December 19, 2012
The Fairy Door
For me, the blogosphere has always been about inspiration, new discoveries, things to learn, and people to learn from. And while very often I’m unable to measure my own life up to those seemingly perfect ones I find online (I can’t decorate a cake for shit, my knitting is always wonky, and if I had a lifestyle blog, it would be called “Cluttered and Dusty”), I usually come away better f0r these encounters. My life is so much richer for what other bloggers have shown me to strive for over the last decade.
Sometimes these bloggers make it all seem so hard though, out of reach, or perhaps they are just underlining the very things my own world is lacking (like an expensive camera, patience and artistic ability). I’m here to show you, however, that none of these things are really necessary to create a little magic in your lives, and the Fairy Door is case in point. Now, Fairy Doors are amazing. I think I heard about them while I was pregnant with Harriet, and I loved the idea of a tiny portal, a door to nowhere and anywhere, of a secret world beyond our own. I wanted that kind of everyday magic in our household, an otherworldly realm to believe in. So at some point in Harriet’s first year, I “built” one.
According to Pinterest and other fine sources, a Fairy Door is a beautiful thing. Apparently you can buy accessories for it. It’s one of those projects I would never ever have accomplished, or even tried, except that I made mine without a template. In fact, I made my Fairy Door without anything except a Sharpie marker, and it’s not beautiful, and my stairs are really dusty, but I promise you that neither of things mean that my daughter believes in the fairies any less.
Somewhere along the line, our Fairy Door became the home of the Hoopty’s, Mr. and Mrs. Hoopty and their daughter Harriet Hoopty who have been identified our own family’s reflections in the kitchen windows while we eat our dinner. (They must shrink down when they go home.) They have a younger child, a son called Hando, and they’ve also taken in Cousin Dupa since his parents disappeared and his babysitter died. Apparently, they’ve also just had a new baby, christened Butterfly, and it must have been a high-risk pregnancy because Mrs. Hoopty was in the hospital for 7 weeks. She’s been reported to be fine though.
Anyway, it doesn’t have to be as difficult as it appears, parenthood. Which is not to say that it’s easy, but there really are so many wonderful things for which almost nothing is all that’s required.
August 19, 2012
How to keep more books
I had a revelation yesterday afternoon: if we had a taller bookshelf, we could keep more books. And as we’ve completely run out of floor/wall space for book storage, this revelation was truly a revolution. I did a search for tall bookshelves on Craigslist and very nearly forgot my recent vow to buy no more furniture that isn’t really furniture (bookshelves with cardboard backs or made of particle board), and then I found a listing for a solid wood bookshelf for only $40. The ad had been up for a week, but I got an immediate response from a seller who’d only just started answering her responses and who’d recognized my name as we had a mutual friend. She also just lived up the street, which was handy, so I took a trip there last night in the Autoshare cargo van, and brought this beauty of a bookshelf home. Of course, its arrival has instigated a massive clear-out/re-organzation that has since turned the entire house to chaos, and resulted in a massive pile of free books being put out on the curb (which were gone in two hours, and yes, my bookish garden is better for the pruning). The task before me now is to clear out our garret-turned-overstuffed-storage-closet, which is totally terrifying. But in the meantime, there is the brand new bookshelf, and we’re absolutely in love with it.
May 1, 2012
The new bunting is here.
I know you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks, but no longer: the new bunting is here! The bad news about this is that no longer are we awaiting bunting in the post, which is a glorious state of being, but at least we get to have our bunting and hang it too. The new bunting was purchased to replace the old bunting, which I’d handmade from origami paper, scotch-tape and a piece of yarn, and was in a rather sorry state. For the new bunting, we went upscale and outsourced it from one with my craft skills than have I. And I’m totally in love with it, just as expected. No longer do we have shabby bunting to be ashamed of, and the best part of the bunting life, of course, is that each day is a celebration.
