Memento Week

Scene 1: Green tomato chutney making on Saturday with the fabulous Harriet Fasenfest and my reliable life domestic pals Kristen and Mel (of What Not fame). In this photo, Kristen and Harriet stir up two large vats of what will ultimately be very yummy chutney--some 40 or so jars of the stuff. It's true: the labors of chopping onions, apples, prunes, and tomatoes are so much more pleasurable with good (albeit at times heated and politcal) conversation. But notice that this picture is taken from behind our range, where once a wall had been. . . .

Scene 2: Look at this spacious combined dining room and kitchen space. Though some would call it a travesty to open up a kitchen in a traditional house to the adjoining dining room, thinking it too modern and disrespectful. But you know what I find more disrespectful? Leaving someone stranded in the kitchen slaving over a meal while family members and guests laugh and drink wine in another room. Plus, the opened space makes it easier for kids to run circles through the house in that crazy way that I mostly don't mind, as long as no one is carrying a stick or pair of scissors (Parenting 101). And though it's not clear yet, the beam will be enclosed and sheetrocked and fitted with molding that matches that of the rest of the house. So there: history respected and modern family life accommodated.

Scene 3: Beam-raising day! After a fair bit of persuasion on my part, Alex made an eleventh-hour call to good buddy (and hubby of What Knot) Brian to ask for help with installing that aforementioned humungous beam where a wall once was. After some let's call it "discussion" between two accomplished and know-it-all handy men, the beam was up and set to do its job of keeping the second floor above the first floor. Not magic or aliens after all: just strong, smart men and math!

A hundred little deaths

You know what makes a house feel like a home? No, silly, not a sheetrocked wall! Six quarts of home-preserved peaches, that's what.

First off, WTF? On the way home from our Sunday excursion to "the country" (a.k.a. east Portland), at the tail end of one of the hottest weekends of the year with twenty pounds of peaches and a flat of blueberries in the trunk, Alex and I pondered this very question. We've been together for fifteen years, and I don't think we've ever eaten canned peaches, so why my plan to clutter the kitchen with cauldrons of boiling water and an assembly line (consisting of SB and me) to blanch, cool, peel, cut, pit, cook, and can these summer fruits? I could just cut them up and freeze them, or, crazy thought, just enjoy them while they're in season, for breakfast with yogurt, or off the pit with lunch, or in cobblers or ice cream for dessert. But no, I wanted to preserve them.

The only reason we could come up with was that it would be funny to have canned peaches in winter that we could bust out some cold winter night when we wanted to pretend we were on Deadwood. Other hardcore fans of this most excellent show may remember how saloon/brothel owner Swearingen has one of his lackeys open a can of peaches for important meetings of the town leaders. (SB would be our lackey, of course, scampering down to the basement to receive a jar for our "family meetings.")

Not a compelling reason to spend a couple of hours in the kitchen, but yet, there we were: SB diligently slipping or scraping the fuzzy skins from the pulpy fruit while I managed the things involving heat and knives--so, everything else. When we got home today, we admired our handiwork and SB said, "Let's eat some!"

I responded, with a sharp intake of breath, "Are you kidding? Eat a fresh one. These are . . ."

"For winter," she muttered, remembering some Little House on the Prairie schlock I fed her as motivation while we were slaving away the night before.

"Right," I said, feeling a little silly. For winter? We live in a city that sees maybe two weeks of truly inclement weather--and those are broken up into a couple of days at a time, here and there. We live within ten blocks of three grocery stores, not in the middle of fricking nowhere, some place where you really have to stock up on food or else you might die of starvation. So, again, WTF?

I posed the question to my BFF on the phone this evening and she offered, "They look pretty," doing her job of supporting my whims unconditionally while not pointing out any utter contradictions or personality flaws. But this suggestion, the best effort of an incredibly smart person, was pretty thin, and we both knew it.

Yes, they do look pretty, and I do feel satisfied to see the growing collection of jars in our basement, but that's not the whole story. I also don't think my reasons are as altruistic or political as what Harriet at Preserve (where I learned to can) would say, that growing and preserving our own food is a way of breaking our dependence on both an industrial food production complex and a flawed economic system that has consumers stuck in a cycle of working too much and buying too much toward some unclear end.

