Big Summer Project

    Painting the garage was always going to be a big deal. It's a big garage for starters - two cars plus a work space. And then there was the matter of scraping. Painting I can do in my sleep, but not so much scraping. It struck me as a  potentially tedious task, and Pete spoke of it as an endless one. So therein lay the challenge.

    I love to surprise Pete, and the feeling is mutual. The afternoon after I moved in, and while Pete was returning a rental truck, I rode my bike down to the quarry and ordered two tons of river pebbles for the back paths. When the young woman told me they would come within ten minutes, I decided to finish the task of spreading them before Pete got back, and I did. I love that expression on his face when he is taken aback, so I worked for a chance to do it again. And here it was.

If you look carefully you'll see the right panel completed

    My hope  and goal was to finish scraping and painting merely the side of the garage you see here before I started my summer teaching in late June. So last Thursday, when Pete went to play golf at six in the morning, I went out to see how far I could get with the scraping. Well, it went so very fast that I only remembered to take the 'before' picture after I had already finished both scraping and painting that far right panel. And it was only nine in the morning. Pete wouldn't be back until noon. To make an already long story shorter, by the time he returned from golf, half of that side of the garage had been scraped and painted. 

   

Expression accomplished!

 

Pete was so impressed by how quickly it had gone that he decided to join the fun. By Friday afternoon, my June goal was complete. Saturday we scraped the front. Monday I scraped the inside of the screened-in porch.

Tuesday we painted both the front of the garage as well as the inside porch.

Not quite finished - but still ready for a close-up

   And as if the week hasn't been satisfying enough, on one of my walks to the woods I found a more perfect table top than I ever thought imaginable.

   Maybe the summer won't be as overwhelming as we had once thought - though roofing sounds less tedious and endless than it does potentially dangerous. Perhaps it's time for a new mantra!

The Back Forties

   The upcoming photos aren't entirely fair 'before/after' pictures. I've tried my best in these posts to match up aspects of a shot, using angles, distance and lighting, so that you, dear reader, feel that you are seeing the house as it truly was, as well as what it is becoming...but there just isn't anything I can do about the injustices of the seasons.

   Spring can't help itself...it is just so darn beautiful!

   So this is the immediate back of sweetlittlehouse sometime in early November just after I moved in; Pete had been camping out here for about two weeks. The baby-sized table is a school desk Pete had found in the shed and used as a sawhorse. We had just bought a bag of river stones from across the road (as evidenced by the lighter patch of ground to the left) to see how we liked them on the path. Clearly we hadn't yet found the back door.

   And now it is mid May and shockingly gorgeous. As you can see, we did like the river stones so we had two tons delivered...for fifty dollars..bless their hearts. The lovely green screen door seems as pleased to be here as we are to have it. And the beds are coming in zealously.

  Taking a few steps east toward the garage, and turning back to face the house, last November you would have seen this -

But now...again....glorious May-

And with your back to the house and looking toward the garage and screened-in porch, sometime before we found sweetlittlehouse, as this was a realtor' s photo...

And now...

And the sweet and sad and hopefully stable grape trellis I fashioned-

6

And the equally sweet and sad and hopefully stable moss farm I've begun under the tipi-

And my native fern and violet bed under the Norway maple-

   And last but never least...our favorite views from the furthest back forty-

And another with the screened-in porch-

And now a wonderful surprise I found in the woods this week thanks to Loretta-

A jack-in-the-pulpit ...

and lady's slippers, presently blooming

I will never tire of Spring!

Where, oh where, would we be without our mothers?

You, too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor - Robert Louis Stevenson

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift - not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even - Billy Collins

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the dark - Carl Sandburg

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses - e.e.cummings

Alas...no roses yet, but take a gander at those quince

One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
To my first Love, my mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my lodestar while I go and come
And so, because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name- Christina Rossetti

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures--
the mouse and the swift--will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late - Mark Strand

And where, oh where, would we be without our children?

Happy Day To Mothers and Children!

P.S. Quite proudly, all pictures were taken in our yard.

Cosmetic Cabinetry

   Clearly we've come a long way in six months if we're now concerned with the cabinets. When we first moved in, the cabinetry, unattractive though it may have been, was the only thing the kitchen had going for it. 

   So Pete and I have officially run headlong into a home renovation phenomena. It seems that when you manage to redo three and a half rooms in a house with a handful of tools, four paint brushes, sheetrock, a mile of moulding and several gallons of paint, caulk and liquid nails, you then start to be bothered by what seemed perfectly fine just a few months before. Humans are so silly. 

   So here we are with nothing better to do than reface the cabinets. I found this idea on a blog where the people clearly know what they are doing. It is a project that involves paintable beadboard wallpaper and what Pete calls "sticks".

And this is how it turns out.

   So here is my latest non-problem. Though I really like both the 'casual afternoon' of the cabinets and the 'cool cucumber' of the walls, it would seem that 'cucumber' and 'sage' simply do not go well together - a perfect example of my complete lack of the 'color gene' to which I have alluded before.

   But screw it, I think we can live with this for a while. And if not, well...Stephen at Steward's Hardware will talk me through it yet again.

   And now, just for the drama of the thing, and because I recently found this picture of our very first morning here...

And now...six months later

You wouldn't recognize that sweatshirt I was wearing either.