We grew pretty massive pumpkins last year, and Steve saved the seeds and miraculously they grew into pumpkins again this year. But we learned what the word heirloom means: it means that the seeds from a plant will make the exact same plant again. These seeds were not heirloom. Our pumpkins were pretty ridiculous-looking this year, and they certainly weren’t as big. Steve got jealous each time we walked by a neighbor’s yard with their extremely massive pumpkins, but I like ours. They glow all sorts of colors, and they’re funny.

Tonight we carved them. Steve and Jack worked on the biggest one, Rosie took a medium-sized one, and I took a regular green pie pumpkin. Steve and Jack’s has a pretty great scary face on fire on its front, and Jack made some sort of violent ghost thing on the back with repeated gashes across its forehead. Rosie patiently carved a very silly-shaped pumpkin, but its innards were so thick that carving a face was going to be pretty tough. She managed to carve away at the skin, which makes it look like a roasted and melting marshmallow, and also it’s wearing a hat. She’s been pretty mellow lately, and she’d mentioned that she didn’t want to carve anything at all, so I was grateful for this large offering of creativity. I made a self-portrait of a pumpkin inside of a pumpkin, which is pretty much the definition of this blog.

October 27th, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Comments (1)

Long legs collapse in my lap.
First an empty cove and then a precise buckling.

A thunderstorm, a ball that won’t bounce.
Velvet weight. A toy I never got to have.

His legs not sticks but coral, thin with hollows,
sprouting like spokes from the waist.
A nose lifts my wrist: he would not assume love or beef or plentitude.

Up, up. Come.

The house creaks by the fireplace, which is not on.
Then by the stove the floor is cold: some vent unfastened.

Dog claws like teeth chatter elsewhere – loud typing on the bamboo mat.

You can hear his Velcro breath when he’s thirsty.

Then a tap on the glass like birds do. More typing then a high-pitched
bird accident, a dog whine, more tapping, typing adagio.

The whoosh of the door and real birds outside
as if I yawned and could suddenly hear.

October 19th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

wake at 8, make waffles from Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food.” put out some bananas and thawed raspberries and local syrup.

shower, go to church, Rosie to church school.

Rosie meets a friend downtown for homework time. Steve visits his brother. I buy pet food and two 50-foot-long leashes and take the dogs to a park to run around and explore.

Rosie and Steve dig two long trenches and plant bulbs. I accompany a friend to look at a house she’s thinking of buying.

I sort laundry and fold clothes and clean out two closets downstairs, plus I search through craigslist for any deals on baby items (found!). Steve and Rosie go to see a scary Halloween movie.

Steve makes homemade soup — pork, noodles, cheese broth, plus some Chinese spices. I continue looking on craigslist.

now Steve and I are going to watch a Netflix before sleep.

October 18th, 2009 | Category: house, right now | Leave a comment

After a week in Seattle and four days with family, two days ago (after I came home from teaching a quick workshop) Steve asked if I’d like to go for a walk. I didn’t, but I went. And I shouldn’t have, (there is a lesson in there about intuition) because on the walk I felt a pull start in my right pelvis and back. I almost asked for a break, but we were almost home. I spent the rest of the day in bed.

But the next morning, which happened to be the morning we went to the midwife, I felt great, and the heartbeat was louder than ever, my goodness it filled up the room with its strength and volume.

The midwife said that if I feel any pain like that I should hit the floor, lay low. It means I am overworking, or have lifted something too heavy or moved too much. Allow the body to repair.

And I realized that yes it was too much, I had spent a week and a half doing too much and here my body was telling me so, my baby was telling me so. I am trying to be still.

Yesterday I stayed in bed as much as possible, which is hard to do, and I was up taking the cats to the vet and up making dinner and up doing whatever little thing the house asks so loudly to have done to it after a busy and beautiful weekend family storm. But I hit a wall, I felt it, at 8, and Rosie and Steve felt it too because I got cranky. I was up until midnight anyway, but sitting down, and my pelvis and back hurt loudly.

