chronicled & illustrated

complimentary,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Did you feel it? It hit me last night.

September.

The weather turned windy and cool. All the little needle-y things I didn’t get done this summer suddenly seem vitally important—even though last week the thought of them caused no sparks in the nerve endings of my brain. Suddenly it wasn’t summer anymore.

{{ Sigh }}

It was an excellent summer. We stayed home and worked. How’s that for a good time? But, it was both what I wanted and needed.

My husband relaxed with me into joint projects on our house that had been neglected all last summer. We did mortaring and carpentry and painting and poured concrete and dug up rocks and dirt and then filled the holes back in. Now that Labour Day’s over, we have a new deck that is brilliantly blue (see above) and already well-loved.

Next summer will be for putting a roof over it and railings and so on (and on and on), but I’m already so pleased to be able to step out my front door onto what is completed. Barry’s reaction is also gratifying. I knew I missed and would love the porch, but he’s at least as happy with it as I am and can’t wait to get out there. Somehow being up on a porch (rather than down on the grass where our patio table and chairs used to be) is more relaxing—almost hypnotizing. It’s given us what my sister calls the ‘rag-doll effect.’

In addition to that outside work, I was able to complete our charity’s website (see EPIC at epiccharity.com) and I finished a short story. See my progress bars! Whoo! So what if I didn’t get much done on the quilt or the novel….that’s what September is for?

Not likely. I have all those needling things, plus a webzine that was sorely neglected all summer, and two trips upcoming. I go to Maine to see my lovely son and granddaughter for the last half of September and to Houston for most of October. November is National Novel Writing Month and then Christmas. Well. No wonder I love summer so much.

I always thought that life would slow down as I got older. Not sure where I got that idea but it’s completely the opposite. Days, weeks, months fly by with increasing speed.

However, there’s nothing like a good stay-at-home summer with lots of completed goals to set up the rest of the year.

NEEDLING THINGS TO-DO LIST:

EPIC Minutes
New EPIC Business Cards, Letterhead and Mailing Labels
New Darvintyne Business Cards
Book Club on Saturday night: Reading, Cleaning, Cooking
New Posts to PCQ
Letter to PCQ Subscribers

Now. That’s not so bad, is it?

Our Scaffolding,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Two days ago we finally began again to work on the outside of our old house. This work has been going on so long that we actually purchased our own scaffolding.

Hmmm, come to think of it, that may be the very reason it’s gone on so long. If we were renting scaffolding, you’d better believe that Barry would find the time to work on it!

Either way, it feels great to be back at it. Last year Barry was so swamped with inside work all summer that the only thing we managed to do was move the scaffolding from the back of the house to the front. So it’s been two years since we did any painting and 5 years since we began it.

That first year, we laughed about it taking us so long that the first painting would need to be re-done by the time we got back around to it. We’re not laughing anymore. I think neither of us had any clue that it would take us this long. And the thing is, we’re five years older and not exactly feeling like spring chickens! Who knew that was going to happen?

Our house looked fine on the outside when we bought it six years ago, but it was very plain and had a flat roof. Predictably, that first winter, the roof leaked so Barry, who once made his living from carpentry, decided that he would put on a pitched roof the next summer. We were lucky enough to be able to get our talented and hardworking (!) friends, the Sobers, to help along with two young men (Mike and Andre) from the local trades high school, and the work was [mostly] done by the time winter set in.


The next summer we began to shingle and paint the gables and new roof line. Barry had always loved the wildly painted Victorians in Halifax and San Francisco, so we made our plan, chose our five colours and began on the first big gable.

I named the five gables—which are all different sizes—the granddaddy, mama, papa, teenager and baby gables. As of two years ago, we had finished all five gables and had only a stretch of roof line across the front of the house (see below) that had to be painted (still a complicated paint job, taking four of the five colours, but a breeze compared to the time-consuming gables). Since last summer was a bust for outdoor work, that’s what we’re doing now.

Once this is done, there’s plenty more work.

