handstories

Notes From the Basement

    I want to revisit some ideas from the past.  See what they might hold now. Will they mean the same things? Will they hold more? Will I even remember why I went there in the first place?  This one started with scraps on the table from recent pieces, including cloths dyed by Deb and Tina.

    (The water cloth is antique Japanese silk from Richard that I dyed in indigo years ago.)

    This is being written in The Basement.  (More about why in a moment.) The Basement is cellar-like. Uneven cement floor, ceiling that can be touched flat-footed with pipes and beams exposed, and more cobwebs than a haunted house. Not to mention all the THINGS & STUFF. 
   All to say, it’s not a comfortable relaxing place to be.  And it's cold down here.

    Some things were thrown yesterday- me, some words, a tantrum, and a spatula.

    Fortunately, K laughed through it all, took over the dinner cooking, and brought wine up from The Basement (one of its good qualities).

    There had been disappointments, frustrations and a triangle tangle of a conversation that I felt I had to scream to extricate myself from.  None of it was a big deal, I was just having A Day.

    Well, none of it was a big deal except for The Basement.  The plumbing issues are not over. It’s not the plumbers' fault. K and I took a gamble and lost.

    The Basement, where I am vigilantly babysitting the washing machine, waiting for the moments that it drains into the utility sink.  Each time switching out the buckets that I've placed under the hose, alternating them as they fill, and running them out the back door to pour into the woods.  Repeating this activity over and over so that the water doesn’t overflow out of the new drain in the floor into a 6-foot-wide puddle across the new cement.  The drain and cement that will need to be jackhammered out again to fix the problem.

"A Place of Through"

    Today I am resigned and resolved about it all, while running buckets to and fro.

    Earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of finishing this piece.  Hours and hours of stitching without direction, filling in crevices between stones, beside starlit water... switching from French knots to Jude's thread beads willy-nilly, enjoying the surprise of color changes in Deb's threads, and nothing has been thrown... yet.

    "The day's not over," as Dad would've said.

A day edged in pink

    An old neighbor and dear friend owns a little house across the water.  Normally she rents it out, but it's empty this month, so we took the ferry there yesterday, she in her car below and me as a walk on.  (Just to say, before you wonder, the entire day was spent with much social distancing care.)

    It was 7:30 in the morning and only a handful of others were with me above deck.  It felt strange and lonely.  The city was shiny in the early light.

    Stitching on this and listening to Jude's post, about being able to "find yourself in anything," warmed my spirit.

    The night and morning until this point had been filled with anxiety, but that all drifted away as we moved through the water.

    Her place is lovely.  A tiny 1940's space that is sparsely furnished between renters, but everything that is there has been placed with care.  The vignettes that she's created in nooks make magic.  I made the piece above for her after my first visit, just after her mom had passed.  It's titled, "The Light of Judy's Daughter" (more about the piece and her place here).

    Even the light fixtures are enchanting.

    The kitchen's reminded me of a crystal punch bowl.

    When I commented on the sweetness of the draped window cloth, she said that she'd hung it there just for me.

    She spent the day working on her garage and house maintenance, while I sat in the "sun room" area.  A cozy sunny spot where sweet peas were sprouting amongst her flower and blue bird pots.

    I stitched, drank tea and watched birds in the yard.  The sky of this cloth was dyed in a class years ago.  I remember not liking it much at the time.  It's grown on me, and how perfectly Tina's cloths in the patched stripe near the bottom match.

 

    When it was time to go, we said goodbye to her friends in the kitchen.

    We were only gone seven hours, but it felt like a vacation, as time with her always does...

    Such a rosy day.

blue medicine

    The cat threw up at 5 am, just outside the bedroom.  The phone rang before anyone was up, a junk call.  The neighbor below the studio windows has been having his roof redone with non-stop machinery since 8 am. 

    All morning I shuffled through half finished things, piles of cloth, papers, rearranging, making no progress, and a needle was lost on the floor in here somewhere. 

    Finally, I told myself to make something blue.  It took an hour to get this far...