So today I am laying low. Hard to type this way. On my side (do-not-lie-in-your-back-do-not-lie-on-your-back). My menagerie like a star touching any part of me they can. Right now Joon is at my right knee, Moby at my left toe, and Lucky at my left thigh (there is some grumbling between those two). (Roxy, the black cat, has not ever been a shadow to me, good girl). Steve pops in and says it looks claustrophobic, but for me I feel contained, unable to fall.

Being down like this is hard. I’m not the most productive person I know, but certainly I have never sat in bed all day. The menagerie is thrilled, but I feel like I have had thirty sodas and my teeth are rotting and I have no way to burn any of it off. I need a fairy to come in and clean the house and comb my hair and take the sweater and sheet patterns off my skin.

October 15th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

We planted so much basil. Maybe the most we’ve ever planted, and we still have pesto leftover from last year (and, actually, from the year before that, too). So I shouldn’t have been so sad.

When we were in Seattle, we paid someone to drive by our house and check on our basil to make sure that it didn’t get hit by frost. We had sheets ready to drape them. When we came home, our basil was still alive, though many of the leaves had dropped. There was a green carpet underneath the thinned, still-green basil plants.

Then my family came to town for four days. There was a lot of activity and much to do and no time to think about the basil, and on the last night it frosted. We woke to gray basil leaves at the edges of the basil patch, but the inside leaves were still okay.

We were too exhausted that day to pick leaves. We dropped by sister off at the airport in the afternoon, then I went home and slept for three hours. We checked the weather that night and saw that it wouldn’t frost again. I slept for nine hours that night.

But the next morning the leaves looked worse. Every one had gray spots.

We harvested anyway, last night, half-heartedly, after more hours of self-imposed bed rest.

We didn’t have to pick for long.

I know it’s a lot about the hormones, but the sort-of harvest made me too sad. After our beautiful summer, after all our tending, all the songs inside the smell of our basil. After a week of adventure and a perfect weekend with my family, we were just a little bit too late to save it. I can’t stand loss right now. It makes me too afraid for other losses.

October 13th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

We left town early this morning — I’m in Seattle now and I don’t want to leave. But yesterday we were rushing around all day, packing — plus preparing for my family’s visit to Ann Arbor the very next day after I get back into town. The day was frenzied, getting the dogs ready for their stay at a friend’s house for the week, and getting the cats ready for the cat sitter, and locking up the house, washing clothes, cleaning, painting, cooking. I finally turned in after 12:30, knowing the alarm was going to go off at 6 to catch the plane.

But Steve was up later — past 2am, as has been happening a lot lately because there just aren’t enough hours in the day for all he wants to make and do (that’s probably true for me, too, somewhere inside of me, but mostly I can close my eyes and sleep at any moment — that’s my new party piece).

Near 2am he heard activity at the cat door.

We have a great cat door. It leads from the mudroom into the garage, and then there’s a second one that leads from the garage to the outside. It’s a small enough size that the dogs have never bothered to even stick their noses through. Each door actually has two flaps, both of which are magnetic. This magnetic double-flap system keeps it insulated so the cold from the outside doesn’t get into the garage and the cold from the garage doesn’t get into the house. That’s a pretty complicated cat door system, but, after some training with the cats, it has since worked for us.

There was a lot of activity at the cat door at 2am. Loud and clumsy. Steve saw our white cat, the clumsier of the two, inside looking at the mudroom, just sitting there. So Steve walked over to see what could be making all that noise, and what he saw was not a cat: it was a raccoon. In our house. Its front paws up on the table where we keep the cat food. A raccoon in our house.

Sometimes when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I’ll walk in the dark hallway and be a little bit afraid that I’ll step on some present our white cat might have left for us — he’s been known to kill mice and leave their guts on the floor, yup. But I’ve never been afraid that I’ll find a raccoon in my hallway.

