Enviable Homes and Gardens

 For some reason I was feeling particularly snarky yesterday, so I picked up the latest Better Homes and Gardens out of the magazine basket specifically to bark at it.  

...Good grief, that one throw pillow on the sofa cost more than all the furniture in my living room put together!

...Clearly these people don't have kids - what would I do with all these white walls and furnishings?

...Oh hey, they didn't need any closet space so they turned this nice storage area into a little play hideout for the toddler with coordinating colors. Big house, eh?

...Oh hey, this lovely, large, lush English garden with inspiring quotes- what is their budget for help like???

...Ooh, edgy black for a modern lake house. Maybe if we painted our house black we'd feel more relaxed, too.

...Hey, they took out all their cabinets and went to open shelving. Now they get to wash the dust off all their kitchen items before they use them each time. Cool!

Then I got inspired to write an article about my own decorating choices...

The Ballances were lucky to find this truly lovely little World War II home in the summer of 2017. With its wood floors and good bones, sold as is, they knew that with some sweat equity, cash, and a lot of help from the older generation, they had a real keeper. Once the house was in working order, the home decor and furnishings have slowly evolved along with their growing family and home business.

Below, Mrs. Ballance highlights some particular favorites in the current decorating scheme.

"For the bedroom, I snagged this lovely second hand table from the side of the road and found the perfect spot for it by my cozy south-facing window. For some extra whimsy, I stacked it up with a huge pile of mixed clothes and fabric swatches, some books, and quite a bit of varied trash. My inner treasure seeker loves knowing that a functional sewing machine is coyly hidden beneath the piles, and it makes the perfect nesting spot for our cat NASA, who is the only one still able to make it far enough to look out the window.

Don't you love this darling gas fire place from Sweden? It has such charm and was one of the major selling points of the house. We really planned our living room around it, setting baskets of instrument cases and cascading stacks of school papers on either side, stuffing a few wigs and other costume pieces beneath it, and topping it with large plastic dinosaurs and broken markers. For an added touch of homey-ness, we turned the nearby chairs with their backs to it.

This gliding rocker here is a real conversation piece. The springs on the seat broke, and we repaired it with some gimpy hardware found at a home improvement store. The cushions were destroyed over the lifetimes of several cats, so I made lovely new ones in a dashing blue and white pattern. For added warmth, I sewed the seat cushion cover a wee bit to small so the green foam inside peeks out adorably. We set it in this awkward corner to cheer up the room, next to a large plastic litter box. Instead of fulfilling its old-fashioned function of rocking the little ones to sleep, it has had an updated and exciting use as a giant clean laundry pile for the last eight months. Bonus, our cats really love it, and argue over whose turn it is on top of the throne.

In our sweet little bathroom, we made a bold decorating choice to match the peeling plaster: an industrial, three level, black metal shelving unit. This is where we keep our basket of wash cloths, with added decor such as wadded up papers and dirty socks, plus all manner of interesting potions, both in containers and smeared directly on shelves, along with table knives and old paint brushes for application. Also, look at this darling nude Barbie in a diving pose with her nose balanced delicately on an art brush sticking up out of the brown cardboard box of textile scraps, candy wrappers, and dirty pajamas. Additionally, this fabulous shelf gives you a feeling of Tetris when you need to get to the sink or tub, bringing back that fun '80s vibe.

Look at this sweet closet in the back bedroom. It's due for an update, but the current decor choices are awfully fun. The clothes pole has this nice sag on it, due to the weight of so many unworn clothes. The lovely second-hand dresser with sticky drawers and a paint drip holds another batch of unworn clothes. It's all meant to hide behind this white, geometric sheer curtain, hemmed with purple thread, but the current exciting spray of stuff animals and wilderness backpacks keeps the curtain at peek-a-boo status. It' such a fun hiding place for my youngest who climbs in by stepping on the corner of that whimsical table in the south-facing window, and allows her to swipe hidden items stacked in exciting piles atop the old family wardrobe tucked into the adjacent awkward corner, also brimming with unworn clothes. So many possibilities!

