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!

The unexplainable in home improvement (as explained by the clueless)

Sometimes, I hate living in the city. For example, I came home the other day and found out that someone dropped this 300-pound beam in the middle of our kitchen:

Alex claims he was napping when it happened, but that must have been some REM sleep he was in. Near as I can tell, some high school kids must have hijacked some sort of heavy equipment machinery to get the thing in here and when they backed up to leave, that beep-beep-beeping sound would have normally woken Alex. But he's been going to lots of concerts lately, and using nail guns, so maybe his hearing is going a bit.

This is the kind of thing that can really only happen in the city. Kids in the country do harmless things like tip cows and play mailbox baseball.

On the bright side, this beam will apparently come in handy for our ongoing home remodeling project. At some point, in fact, it will soon hold up the second floor of our house, either through some feat of engineering or magic or both. I wonder if space aliens will use their advanced powers to levitate the thing and hold it place while Alex pounds/glues/staples it into place?

The home laboratory

I'm busy this weekend getting through the last of my taped interviews for the book, so here's another excerpt from the project, this one from chapter two, "The Home Laboratory":

Within two weeks of moving into the house on NE 70th, Alex cut a hole in the wall between the living room and a bedroom and put in a set of French doors, which nearly doubled our living space. Because of the noise and the dust, he waited until I was out one evening before breaking through the lath and plaster, and I arrived home later that night to a cloud of dust, the sight of wires dangling from open walls, and a new life of plastic tarps and face masks.

The bungalow wasn’t technically a fixer. It was absolutely habitable, according to the bank appraiser and to us. We slept in the roughly finished attic for years before completely remodeling it, though the ceiling was lined with three different sizes of acoustic tiles and the subfloors threw off brown latex paint chips that clung to the soles of our bare feet. The rest of the house was fine: any other homeowners might have merely repainted the main living rooms and perhaps had the kitchen cabinets refaced, and then called it good.

But for Alex and me, the house was a perfect laboratory, a place to try out new ideas and designs—What would the walls look like in bright orange? What if we carved out space for a bathroom upstairs and installed skylights that let eastern light in? What if we added an exterior door at the back of the house where the nook was? Perhaps it’s easier to feel inspired by home remodeling projects that address creative longings rather than necessities.

When we first looked at the bungalow, the living room and adjoining dining room seemed impossibly small. Brad chalked it up to the owners’ clutter and over-large furnishings, but even several weeks later, when we walked through the empty place for the first time after getting the keys, those front rooms felt stingy and tight. In a typical sellers’ market kind of buyers’ remorse, that first walk through was incredibly bittersweet: It was later in the evening and the previous owners had left the place dusty and dank, the smell of basement permeated all the rooms of the main floor. We fumbled in doorways, searching for light switches, but once lit, the deserted rooms seemed too yellow and faded in the glow of cheap fixtures. The house, which had loomed large in memories garnered from only two brief visits, was disappointing: a smaller, sadder replica of itself, shrunken and deflated.

The main problem was the floor plan—there was no drama, no surprise. We knew that would have to be the first thing to change. Many of these modest, 1920s bungalows were designed the same way, so that when you’ve seen one, the others all give a sense of deja vu: a front door that opened directly into the living room, which was divided from the dining room by half walls or a broad archway, with a kitchen through a single door beyond. Also included on the first levels of these small homes were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a steep set of stairs that led to an attic, which by the end of the twentieth century, more often than not, had been finished to provide more space. In her book Bungalow Nation, Diane Maddex notes that “a bungalow’s universal characteristic is that it is no bigger than it needs to be.”

Increasingly, middle-class Americans are discovering that though they have character and soul, old houses like bungalows don’t always accommodate modern lifestyles. My friends and I chide each other for complaining about how our houses seem barely large enough for our small families of three or four, because we know that much larger families were raised in them, with three or four children to a bedroom. Although the size of the American family has shrunk decade by decade, our need for privacy has inversely grown—and quiet space is a tough thing to find in traditional two-bedroom bungalows. Not to mention that the lifestyles of some modern families seem to require whole rooms for activities such as watching TV, working on a computer, washing clothes, and exercising.

But even for homeowners who creatively use nooks and corners of other larger rooms, including the less-finished spaces of attic and basement, it’s undeniable that our activities today come with a lot of stuff: closets crammed with jackets for every season and equipment for every recreational activity, kitchens full of gadgets and small appliances, basements and garages piled high with unused furniture and boxes of mementos. No longer do our activities swirl mainly within the walls of our homes—sewing, cooking, canning, cleaning, reading to one another, working together in support of the domestic life of the family. As Stewart Brand writes in How Buildings Learn, “Economically, the home has been completely transformed in a hundred years from a place of production to a place of consumption.”

