Home Sweet Apartment ~ in Pink

Since bringing back from my parents' house the mantel my dad built for me and Mike last April, I've been painting it and fixing up the things that will surround it.  My treasured old "Home Sweet Apartment" needlepoint is the first piece I've revamped for the mantel-wall.  It was one of my very first eBay finds back in 2001, that most-miserable of years, and even though--or maybe especially because--I was unexpectedly living with my parents again at the time, I was thrilled when mine was the winning bid:  This vintage sampler, like a Field of Dreams-type "If-you-find-the-decorations-for-it-the-new-home-will-come" talisman,  gave me something concrete to work toward as a frustrated twenty-four-year-old.  

In the summer of 2002 when I finally had my first all-to-myself-with-no-roommates apartment, I delighted in unpacking the needlepoint and dolling it up, and what a year before had arrived pine green and maroon with an unfinished wooden frame became pink and aqua to match the little dining nook in my new place. 

"Home Sweet Apartment" behind me as I would sit in the corner seat under it there and work on school work for my second Masters program.  "Home Sweet Apartment" beside my newly-ex-boyfriend and I as we sat across from each other at this vintage tablecloth-clad table eating bowls of my homemade soup and awkwardly figuring out our post-breakup friendship.  "Home Sweet Apartment" above me as I bawled my heart out in this pink-dotted chair the following New Year's night after realizing we weren't ready to be "just friends" just yet and that we might never be able to in this lifetime.  The sampler over me and my mom when she showed up on a whim with two chocolate muffins from the bakery and listened as I made us tea and told her all about it.  The sampler over a whole bunch of us when I hosted both my first family dinner and first birthday party and relearned that as long as I had love to give--and gave it--I wasn't down for the count.  Before I moved out of this first "all mine" apartment, a former professor joined me for cookies and lemonade under the needlepoint and commented that I was good at making people feel welcome.  "Hospitality is your thing, isn't it," he thoughtfully noted.  And that's when "Home Sweet Apartment" really clicked for me:  I really had created a home here, not just filled and decorated a rented space.

The pink and aqua needlepoint became a more subdued and not-very-Val-like red and yellow in 2007, so as not to overwhelm Mike with my pink-and-rainbow-loving tendencies.  Our studio apartment was so tiny, it was hard to do any real decorating in it at all, so the yellow and red actually didn't bother me too much.  When you can roll out of bed in your home-sweet-apartment and land on the kitchen floor, or open the bathroom door while sitting at the dinner table, the color combination of a sampler's matte and frame isn't your biggest homemaking concern.  Besides, the sweet sampler watched over me and Mike, this time hanging from the apartment's built-in mantel, during all our goings-on for four years the same as it had when it had been pink and aqua for me before.  Home was still love-filled and our favorite place.  Be it ever so humble, you know.  

Today it became pink again, though, and I don't see it changing after this.  It finally looks just right to me.  I covered the yellow matte with the dotted pink upholstery fabric that I had used to cover the captain chairs in my little circa-2002 pink and aqua corner.  I repainted the red frame black.  And I removed the glass-front since I don't trust this apartment's wall to hold its weight.  While I continue painting the mantel and fixing up the wall around it, at least this much is done.  That I figured out a way to incorporate the old chair fabric makes me especially happy. 

"Lighten up, Val--It's a sampler," I know, but when I look at it, I remember the journey it's accompanied me on and think of it as a witness to the past twelve years.  When Mike and I eventually move on from renting, I will pass it on to its next owners with a prayer for their own resilience and contented refuge in home. 

Sweet, indeed.  ♥

36

I turn thirty-six years old today.  I am the rare soul who loves to grow older.  I've loved my thirties and can't wait to be forty and have been saying since I was a kid, "Can you imagine being eighty or ninety someday!?  Knowing everything you'll know by that point and having learned that much and experienced that much and finally being able to see how so many of the pieces and storylines of your life all fit together?!  Wow!"  Wow, indeed.  My older brother will be forty in February and has long been lamenting his "advanced" age, but I myself love it. 