This all makes a lot of sense to me, but I think another reason I've spent so much time this summer looking for, eating, and preserving seasonal produce is more emotional. Every summer that I've lived in Oregon, I've marked time through fruit, experiencing each as a mini-lifetime: anticipating the arrival of the first strawberries, then relishing them, preemptively mourning them, and, finally, fully mourning them. And so on, and so on with raspberries, peaches, blueberries, melons, figs, apples, pears--a hundred little births and deaths. Thinking about eating Hood strawberries only once a year is a little bit heartbreaking, especially when I do the math and think about how many more strawberry seasons I have ahead of me.

Sentimental and overly dramatic thoughts, for sure, and more evidence of why rudimentary math skills in the hands of a writer is a dangerous thing. Considering that I'm on the verge of turning forty, this reeks of a pre-midlife crisis, which totally fits. I am the queen of preemptive mourning. I mean, if I let myself mark time like this in other ways--number of family summers we have before SB is an adult, for example--I'd just end up curled up in fetal position in a darkened room for days. So maybe putting up these peaches is a way of stopping time or, at least, messing with it. I don't know about you, but I find that a little denial and delusions of control are helpful in getting through any given day.

House archaeology, anthropology, and projected fortitude

Three finding about the our current remodeling project:

1. Why, yes, that IS NOT a header but a 2 x 4 holding up the entire front half of our house. And, yes, you're again right that one of the "posts" is in fact a couple of scrap pieces of wood spliced together. I thought this must have been a recent patch job gone awry, but Alex assures me that we're looking at original work. Goes to show that sometimes the much-lauded craftsmanship of the olden days wasn't all that different from today's quick-fix "make it work" jobs.




2. A list of cool and gross stuff found behind the walls so far: a doll's comb (circa 1999), a tarnished key to a lock box dangling on a chain, a mouse's nest, a desicated mouse (not found in the nest but, unfortunately, under one of the kitchen base cabinet--eww), and, most cool, a photo of a family sitting in front of the fireplace of this house. Judging from the hairstyles, clothing, and style of photo, and in consultation with our neighbors, we think the photo is dated from perhaps the 1950s.

The most interesting thing about the photo is that the family is Asian. As a multiracial person of Asian descent who's come to accept that fact that I live in a predominantly white city with an unfriendly history of race relations, there's something thrilling about living in a home once occupied by a family of color.

This is a bit of a tangent, but there was an interesting post at Racialious a couple of days ago that explored why humor based on racial stereotypes by a comedian of color, such as Indian Canadian Russell Peters, is acceptable to people of color. To help figure this out, the writer describes Junot Diaz's theory called the wheel of tyranny, in which writers of color set up worlds in which only two races are represented, white and nonwhite, with the latter revolving around and responding to the former. This wheel excludes interactions among communities of color, which can be powerful nexuses of home-making, so the Racialious writer suggests that Peters thwarts that dynamic, creates a common ground, and is thus refreshing and acceptable.

It's kind of a shaky argument, but I have to admit that something about this rings true in my response to the photo of the Asian family. Because the majority of my daily experiences involves interacting with white folks, the possibility that people of color owned this house makes me feel more at home here--sentimental, but entirely characteristic of me, despite my public bravado and default posture of skepticism.

3. Check out how spacious the dining room and kitchen look (use your imagination and ignore the studs and dangling electrical)! Question: How long can we live in this state of unrest? Answer: A surprisingly long time. I'm sure it will get old fast, but the truth is, we both work full time so this stuff gets done when it gets done. And we're still waiting on the engineer, so this rustic cabin look could be our milieu for weeks to come. Question #2: Which will come first, the completion of the project or my disinterest in writing about it? Place your bets, people.

That wall's dead. Wrapped in plastic.

(Any Twin Peaks fans out there? If not, just disregard the title of this posting and move on to the next paragraph. Thank you.)

That's how it goes: one day, you're just an innocent, well-meaning wall, doing your part in holding up a house, providing a buffer between the working-class kitchen and the showy dining room, and the next, WHAM! You're out of there, stripped and left down to your bones. Goes to show, you've absolutely got to live each day as if it was your last, because, especially if you're a wall in our house, it might be. (Yep, this is the same wall that I posted earlier this week, only, naked.)