Marjorie Garber notes that it’s easy to be judgmental about materialism and consumption in the modern American home, and pass them off as displays of status. “But take away the sense of invective here,” she writes, “and you will be left with a different kind of ‘reality’: things, commodities, objects, consumable goods, are not only possessions but a kind of language. They are, like it or not, the way we communicate with each other, with ourselves, and with the world.” Though it may be of little comfort when feeling jealous of a friend’s closets or complaining about the lack of a playroom in 1,400-square-foot bungalows, at some level, it makes sense that we want our homes to not only meet our daily needs, but also tell the story of who we are.

Rather than building a new house that does all of this in the suburbs, many Portlanders are turning to major renovations of traditional houses in the urban core. With their sense of history and soul, bungalows can ease the anxious, guilty minds of middle-class intellectuals who feel that through renovation, they can become a part of a house’s history, while actively shaping its future.

Things you'd have done this week if you lived here

1. Jacked up your house: You notice that the front half of your house is sagging, so you tear the walls apart to find out why (no header, see "House archaeology" post), talk your wife into letting you jack the house up yourself, then, jack the house up yourself. You have to build a temporary wall to do this, and then cut the old studs so that the house will actually rise. During the week that you're raising the jacks, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the continental plates of your house will drift back together into Pangaea: the door to your daughter's room will actually close rather than have a two-inch gap in the frame, and she'll be able to open her jammed closet door herself rather than calling you to do it for her every time she wants her dress-up clothes.

Throughout the whole process, your wife will have a semi-permanent worry furrow on her forehead and may need constant reassurance that you know what you're doing, not merely think you know what you're doing. Though you've been together a long time and have done many difficult tasks simply by reading books, getting advice from friends, and tapping into your bottomless well of confidence, you should just smile and tell her things will be okay. And when you take a day off in the middle of the week to build the new wall, and then run into a moment where the house almost falls down because the temporary wall slips and the old wall is no longer there to hold it, and you have to grab a two-by-four to prop the house up while you run out to the garage and cut more two-by-fours to hold the rest of the house up--you should skip that part when she asks you, "How'd things go today?" Just show her the finished product, accept her congratulations and thanks, and sleep the sleep of angels.

2. Get dragged all over the tricounty area in search of even more fruit: Your parents call you a fruit bat because some summer mornings you want blueberries, peaches, watermelon, and apricots with your yogurt. But by mid-August, even you are tiring of fruit. It's peach season, and your mom's got some unexplainable attraction to stone fruits, so you have to get dragged away from your art table and your back yard kiddie pool to drive hella far east or west to find farmstands and u-pick orchards. It's hot in the car and the air conditioner doesn't really reach you in the back seat, and your carseat feels too small and cramped--Will they just get you a booster seat already? Maybe one with a cup holder like your friend Z. has.

When your mom's friend calls one night and says, "The Veteran peaches are here!" you just know tomorrow is shot. And sure enough, you're on the road at 8:30 a.m. on a stay-home day. You're in the back seat with a grown-up you've just met, so now you've got to make small talk, which is fine, but it's a long drive and your mom and her friend in the front seat are talking about boring things like anti-consumerism and urban homesteading, so you talk to the nice grown up next to you about your favorite color and point out letters you know on the billboards outside.

The orchard is just another orchard--seen one, seen them all. You make your mom pull you in the wagon and then pick a few peaches that are growing at branches at your height, sneak one and let the juice dribble all over neck and t-shirt and arms. Briefly, you and your mom talk about a book you just read, James and the Giant Peach, but then she is off again, picking, picking, picking. All the grown ups are hunting for the perfect peaches, clucking at the disappointing size and color of the fruit, and talk about coming back next week. Sigh. The high point of the whole excursion is in the car when the friend gives you a tube of lipstick and urges you to put some on, and your mom's grimacing in the rearview miror, so that makes it even better as you slide some of that stuff on your lower lip and most of your chin.

Later that night, spend an hour crawling around naked on all fours meowing. When your parents ask what you're doing, say in kitty broken English, "Me Mucous the cat. Meow." Refuse to answer to your given name, so they have to call you by your kitty name in order to get you to put your jammies on and brush your teeth. You've put up with the peaches this week--the picking and the canning and the jam-making and the sorbet-making. You are Mucous the cat, and this night is yours.

3. Nursed your latest bout of insomnia with Jane Austen: While channel surfing last week, you get caught up in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice, particularly the Netherfield Ball scene in which the camera dips and floats through the crowd giving glimpses of 18th social hierarchies, maneuverings, and manipulations. This world of good marriages and important connections, of aristocrats and bourgeoisie figuring out how to fall in love with one another, of spirited daughters, plain daughters, imprudent daughters, and stoic daughters is as familiar and comforting as mac and cheese.