We all had a sweet visit over the weekend.  My mom loved her paper dolls, yes.  As predicted, right after the "Oh my gosh!" and "Vally, how did you FIND this?!" came "There's IDA!  Oh, I remember her!  I always remembered there was an Ida with dark hair pulled up on top!"  :)  My younger brother and his wife announced that they're expecting their first baby in November.  Aunt Laurie and I sat at the dining room table with mugs of hot chocolate Sunday night and looked through a stack of old Country Living magazines that Mom had found at the flea market the day before.  Mom made my traditional birthday cheesecake (made with lemon gelatin) and wrapped my gifts in a pink polka dot paper.  (My brothers groan and make fun of me because I take so long to unwrap presents, but I admire the gift wraps and bows and cards so much and always save a scrap of each wrapping paper from birthdays and Christmas.  They thought and hoped I could open my gifts during the twenty-minute intermission during the hockey game they were watching Sunday, but alas, no, so they turned on the radio to listen to the next period while I finished.  ["Brothers."  :)])  My older brother gave me my traditional birthday bag of rhubarb from his garden.  My uncle showed me his new camera.  My cousin Mark and I caught up and watched a couple shows on the Food network.  My dad and I laughed at the fact that Mom is all excited about the "new" shade of blue she and Dad have been repainting the house this past week even though it's looked to the rest of us like the exact same blue since 1978.  My nephew regaled us with sports trivia, and my niece's ever-growing refrigerator collection of grinning cat drawings--each one labeled "HELLO KITTY!"--still has me and Mike giggling. 

I'm not 100% yet but am feeling much better.  Thank you.  ♥  I hadn't been sick since around New Year's, so that was a great good-health streak for me.  And I have a few more days to rest before returning to work, so this should be a restorative week. 

Last year's rainbow birthday cake took forever to make, although it was so fun and cheerful, it was worth it to me, but I needed rest more than rainbows this time around, so tonight's dessert for me and Mike was two slices of carrot cake from a local coffee shop. 

And especially since I never found pink Tulips for Easter or my beloved Daffodils at all this spring, I treated myself to a small bouquet of orange Tulips this afternoon.  It rained here almost all day, so orange was the way to go today.  Here's to another year of trying to shine brighter and to be better and wiser and kinder, both to self and others.  Here's to 36.  ♥

A Dozen Cousins, Two Gnomes, and a Frog

"Ida was always my favorite," my mom says whenever the subject comes up.  "I remember she had dark hair and it was up on top."  Mom always tells me about her beloved "A Dozen Cousins" paper dolls the same way, with the same smile and the same words.  "There was a Fred too, I remember."  I've been hearing about Ida and Fred and the rest of their family my whole life.  And then:  "I always thought that was the sweetest idea for paper dolls:  All the cousins all different ages."  And finally, and here you may imagine me mouthing the words sitcom-style along with her as she says them:  "I wonder if kids still play with paper dolls?  Boy, your aunt Laurie and I used to!  For HOURS.  We'd make extra clothes for them too.  Mom would let us cut up the Sears catalog for the pictures. . . ."  

I spent years trying to find a set of these old paper dolls for her.  The one time I saw a listing for them on eBay, the bidding reached $200 by auction's end.  They're never at the flea market.  I've only seen a few mentions of them online.  Luck was with me recently, though, when I found an online seller with an uncut set of the dolls.  Fiiiiiinally!  For less than Mike and I usually pay for a pizza, dark-haired Ida and Fred and all the rest of the cousins were on their way here and will soon be an early Mother's Day present. 

And they are sweet, indeed, and so "Mom."  My mother has three brothers and three sisters and grew up with many cousins in her daily life, as well, so I've always understood that part of her affinity for these dolls, but now I can see why she loved them even beyond that.  Such darling details in these old illustrations. 

Like mother, like daughter:  I would happily wear just about any of the dolls' clothes.  I am honestly surprised, now that I see them, that Mom never embroidered a red-threaded "Valerie" onto the fronts of my undershirts when I was a kid. 

I get to go home to visit my family this weekend, ♥  and the surprise paper dolls are part of my goody bag for Mom.  It is an informal tradition that when Mom, Aunt Laurie, and I get together, we exchange what Louissa May Alcott in Little Women called "bundles":  Sometimes notes we didn't have time to mail pre-visit, flower seeds in the springtime, small tins of cookies, usually notecards and stickers for all our letters to each other, almost always silk flowers from Aunt Laurie, small handmade scrapbooks, thrift shop finds of vintage linens and tea cups and coffee mugs, sometimes a framed photo from a past visit for them from me, tiny bottles of cake decors and sprinkling sugars for cookies. . . .Both Mom's and Aunt Laurie's presents this visit includes gnomes, of course, and toadstool-shaped pencil sharpeners from Target's dollar bins. 

