Closing a Chapter in the Story of a House

December, 2006: It was very late in the afternoon and already dark when we left the title office. It was snowing again, in great big flakes. Too late to start moving into the little bungalow on the corner two blocks north, but we were happy and excited and just wanted to walk around the empty space and relish starting a new chapter in our lives. As I stood for a moment at the kitchen sink and looked out the window, I had the sense of being inside a snow globe, a bubble of wishes and dreams. The marquee of the community theater in the converted red brick church across the street came on, and lit up the entire corner: It’s a Wonderful Life.

December, 2017: Again, late afternoon, snow starting to fall, just returned from a visit with my mother. It had been a strange and exciting twenty-four hours, beginning with a problem-solving epiphany and ending with all parties on board: we were going to sell our houses and go together on a new one. I needed to make tea, to let the heat of the cup warm and soothe my hands, and the very act to center my thoughts and emotions. As I stood at the sink and filled the kettle with water, the theater’s marquee came on in the fading red sunset: It’s a Wonderful Life. Performed for the first time in eleven years. I took it as a sign that we had, indeed, come full circle.

If you’ve reached the time of life when you (or at least your body) is no longer young, but you have a beloved, still-sharp, and stubborn octogenarian parent who really shouldn’t be living on her own in the middle of next-to-nowhere, then you know the sort of situation this is. A series of common life events led to certain inescapable realizations for Mom, as well as for us: she was finding it considerably harder to do everyday things, like housework, shopping, and gardening; she was relying on neighbors, who were themselves aging, to help out more and more; her daughter and son-in-law were not retiring any time soon, but were now themselves at the age where existing health problems could suddenly get a lot worse; her entire family lived in another town an hour away, including the great-granddaughter who adores her; the cost of everything was going up faster than income–but two households could live almost as cheaply as one.

That last one was my epiphany, and like an old movie cliche actually happened while taking a shower. Ran it by my husband, and it made sense to him, too. Ran it by Mom, who crunched the numbers, and, happily, it clicked. We first tried really hard to figure out a way of creating an apartment or suite for her in our little house, but it would have involved virtually rebuilding it. That kind of long-term project was out of the question for anyone who works from home.

So we found a nice colonial at the edge of town, straight north as the crow flies. It’s in a neighborhood my husband had always found appealing, and I quickly came to like it, as well. Part of the main floor will become Mom’s suite with a little bit of work. Most of the second floor will be our offices and studio. The kitchen and the bathrooms have been updated very nicely, and even the color scheme is great as it is. Best of all, there’s a certain lightness to the place. It’s a happy house. You know what I mean.

We are going to miss so many things about our little bungalow, especially the garden, with the brick and pea gravel patio Steve built, and the trellises and trees we put in. We know it well, and made it our own. Much life happened here, the family, financial, and health dramas, and the wonders of creation, growth, and healing. We bought it when it was the lone residence in a half-block of tear-downs and parking lots. We watched as ugly old downtown buildings were razed and a beautiful park rose in their place. The ratty area we downsized to has been gentrified, and our house is now the little period at the end of a bold exclamation point of towering townhomes.

From the perspective of a nearly hundred-year-old house, however, our stewardship is but one of many in its ongoing story. It’s given service in turn as a home, a tavern, a home again, then professional offices, again a home, a commercial cookery, and finally a home with offices and a studio. And those are just the chapters I know about. My understanding is that it will continue to be a home for the new owners, but it will soon look a lot different than it has for the past century, like a classic book with an updated cover.

So long, 107. May your story grow and your structure prosper.

The Minimalist Cook’s Simple and Homemade Thanksgiving Dinner Guide

The holidays are quickly approaching, and the kids are doing the honors for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, now that they have a house big enough to turn around in. They’re excited, but also a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of cooking a big traditional dinner for the first time. Lots of others are in the same situation. So I thought I’d share the links to the Thanksgiving Dinner posts from my old Minimalist Cook blog, which were written for trad-dinner novices and people who had no time to shop for the ingredients until early Thanksgiving morning. And yes, that also means a post on cooking a frozen turkey without thawing it first.

Let me begin by saying Minimalism and the traditional Thanksgiving dinner are mutually exclusive. That’s also the opening line of the overview post, A Simple One-Day Thanksgiving Dinner Cooking Timeline. Nonetheless, it can be done, with everything homemade and tasty, and without going either broke or insane. Read it first to get the overall idea, and refer to it throughout the day as you cook.

Next comes the list of what you need to have on hand for the recipes: Thanksgiving Dinner Shopping and Ingredient List. The previous post gives an idea of the pots and pans needed, and this post is for the food.