Our kitchen is particularly nostalgic. We retained the original floor plan, but of course modern refrigerators don't fit in the old nooks, so ours is relegated to the laundry room. We have a modern ikea-style cabinet in its place. But more fun is this solid L-shaped pole holding up the roof. We have mounted a fun recycling bag hanger made from reclaimed parts and acrylic paint and also hang our aprons from an historic hook. The homemade pot rack, which we are quite proud of, will only hit you on the head if you are over 5 foot 7, and the cabinet doors stay open to give you a little peekaboo at the packed in assemblage behind. But best of all is this vintage rolling dishwasher with the broken wheel, peeling linoleum, and the front casing removed to give a better view of the water works. It conveniently rolls back and forth at a jaunty angle to block either the sink or the stove in the sweet little galley, and reminds one of all those fun grocery runs with a lurching cart and items sliding off the top. So nostalgic!

Really, though, the pride and joy of our decorating scheme is this antique, blue hutch, which belonged to my great-grandmother Mildred back in Missouri. It was a drab brown when she had it, and was used as a display for her fine dishes. It was really due for an update, so we have renamed it the Hutch of Doom. It is now home to our CD and DVD collection, our business papers, a giant tote of crayons, unused cables, batteries and matches, board games, library items, mega blocks, construction paper, and all manner of odds and ends stuffed here and there. For added design function, there are three full-sized cellos in their cases, which get used in various orders each day, loving packed in the narrow aisle between the doors of the hutch and the back of the tall love seat, delicately rearranged several times a day while not crushing the cables and box for our internet, sweetly tucked into the corner."

We hope these fun decorating ideas will lend some inspiration to those of you with executive functioning challenges and those whose responsibilities and sentiments lend to a more lassez faire approach to selecting pieces and arrangements to enliven your environment. Go for the gold and your home may be featured in our next edition of Enviable Homes and Gardens!

Astronomy Moment

 My apologies to the half of my tiny readership who already heard this story in person.  I was so tickled that I decided I had to write it down...

When we departed April 5th for Austin, all flights to Texas were full-to-bursting with eclipse-watchers-hopeful.  On account of this, we did not get a direct flight but connected through Dallas.

Our Dallas to Austin leg was, of course, very short, and I was seated in the aisle across from my kids.  To my right was a very quiet fellow, probably in his 60s who looked to be British,  based on the periodicals he was reading and his reserved manner.  In the window seat was a talkative and flamboyant young American fellow who was chasing the eclipse and had a whole lot to say to the quiet fellow about all kinds of things, especially on the topics of accommodations and food.  After we landed and were waiting to de-plane, the British gentleman turned to me to make some small talk, and mentioned that this would be his sixth total eclipse.

I replied: "You must have a real interest in astronomy. "

"Yes," he said quietly, "I am a physicist...", then added almost as an afterthought, "an astrophysicist."

He then said, "I have a question for your kids.  How far does the moon move away from the earth in a year?"

I glanced at them and answered, "I don't think they are going to talk to you, but the answer is an inch and a half."

He looked gobsmacked, and replied, "Yes, it's 3.8 centimeters."  He went on to detail several wild guesses he had gotten from others in response to this question.

The reason I happened to know this small piece of astronomical data is that earlier in the week, I had watched a couple of videos about solar eclipses with the kids so they could understand what was going on when we would see it.  As it is, the moon has a very slightly elliptical orbit, and so when the moon is on the slightly-closer-to-Earth phase, any eclipse created will be a total eclipse.  When it is in the slightly-further-from-Earth phase, eclipses will be annular.  (You can Google that or have a look on YouTube if you aren't sure what that means. )  The moon's slow drift from Earth towards a mathematically dual orbit system means that at some point in the extremely distant future, it will not ever be close enough to Earth to create total eclipses, and all eclipses from then on will be annular.  This drift occurs at the previously stated approximately  1 1/2 inches per year.  

This British astrophysicist could have asked me almost any other question relevant to his field, and I would have been absolutely stumped,  but I happened to have been pondering that one random fact at that time, making me appear to know way more about his field than he would have expected.

He is going to Spain in 2026 to see the total eclipse there, but he is not going to Alaska in 2033, because, as he reported,  "I am not that crazy."

Train Tracks

Sometimes life is sailing along on one track and I am positive my life will always be that way.  This is the track, the only track.  Suddenly I have an opportunity to switch trains at a station.  I find myself on a different track headed somewhere else.  Now this is the Only Track.  I will be on this train for the rest of my life - no question. Without warning one day, that train derails, and I can't even find another train to board.   Can't go back to the first train.  Don't even know what sort of train to look for....