December 31, 2011
Harriet's room
It’s an exciting time in any parent’s life when your child moves out of her crib onto the futon that was once your living room couch. It’s like the circle of life for the not-so-upwardly mobile. But it’s gone off without a hitch and, like everything ever in the history of Harriet, was a much bigger deal for us that it was for her. She likes the new bed because she can turn somersaults on it, and is fond 
of the comforter she received for Christmas from one of her grandmothers. From the other, she received custom bunting spelling out her name (and you can catch a glimpse of it in the first photo). All these new things being the best excuse for a bedroom reorganization, and I’m very happy with the result.
You can click here for a glimpse of how Harriet’s library began, and from the picture on the right, you can tell that we’ve come a long way. And aren’t kids books impossible to get rid of? I am pretty good at pruning my own collection, but with Harriet’s books, every one seems so essential.
February 2, 2011
Slow snow falling deep
My life at the moment offers such a richness of time, for which I am incredibly grateful. We are very rarely in a hurry, Harriet can walk down the street at her own stumbling pace, we can do the grocery shopping in the morning when the store is nearly empty, we get chores out of the way in the week so that weekends are devoted to pleasure, and when I call to make her doctor’s appointment, I’m able to say that pretty much any time is fine. (Except nap-time. Nap-time is sacred. There is never enough time in nap-time, or in the evenings after Harriet goes to bed, and I take care to use every second of this precious free time for writing and reading, and I do. When I’m not looking at photos of people I don’t know on Facebook.)
The best thing about this arrangement is that we can take pleasure in the little things, that there is no such thing as drudgery, because everything has its place. For instance, I clean the house on Friday mornings and don’t worry about my filthy kitchen floor for the rest of the week, and I have somehow come to love this ritual, that I’m not cleaning while I could be doing something better, but that I’m cleaning because it’s what we do then. And when we finish, there will be time for something else. So that I can enjoy the seven seconds in which the sun gleams from my just-mopped floor, and the stove-top is scrubbed (and I just don’t look in the bathtub, which is never, ever scrubbed). To clean my house is satisfying, and to be finished even more so.
I have also become a passionate snow shoveller. Snow shovelling is only such a chore, because it creeps up on you just when you’re late for work, but this is never the case with us. The storm that struck our city last night was not as powerful as predicted, but still, a man skiied by my house this morning, and snow had covered everything. And because Harriet and I were expecting a friend this morning, we went outside to shovel her way up to our door. (We shovel also for the postal service. If you clear it, they will come.) Harriet has a small shovel, and is impressed enough by it and by the snow that she is satisfied to watch me work. And it was the perfect snow to shovel to– there was so much of it, but it was light enough that I could lift big shovel-fulls of it, feel impressive, and not injure my back.
I get so so few opportunities to actually physically labour (which is a good thing. I once did a Habitat for Humanity Build, almost killed myself, and spent most of the build under a tent eating twinkies, and no one minded, because I was very bad at building houses). Which makes it entirely satisfying to work for once, to use my body, my strength, to clear the sidewalks and our driveway, creating mountains at the edges that are taller than Harriet. (A mountain taller than Harriet. I know. Can you imagine such immensity?). To know that snow-clearing is by-lawed as my obligation as a citizen of this city, that we have to work together to keep our sidewalks clear, and how many people fulfil their duty actually as opposed to those who don’t. It makes me hopeful. And to be out there in the fresh-snowed quiet of a Wednesday morning, everybody either gone to work or snow-dayed in bed, the snow still falling and me quite content knowing that I’m doing a job that will never be done.
January 30, 2011
Found Clock
Behold, the clock we found on the curb today and it’s new home on my kitchen wall of interesting and colourful things. Beside, in particular, the souvenir tray from mid-‘sixties Toronto (skyline sans CN tower!) that we found on another curb about six years ago. Below that is a series of photos I took in a British supermarket cereal aisle. Mustn’t neglect the Blackpool tea towel either, or the bunting, the watering can and bucket mobile (which was the only thing of interest I could find at the worst bookshop ever), and you even get a glimpse of my gorgeous Tessa Kiros cookbooks on the right. Anyway, I like the clock. We didn’t have an analog clock before (and yes, they’re really called that. Which I find a bit strange) and I was concerned that Harriet would grow up to be analog clock illiterate. No more. I foresee many conversations about big hands and little hands ahead of us over cereal bowls and teacups.