Alex scheduled an enormous Dumpster for delivery on Friday morning and was ch-ch-chomping at the bit to get started, but we had dear friends in town on Thursday night so we spent a fun evening out with them and our families hung out together on Friday (puzzles and pretend picnic for the kids, chortling and guffawing for the adults, followed by lunch at Clyde Common for all). And the minute we got home, I took SB up for quiet time and Alex got to work. Poor SB came downstairs, yet again (see the posting "Where It Begins") to life in a hazmat zone: the entire house tarped off and all the floors papered to isolate kitchen, dining room, part of the living room, and entry hall. Any comparisons here to a surgical procedure would be accurate.

We're still waiting for the engineer to approve our plans and size a couple of beams (the walls in question are load bearing), but we started demo to see what we had ahead of us. We pulled most of the lath and plaster off the kitchen side last night after SB went to bed--really disgusting, dirty, but yet satisfying work. Nothing makes you respect the craftsmanship of an old house like tearing it apart, bit by bit.

I was on kid-duty for most of today while Alex spent the morning removing ducts and beginning to pull apart the ceiling in the dining room while SB and I were at swim lessons, garage sales, and the library. He took a little "break" at midday to run a leg in the Rockin Relay marathon relay, then joined SB and I for Ten Tiny Dances, part of Linda K. Johnson's innovative artist in residence project down in the South Waterfront in Portland, before coming home to straighten up a bit and prepare for another day of demo tomorrow. Yes, Alex gives that other renaissance man DaVinci a run for the money.

Me? I'll keep taping floors and taking the kid to swimming lessons and schlepping buckets of plaster out to the Dumpster and arranging our social calendar. And, of course, I'll write about all of it. It's like that old saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, blog."

Remove a wall, invigorate a marriage

The tension is palpable. Can you feel it? Gaze upon this pristine expanse of white wall between our dated but functional kitchen and our dark and dreary dining room--but don't get attached to it because starting tomorrow, it'll be gone.

Not entirely gone. We're very noncommittal remodelers and like to draw out the decision-making process for as long as possible, so we're only taking out the top half of the wall, enough to move ductwork and wiring and experiment with just how open we want the space to be. We're on the verge of compromise here: I like an open floor plan, and Alex prefers a bit of separation between kitchen and dining. In this particular case, he should certainly have more say because he's the primary cook in the house. Look at the difference between his sliced cucumbers on the right and mine:



He etched in a pretty design on the skin of the cuke using a lemon zester or something. And this was just for a family dinner, not for guests! I don't bust out the fancy gadgets except when company comes over.

Cucumbers aside, remodeling is one of those things couples do that really smacks of optimism--or naivete. But in our case, let's call it optimism, because Alex and I have been down this road many times before, from the back-breaking work of constructing a brick patio at our first house to the huge tasks of refinishing the attic and remodeling the kitchen in our second house, with myriad other projects of varying complexity in between. Alex does the bulk of the work because he has a better idea of what he's doing. I help with things like planning, prep, demo, clean up, and painting, but he does pretty much everything else--with me at his shoulder asking questions, being annoying, and generally getting on his nerves. And when the going gets particularly dirty, I whisk SB away to safer, cleaner climes. Again, it seems like domestic work falling along gender lines (see my earlier post "Home-living over books and snack?")

But one thing in our marriage that seems to be genderless is the way that our dreams play out on the very structure of our houses. In much the same way that we daydreamed aloud about our shared future before we moved to Portland and while I was pregnant, we also dream (and argue and disagree and concede) together about our houses. We've done this so many times that we can predict each other's concerns before they're voiced, and sometimes rush into a quarrel without even articulating the problem. We know each other's aesthetics, politely acknowledge them, then make impassioned pleas for our own. We bicker and hold grudges and make up--or agree to disagree for the time being: when Alex showed me a mock up for how our new kitchen layout would look, I bit my lip and grimaced, and he smiled and closed his laptop. Remodeling has become a kind of proving ground for our marriage.

