ORGANIZING JUST ONE THING

I’m sitting at my kitchen table looking out at my garden. The mucronulatum azaelea is just starting to show red leaves, the little braided one from Katharine, the priest at my church (and my friend), which she brought to me in the hospital in January is blooming profusely…obviously still mixed up about its seasons. The day promises to be one of those wonderful warm autumn days called Indian Summer in New England (which are supposed to happen after a frost which we haven’t had yet, and haven’t had in October for years. Climate change seems to favor New England). My thoughts run (very slowly I admit) to fall cleanup chores. They consist of putting the porch furniture from all porches into the barn, rolling up the porch rugs and finding someplace in the basement for them (the basement... a story for another day). I should bring the citrus trees and as many of the geraniums as I can cram in to the small greenhouse…but not today, Scott is making repairs to it. So I will focus on a major clutter magnet inside the house.

There are several of these: the piano (but I filed all the music on it away earlier), the coatrack in the front hall (not bad right now), the back hall table (actually quick and easy), the dressing room (only a bag of summer clothes to take downstairs), the tables in our bedroom (book and magazine clutter, and of course, knitting projects), and finally the biggies: my desk and the kitchen table. It’ll be the kitchen table since I’m sitting right at it. It has on it, in addition to a pretty woven tablecloth with orange, red and yellow stripes, the following:
3 cloth napkins.
A white metal trivet.
My water glass.
A large footed fruit bowl.
A pile of magazines and catalogues.
A folded woven striped tablecloth which is too small for the table .
Eight candlesticks (two pewter with candles, two glass, one wooden gold-painted angel, three brass ).
The Whole Green Catalogue.
Eleven cookbooks (including The King Arthur Flour Baking Book, both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Joy of Cooking, Molly Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven and six others under them.
Three cloth shopping bags.
My music bag (OK, it’s on the chair, but that counts).
One potholder, one tea cozy.
A notebook and three pencils.
A small bowl of calcium chews.
A tea tin with Grace Tea’s Owner’s Blend tea.
Two placemats.
A doll’s dress for a teddy bear, which I intend to knit.
A beautiful pottery sugar bowl, made by my friend Daisy’s very talented potter daughter Adero Willard.
A ladder thingie with five votive candles on it.
Three other votives.
Four ceramic ducks.
A blue pitcher with what were once fresh autumn flowers, now become a dried bouquet.
A mailing envelope with a CD of a radio talk Rudy gave last week.
Bits of yarn and a yarn label.
A cardboard tray for catfood cans.

The reason this is not a truly daunting project is that I have a place somewhere else for all this stuff. I have to chose between all those candlesticks and votives, and the rest go in the bottom of the Welsh dresser. The fruit bowl, the napkins and the placemats actually belong on the table. The cookbooks have their bookcase, and so on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if, like me, one’s kitchen tastes run to the 1989 country variety…oak and maple unfitted cupboards, wooden floors, butcher block and oriental rugs, with lots of things around, you’d better have a place, (or two or three) to stash the stuff in some orderly way, or it could get to be overwhelming. I think that if I lived in a smaller house, my tastes might get much simpler very fast. But I’m lucky, both of our houses are quite large and have outbuildings, even the one in Cambridge which has a carriage barn. People have offered to buy this barn for a lot of money to convert into a small house. We don’t really need the extra money, so it has what carriage barns were built to have in them…cars, garden equipment, bikes, and house leftovers or out-of-favors.

The Victorians understood a few things about living graciously, and we benefit from these today. I don’t have the house’s original complement of three live-in servants and several outside daily people. Instead we have wonderful Dina who comes for a few hours every other week to clean out the worst of our mess, and Scott who lives with us and does our carpentry and repairs. We have Jim and his guys who paint one side of the house every year and repair any roof things that aren’t slate. We have John who shovels at exactly the right moment after every snowfall. We have Carlos who delivers our milk and butter from a suburban farm. We have Boston Organics who bring (usually locally-sourced) organic fruits and vegetables and eggs every week.

One can easily find local farms and people who deliver milk, painters, carpenters, roofers, masons on the Internet. I find cards from cleaning people on my porch every week. Better yet, ask the neighbors. Mike sent John to us, a real estate agent sent us Scott. Other recommendations brought Jim to us (who practically lives on our street he has so much work). Our chimneys are currently being repaired by a mason who did work at our church. A new plumber is currently being auditioned. All these people need the work, and we need them. It’s called community building and it’s really important at this time in our history.

The table cleaning is finished and time for a sushi break!