And of course this happens just hours before we’re about to leave town for a week — this potentially catastrophic event, this animal that, if Steve had not been awake so late, could have torn apart our kitchen — and it’s about to have a week to try again.

Steve made a loud sound and the raccoon dove back through the cat door — through the really complicated double-flapped magnetic cat door system that leads to the garage that leads to the outdoors. But less than a minute later, its head was poking back through. Steve made another loud sound. He opened the garage door and spooked it outside.

Then he waited in the garage with the lights very dim, a broom poised above his head.

When the raccoon poked its head through the cat door that leads from the outdoors to the garage, Steve let that broom fall right at the raccoon’s nose with enough force and surprise that maybe, maybe, if it’s smart enough to know how to get into our house, then it’s smart enough to know to not come back.

Then he closed off our much-researched, so carefully-created cat door system, propping up boards and boxes of books.

But our black cat was still left outside, on the night of Ann Arbor’s first frost, just hours before we were to leave town for a week.

I woke at six, heard the story, and raced outside, calling our cat’s name. She came within seconds. I scooped her up in my arms and warmed her and brought her to her food bowl. I realized while filling her food bowl why all her cat food, which I had been keeping in the garage, had disappeared so quickly just the day before, the bag of food dragged out to the middle of the garage and clawed open by an animal I should have understood was not a cat. I usually keep the cat food in a airtight container in the garage, but it had recently been taken out and left open, and that must have been what initially lured the raccoon in.

So now both our cats are inside, or at least I hope they are. And I’m in Seattle. And I’ve learned that raccoons are pretty smart. Though hopefully that raccoon won’t remember in a week’s time about its adventure into our home, and maybe we can open the cat doors again, and I’ll only encounter my own imagined fears in my hallway in the middle of the night.

October 2nd, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Leave a comment

When we did the house renovations last year, I painted a lot of the walls in the public spaces a color called Moonshadow, and this color has taught me so much. At Lowe’s, under the fluorescent lights, the color was unmistakably beige. That day, we took home a quart plus a few other quarts so we could test them out in our lighting. When we painted the walls with the samples, the rest of the quarts remained pretty much the color they promised, though darker or lighter depending on which room, which lights, and which way the wall faced. But Moonshadow in our house is a gray-blue. In our kitchen it’s a gray that’s close to white. In the mudroom it’s blue-gray that’s pretty dark in tone. In the living room it’s a solid light blue. We couldn’t use it in the basement because it became a very dark gray.  Nowhere is it beige, but there’s something beige about it nonetheless. Like an undertone. The color shifts. It functions like I think a Japanese screen might: as if the walls are backlit. As if the house is made of translucent paper and the light from outside is shining in.

But I painted the wall that you look at when you look out the window at the garden a murky green. It pushes that wall right out into the yard; it’s close to making a wall disappear (at least for three seasons).

I’ve been working on the color for our bedroom. At first, three years ago, I painted it white, but it looked undone. We had no red walls and Steve loves red, so I then painted it red. But color that is so pigmented is color that announces itself before it announces space. It shrinks the room; it makes the walls objects. It makes it really easy for the color to seem wrong, when maybe it’s the right color, there just shouldn’t be so much of it — that red has ended up working beautifully as window trim elsewhere. And plus the red scared me. So I painted the walls Dove White again.

But last fall when the leaves were turning yellow, suddenly yellow was the color that brought the outside in. I bought all sorts of quarts of yellow to sample, because I wanted it to be not a pigment of yellow but the yellow glow from the leaves transported inside. That color worked for, surprisingly, one season. Then in winter it became entirely primary — the effect was primary yellow, but the paint chip, I swear, was pretty mustard.  Fall knew that, but winter didn’t. Spring knew that okay, but summer definitely hasn’t.

So I’ve been bringing paint chips home from the store, trying to find the colors that I can see through, and the colors that shift dramatically depending on the light and the time of day. I finally found a chip that I couldn’t name — maybe beige, but maybe gray, but there’s some pink in there, too. More of a shadow of something. It blends in with the shadows of the plain linen curtains in our bedroom. And it looks like old, yellowed onion skin paper.