This has been the first school year in a decade or more where things felt stable - where I wasn't completely losing my mind.  There are various reasons for that, and I can't necessarily articulate them all.  I would not have said at various points in the moment that I was losing my mind, but I don't always notice things like that until months or years after the fact.  It takes a long while of figurative rumination to reach such conclusions. Suffice it to say that it has been really challenging and exhausting for a long while.

In the autumn, E was off to the same school for the second year and better settled in; Jared and I still had L and L home with us.  I had a larger teaching load than ever before, but I also recognized that I was at my limit and turned away further inquiries.  I had scheduled that load in such a way that I had this lovely morning gap in which to fulfill the following missions: morning constitutional including daily grocery stop for the immediate requests, prepping and looking through various activities and projects to do with L and L which could be rightly construed as education, and two or three hours to just be with them - to work through those projects at their own pace in their own time with joy and no hurry.  We explored math and reading and violin and piano and science and art for the most part, and it was lovely and collaborative and really rich.  We had found a really comfortable groove...

Last summer Jared and I played a chamber concert as we have done the last several summers, and it was such a strong reminder of how much I like playing the violin and want to play more of it with others at a similar level. Between times, projects of that nature are somewhat of a rarity, due to coordinating far-flung personnel and the logistics of drumming up an audience.  It is an intensive labor of love, which rarely pays much, if at all.

Then there is a vague background dissatisfaction in my life, a scratch which is not itched by practicing "for fun", teaching the violin, or other creative pursuits. It is the wish to play the violin, well, with and for others, in an appreciative setting.  This is what I trained for, really from my youngest years and up through my masters degree.  Teaching was always an interest and part of the imagined equation, but the performing part was always central, and this is not the essay to go into how and why that may have derailed.  Maybe that's better left for ponderings and wanderings and journals and the proverbial therapist's office.

Also last autumn, a former classmate made a joke about no one wanting to sit next to her, as the two chairs to her right were open in the Seattle Symphony.   Jared suggested I could take up the viola and play the audition.   I really didn't want to play that much viola, so rejected the idea out of hand.  But not long after, multiple violin spots came open, and with Jared's urging, I decided, on December 19th, to take the violin audition.  He also wisely suggested I could not do everything and would need to cut back in other areas.

So, I began preparing carefully, with great focus and intention,  spending between three and nine hours a day in my practice room, six days a week.  I collected the audition materials.  I designed an intensive, stretching, and apropos scale, arpeggio, tone, and vibrato program for myself.  I scoured recordings for tempo and expressive choices.  I recorded myself frequently and analyzed the results to plan specific attacks on unsatisfactory bits.  I problem solved and asked unending questions of my playing. I spent hours using the metronome and drone in so many creative and challenging ways.  I played for people at home and over the internet for experience and feedback.  I tackled every challenge that came my way, not "hoping and praying" my way through the hard spots as I had spent my previous life doing.  I watched lectures and demonstrations online.  I had four people help me with my resume and four people help me with my pre-audition recording.  I made phone calls (a challenge for me) and communicated via email with many people until I found someone to prescribe and help me trial an anti-anxiety medication for the actual event.  I invested everything, and I started to get results.   I learned so much, I embodied so many things I had previously only known intellectually,  and I was excited to see where I could go with this.  Despite my years spent preparing for and attending conservatory, I had never focussed so single-mindedly on one project, and it was an incredible ride.

On March 3rd, one month prior to the actual audition week, I learned I had not been invited.  I had logged probably 400 hours of work by then, and even more hours of focus and intention, and that train wasn't going to just vanish in a poof of smoke.  But... I was not still riding it to its destination.  The first twenty-four hours of disappointment were overwhelmingly intense and I canceled some teaching that the grief would not allow me to fulfill.  Then it took three or so weeks to sort of gain a new footing.  I was not worried about the emotional rollercoaster this go round; I knew it would settle in time.   That is one of the huge blessings of age, because my younger self would not have yet noticed the train pattern and really thought that there would be no other trains ever and been utterly hopeless.   (On a related note, I have read that it may be now thought that certain types of brains don't finish the growing/connecting/pruning sequence until around age 35, as opposed to the more common age of 25, and that really makes me wonder a few things looking back...)