Our front porch has to be completely re-built! In August we hope to get the foundation and decking of that done. Next summer: the roof of the porch. The next? Painting the porch, including one more gable. And some time in there the bulk of the house has to be painted (it will be the same colour as the shingles of the gables) as well as all the windows. Any sane person would hire at least some of this done but so far, my husband’s sanity is questionable. I think even he, who likes to maintain control of his project, is wavering.

So why isn’t this unending project a drag? I certainly do not relish going up and standing on the top of that scaffolding! It’s something I’ll never get used to. But I am proud that I’ve learned to do it, that I still can do it and that I’ve overcome a certain fear of heights to do it! The main reason that it’s fun to get back to it is that it’s our project. Our house. Our scaffolding. Our colours. Our folly, if you will. The inside of our house is beautifully detailed and preserved. We feel that the outside should be as special.

We know not everyone would agree with our wild paint colours but we don’t have neighbours to offend so there’s no one to answer to. One day it will be finished and will be a show piece. And if that first grandfather gable is peeling by then, so be it. It’s an old house after all.

Before:

After:

Barry’s Patented 6-colour Painting System

I’m impressed with how easily we got back into this painting after a year away from it. Here’s the tricks of painting with six colors (counting the white primer) over 6+ years:

1) Keep the paint (the best quality you can afford) in your house; we have it in the closet under the stairs. You know, like the one Harry Potter had to live in, once upon a time.
2) Good quality paint brushes. We probably spent $25 CA on the four trim colour brushes but they are still perfect after five years. Of course, we are fanatical about cleaning them each time we’re through with them.
3) One colour = one brush. No exceptions.
4) For ease of use on scaffolding, we’ve taken large plastic ice cream containers and made wire handles for them. We pour the paint into a smaller plastic yogurt container (not the tiny ones) and put those into the larger container. When atop near the roof, the handles make it possible to loop the containers over the top of the scaffolding so that you don’t have to hold them while you’re painting. Good for those of us who are wary of Falling Off and need hands to Hold On. I’ve also put them on my belt when there’s no scaffolding handy. When not being used, we have lids for the yogurt containers.
5) One yogurt container = one colour. No exceptions.
6) We use a simple rope and hook and big ol’ plastic bucket to haul things up and down the scaffolding
7) This is totally Barry’s way of doing things. Mine would have been to just use any old brush on any colour and buy new ones next year. I’m proud to be associated with such adaptive compulsiveness. It works!

What it will look like (sort of):

white lilacs,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Lilacs.

Lilacs were not a part of my life until I moved north in my thirties. When I discovered them the first spring, it was as if I had dreamed them. They felt that important and that personal. And yet, I never remember a conscious thought of lilacs before then. Growing up in southern Texas, lilac wasn’t a flower, or a smell—lilac was a color.

In my fifties, I moved even farther north and now I have lilacs in my yard. They are white.

I have to re-dream lilac.

The lilacs in my yard are old; some so tall that we don’t bother to even try to prune them. I can see them from the second story. I imagine they were first planted by Florence Forbes around the turn of the last century when the house was built. She married George Forbes, an engineer and—by reputation—a sweet man, after the death of her first husband. Her daughter by the first husband was named Ava and Ava’s daughter was named Flora.

George and Florence’s house, though large, was a smaller version of his brother’s house nearby. That house was gone by the late 20’s, first abandoned, then vandalized, then burned. The brothers’ family was from Scotland. In fact, George, the elder, was born there. They named their homes after castles in Scotland. The brother’s large house was named Craigevar. George’s more sensible house was named Moneymusk.

George and Florence had no children of their own and when they died in the 1920’s within a few years of each other, the house they built was left to their granddaughter, Flora. But Flora wasn’t the only grandchild. There was another offspring of Ava’s named Billy and Billy, in the vernacular of the times, was a ne’r-do-well. He was a gambler, a drinker (in the times of prohibition) and incidentally, a cripple.

The house was inhabited by Flora and Billy, and soon all of Billy’s nefarious friends. Flora loved the house as she had loved her grandparents. She had lived with them off and on in her later childhood. By that time, Craigevar was no more and her relatives all lived far away in Glace Bay and Baddeck. Some lived in the States. She saw the house she had inherited being turned into a house of ill-repute.