HALLOWEEN

I am not a great lover of Halloween. I hate the color combinations of orange and black. I wonder how the idea got around that witches wear all black rags and ride around on brooms. Maybe they got that one mixed up with Cinderella, what with cleaning out the chimneys, having a daily workout with a broom, and no shoes. Pumpkins and squash are pretty decorations inside and outside the house, as long as you don’t actually have to eat the pumpkin when you, and it, are done. It takes a sharp axe, or sword, or machete to cut a pumpkin (and it’s pretty easy to do yourself in while you’re doing it), then you have to scrape out a huge amount of seeds and disgusting goo before you bake it for about 24 hours in a slow oven. After you’ve scraped it out of there, you get to eat, or use in baking something which tastes exactly like water and has the consistency….you get the idea. I really don’t like pumpkin. The seeds are nice, especially if you have small children. You can save them and plant them in the spring, and the kids can watch their own pumpkins grow. I am a dyed-in-the-wool locovore most of the time, but this really is a case where if you want to make pie, or whatever, it’s much better to get the kind in a can.

It used to be fun, dispensing candy to cute little kids in pirate and ghost costumes and ballerina outfits, but that seems to be a thing of the past, what with razor blades in the apples and anthrax in the chocolate bars being held out as a threat to parents who like their children to stay alive after the day. Most places have events instead, which is probably fun, though I’ve never been to one. The idea of getting into a costume and going to a party with other people in costumes doesn’t appeal either. I’ve been in enough operas for it to lose it’s appeal . Actually, I stopped doing it some years ago when I went to a party in a suburban town made up and dressed up as Georgia O’Keeffe, and no one knew who Georgia O’Keeffe was. Would they have known if I went as Sylvia Plath, or Virginia Woolf? I’ll never know. I look a bit like Virginia Woolf anyway (if she had lived to be my age), so maybe I could just go as myself and say that I was dressed up as her.

But what Halloween is really, is All Hallow’s Eve, the Eve of All Saints Day, when the veil between the living and the dead is most permeable. I like that idea. I like the quantum idea that past, present and future aren’t as well defined as we think they are. This year, there's a time change from Daylight Savings Time to EST. It'll be a looong night. I'm a member of the Church of St John the Evangelist on Beacon Hill, an Episcopal church with a wonderful High Church liturgy and a liberal attitude. On All Saints Sunday we bring in pictures of people we love who have died and put them on the side altars with lit votives and icons. It’s very beautiful, and every year I bring pictures of my mother and father, Larry, Andre, Ray, Ralph. If I didn’t think that everyone would think it was stupid of me, I’d bring pictures of my old dogs, Missie, Wingfoot and Patty, and my beloved cats Nimrod, Tux and Boo. I’d love to think that they’re all near to me on the eve of All Saints, and that maybe they have something important to say to me. That’s when I love Halloween.

LEAVES

There’s really something special about autumn in this area of New England. The days are warm with beautiful leaves, or frosty with beautiful leaves, or rainy, kind of like a French Impressionist painting of Paris at the turn of the century…this with all the beautiful leaves falling to the ground, but still vivid and lovely.

I have a good friend, a displaced New Yorker who is a wonderful poet. Every year he tries to determine exactly when the perfect pitch of the leaves will lure him to Vermont. Sometime in early October he gets into his car with a friend and heads for the mountains, invariably in a traffic jam of other leaf peepers, always wondering if this is the best spot for optimal leaf viewing. He’s written poems about this. One has been set as a song, so his experience is truly immortalized.

I just wait. In Cambridge, or Gloucester where we have a house near the ocean, the gold and red and brilliant yellows come later, but the days of all that glowing light do come eventually. When it’s time, for the week or so that it’s most lovely, I walk, and look, and kick up leaves.
This week I went to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is a couple of miles from our house. I had never been there in the autumn before, I tend to go in the spring when the azaleas or rhododendrons are blooming, and I hadn’t been there at all for a couple of years. The first day I went with a friend who didn’t walk far enough or fast enough for me, but the next day I went alone feeling really tired and out-of-sorts. I walked along with my camera, which got to be very leisurely because I kept stopping to take pictures. I only got a few really good shots, but the whole place was breathtaking. I came home refreshed and ready to take on anything. I went yesterday with my granddaughter and she took pictures with a camera which has film which needs to be developed. I hope she’ll get them back soon, she’s a great photographer.




One of the many reasons I love the autumn is the colors, the light. I use these elements a lot in my decorating. Our front hallway is a wonderful saturated autumn yellow color, with russet carpets and a dark mirrored armoire and paintings on the wall. The upper part of our bedroom and our library is a red color which we have named after our street….it has to be mixed up each time. It’s the color of old books, and autumn leaves. My kitchen is green and cream and wood, and in the autumn there are bouquets of mums and tablecloths with russet and green, with brass candlesticks which we light when we eat at night.