December 13, 2010
Ode to the coffee table
The addition of a Christmas tree to our living room decor means that we once again have a coffee table. Previous to the tree’s arrival, our coffee table (which is an old steamer trunk we found five years ago on Shaw Street) had been pushed against the small book shelf, in order to give us some open space, but more importantly to keep small people from hurling the books to the floor. Now the Christmas tree is performing the latter task, and the coffee table has returned to its rightful home. And it’s so useful! For putting pyramids of books on, and feet on, and coffee cups, and beer bottles, and teapots etc. I think I’d always taken coffee tables for granted before, but I will do such a thing no longer.
October 20, 2010
Bunting!
Clipper Tea marketers, you’ve done it again! I was compelled to buy your tea solely on the basis of its gorgeous packaging, and then you went and made this television advert complete with bunting. Bunting! It even falls down, like the bunting in my kitchen, because masking tape can only ever be so sticky. And I am raising this point now because I want to post a photo of the bunting in my kitchen, which was an idea I stole from my friend Bronwyn, but we both thought it was a good one because India Knight has bunting in her kitchen too. I made my bunting out of origami paper, and it has made the kitchen one of my favourite rooms in our house (rivalled only by the living room, the hallway, Harriet’s room, and my attic loft). Other fantastic objects in this photo include my breadbox, the Blackpool tea towel, a wind chime made out of buckets and watering cans, and the first two of a row of five photos of a British supermarket cereal aisle. In unrelated news, my horrid craft blog has been updated. Click here to answer the question that’s been obsessing everyone: what has Kerry been knitting lately?
August 23, 2010
A Room of One's Own
In March, I spent $130 signing up for ten yoga classes, of which I’ve gone to two, and my pass expires this week. Which is good actually, because then I get to feel less bad about the money that’s gone to waste. I’m not typically a quitter, or one who doesn’t follow through, but when I signed up for yoga class, thinking it would give me a fine escape from the stay-at-home nature of stay-at-home-motherhood, I really had the wrong idea. After a long day alone with a pre-verbal midget, the last thing I need is to be silent in a room of levitating hipsters. It is also distinctly possible that I just picked the wrong yoga studio, but that is another story.
What the story is, however, is that it turned out I didn’t need that much push to get out of the house after all. Yes, indeed, I could probably do with more exercise, but I’ve also joined a fabulous book club, take part in an incredible writers group, and do some work for a charity’s board, and that takes care of quite a few evenings each month. And I enjoy these evenings out so completely, their social nature in particular, because it turns out what I need at the end of the day is company and conversation, but I didn’t know that in March.
Similarly, I have abandoned my garret. Tragic, I know, that the garret is forced to make do without me, and I find myself garret-less. And yes, the garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area, and now it’s packed to the sloped ceiling with newborn baby gear (which, yes, we haven’t gotten rid of. Though it won’t be put back into use for a very long time), but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.
But it turns out that after a day at home alone with a young child, spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects. I’ve contemplated moving back upstairs, but this arrangement seems to be working, and so my desk in the garret sits terribly empty, a magnet for layer upon layer of dust.
One of the best things I own is my A Room of One’s Own tea towel, which was a gift from my friend Paul. Due to its literary nature, it used to hang in our library, before the library became Harriet’s room. Since then, the tea towel has been homeless, and I’ve wondered where to put it, no longer actually having a room of my own (or rather, now that my room of my own is usually empty. Which would make hanging the tea towel there particularly sad).
Last night I finally hung it up in the living room, on the last bare spot left on our increasingly riotous walls. True, this room isn’t one of my own, but I’ve decided to regard Woolf’s idea as a metaphor. This idea underlined by Rachel Cusk’s suggestion that perhaps the greatness and distinction of women’s writing came from women not having rooms of their own, from their novels being composed amidst the hustle and bustle of family life.
Perhaps she’s right, or maybe that only works for some people, and I’ve no doubt my mind and my location will be changing one of these days, but having the tea towel up again, I feel that I’ve arrived somehow. Or that I’m home again, settled, and that it’s not so much a room of my own that I need as much as simply room.
*I guess this is my how NOT to be alone post. I never claimed to be consistant.
