Time away
It's been a very good summer. But we're already in the second week of school, and, gack, Christmas is 4 short months away. By now we should be finishing all those house things we can't get to at any other time, and this year there is seriously no end in sight to the various projects, each of which seems to be happily spawning another. Few house projects follow a linear course, and that's been the rule for everything we've touched. Off to my left in the room where I work there's now a huge sliding door, replacing a window. Lots of natural light, better ventilation -- all in all, a very good thing. The door is in, but now we find we need some sort of transition to the outdoors, all of which means, yes, a wooden deck. Our only saving grace is that it's a tiny space, so who knows, it may be completed before Hannah leaves for college. Then there's the washing machine: We've decided to move it. Which means we can now have cupboards (always good for storage), and since we're getting them anyway, how about also putting a few along the top left and right of the laundry room? And of course we can't put in cupboards without tiling the floor, duh. On it goes, the curse of homeownership and the unrelenting diy hydra. Self-sustaining, endlessly replicating, cannot be killed. I realized today that our projects have become more complex over the years because, simply, as Hannah got older we could do more. That really came home during the past 2 weeks when she held her own on hikes and museum visits. Not only did she want to see everything, but she insisted on photographing it all when allowed to do so. And! She understood and didn't put up a fuss when I nixed the childrens' museum in favor of the grownup one (reason: three-fourths of our time was spent doing everything kid).
We came back with a hefty addition to her shell collection, which I was instructed to courier with every caution on and off the plane: She now has 140, all picked off various beaches over the past year, carefully washed, dried and bagged. Hannah collects everything. Because, like her father, she can't throw anything away, and the contents of this house are testimony to this sad fact. One morning I heard him carefully ripping something out of the newspaper (a habit she inherited) and I had this lovely thought: If he tore something out of the paper every day (he does), that amounts to 365 pieces of newsprint. Say he started doing this in his twenties. Then we're looking at over 25 years of clipped articles. So somewhere (I haven't found it yet) is a stash of about (drumroll) nine thousand articles. Time for a bonfire.
One afternoon, when it was a little too hot to be outdoors in sunny, green Potomac, we collected leaves. Her cousin Mark found some dull, leathery brown seedpods which we held up to the sun, discovering that light made them translucent enough for us to see a column of black seeds running down the length of the pods. We came indoors and for the next hour they drew leaves. And somehow progressed from there to poetry, and then to robots.
It was just perfect. All we needed were more & longer days. And fireflies.
[ Above: Andy Goldsworthy at the National Gallery of Art ]