None of this is hard or expensive to do. Many years ago I lived in New York City, and I had a friend who was as impoverished a musician as I was. He had (and still has) an apartment on the corner of West 70something Street and Broadway. It’s one large room, with a kitchen and bath and fantastic large windows overlooking Broadway. In those days of rent-controlled apartments, it was possible to have such a place. It was also a high-crime area then, with a lot of break-ins. In my own apartment not far away, which I shared with another mezzo-soprano, we had figured out all the places where the burglars hadn’t looked and we hid things there when we were both away on tour. We had jokes about “New York Decorating: Macramé Your Police Lock, Arrange Ferns on Your Window Bars”, perhaps for New York Magazine. I threatened to put up signs on our fire escape in several languages asking whoever broke in to put the houseplants back inside in the winter and close the window. My friend, however had the ultimate burglar-proof apartment, and it was gorgeous. In his large room, was a huge, old oriental rug which he had found in the rubbish and had gotten cleaned. On it was his old and large Steinway piano (a necessity as he was a pianist) and chained to it was the TV, on the floor, and covered with some nice material when he wasn’t looking at it. He painted the walls an autumnal red. He recovered several large floor cushions in autumn colors and had lovely drapes, which he made. His bed was a platform in an alcove, with an Indian bedspread on it in bright colors with lots of cushions, a couple of lamps…and that was it. It was totally stunning. I haven’t seen him for years, and I wonder if now that the neighborhood is upscale, if anything has changed.

Someone showed me what to do with leaves if you want to preserve them for an arrangement. Go to the pharmacy and ask for glycerin….about a cup should do it. Put the colored branches (yellow beech works particularly well) on to a surface you can bang on, get a hammer and smash the stems. Arrange them in a container with the glycerin. That’s it. The stems and the leaves will become like suede and keep their color for several months.
Then go and heat up some cider with cloves and cinnamon in it drink it and look at your handiwork. This is particularly satisfying if you’ve been outside kicking up some leaves. Wherever you are, if you’re in a region with actual seasons, there are some, and you can find them easily, and it costs you nothing. My Hot Tips for living in a recession….or any other time.

KITCHENS

CONFESSIONS OF A MODERN VICTORIAN
KITCHENS
My kitchen in Cambridge is old, and has walls which, to put it gently, are definitely not plumb. In fact, the construction of the walls leads us to believe that this part of the house, which is a wing, was built by a drunken Victorian carpenter who had lost his level and possibly his mind. We repaired and replastered them when we renovated the 1950’s metal kitchen slum it had become into a functioning (and lovely) kitchen ten years ago. It is what is loosely called an “unfitted” kitchen with wooden oak floors, an island made of IKEA cabinets of huge drawers, a maple butcher block top and ball feet so that could move it if we wanted (we never have). Part of the kitchen has built in base cabinets (all drawers) where the sink and stove and dishwasher are, but we don’t have the usual run of overhead cabinets. Instead, hanging on the wall are a glass fronted oak cabinet, a large wooden dish drying and storage rack (very British, that),and an old mantel salvaged from the basement of the house, with great stuff on it. In other parts of the kitchen are a Welsh dresser, a large and ornate Chinese cupboard, and a New England oak cupboard, as well as the previously mentioned bookshelves crammed with cookbooks and bowls.
What was going through the mind of the drunken Victorian carpenter when he studded in the walls is lost to history, but the studs are spaced at random widths. Studs are usually 16” apart, these are sometimes 12”, sometimes 10”, sometimes who knows what. A stud finder is no help at all, because there seems to be a lot of metal stashed away in there and old leftover boards from some other project tacked up between the studs. The original Black Holes and they may be the origin of the universe. This means that you may or may not be able to fasten something securely when the light goes on in the studfinder and the little beeps sound. There are a lot of plastered-over holes from screws going through the plaster to nothing at all. There’s horizontal wainscoating painted dark green with a fashionable crackle finish. I hope it stays fashionable because that what paint does on these boards. This is the real Dark Matter of the universe. The countertops, unlike the ubiquitous granite or marble ones in Cambridge, are made of black laboratory-grade Formica (like the kind in your high school chemistry lab) edged with oak. They’re stunning, and wildly practical. The top part of the walls up to the fourteen foot ceiling are painted cream color. It’s a wonderful place…full of light from large windows, French doors with a transom opening onto a Japanese garden, and I’m constantly experimenting with it…moving things around, buying stuff for it as if it were a school child who needs new clothes in the fall.

