Our House

Is a very, very, very fine house
With one cat in the yard...

OK, OK, sorry! And, yes, I know the song says "two cats"--I'm working on it!

I haven't been around and blogging because (1) I succumbed to the pressure of worrying that people were actually reading my ramblings (including my husband), and (2) I've been suffering from my seasonal affliction.

No, I don't need a doctor. I need a decorator, and a budget of about $20,000. OK, I'd settle for the $1000 Trading Spaces makeover at this point and a couple of extra bodies to do the labor. You see, every few months, I get this nagging urge to move furniture. And, if you've ever read "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," then you know how this is going to go. It's a chain reaction that results in moving, cleaning, scrubbing walls and baseboards, patching mysterious (and not-so-mysterious, since moving furniture means moving artwork) holes in walls, painting...well, you get the picture.

It usually starts innocuously. My mother-in-law is coming for Thanksgiving, along with my brother-in-law and his fiancèe, so I started thinking about where people were sleeping, where people were sitting, where people were eating, etc, etc. After that, the Christmas tree will need to go somewhere. This stream of thought then leads to the terrors of Internet Diagnosis. You know--I start visiting decorating websites and THINKING. Stewing. Mulling. Waking up at 3 a.m. and wrapping my brain around it. And, then, one day I give in to the urge and start pulling things around.

My husband doesn't like it when I do this. My twelve year old son, as oblivious as he is to most of what goes on around here, refused to help me on Monday because "Dad wouldn't like it." My husband says he wants it to look "lived in." Well, husband dear, the problem is that "lived in" around here means "cluttered and dirty, with nests of pet hair behind the sofa." At least the furniture moving results in seasonal housecleaning! Besides, you're the one who told me you wanted the Christmas tree in the living room this year.

So, why do I do it? Well, primarily because our family is slowly exiting the toddler/pre-school phase. As the big, chunky toys slowly meander out of our house (or, at least to the basement, since they're old enough to get it out themselves, or just go down there and play with it), it leaves SPACE. In the meantime, our needs change. We now need more room for hobbies and board games, rather than the vast floor space we needed when they were playing with Little People all over my kitchen floor. It's like one of those sliding puzzles--you move one piece, and that leaves a space into which you can now move something else.

This house has its issues, too. We bought it when we had only one child, so three bedrooms meant that I had a nice guest room. The cathedral-ceilinged foyer was bright and architecturally pleasing after a couple of years in The 1900 House (a dingy-but-charming Cape Cod that had last been updated in about 1957). We never used the formal living room in our house in Virginia, so it didn't matter that this house didn't have one--the other rooms were bigger because of it. Well, fast forward two kids later, and I wouldn't complain if the renovation fairy dropped a two-story addition onto my house in the middle of the night. Besides, I need a place to put my piano. I now call the foyer "my fourth bedroom" (if it HAD a ceiling, then there'd be a ROOM up there). The rooms are too big to just push the furniture against the walls and say "Well, that's the only way it will go," but too small to really float the furniture and group it the way the decorators suggest. And, some of the rooms (the foyer/fourth bedroom, and the large-but-undefined-space side of the kitchen) have too many doors. So, I shuffle stuff around. My husband says I'm "fenging my shui" and, really, it DOES have that effect for a while.

I drove a friend of mine home on Saturday night. I had never been to her home, and, when we pulled up, I laughed and said, "Hey, it looks like mine!" She's been here, so we sat in her driveway for a while, grousing about what was wrong with our houses. Finally, she laughed in the middle of a complaint and said, "As if we really have anything to complain about!" And, the truth is, I don't. I have more house than many people do, and part of my problem is that we have just plain more furniture and stuff than it will hold. So, I declutter it, I shift it, I Freecycle what we don't want or use any more, and I have a good time doing it.

And that's my silver lining for today.

P.S. My friend Carrie and I seem to be on the same wavelength. Read her blog if you want a little decluttering inspiration.

The Fall Doldrums

Autumn in New England is a thing of beauty. It brings warm days and cold nights; a new wardrobe (or, at least, bringing out stuff I'm not sick of!); and, oh the colors!

Then comes fall.

Now, you ask, aren't "autumn" and "fall" one and the same? I suppose, technically speaking, they are. But, to me, autumn is a time of promise, while fall is the reality. In autumn, the children return to school, excited to start a fresh, new year. We go shopping for new school clothes, and they excitedly wait for it to be cold enough to wear their new acquisitions. Homework isn't so bad when you can race through it and then go outside until dark. It's fun to settle down for the evening with the older members of the family after the younger ones (whose late summer bedtimes are now curtailed) are in bed, either watching the new TV shows, or sitting by the fire working on a crochet project that was too big and bulky to work on in the summer. Long autumn Saturdays and Sundays bring soccer games and the slowing up of yardwork, as the cooler weather makes the weeds and grass stop growing faster than you can cut them down. The same cooler weather, and the onset of late-season vegetables, brings out the Dutch oven for some good old-fashioned pot roast or roast chicken (and then the soups that result from the leftovers). Yes, life is good in autumn.

Then the bloom wears off the rose--or the leaves fall off the trees, to be more exact. I spent most of Sunday cleaning up leaves and getting flower beds ready for winter. I went out this morning for about an hour, and then later this afternoon, again. Well, I think I did--it's covered with leaves already. The weather is gray and rainy. It's been down in the 30's on many mornings, so I guess it's time to pull out the winter coats and figure out where to put them. Daylight savings time ended this past weekend, and now the kids race outside to play for a bit before doing homework--it's 4:50 pm as I sit here writing this, and it's already dark out, so the kids are now stuck in the house.

Then, as I sat outside the middle school this afternoon (where I sit MOST afternoons these days), I thought I might have seen a flake. It wasn't--it's too warm and muggy this afternoon. But, for just a moment, I got excited, because, after all, winter is just around the corner. Every season has its beauties and, while I'll probably sit here complaining by mid-January, there's nothing more exciting than the first snow. And, I have that to look forward to.

And that's my silver lining for today.