    Some hot chocolate was made, and then everything was stitched, and then some.  Using some of my favorite Deb threads and cloths from Jude, I made myself a place to be.  It's a very quiet place, with a rosy view and a magic door that requires an unknown password for others to pass through.  There's even a garden.

where the waves touch moonlight

    Last summer's clearing, cleaning and rearranging created a much better living room situation.  After a few years of it being more of a chaotic studio than a family space, everyone was pretty happy with the new set up.  BUT...now that autumn has arrived, complete with less daylight and rainy days, stitching is becoming harder.  The other day I found myself standing by the window while trying to work on a detailed spot.  I foresee another rearranging, one that gets a chair back near the window...soon.

    Today's dark skies were too much for these tired eyes.  Moon's (hopefully) Christmas quilt was pulled out.  It's already a wonky make-shift of a thing, so tidy stitches aren't important.  It was good to work on it.  He's been such a teenager lately, just as he's supposed to be.  Even so, exasperation and exhaustion fill me.  Slow mindless stitching let calmer thoughts come, remembering why I wanted to make these blue quilts for each of the boys in the first place.  Aside from their long selves needing more coverage, I just want to wrap myself around them- in care and protection.  Hoping that someday, when all the angst of this growing-up and letting-go piece of time has passed, the quilts will be a reminder that underneath and around it all their grumpy tired mama loved them in her own wobbly way.

patching things

    It was rough here last night. Late in the evening, in an effort to calm, a bunch of scraps in the basket were grabbed and stitched down.  Taking the shape of a house, of course.  

    Later, there was a dream... Driving through New York City with both boys, heading to meet K. All three of us were sitting in the backseat with no one driving. That old nightmare. And then Blue reached over to take the wheel.   Relieved and terrified all at the same time (because in real life, he still doesn't have his license), I watched him maneuver through rush-hour traffic as we headed into a tunnel.

    And there, standing in the middle of the thoroughfare amidst a pile-up of wrecked cars, was Jude.  She had on a short fitted grass green dress, respectable and fancy, dressed for a party.  She was moving from to car to car, carrying a medicine bag- one of those old-fashioned Doctor's bags. Calm as can be. I yelled for Blue to take a picture of her with his phone camera.  He took a couple shots, and then finally pulled over to get into the front seat.  As he drove us through the tunnel, we passed Jude standing over a pile of broken car parts, throwing her hands up in the air and walking away, knowing she'd done all she could do. 

    This morning I found that moon on the dining room floor.  I'll stitch it on after work.

good neighbor

    Twenty years ago, the house across the street was for sale.  One evening, while K. and I were sitting out in our yard playing with baby Blue, a couple came out of the house and stood on the sidewalk looking at it.  As she tells it, I walked up to them and definitively said, "You are the people who are going to buy this house!"  They were puzzled, as they had just seen it, and had not decided anything.

    Well, they did buy the house, and she became one of my dearest friends.  Lives change, and the house was sold again a few years back.  We see each other now and then, but I miss the everydayness with her terribly.  She's wicked fast smart, a poet at heart, and a brilliant gardener (our yard misses her, too!).

    This year she bought a little house across the water.

    It's a sweet spot, full of light, and her evolving big garden.

    Yesterday, I joined her there. 

    There was sitting in the autumn sunshine, munching on tomatoes, nasturtiums, blackberries, plums and blueberries.

    A retreat-like day.

    There was even charming conversation over the fence with the neighbors.  His name is Wilmer, I love that.

    While she tended her plants and called out their wondrous attributes and scientific names, I worked on the story square that had been promised at her house warming months ago.

    I'm trying to stitch bounty, beauty and light into this piece.

    She deserves all of that, and more.

a view from there to here

    The windows first appeared in the autumn of 1987.  I had recently graduated from college and we had moved across the country for K's new job.  Quite lost and barely functioning, I found a therapist.

    Early on she gave me an assignment to make a drawing of how I saw myself five years into the future.   I brought back a rough crayoned self-portrait in a blue room with three windows across the back wall. (I had always wanted a blue room, but that’s another story…) The room was empty except for a table piled high with books and a cat underneath. My sketched self was sitting in a chair peeking out from behind the stacks with a tentative expression in a barely there face- dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, with a bit of a curve at each edge trying to look pleasant and acceptable. My hopes for the next five years were quite bleak.