So when you're tossing in bed at 4:30 a.m., fretting over everything from problematic chapter five of your book project, to daunting deadlines at work, to all the slowly rotting fruit in the kitchen downstairs that needs something, anything, done to them, instead of your customary walking of the rooms, you dig out that old marked-up paperback from some undergraduate English class you took eons ago, curl up on the couch, and get swept up all over again by Lizzie, who is you and every woman you know, and Darcy, who is every man you know. But what you love most, what settles your mind enough so you can catch another hour or two of sleep, is how how propriety and expectations and order, as restrictive as they were to the Bennett sisters, provided at least some kind of framework, some kind of boundary, within which their lives were to be lived. Because in the middle of the night, your own world seems shapeless--the edges too far off to be useful in giving you a sense of direction or a hint of what's to come. You know the happy ending for Lizzie and Darcy, know that it all works out for everyone, so the constraints of their lives comfort you. You don't read to critique or to understand--or even to feel grateful to be a modern woman, because at 4:30 a.m., that doesn't seem like such a great thing to be at all.

What to do with the past?

Alex completely busted me having yet another sentimental moment the other day. It was when we were prying the lath off the studs in the kitchen. I commented that what we were doing was sort of sad because someone more than a hundred years ago had put this house together, nail by nail, strip by strip, and here we were, tearing it all apart in mere hours.

Over lunch today, he said my remark surprised him because, of the two of us, I've always been less concerned about preserving the traditional characteristics of our houses. While Alex digs through piles of old molding in the bowels of Hippo Hardware, I peruse Dwell magazine to figure out how to make our traditional house more modern. In both of the older homes that we've owned and remodeled, I've rallied to open up our floor plans and use modern materials and designs in our updates. But it doesn't mean I don't recognize the symbols of the past as important, too.

As part of my job, I attended a meeting on Wednesday, with about fifty of the state's heritage, history, and preservation folks, to brainstorm ideas for a conference next year. At one point, one gentleman raised the issue of how sustainability, for which Portland is famous, and preservation could work together. He commented that sustainability efforts in urban planning tended to involve tearing down older, historic homes and putting up higher-density new dwellings. It was an interesting observation: how do we move forward to address the way we live now (Drywall and bamboo floors) but also protect and preserve the creations of our past (lathe and hardwoods)?

Is this a line that anyone can really walk? Though many folks I know work hard to preserve or restore the original details of their homes, no one is putting up whole walls of lath instead of sheetrock. Companies like Rejuvenation Hardware and Pottery Barn seem to do this, creating and selling products that nod to the past. And New Urbanist architects and planners develop mixed-use commercial/residential neighborhoods and traditional-looking houses with porches in an effort to recreate an idealized lifestyle--one that my planner husband is quick to point out is no longer a reality. Cities are too big, many Americans can't afford to live close to where they work, communities are built less around neighborhoods and more around common lifestyles and shared interests. So perhaps these gestures to the past are at best nostalgic and at worst marketing.

As we pull our house apart at the seams and find treasures of the past hidden in its walls, I am reminded again of the basic purpose of a house: to shelter a family, no matter when or how they live there. That's continuity--it links our past and our future no matter the materials and politics involved.

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.

And now, for some much-needed context

Those of you who know me may be wondering why I've started blogging now when I have other things I should be doing when I'm not at work or hanging with the family--namely, my 120-page creative nonfiction master's thesis project that's due by the end of summer.

Short answer: Blogging is more fun than writing a book.

Long answer: This blog covers the same ground as my thesis, which is a collection of essays that looks at how the middle-class American home has become a more public and political place in recent years (e.g., urban homesteading, DIY craft circles, salons, green build and remodeling, work at home ventures). In a lot of ways, I see this blog as an incubator, a place to try out some theories and get some feedback/input/other ideas from anyone else who stops in.

And I think this is also a good way to record the effect my thesis research has had on my family and our daily lives. The urban homesteaders and green mamas I've interviewed haven't only given me fodder for my book, they've inspired me to experiment with ways of breaking away from larger industrial systems of consumption by creating a microeconomy in our own home and engaging with our communities at the same time.

For example, after interviewing Cafemama, who is considered something of a superhero in these parts, I was inspired to start getting our organic dairy products delivered directly from Noris Dairy in Crabtree, Oregon. Check out the bounty--milk in glass bottles, butter, sour cream, half-and-half, and eggs--delivered to my porch this afternoon:

Because my family couldn't alone make the $16 minimum charge required for home delivery, we asked friends and neighbors if they were interested in joining us and, as you can see by the full coolers, they were. And just like that, our porch became a public space, which is really what porches want to be.

Our homes can be our best canvases for self-expression, but it seems to me that this expression has become a very public thing: Many of us aren't quietly, solitarily knitting scarves and canning strawberries and planting vegetable gardens and remodeling our old homes--we're raising our kids in these lifestyles and with these values, and, even more interesting, we're talking and writing and reading about these things. A lot. So here I am, jumping into the fray.