house, continued

Oh, you old farmhouse! How long have we been chiseling away, nailing, sanding, staining, sealing? Since December? You’re not nearly finished! Who takes so long to get ready to show her face in public??






Weekend: Home Depot. Return this, buy that. Wrong adhesive, new whatever, can’t even remember. I have pages and pages of notes on what we purchased and when and another set on what we returned and why.

At the house, we check for leaks, carry in crates of books (last load of those! So now I have rows and rows of books spread over the basement floor...). I inspect yesterday’s painting job, Ed attacks the door to the basement. Really attacks. He’s already ripped out the old frame. Time to start fitting in the new (on sale!) pine door. To be prepped, stained and sealed by me. Someday soon.

I paint window frames. I know – that’s a new one! Don’t you dare think that this house has uniform anything. The downstairs sun room windows are white framed. Where they’re finished. So I paint the parts that, for same reason have been left bare.

It’s as if there was a life interrupted here. Take the front door (which we do not use as the real entrance has long ago collapsed to become mere fragments of a front porch – another project for another time) – it’s prepped for painting, but it’s not painted. Stroked with a ghostly white brush, looking naked and exposed.

Tomorrow I’ll paint it. Today, I quit in the early afternoon as I’m to meet my daughter and her friend for a brief hike along a nearby segment of the Ice Age Trail. They want the walk, I need the pause.


It’s not exactly gorgeous out just yet. Give the trees another week or so and they’ll start sprouting green buds. Now, they’re still sullen and unadorned. And there’s a mist in the air. So that the landscape looks translucent and somewhat distant. Is this Wisconsin? Is it Asia, Poland, Colorado?






The mist burns away. The late afternoon sky is blue now, but a cornflower blue. It’s almost hot outside. Nearly 60. Surely the warmest day of the year?






Back at the condo, I do another visual sweep of the place. What can I give away? Sell? Throw away?

Tomorrow I’ll spend all the daylight hours at the farmhouse. But tonight I'm going back for an evening in my old neighborhood – the place where I once lived in a house, raised a family, had neighborhood friends. It’s a chance to catch up, while it’s still easy to hop over and then back again, while I still live close enough to walk there (41 minutes at a brisk pace). Before I move to the country.