The rain, the cooler temperatures, both infuse me with a new energy to tackle cleaning house. I dig through the sawdust-laden piles in the garage, sweeping clean a path with the vacumn cleaner. I get out the box of summer dishes. I'm way overdue for the change.
Maybe I've been resisting because I know I'm not putting my autumn dishes away; I'm throwing them away, casting them out of my life. This year, for some reason, we've managed to chip every dish. I bought the autumn dishes almost ten years ago. We used to drive the 60 miles to the outlet mall and I would buy one 5-piece place setting for $45.00...about half the suggested retail price...on each trip. The maker was Sasaki. The pattern was Pompeii. The last time I went to the outlet mall, I couldn't even find the Reading China and Glass store. So as much as I once loved these dishes, it's goodbye, Pompeii.
I'm having a difficult time reinventing myself because my old self keeps butting in. Yesterday, while waiting for my new glasses to be made, I wandered over to Dilliards thinking I'd spend $25.00 at the cosmetic counter in order to qualify for the "free" gift from Lancome. As I approached the cosmetics department, a clerk asked if she could help me and I just shook my head no and kept walking.
On my tenth birthday I got my first purse. It was a milestone, a marker on the road to womanhood. Girls don't need purses, especially tomboys like me. But women, keepers of civilization, carry purses. A woman's purse is like Mary Poppins's magical bag, ready to bring forth whatever the occasion requires. My mom carried postage stamps, wet wipes for sticky hands, and tissues for runny noses. And it's a sacred space. No one, certainly no man, should ever go rummaging through a woman's purse.
My youngest sister manages her household with the discipline and energy of a corporate officer. "If I'd known you were coming over, I would have cleaned up a little," she said disparagingly as I eyed her immaculate house. Although its 13 years old, it looks new. And who would have imagined that you could raise twins in a house with white carpets?
Everytime I passed the store window, my 5-year-old self paused wistfully, staring at the rhinestone tiaras and the black velvet slippers with glass beads. Part of me remembers getting the tiara and slippers; part of me remembers longing and disappointment.
AJM has been bugging me to toss my old jammies because the seat is worn thin and they don't fit me very well. So today after working out, I dragged him to the mall to show him some velour jammies at The Gap. I liked them because they were soft, but there wasn't a matching top that either of us liked.
Dizzy with the success of having finished the "painting the living room wall" project (two weeks! it took only two weeks!), I decided to tackle another project on the "well, I'll get around to it someday" list. I mounted my set of hanafuda, Japanese playing cards with a flower motif.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, I read two different books on decorating your house with a "Japanese flair" that showed mounted and framed decks of hanafuda. Deciding that this was a perfect souvenir of my time in Japan (cheap, light-weight, and small), I took some trouble to find some when I was there. After searching and searching stationery shops and department stores, I found them in a cheap 5-and-dime style toy store. I was so thrilled that I took them to school to show them off. My best friend did the Japanese equivalent of clucking and shaking his head and told me that these cards were bad. Apparently they're associated with poor people gambling.
I'm not bothered with any traditional Japanese associations. I like them because they look pretty in an old-fashioned way. (Remember how I fell in love with the old toys in the Pollock's Toy Museum or the old games that Margaret has at Wilmaton?) There are twelve sets of four cards; one set for each month. Each set has a flower/plant associated with the month: January pine, February plum, March cherry, April wisteria, May iris, and so on. It's explained in greater detail in the hanafudalink above.
For less than five dollars, I bought a nice piece of hand-made paper (which just happened to have 48 rectangles and matched exactly the color of the walls in the living room). I glued on the cards. Another project finished: 18 years in the planning; 1 day in the execution.
Postscript
I just discovered that Pollock's has closed! They are in need of funding. Please visit the museum collection online and see if you can help out.
Over the weekend we decided to remove the ceiling above the covered patio and see what was there. Our sixty-year-old house has undergone a number of rennovations over the years which are a source of amazement to any repairman or inspector who comes by.
Apparently the house was built in three stages. Sometime after the original house was built, someone added on a patio. Then much later (as plywood replaced boarded siding) a garage was attached to the house. The patio became a breezeway between the two which was eventually enclosed. The original windows in the living room and the kitchen, which once opened to the outdoors, now opened into the breezeway. When the roof was put on the garage, the huge new roof was extended over the back of the house to make a new, sunken patio. The breezeway roof was covered as well, making it a false ceiling.
Looking up at the ceiling inside the garage I've always suspected that someone intended to build a second story. The supports are massive and the same type of boards that are used as the underlayment of the main house are used in the garage. In contrast, the ceiling in the main house is just rafters covered with gypsum drywall.
So under the theory that we can't make plans to remodel the house if we don't know what we have, we cheerfully tore out the ugly fiberboard patio ceiling (we meaning AJM). Feeling like Nancy Drew, I poked my head through a hole in the ceiling. And wow! We've discovered a whole new section of the house: a huge clean attic. (No bodies or gold coins.)
Although the hidden attic is not big enough to stand upright in, it certainly is big enough to store years and years of old New Yorkers, Christmas decorations, and all of JQS's childhood toys and books. In other words, it's much larger than the attic over the main house. Huge, in fact. The floor is asphalted, as if it had been a roof before they added the existing roof. Maybe the garage originally had a flat roof. At one time, it would have provided a fantastic view of downtown and the Texas capitol. So now we have this huge and completely inaccessible space. Now what?
In other "Old House" news, I continued work on AJM's closet makeover yesterday by covering the back wall with cedar planking. All was going pretty well until I began putting my tools away. Then I dropped the large crowbar on my bare toe. (No. I wasn't working barefooted. It was just that I had gone to the gym, come home, taken a shower and changed into my pajamas when I thought, "I should put these tools away before AJM wants to go to bed.") I can barely walk today. The toe doesn't seem to be broken (I can wiggle it) and there is only a small cut on the top. But the bottom has turned black. I'm just glad that AJM was there to give me hugs, a glass of wine, ice, and more hugs.