Now if it’s a pot of beans my husband has cooked
that is a whole other food experience.
He puts things like apple juice and raisins in his beans so they have a
lot more flavor than what I put together.
So I offered a lettuce and tomato sandwich or eggs and potatoes (I
didn’t say lentils, I was just going to put them in there with the onions) and
ended up making the quickest – peanut butter and homemade raspberry jelly from
Anne, who actually contacted me yesterday to offer a Christmas tree that had
been banished from the house for giving her a rabid allergic episode. I said “no thank you.”
How do people write
novels? How do they decide what to say
and what to leave in their mind? I just
want to dump it all out there like a kid emptying the toy box so they can get a
good look at everything, including the toys buried at the bottom. Ok I might leave a few in the box and close
it and stick it in the closet while we’re playing. But this concept of being a thought dj and stringing
things along according to some kind of theme is a skill I sorely miss. I need an inner editor.