The great bird itself is the most unnerving part if you’re roasting one for the first time, or if you only do it once per year and can’t remember the details. A frozen turkey is what nearly everyone buys, but the thawing process is time-consuming and potentially hazardous. In the third post, Roasting a Frozen Turkey and Homemade Dressing, I explain how roasting from the frozen state is actually much easier and far safer in the first place. Thus, if you haven’t picked up the turkey until the morning of the big day–or if you simply don’t have room in the fridge or freezer for storing it ahead of time, you’re in luck!

Once you get the turkey and the dressing in the oven, the next thing to make is the two-ingredient cranberry sauce, which will have plenty of time to set up in the fridge: The Easiest Cranberry Sauce Ever.

When the dressing is finished baking, that’s the time to put the pumpkin pie in the oven. The Pumpkin Pie and Easy Variations post has a recipe for a tart-style crust that complements the creamy filling and is much simpler to get right than traditional pastry pie crust.

Besides some form of sweet potato (this menu has simple baked ones), nearly every Thanksgiving menu I’ve seen includes the ubiquitous green bean casserole. Simple Green Bean Casserole from Scratch is easy to do and great as a leftover, and you don’t even need to buy a can of French-fried onion rings.

If you don’t already have a preferred go-to recipe for rolls or biscuits, how about cornbread? Tastes great with turkey and baked sweet potatoes. The recipe for Easy Cornbread Muffins is simple and reliable, and the muffin shape eliminates the mess and crumbs from cutting slices in a baking dish.

Not everyone likes pumpkin pie, but a lot of people like having a couple different dessert choices. The Apple Crisp is fast and easy, and bakes while everyone is having dinner. If you like, you can double the topping by mixing the doubled ingredients together in a separate bowl before spreading it over the apples.

There are fancier recipes than these, and plenty of people wouldn’t be caught dead buying a frozen turkey. But if you want to serve a homemade Thanksgiving Dinner that is affordable and manageable, simple and unpretentious, yet tasty and traditional, this is a pretty good way to go.

Advanced Decluttering: Death Knitting!

Death Decluttering has been making waves lately. The somewhat morbid name grabs attention, but it belies the life-affirming concept. So while I don’t think I’m dying anytime soon, I do still have stuff I know no one else is going to want when I kick the bucket, especially my huge mish-mash of yarn. Thus, I decided some Death Knitting was in order!

First, however, I need to back up in time with a confession–it’s relevant, bear with me: despite all the stuff I managed to get rid of this year, I still had not destroyed the twenty-plus years’ worth of papers stacked in neat plastic sweater boxes in the basement. The sheer tediousness of the shredding stopped me from even starting, and I knew the repetitive movement was not going to do my arthritic hands any good.

There had to be a way to destroy all the papers in one easy afternoon. Commercial shredding was too expensive. The soak ’em in bleach and water method was too messy and awkward, smelly and time-consuming. The burn ’em method was not feasible here in town. But wait. There was the farm, way out in the countryside. Mom, too, had a couple of file cabinets’ worth of she wanted to burn, so we decided to combine forces. Picked a very nice day, and got it done. Hooray!

I was giddy with relief at knowing the papers were finally, finally, finally out of my hair. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t be giddy with relief, but it certainly “sparked my joy.” Bonus: I was now also the owner of twenty empty plastic sweater boxes that I could just donate someplace, right? Well….

That brings us back to Death Knitting. I didn’t knit a single thing all last winter or this year, until this month. Part of this was also due to arthritis, and fatigue. I certainly didn’t need another single knitted thing, and couldn’t face working from patterns. But, as in the case of the many years’ worth of papers, I had a large stash of leftover yarn, some of it dating back from my youth. It was all crammed in a large antique lidded box that serves as a sort of coffee table in the living room. And it was All. Tangled. Up. A wool, acrylic, and cotton nightmare just short of a Gordian Knot.

The frugal side of me wanted to use it up, and not buy any more yarn until I did. The creative side of me wanted to turn it all into something different than the usual sweaters and afghans. The challenged part of me couldn’t deal with anything too complicated or tiring. The declutterer part of me wanted to either get it organized and accessible, or get rid of it. After a few days of simmering in the back of my mind, all four sides are now happy.

First step: Decluttering Meg spent an afternoon untangling and rewinding every ball, skein, and blob of yarn and sorted them into the cleaned-up sweater boxes. Really small bits were stored in baggies inside the boxes. A well-lit and easily accessible place to stack them was created by getting rid of a couple of comforters we no longer use.

