November
…and living the life you want while waiting for the world to catch up
I don’t think that clarity exists in its pure form. Maybe somewhere in ideal conditions. Like pure vacuum.
My mind is foggy and I’m organizing my studio. Maybe I can at least bring some clarity into my surroundings and it would trigger internal…I don’t know, purifier? Im not asking for perfection, like all ducks in a row. At this point I’d be pretty happy to just know if my ducks are in a same country i am.
My idea of perfect environment is a seamless flow. I want my home space flow into my workspace and into my garden space without interruption. I work on it daily and I’m almost there, i keep telling myself. My day starts in a kitchen (whose doesn’t?) and rolls into garden for morning walk with the dog, and back into my studio and then weaves in and out as I pick lettuce for lunch and see if my chickens shared their eggs with me…they’re good at hiding them. Back to the kitchen for a cuppa, lunch in the studio, work, cook, garden, read on a deck watching sun setting. None of these feel like separate tasks anymore, only an endless flow of life.
Our house is old and smells of all people who lived in it. It smells of sweet pipe tobacco , coffee, old books and cigarettes, beeswax and furniture polish, and something that wafts from the basement that I can’t quite identify. In our “Christmas closet” hangs enormous painting of previous owner’s dogs. Dogs are lovely, the painting is, well, not so much. It will never leave the closet because of its frame. It’s a very nice frame. A lot of other things we took outside and had a bonfire.
House was built before “open plan” was a plan or even a concept, it compartmentalized in a full sense of a word and then some. There are rooms to be together in, and rooms to disappear into until supper. The private cemetery on the property states that people were dying here since late nineteen hundreds. The house demands respect by slamming cupboard doors and making moaning noises. It used to press on curtains making outlines of faces but I took curtains down and it got the hint. It still makes occasional rambling sound but doesn’t slam doors anymore.
What used to be a “ballroom” is now my library. Both words are too grand for the little room with a ceiling a short person can touch without stretching but the couple that lived here in nineteen fifties used to have dance parties in this room and then it became a “dining room” with a table in a middle that we had to vacuum around, a dark cavernous space no one ever walks into until thanksgiving…it wasn’t easy but the dining table lives in a basement now along with a love seat and about eighteen chairs. Old blue velvet camelback sofa took its place, smack in a middle of the room, and amount of books piled on my desk, shelves, chairs, and under the blue couch shows how optimistic (unrealistic?) i am about my lifespan. I’m currently in search of more shelves - i like old ones with glass panels. They are good for the books because glass keeps dust out.
Things we love become us. I am a kitchen and I’m a garden, and I’m a ballroom with cork tiles on a floor to keep it friendly to tired feet jailed for decades in a pointy dress pumps. And I’m a library with a couch in a middle because there is no available wall anymore to shove it against, and a bedroom with corners so crooked they make you question your reality, and now I’m a cemetery too. I’m moving about all rooms mapping out the path for my future ghost. I will never accept this place as someone else’s home, just like my predecessors didn’t. Ooohh, the fun I gonna have flipping switches and freaking out fire alarms. If you’re of fragile mental health…don’t buy an old house on the hill with white hydrangea hedges and a private cemetery…unless your taste is quite peculiar. Then we can be friends, forever.
Also, the art I have on the walls is non-negotiable. It comes with the house and it stays with the house. You can add but can never subtract. Just look at the frames, for heaven’s sake.
