Boring Rainbow

So, a very tiny, very small, and yet entirely miraculous thing happened, which is that we finally put some wood in the floor underneath the bathroom doors. What’s that even called?

It has been nine years of minding the gaps in these floors. We’ve done a million other things and hand cared for our home in a thousand other ways, and these tiny details were lost in the lustre of everything else. But they always kind of bothered me.

And then a bolt of lightning struck my husband and he decided to lay down wood. I don’t know what came over him, or inspired him, or which spiritual friend from the other side whispered in his ear but they did, and it happened. Here’s a photo:

First we laid them down, then removed and stained them, matching perfectly, and then we waited for the stain to dry which convinced it to totally change color and now they don’t match at all. But I’m okay with that. I will take not-matching over gapping.

Is that even a word?

Today I’m sitting at my desk, forcing things to happen. The Barefoot Contessa writes in her book that she sat in her office for a year, forcing herself to go every day, until she finally got the idea to write a cookbook.

I am forcing myself to also stay at the desk, dear mind, heart, and soul, and work on your projects. Take them seriously. Love them into existence. Write and work with heart.

Yesterday a client and friend of mine told me about a house for sale that no one knows about, because she knows the owners and only they and a few close friends know they’re selling it. It’s in the forest. Near my favorite forest–my stomping grounds, the forest I intentionally drive to, to live my best life, be with the trees, be in nature. The forest that convinced me that I like being outside.

It’s right near there.

I don’t know how exactly we’d swing it. It also has, I kid you not, a slice of forest right next to the house that they also own and that we’d own if we bought it.

It would be, to be honest, a dream come true for me.

I always tell people that my dream is to live in the forest. I’d love to open my door and walk right into the trees, feeling the cold, the damp, hearing the birds, seeing the lush ferns. I would set up a hammock and live there, outside, in the summers.

We could let our child run around in the street, ride his bike, roller skate, and not worry at all.

It would be good for us.

I don’t know and it probably won’t happen, but my friend said, “You should buy it. They have a converted art studio, and an office above that, and you wouldn’t have to hear the sounds of the park every day.”

The park. We live near a new park that the city installed, along with three sound installations and, the way our house sits, we can hear, from inside, every time a child whacks one of those installations with a stick, which is all day, every day, in the summer, and deep into the night.

Before the park came in, I didn’t know that parents took their kids to the park as late as 9 p.m. I also didn’t know that they let their children take off all their clothes and climb on top of their cars then climb down and pee in the grass. But now I know that they do both because I live here, across from the park, and I see it all from my windows.

We can hear the sound installations from our beds, from the bath, from the kitchen, from everywhere. When it gets overwhelming, I play the piano, opening the window a crack to get them at their own game.

To be honest, it’s the screaming that really gets me. I also didn’t know that children scream at parks all day every day. SCREAMING.

One time, when a child was just really having a go of it, I went out to my patio and yelled over the fence “STOP SCREAMING!” and my neighbors all clapped. They cheered, actually. I don’t think the child heard me, but it was a bit of solidarity for us (I love my neighbors and we’re good friends.)

I asked the parks department about the sound installations, and about installing three of them, and they said that sound is an important part of a child’s development. And I guess screaming is, too. Running wild, filling your lungs with fresh air, and really tearing the world with your loud and lively scream, because you are alive and well and happy. We should all be like that sometimes. Just maybe not in the same place each time. Spread it out and let the neighbors rest a little, tiny friends. Just a bit.

So we have an air current of small things that are huge: laying down wood and covering the crevasse of the century, and also huge small things: dreaming of living in a new house embedded in an evergreen forest with a real art studio and solitude.

Which do you love more?

I love both.

And have resigned myself to the park, which we still love in its way, and am making the dollhouse for the children in the park, so it’s not all bad. It’s just an embedded part of our tapestry. As a child I grew up, in part, next to a freeway (before the house with a dock). So perhaps I’m a little more able to integrate and forget than those who haven’t already been trained denial and acceptance.