That’s what I painted our bedroom yesterday: Waxen Moon. I was scared, though. It was impulsive — I had thought last week that the room should be a gray-green. And painting while pregnant is tiring enough that I knew I wouldn’t be doing it again soon (note: the paint is this new non-toxic kind from Mythic, though admittedly it smells suspiciously of vinyl).

The color’s good. Steve walked in at first and didn’t like it: it might pass in some other setting as an institutional beige, and he has bad memories that I don’t have of low-income housing. Hormonal, hurt, I painted on anyway, depressed that I had picked a bad color and it was so much work, up and down the ladder, crawling on my knees to cut in above the trim.

But once all the walls were done and I put the simple curtains up, the magic happened. Mature is the word he used next — though it’s possible he picked up on my fragility and was just being nice. The effect really is not at all insitutional — the color is more complicated than the beige he’s thinking of, especially in this setting, with natural lighting, in a bedroom. And I think it’s the first room in our house that feels masculine, though I don’t know why. The room is bigger without the primary yellow pigment.  This new color is sort-of backlit, but there’s a lot of chalk on the scrim — the color reminds me of the pigment that’s blended with stucco in Italy. It’s calming, and it works how I wanted the yellow to work: it gives the room a warm glow. We’ll see how it works in the fall.

September 21st, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

(don’t mind the blue tape, we’ve been prepping the wood in our house to add a clear coat of varnish this weekend.)

That greenish couch used to have its back to the photograph, and that center table wasn’t cockeyed, but for a few weeks — and then intensely for a few days — I was hating our living room. Two rooms in our house I love desperately — our kitchen and our dining room. There’s nothing huge about them I would change, or that I could change really. But our bedroom is constantly getting repainted (four times in three years) and rearranged (seven times). I think it’s getting closer to being the space I need it to be right now.

I thought that what our living room needed was additional furniture, and certainly it does, but then in a flash I decided that it needed more than that. I suddenly realized that our living room was trying to be something that it’s not — it was trying to fit into my sister’s fancy house, and while in her house it would look simple and professional, in my house it looked unloved and uninviting. Nobody has sat in our living room since we could sit outside, and so it’s been a long glorified hallway to our bedrooms since early May.

I walked down that hallway this weekend and suddenly knew that the couch had to sit more strangely. I suddenly saw that if I wasn’t going to use this space comfortably, then I could never love it. I don’t think the coffee table is right, but it’s what we have. I would like something square or circular, or even one of those soft ottoman-like coffee tables. Then I knew that the couch needed two side tables to act as arms for its armlessness, but one had to be short so that you could still fly over it (visually, or if you’re Rosie, literally). The stool I’d spray-painted turquoise this past spring was suddenly the perfect side table. Then the red side table from another room added the color that made me want to enter. Plus I put my most loved throw over the couch, which I’ve never understood why people do and then suddenly I knew: even if no one would ever use it, it’s an invitation of potential comfort. Oh plus I hauled in some pumpkins and gourds from our yard, for color.

It needs so much more to be the room I want it to be, and I’m not saying it won’t change tonight, but suddenly I can love our living room again, just in time for fall. When Rosie came home on Saturday, she threw all of her stuff on the couch (as she always does despite the mudroom and my picky reminders), she found my iphone with its games, and she sat by the fireplace in one of the reddish chairs, her feet propped up on the coffee table. I was shocked. We haven’t sat there, no one has sat there, for a very long time. Then my friend Jennifer came over and when she walked in she saw it right away: ooh, good feng shui, she commended.

The house changes with me. When we bought it, we were still used to shopping for furniture at the Kiwanis center. I was still hanging crystals to make rainbows, and thumbtacks seemed better than frames for art. But the crystals got dusty, and the art got hurt, and Steve kept pushing for real furniture — furniture we selected, where we got to pick the fabric, and it took weeks to make, and then it was professionally delivered.