It didn’t cost us a lot to renovate . We did most of the work ourselves with the help of a construction guy who loved to tear down walls, and who installed new windows. We have Scott, our housemate, who’s really a musician, but is also a wonderful finish carpenter, who finished and trimmed the windows with wide sills for plants, installed the French doors and built a porch. Probably none of the big stuff could have happened as beautifully without him. We had floor people install the oak floor. Everything else was mine and Rudy’s labor. He built new walls where they were needed with studs 16” apart, and did the drywall and plastering. We spackled and cleaned and painted, and assembled and installed all the IKEA base cabinets and the island. Home Depot fabricated the single countertop from my measurements…and I got it right! Rudy installed the sink, the plumbers plumbed and we were in business. That was 10 years ago, and we’ve accumulated the rest of the stuff over time, including the cookbooks.

That’s the back story.

So….this week the towel holder fell off the wall near the sink (only one of the screws was actually in a stud), making two more holes in the wall, as well as a couple of others for similar reasons. Last week I saw a picture in a magazine somewhere of a child’s room with a wall which was painted with blackboard paint. I thought what a fun idea it would be to have a blackboard as a backsplash behind the black counters. We’ve never been able to tile it because it’s so uneven. I thought we could write notes and recipes and put pictures on the wall.

I cleared everything off the counters (no mean feat) and admired the uncluttered look for awhile, then headed to the paint store. I needed to know if I could apply paint over high gloss paint (yes, with sanding, washing, primer) and if it could be painted over if I hated it (phone call from the store to the manufacturer, yes). So I brought my quart home with a small new can of spackle and a new putty knife, and a box of TSP. In the corner of the basement where we keep paint cans and supplies (otherwise known as The Alternate Universe) I scrounged a can of latex primer, along with three other gallons of primer which were way old, currently residing in the barn with their tops off , drying out,awaiting recycling. I washed, spackled, sanded and primed. Still ugly, all white, but smoother. I masked off the top part the next day, where I wanted the blackboard to stop and applied the first coat of black. Oh dear, awful, and was it going to have crackle finish too? I waited overnight, and obsessively at 6:00AM I laid on the second coat. Better, but awfully shiny. By the end of breakfast thought, it had dried and was stunning. It ties the whole thing together. I put the stuff back on the counters where the black backdrop makes the Kitchen-Aid mixmaster look like a twentieth century sculpture.



Yesterday I wrote the menu next to the stove (my twenty-something granddaughter is learning how to cook) and she drew a flower and a happy cat eating her cooking.







Now about organizing the cookbooks….no, Jane, lie down until that organizing urge passes!

SOMETHING ABOUT ME

CONFESSIONS OF A MODERN VICTORIAN
A woman quite at home (mostly) in the 21st Century, but with one foot firmly planted in the 19th

SOMETHING ABOUT ME
I’ve had a career. Often a very active and public one because I’m a “classical” singer. I’m nearing the end of that now (I’ll be 70 soon), but it was a great run. I performed with the best orchestras and conductors and colleagues, and musically it was wonderfully satisfying. I read “The Feminine Mystique” years before anyone else. It was the time of Love-Ins and Be-Ins and a lot of sexual and social-psychological experimentation, not to mention hallucigenic drugs and I delighted in it (and nothing really terrible ever happened to me, probably because my drug use was pretty moderate for those days). I’ve met, and taught, and been taught by a lot of amazing people in this life. I have grown children and remarried when I was in my forties to and accomplished scientist. (I like to say that he’s my second and last husband!) I have four grandchildren….my oldest granddaughter currently lives with us.
So what do I most love to do in this interesting and varied life, besides learning new stuff? Move furniture. Bake. Make renovations to my houses. ( I’m one of the very privileged people in the US…we have two). Knit. Cook. Decorate (that’s the best). I have a vast library of books on home décor…lovely picture books for grownups. I have hundreds of cookbooks and bookcases in two kitchens to hold them I am the Queen of Catalogues and a closet reader of shelter mags (though some of the best have gone out of business recently, alas). I have taken up knitting with a vengeance. I can tell you how to clean anything…in recent years with vinegar and baking soda. I make curtains. I uswed to hook rugs and crochet afghans and I may again. I know all the best consignment stores for antiques and clothes, every second-hand bookstore for miles (and every other bookstore for that matter). I can paint anything, including pictures. I garden. I love it…these “feminine” pursuits. They are what get my juices flowing, and are my comforts when things go wrong. I see something in my imagination, and I can create it, make it happen. Things of the mind made real.