In the ensuing month, I have practiced dramatically less, but thankfully I have also not been handed a ticket for a train I rode a decade ago where even the thought of the expectation of practice made me vaguely angry.  What to practice has been a bit of an issue...  And how to balance time with my kids with my interest in actually playing the violin while working full time has been a bit of an issue... There has been some slow movement towards those hard-to-schedule, hard-to-recruit-audiences, hard-to-get-paid chamber concerts.  There have been some new personal contacts made and slow progress towards getting myself on the sub lists for the local ensembles.  There has been slow progress towards getting back into a richer environmental routine with L and L.  And... the smaller L has been registered for Kindergarten next year.  There is much wondering on my part as to how that will affect the larger L in the fall.  No real conclusions have been made on any front.

I am not sorry at all I took that audition train.  I learned so much about playing the violin, about practicing, and really about teaching.   I also learned about how mythical the US cultural idea of doing it yourself or pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is.  Instead, I found a group of incredible people around me supporting, teaching, and assisting, and I discovered with my eyes wide open just how communal any single success really is.  It is easy to buy into the John Wayne myth of our culture when you are younger and can't see privilege yet.  It seems that maybe real community isn't about conformity or following the same sets of social rules, but about seeing people for who they are and supporting each other anyway.

Portent

The morning was pleasantly cool when I stepped outside my shelter.  The cicadas and crickets and birds were singing their morning songs,  and the mourning doves were calling, as they do after dawn.  The sky was blue in patches with a light breeze.  As I went about my morning roundbout, past a creek, through stands of trees, along patches of grass and wildflowers, the gentle breeze blew in more clouds, and the air grew thicker, heavier, and wetter.  After some time, I returned to my dwelling and remained there, tending to the inside chores until the middle of the day. 

When I again stepped out of my shelter into the clear patch near my dwelling, the sun was not at its zenith yet, but it rode high.  The clouds roiling the sky portended rain,  but just now they were pleasant, blocking some of the heat of the day and changing the light constantly.  As noon approached, it did start to get noticeably darker, as if it might rain, but the clouds had not thickened.  Then evening came on rather suddenly.  It was definitely an evening sort of light, but the shadows did not grow long.  Birds and crickets and frogs sang their evening songs and it grew duskier and duskier.  The light was not right, the timing was not right, but it was not yet stormy.  The familiar felt quite strange, as if I were waiting for the unknown, and all my senses prickled.  Something frightening and unusual was happening: the whole world was falling asleep at noon.  

Suddenly the brightest part of the sky fell dark, and night was upon us.  Directly overhead, where the sun had been only a few moments ago, a frightening black circle appeared with pale, glowing tongues of white flame streaming away.  The sky had  turned to night, and Jupiter appeared high overhead.  Grey shadows cast about, and cool, quiet stillness covered the ground.  I was frozen in place, frozen in this moment.  Was this a sign?  Was this the end of all things?  Was this a visitation?  Was this a dream?  I could not tell what I felt.  Terror?  Fascination?  Joy?  Complete peace? Trembling, that I was.  I could not take my eyes off the black, streaming orb above me.  The image flamed in my mind, and eternity stretched out behind and before....

...I know not how long I had been locked in gaze at this terrifying wonder (seconds?  minutes?  hours?), when suddenly it flashed bright - blindingly, brilliantly bright. The black thing was gone.  The landscape got lighter and lighter: another dawn in the middle of the day, as the clouds roiled onward.  The world woke from its trance, and the light changed back by degrees, to that of a cloudy noon. The storm never came, though a few raindrops fell.

The sky and the animals and plants returned to their ancient routines, but the world would never be the same again.  Something terrible, dramatic, mysterious, and magical had happened.  I did not know what yet, but it clearly had some meaning to be learned with an open heart.

*********

Yesterday I saw for the first (and possibly only) time a total eclipse, and I tried to think really hard about what it would be like to experience that in a pre-scientific, pre-industrial culture.  Even with all the information about what would happen and the cameras and the pinhole viewers, and the special eclipse glasses, it was still shocking and deeply moving.