While Mom's little gifts are blue and red, Aunt Laurie's are aqua and green, as is also tradition.  The grocery store sells these 50¢ paper lunch bags in different colors, and I find myself buying them over and over again for small gifts.  Aunt Laurie's got jazzed up with "her" gnomes and frogs this time. 

I was supposed to go home yesterday but have been battling a cold all week and didn't feel good enough for the trip yet.  Hopefully, by the time I see everyone this weekend, I'll be able to enjoy it more--and laugh with Aunt Laurie over her frog-prince without falling into a coughing fit.  :)

Here's to family, dear Ida and Fred and all the rest included.  ♥

Goofball at the Grocery Store (or Shy Val Strikes Again)

I have a knack for getting myself into the most awkward situations, and the latest is that, in a poorly-thought-out attempt not to embarrass a grocery store employee who obviously had me confused with another shopper last week, I seem to have agreed with his assumption that I have children.  "You dummy!" Mike laughed when I finally, after a week of suffering privately over my socially clumsy interactions with this man, told him what I had (and hadn't) said to this kind and good-intentioned person.  "Why didn't you just correct him?!"  Yes, well, that would have been an easy fix, I see now, more than a week into my repeated almost-daily attempts to try to avoid him.  

This man has worked in the store the entire six years I've shopped there, and we always exchange hellos and make small talk.  He is, as Mike and I have noted numerous times, undoubtedly among the two nicest staff members in the entire supermarket.  Those of you who have worked retail know just how amazing his kind of constant pleasantness with the public is.  I have never been there with children, but for whatever reason, this employee greeted me last week with a cheerful "How are your little ones?" and because I knew ("knew") that he would realize his mistake the second I walked away from him and I didn't want him to feel embarrassed, I simply said, "Oh!  Fine.  Thank you!" and wished him a good day and kind of scampered off.  Strike One.  It threw me off, and I clearly wasn't graceful in my quick getaway, but I thought nothing more of it.  

Until the next time it happened, when he said my "little ones" sure must keep me busy and then asked me if they were in school yet.  You would think that that would have been the moment I'd have corrected him and that we'd have had a good laugh about it and that would be the end of this, but it was not.  Apparently, the words "little ones" set off the Shy Person Panic Alarm in my head, for I felt like I was rooted to that spot of the store aisle by quicksand and my mind came up with nothing except "Uhh, no."  And I raced toward the checkout lines, leaving this man looking puzzled by my uncharacteristically curt response.  I have been trying to tell myself that surely ("surely"), I must have at least called a more-gracious "Thank you!" or "Have a nice day!" over my shoulder as I ran away, but I don't think I did.  Strike Two.  

And now, more than a week later, because I know the jig is up and I need to correct him--which we all know will now be more mortifying for me than my having corrected his error in the first place would have ever been for him--I have been avoiding this man altogether, unable as of yet to steel myself for what can't help but be a sink-through-the-grocery-store-floor-in-embarrassment moment.  Gah!  The only even somewhat intelligent explanation I have been able to think to offer this person--and it is flimsy at very best--is that I work with children and thought he meant that "my little ones" at work must keep me busy, but. . . flimsy, like I said.  It is all I have come up with, though--Mike is enjoying my predicament too much to be of any help--so one of these days, I need to bite the bullet, seek out the employee (so he doesn't catch me off-guard and throw me further off my game with an inquiry about my kids' names or birthdays or something), and explain (with a fair amount of charming laughter at my own expense, if I can muster it) our "misunderstanding."  I try to tell myself that nice people are nice people and that they're not going to stop being nice just because I have something embarrassing to tell them, and I know the entire encounter, when I do ultimately brace myself to have it, will only take a few seconds, but I am just not ready to deal with this yet, and day after day, I have not been ready.  And that, dear readers, is why I have been doing my food-shopping between 6-7 a.m. this week.  I am actually typing this right after returning from my latest quick-get-to-the-store-before-this-man-starts-his-shift-at-work grocery store jaunt.  How do I get myself into these stupid situations?! 