There was a family nearby who had worked for George and Florence. The father did caretaker’s duties and the wife came in to clean. They had four children. In an act of desperation —trying to regain control of Moneymusk from her half-brother, Billy, and his friends—Flora invited the family to come and live in the house.

One can only imagine the sobering effect it had on the ruffians to have a poor, working family with children living in the house. Perhaps there were scenes. Perhaps the friends—who were, after all, only drunks and gamblers, not evil persons—simply left one sunny morning when they realized there were decent people, a family, in residence.

No one knows what happened to Billy.

Flora lived with the family for some months and then, for reasons lost to time, decided to go to the States.

The family stayed and took care of the house. Flora never returned and they stayed and stayed until the mother and father died. The house was left to the oldest son, John R., who stayed and stayed—for many years with his sister, Georgie, who did all the cleaning and caretaking. In his older years, John R. married and he and his Dutch wife continued to care for the house until they grew too old. Georgie and the widow of John R. still live nearby and have told some of these stories but have been careful not to tell other parts of it.

Some of this is fact, and some the stuff of dreams.

But this is true: all this time, white lilacs came back fresh and new every June, becoming thicker and taller with each passing year and if lilacs are white, any of it is possible.

FINISHED: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes
by Jaclyn Moriarity
BEADED CURTAIN RATING:
READING: Causeway by Linden MacIntyre
EDITING: Big Enough, a short story
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
SMELLING: Oh yeah, lilacs
GROWING: Looks like mostly varieties of peas and squash
HOPING FOR: Some beans, too
MOOD: Dreamy

Eyes cracked open at 5:27 am today to see a thin layer of snow on every little branch outside our window. By the time I got up several hours later, it had begun to rain and wasn’t as pretty. But—as a relative newcomer to Nova Scotia—this is my record for the latest snowfall of the year.

My husband tells a story about his first summer here in Cape Breton, back in the early 70’s. He was, for a short time, living by himself in the country and because he’d come here to farm, was putting in his first vegetable garden. He woke up on the morning of JUNE 17th to find a layer of snow breaking the will-to-live of his fledgling plantlets. The short-term ending of the story is that he—having absolutely nothing else to do with his time—propped up each and everyone of the bent seedlings and about 80% of them survived the snow!

The long-term ending is yet to be written but over thirty years on, the weather in Nova Scotia has changed. Whether for better or worse, is a matter of personal opinion, but few can argue that it’s rapid and scary.

A week ago this was the view outside our window. Those are firetrucks in our driveway at 3am. It’s a tradition locally for kids to set fire to the grass and woods in the middle of which our old house happens to sit. The spring has been very dry and these fires literally made the national news because of the sheer number and the toll it was taking on the island’s volunteer firefighters. Yay for volunteer firefighers! Come to think of it, Yay for paid firefighters!

This is the second time the fires have come close to our house but the first time that I seriously considered packing up those things that are most valuable to me. I found that a worthy exercise.

One surprising thing to me was that my journals (there are dozens of them!) are more important to me than my paintings. I’d hate to lose either but found that the journals represent my history, the art represents momentary self-expression. I guess for me “chronicling” beats out “illustrating.”

What I learned:
• Keep all stored photographs in one place.
• Have a box with the VIPs (Very Important Papers): wills, birth certificates, insurance policies
• Mark files in the filing cabinet that are irreplaceable. How about a gold star?
• It takes longer than you might think to get THE most important things together.
• Better safe than sorry.

Reading: Tales of Protection by Eric Fosnes Hansen
Writing: Words of Paradise - a novel set in Canada, the US and the island of Tobago in the 60’s
Working on: EPIC’s website and this one
Upcoming: a trip to Maine for Cadi’s 2nd birthday and to see Ty and Carson
Mood: calm
Physically: achy
Progress since yesterday: this website—do you like my new beaded curtain?; the book for Book Club on the 26th