Second step: Creative Meg reconnected with the colors and textures of the yarn stash during the decluttering, and began to visualize a fiber arts project, with the parameters set by Frugal Meg and Challenged Meg: use it all up, and do it in short, manageable bursts without prior planning or intent. There’s quite a bit of yarn, though. It might take a couple of years to get it done.

Several years ago I made a crazy quilt out of a considerable amount of the leftover yarn, knitting or crocheting the next piece off the previous one. It turned out well, but toward the end was extremely heavy and hot to have on my lap as I worked. This time around, I would do one piece each evening while watching TV. Knitted or crocheted, square, circular, or free-form. Small or large. Didn’t matter. I’d make whatever the spirit moved me to make that evening, whatever my hands would let me do.

When the yarn is all used up, or getting close to it, I’ll lay out all the pieces and decide how to put them together into one fiber artwork. Maybe it’ll be an abstract composition, or another crazy quilt. Maybe it’ll be vaguely representational, like an aerial view landscape. Maybe it’ll be three-dimensional, with appliques and embroidery. Maybe it’ll be cozy and hunky-dory, or something inspired by Anselm Kiefer’s The Order of the Angels. That would be awesome, practically a legacy piece, wouldn’t it?

Or maybe it’ll just turn out to be occupational therapy, something for Twitchy Meg to do that doesn’t involve writing or computer screens. And that’s enough, in of itself.

Happy Halloween 🙂

 

The Signs of Acceptance, and the Acceptance of Signs

Back in January, I wrote about my word for the year, Acceptance, and what it meant to me. Little did I know it would end up meaning something even more.

I’ve made no secret in my blogs over the years that I’m profoundly deaf, although not birth deaf, and that I’ve always worn hearing aids and grew up speaking, lipreading and attending regular schools. I didn’t learn any sign language until after college, and then never used it because no one else in my world used it. I’ve been losing even more hearing with age, as to be expected. But there was another gradual, age-related change that I hadn’t thought of: loss of lipreading acuity.

It takes a ton of focus and energy to lipread well, even if you have a knack for it. You have to take in whatever cues (data) are available: context, facial expression, body language, voiced vowels, and possible consonants formed by the lips. This data is then rapidly processed to result in the most-likely interpretation of what the speaker has said. Naturally, when focus and energy go down the tubes (from aging, among other things), the intake and processing of data declines; lipreading goes from being somewhat accurate to a crapshoot. Read more »

The Armchair Declutterer

Back in January, when I rebooted this blog, I said I was going to tackle decluttering my basement, and I’m proud to say that I got it done! Well, it isn’t entirely finished–there are some smaller jobs that still need doing, but I think that a giant stack of flattened boxes set out for recycling, a dozen unneeded large items set out with a sign saying “Free,” four loads of stuff donated to a charity resale shop and the local library, plus one load of items to the electronics and hazmat collection site qualifies as major decluttering. It also helped that my son has just moved his family into a new house and I’ve given him one good armchair and several pieces of patio furniture.

Sounds like a lot of stuff for a professed minimalist to own in the first place, doesn’t it? A lot of the things donated were books I’d picked up at library sales for my mother to read, and she gave them back to me to give back to the library, as well as jigsaw puzzles for the charity shop. I also donated my Kitchen Aid mixer and many other items that I’d kept from my commercial cookery for my own use. It was finally time to accept that I wasn’t going to do that kind of cooking anymore. It’s exhausting for me, and no one in my family eats a lot of sweets or baked goods. Dinner parties have morphed into drinks and snacks.

That’s what I find at the crux of things piling up: changing needs. Whether it’s for a change in health, job, family, location, or interests, new things are acquired and old things become obsolete. While it is a good idea to get rid of something every time something new is brought home, it isn’t always as simple as getting rid of an old pair of jeans after buying a new pair. Sometimes we’re just plain too busy or too tired to make more complex decisions on the spot. Sometimes we don’t even realize our needs have changed until a pattern shows up in our acquisitions.

A case in point is chairs. Old butts like upholstered cushions, old backs like lumbar support, and old knees like seats that aren’t too hard to get up from. Other than that, not too picky. So my son got some rather nice chairs that he needed and I (or more precisely, my suddenly older butt, back, and knees) acquired more suitable ones. We’re all happy now, and nothing has gone unused.

But this “older” thing somehow crept in. What was periodic creakiness is now more or less constant, a threshold that was crossed when I wasn’t aware of it–some time in the past couple of years, can’t pinpoint when. There are all the usual things to keep it at bay–diet and exercise, family and friends, a vocation–and also the things that provide a pleasant illusion of control over one’s life, such as decluttering.

I like my comfortable new chairs. They provide my body with the illusion that time hasn’t completely taken over.

 

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