    A couple of years later, I was further down the path of healing.  Once more she asked me to draw myself in the future. I drew the same blue room as before, but with a few changes. The table was gone. There were still heaps of books, only now they were stacked in comfy mounds on the floor around the edges of the room. The same trio of windows covered the back wall, this time framing a view of a big apple tree laden with rosy fruit. My figure stood front and center, smiling, bookended by our two cats, and K. leaning in the door with a wave and a grin.

    Five years after the original drawing, we began the search for our first house.  As we walked into each house, K. and our realtor would go on and on about the views, spaciousness, appliances, etc.  Every time I would stop just inside the door and announce, “I can’t live here.”  Often there wasn't a reason, just a feeling, but I knew it was true.  They grew more and more exasperated, and the search went on.

    One day the realtor called to say there was a new house going on the market near the school where I worked. “It’s not what you’re looking for.  It’s a mess.  But it’s close to your work, and in your price range.  Let’s take a look.“

    We met outside the house.  We stood across the street staring at it.  “It’s yellow,” I said, “an ugly yellow."

    Even so, we went in.

    It was a mess. The owner had died, and all of his belongings were scattered throughout the house in piles, as caretakers prepared for an estate sale. The house was covered in dust and dirt from the process. We stood there in the living room, K. and the realtor shaking their heads with disapproval, and I said, “I think this could be it.”  It was just a feeling. The realtor was confused, K. was worried, but we continued through the house.

    Upstairs there were two small bedrooms and a tiny attic room at the point of the house (it was painted Pepto-Bismol pink, and only the center of the room was it tall enough to stand upright in). There were no closets on the main floor, one small bathroom, and a dark narrow kitchen with splintering floorboards and a cracked countertop (broken, ugly, molding, and made of a substance that couldn’t be identified.)

    There was one more space, a half of a room at the back of the house.  Walking toward it, I could see the walls were an old dingy blue, but still, blue, with three windows across the back wall, framing a view of a tall old apple tree.

    “This IS it,” I said, and knew it was true.

    We've been here almost 26 years now.  Blue was born in that little room.  Moon came too fast and arrived just outside of it.  We had it extended so it could be our bedroom. The contractor argued with me about keeping the windows, and painting it blue.  "You'll want new, insulated windows," he said, "and blue is too cold for a bedroom."

    "Blue." I said, "And we're keeping the windows."

    When he and I stood in the finished sky blue room with the old windows set into the new wall, he said, "You were right."

    I said, "I know."

dream house

    There is a house I dream about often.  It sits at the edge of various neighborhoods, at the top of a small hill.  I've never gone into this house, but I know that it's where I live.  I'm often on my way there, or hanging out in the yard talking with other folks.  It's the only house on the hill, surrounded by grass.  A small plain house, with a window on the front.  I wonder if I'll ever get to go inside?

    And just as I was thinking about this house, Moon asked me, "Mom, do you ever dream about the same place over and over?"  Really, he did!

    And one more home thought, we bought this house because of one of it's windows.  Have I told that story...therapy, drawings, window & apple tree?  I think so.  If I haven't, somebody tell me... it's a good one.

house building

        Late last night, there was an idea. 

    I made myself stop at a little after midnight.

    My dreams have been full of houses the last couple of weeks.  All kinds.  Mine and others', real and not.

    There was one at Velma's place, it involved a missing roast chicken.  Old neighbors moved back and began building a farm house here in the city.  Remodeling this house, which wasn't really this house.  They are mostly old houses, with winding back staircases, big open rooms filled with heavy antique furniture, and other rooms that are clean and spare, with sunlight pouring in the windows.

    The roof didn't quite turn out as planned, but Tina's beautifully dyed cloth adds a cosmos feeling to it.  It's removable, too, so the house can be turned any which way.
    

tilt-a-window

    Try as I might, straight and squared windows don't seem to be in the stars for me.  So I've put a few twinklings in one of them.  It's all probably a reflection of my wonky life, going here and there, doing this and that.

    I'm surprised the windows of our real house haven't gone askew by now.