"As I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things." ~ Martin Scorsese

A day or so after my grandfather died in 2001, my dad and I were at home stumbling through the motions of making breakfast or something when he mentioned that upon stepping outside that morning, he'd found two homemade pies that his coworker Buddy had left on our front porch.  Immediately, and repeatedly over the next couple days, it wasn't Papa's death or Grandma's loss of her husband of almost sixty-two years or the knowledge of other family members' pain that made me cry, but instead those damned pies.  I cried over the pies even while agreeing with Dad how good it had been of his coworker to offer them.  The mental picture of those disposable foil pans left without fanfare on our porch made me cry awhile later as I dressed for the viewing.  A stretch of time would then pass in which I'd be calm, in that rubbed-raw weariness that grief brings on, and then the pies would return to mind and I would feel my face crumpling up again.  Soon enough, the full weight of Papa's death hit me, of course, but until the initial shock wore off, my tears were for the kindness that leads a person to buy the pans and the ingredients, to take the time out of one's own life to follow a recipe and to wait for pies to bake and then for them to cool, to wrap them up, and finally, to drive them across town--all to acknowledge and console another's hurting heart.  

Similarly, this past week, with our world news seemingly fuller than usual with stories of trauma and terror, it is a show of compassion, and not one of grief or gore, to which my mind keeps returning.  Soon after the Boston Marathon bombings last Monday, Boston.com created Google Documents to help locals who could offer housing reach those who had been displaced by the attacks.  In just a couple of days, almost 6,000 people posted to the spreadsheet offering everything from guest room beds and pull-out couches to hot showers, cupcakes, and snuggles with pets.  In honor of these Bostonians' kindness and goodwill, the list of housing offers has been kept online.  As with Papa's death and the front porch pies in 2001, it is this story this past week that has made me cry more than any other.  If you need to be reassured of human beings' capacity for compassion and goodness, this simple spreadsheet glows with both.  "I just made soup. . .and have a friendly cat," one offer reads.  Another:  "We have lots of coffee and floor space."  Yet another:  "Futon, showers, and two doggies ready to comfort you."  One more:  "We have lots of food, beer and cookies!  :)" (The smiley emoticon is the poster's, not mine, and even seeing THAT touches me.  People are amazing.)  "My wife might even spring for Chinese food tonight," reads another listing.  Some are from local college students who live in dorm rooms but are willing to give up their beds.  Some helpfully mention all foreign languages spoken in the households.  Many offer transportation.  At least one offers his YMCA guest-pass so someone can shower or sauna there and/or just get away for awhile.  Imagine:  Nearly 6,000 people reached out to help like this.  Constantly refreshing both Boston.com and the Boston Globe's Twitter feed last Monday, I read some of  these housing entries aloud to Mike as they began pouring in and exclaimed to him, "Honestly, can you even imagine!?  In a major city--And these people don't even KNOW who-all is reading this--And they're posting their phone numbers and email addresses and everything?!"  I was astounded by it.  It is one of the things I will remember most about the events of last week, all that kindness.  It is only now, eight days after the attacks, that I can even think about the housing offers list, let alone skim through it, without beginning to choke-up again.  ". . .Pullout couch.  Excellent brownies."  Well, honestly.  

I believe that good outweighs evil.  I believe that most people are good and are actively trying every day to be good.  I believe, like Mr. Rogers believed, that "you will always find people who are helping."   Here we all are, stumbling around the planet together, sometimes the ones falling and being helped up and dusted off, and other times the ones with hands outstretched to lift or carry.  We share our stories, we sing songs, and we try to make both sense and something good--there's that word again--come from it all.  We offer what we can, and if we pay attention, we see how the love we pass back and forth saves the day every day, one pie on a porch-front and sofa-bed-offer at a time.  ♥

Two Years

Mike took this photo of us in our hotel room on our wedding day two years ago.  It's one of my favorites from that whole day.  Our smiles!  We had just finished calling our parents to tell them the news, and the blushing giddiness we felt after those laughter-filled conversations is still on our faces in the picture.  "Oh, I figured you were up to something!" Mike's mom responded to his announcement.  "You never call in the middle of the day on a Friday like this!"  My own mom tried to speak normally but kept giggling and barely managed to call out to my dad in the background, "GENE!  Val's MARRIED!"  When she put my dad on, we caught up, and then he mentioned, in his usual Dad's Daily Diary-fashion, some dish he had recently cooked for his and Mom's supper that had bacon in it, and when I replied that it sounded like something Mike would love, Dad chortled, "That's right!  Mike!  I'll have to make it next time you're both here!  For my son-in-law!"  I love remembering these moments, all of us simultaneously shy and stunned-a-bit-stupid and and laughing during every pause in our conversations.

Tittering to each other and repeatedly rubbing our thumbs against the backs of our plain silver bands, Mike and I took one more picture and talked about where to go for supper.  We decided on a restaurant.  We commented that it would be Our First Meal as a Married Couple.  We laughed some more.  And hand in hand, we set off.