And this is where optimism comes in: We don't just move forward again on another project with the simple faith that we'll weather several weeks of disarray, of cracked moldings and shards of plaster, of the inevitable hurt feelings and misunderstandings followed by cold stony silences. We move forward in the face of all that. We move forward anticipating how the eastern light from the kitchen windows will dance on the dining room table at breakfast, whether by way of a large pass-through or a completely opened space. We move forward feeling grateful and lucky that after fifteen years together we're still in motion at all--moving in roughly the same direction, toward the same general end.

Where it begins

In response to folks who've asked, "How's the thesis coming along?" here's sneak peek at part of the intro, not-so-sneakily disguised as a blog post and supplemented with photos from the kitchen renovation mentioned in the first graf:

One summer morning in 2007, my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter padded downstairs to find the refrigerator in the dining room. The prep tables that had once served as extra kitchen counter space were now also in the tiny room, along with the cobalt blue microwave and the stainless steel rack that had once held dishes in the nook. SB didn't bat an eyelash. As she climbed into a chair at the dining room table, I explained that we were starting the kitchen remodel that day and she'd be going over to a neighbor's house for a few hours so her dad and I could tear the lathe and plaster off the walls. Still completely unfazed, she nodded her head agreeably and asked for a strawberry yogurt.

Although I later wondered what it must be like to grow up in a state of constant upheaval--piles of debris and tools spread throughout the house as common as piles of stuffed animals and Crayola markers, the gritty film of sheetrock dust on every flat surface, the sharp smell of varnish and paint in the air--at the time, it was simply another day in our family's life. Even in utero, SB must have heard Alex and I arguing about where to put the skylights, what color to paint the bedroom, or whether to use oak or bamboo flooring upstairs. Some kids wake up to high-rise views of the city or the smell of grass and cows in the country: SB spent her first three years enveloped in the sights, sounds, and smells of a house in progress.

My husband and I aren't flippers or remodelers: we both have full-time jobs in fields that have nothing to do with real estate or houses. Instead, we're middle-class homeowners who bought a small house in a hot real estate market and then spent the next several years transforming it into a wood-and-mortar version of who we are. In other words, we're a lot like the other young upwardly mobile American couples you might know or see at Home Depot early on Saturday mornings or read about in Sunset and Dwell magazines.

If we were just a generation older, we might have been called yuppies, but we're more akin to what David Brooks, in his 2000 book, dubbed "bourgeois bohemians" or "bobos": mid-twentieth century anti-establishment liberals who broke through the traditional stranglehold of Protestant elites at the country’s best schools and worked their way up various professional ladders to suddenly find themselves firmly on the upper and upper-middle class rungs of American society. Brooks says that because of this history, Bobos are “an elite that has been raised to oppose elites,” and, therefore, a conflicted lot—a socially enlightened, educated class that feels anxiety and guilt about their wealth and participation in consumer culture.

Brooks says that in response to this guilt, Bobos have devised a set of codes to both justify and regulate their participation in capitalism, “encouraging some kinds of spending, which are deemed virtuous, and discouraging others that seem vulgar or elitist.” Virtuous spending might include buying old or handmade things that show craftsmanship and have “soul,” or supporting local, small businesses over large, national chains.

Although we’re perhaps on the tail end of the Bobo generation, Alex and I and most of our peers not only have the college diplomas and white-collar paychecks, but also guilt and anxiety about consumerism. In broad, general strokes, we are a group of people who strive to be hands-on, conscientious, political citizens who buy local goods, eat seasonal produce, and make things with our hands. Of course, this runs a wide gamut: Some people don’t own cars, grow much of their own food, and buy products from within one hundred miles of their homes. Others invest in green building and remodeling supplies and drive Priuses. Others buy mostly organic produce and eggs, use low-VOC paints, and grow native plants. But regardless of the various permutations, for most of us, our homes are both our laboratories where we experiment with materials and ideas, and our canvases on which we communicate who we are and what value.

It makes a lot of sense that Bobos use houses in political ways, because doing so justifies what is, for most middle-class homeowners, a huge expenditure and also the straightest path to wealth—less risky than the stock market and more profitable than a savings account. By renovating an old house with “soul,” building a green house on an infill lot close to public transportation, or pulling up lawn to plant vegetables, we can rationalize home ownership as virtuous spending. And on a more spiritual level, a house can be a life’s work, akin to a novel or painting or symphony. It can be justified as an aesthetic endeavor that fulfills deeper, undeniable human needs.