Recently I’ve been intensely analyzing my bedroom, maybe because I know it’s the place where the baby will stay at first, and also maybe it’s because it’s the last place to seem grown up — clothes everywhere, dog beds and parts of dog beds all over the floor, stacks of boxes, cheap Lowe’s closet inserts to try to make the most of the tiny space. I’ve been wanting it to be brighter, more simple. My mistake is when I look to Pottery Barn, because I could never live in those rooms for more than a week. I’d start hauling pumpkins into my bed for color. Still, I’ve brought home too many paint chips with light sage and pale blue-green, and I’ve stickered too many magazines with images of bedspreads that are so pale they’d have a dog print on it in a minute.

Then I was reading a New Yorker the other night (I couldn’t tell you which one, our backlog is daunting), and there was an article about a wild designer in LA — mirrored walls, yellow carpets, hot pink leopard-patterned bedspreads. I could never live in those homes, but nonetheless I realized that neither could I live in its opposite. She was describing what’s happening to homes in America (our baby-shade paint on the wall, neutral art, neutered rooms, no war anywhere, nothing to complain about), and I realized that while I’ve been trying to grow up, I’ve also been assimilating. When it comes to a home, where it seems that everything is expensive, making a playful choice can sometimes cause too much regret, so the safer choice is often more economically sound. Yet as much as I want the austerity, I end up at the end of the day turning toward the room with the funny things tacked to the walls. Though that doesn’t mean I’m not learning how to pick up my clothes, thank goodness — there’s delight and then there’s just clutter.

September 14th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

There have been a string of burglaries in our neighborhood in the past month — 30 in 30 days. We live in a really safe neighborhood, and so it’s surprising and has caught us off-guard. Apparently what the burglar sometimes does is knock on the front door and ask for someone who doesn’t live there. If no one answers the door, he finds another point of entry and steals laptops and jewelry. Sometimes he’s broken glass, sometimes cut through a window screen. If the person’s home, he walks around the neighborhood until he finds another house.

Recently descriptions have been coming in, but before then I didn’t want to imagine who it was. Everyone was using the pronoun ‘he’ and I didn’t want to — why assume. And then when the description came in from an older lady that the burglar was a young black man, I didn’t want to believe her. Prejudices can cause blindness, and older people are more prone. But then the same description came from someone in another house — young, black, a goatee, wearing a gold cross. And then a house a few doors down from us talked of hearing their garage door open and close a few times at night, and she went to look and there was a man matching that description in her yard.

Why does it always have to be a black guy, I said to Steve. We all talked about it over dinner, about stereotypes and when they hold true — about who’s most likely to be poor in this town, and about the connection of poverty to crime. Rosie is vehemently colorblind, which I love, but just like everyone she’s learning that there’s a pattern of who acts out at school and who gets in trouble on the streets (which is partially the prejudice of the police and partially it’s learned aggression and desperation).

Pity the random black guy who innocently walks through our neighborhood this week, Steve said. Because all our eyes are wide open right now. It might be hot, and we might not use our air conditioner, but still we shut tight all our windows and doors, even when we’re home (a house down the street from us got robbed this weekend when they were home — she was in the garden, he was in the garage, their kid was probably in the basement). Probably because of the bubble in my belly, but we’re even more vigilant right now about anything potentially toxic or harmful. I walk in the front door and fear I’m being watched. Burglar, I’m home, Steve sings when he comes home. He thought he saw a suspicious car last week, so our walks have taken to looking for that car.

One good thing is the neighbors have never talked to one another as much as now. We’re all eyes, outside in our driveways, ready to protect one another if we need to. One of the neighbors came over to tell us more about the crimes last night when we were cooking dinner. Steve said, Why does it have to be a black guy, and the woman agreed. Then she added: Because the white guy’s chicken, still sitting outside in the car.

September 10th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment