Am I in a rut?

I sleep in to make up for time lost coughing all night, wake up, open my eyes and see this....

I had taken the lace curtains down to wash and now wonder if I'll even bother to hang them again, so struck am I by the beauty of sunlight and shadows.

Must bedrooms have curtains?

I think to myself that I must be getting well to even notice this pretty artwork in my windows, when I've noticed so little for over three weeks now, including dust on every surface.

I go into the kitchen for my glass of water and lemon oil and see that the pink geranium is almost as full of white blooms as pink.

Planted perchance by the wind two summers ago when both the geranium and a shamrock plant sat near each other on the front porch table?

I think what a quaint combination they are and consider bringing in the large pot of pink geraniums from the garden before frost and next spring scattering shamrock seeds in it.

Can it possibly be that I am at last interested again in something other than watching Netflix?

I open the kitchen door to let BreeBree and James Mason out and see that our jalapeño and serrano pepper plants are loaded down with peppers. Who even thinks about jalapeños when they're sick?

But frost is coming soon and these cannot go to waste so I get the clippers and step out into the chilly morning to cut all of them. And I do all this without shivering, a good sign.

What shall I do with them? Make cheese stuffed poppers? Am I really ready to cook again, something other than nursery food? Maybe.

I walk over to check the calendar, hoping I haven't missed another family birthday as I recently did our son-in-law's. And there beside the calendar is the photograph of our beautiful daughter-in-law that I stuck up there in early September because she is picking apples and that's what they do in September.

I think about all the Facebook pictures she and our son put up last week when our granddaughters were on fall break. Each day crammed with fun things for the girls to do around their own hometown because this year they didn't go to the beach for fall break.

I shake my head in amazement at how much fun these two young parents create for their children constantly and I regret again that RH and I were such sticks-in-the-mud by the time that our last two kids came along.

I guess we're all that and even more so now. Sticks-in-the-mud. Old people in a rut.

I get mad and think about changing, someday, when I get well.

I could make a start by quitting postponing my day out with my sister....has it really been almost a year since we had a Sisters Day, seeing fabulous historic houses on a Christmas tour of homes?

For months we've talked about visiting the house we lived in as small children, or shopping in some of the cute shops and antique stores in my own little town outside Nashville.

I wonder how soon I'll be able to do that because it seems really important to me that we not put it off.

Maybe when the autumn colors finally arrive we will, which surely will happen in another week or two?

I load the dishwasher, start it and pat it in thankfulness for the flu germs it kills, start a load of laundry next and make my bed--no, I'm lying about that. I mean to but never summon the energy.

Instead I look at all the dust on furniture in every room, make a start on that until a coughing spell interferes with the chore. I decide to finish sorting my drawers of jumbled table linens.

I feel weak, shaky, tired but so happy handling all the pretty cloth napkins I've collected over the years.

Just a common variety hausfrau stuck in a rut and more happy to be in one than I should be.

Maybe I'll start small in climbing out of my rut, make those jalapeño poppers for supper. What else can I put with it that might pass as a meal to RH?

My fried onion rings! He likes them.

Suddenly a wave of fatigue washes over me and I remember the mess that onion rings make. I decide that it'll just be leftover soup with the poppers....or possibly only leftover soup. 

Maybe next week I'll climb out of my rut.

Besides, what's so bad about a rut?

Why this passion for shaking people out of ruts? I am devoted to ruts. Moreover, most of the people who are in ruts are much nicer, and much happier, than the people who are not. To speak of ruts as though they were undesirable is the sign of a coarse and callow mind. Ruts are the wise old wrinkles that civilization has traced on the earth's ancient face.

Beverley Nichols

Laughter On the Stairs 

If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride

Or to paraphrase the old proverb, if wishes were dining rooms, I would like this one, please.

[source: wildflowerlinens.com]

It may not be as grand as those wished for by Beverley Nichols in Merry Hall.....

"Visions of candlelit parties

[source: stonegable.blogspot.com]

bare shoulders reflected in gesso mirrors

[source: Vogue January 1933]


Sheraton sideboards,

[source: williamreubnks.com]


Tio Pepe in Georgian decanters,

[source: coritani.com]


spinach souffles,

[stevepaleo.blogspot.com here]

Nectarines from the walled garden,

[beyondthewildgarden.wordpress.com here]


Chateau Yquem with walnuts."

Yes, Mr. Nichols, a dining room would be loverly. With a table that could be set ahead without rush. Where guests could enter at night after candles were lit, like walking onto a stage set. They would be surrounded by beautiful ornaments or paintings to talk about if conversation lagged. But, of course, it would not. The ambience would be such that conversation would sparkle. The meal would be savored, no dirty pots and pans stacked in the sink in plain view. Naturally, the table setting would be blog-worthy. How could it help but be?

I yearn for a separate dining room. Here is what I call our "small dining room," as though there were a large dining room somewhere, through a door I have yet to open.

It is at one end of a long narrow room that originally was the back porch of this old farmhouse. Here is the opposite end of it, which for 14 years contained my kitchen in a closet-sized space. My stove stood where the red door is now. It opens to the laundry room we added when we added the new kitchen. The stacked picnic baskets serve an important purpose. They hold all my cloth napkins. And if you zoom in on the ceiling here you can see the unusual pattern of half-moon trowel work that was done back when the porch was made into a kitchen and the original kitchen became a bedroom. The original owners' grandsons stopped by not long after we moved in and told us that was done in the late 1930s, when they were about ten years old. While visiting their grandmother, they slept in a room built on top of the root cellar.

The small dining room is where our grandsons' table was when they were young, and where their girlfriends were seated with them eventually. Now no one wants to sit in the children's dining room, now that they are grown up, except for little Nora, so it is merely a cozy space without much function. At one end is the old wood ice box that R.H. spent hours restoring decades ago. It holds lightbulbs mainly, and cereal boxes.

There is a narrow table holding family photographs, and over it hangs an original charcoal drawing of an old local railroad depot, Amqui Station, drawn back in the 1970s by local artist Burnard Wiley. It was my Christmas gift to R.H. one year. Afraid the depot would be demolished, Johnny Cash bought the building and moved it ten minutes away to The House of Cash. After Cash's death it was again moved and is now The Amqui Station and Visitors Center, dedicated to railroading. The Amqui Music & Arts Festival will be there on September 28, 2013.

On the opposite wall are old built-in cupboards that give me extra dish storage. The feed sack curtains hide Christmas decorations for the rear of the house. 

The first cupboard holds dishes in bright colors and punch cups hanging from hooks.

The third cupboard holds mostly odds and ends of china.

But it is the middle cupboard that is my "happy" cupboard. It contains Christmas dishes, and I open it up all year round for a little Christmas cheer.

See the old red and white enamel dinette table that the previous owners left in the smokehouse when we bought this place.....

It could serve as extra dining space for a few people but no one wants to be separated from the others eating at the big kitchen table. Behind this old table, the windows look out to the smokehouse. Why have we never shown the smokehouse interior to you? Because it is not a space you would want to pin on Pinterest.

With a ton of work it would make a beautiful garden shed, but it is also home to our big Brown Eyes. He has a big doghouse inside to sleep in when it's cold in the winter and a cool cement floor for when it's hot outside. The generator is inside here as are bins of birdseed, tools, and the empty milk jugs filled with water that R.H. thinks we'll need if there's ever a water shortage. Here is the back of the smokehouse.

And the side that faces the "small dining room."

Now, this is the point of this whole long post on dining rooms. Wouldn't it make perfect sense to knock out the wall in the "small dining room" for a long table and chairs, windows all along the side, with a garden door stepping out to a tiny enclosed terrace between the new dining room and the smokehouse? With a slanted roofline for a cozy feel? A shelf under the windows for serving dishes? Makes perfect sense to me.

Mind you, we will not be doing this. R.H. and our sons could do the work. It would just be a matter of pulling them off other jobs, jobs that actually pay instead of costing. See what I mean?

Ah, but I can dream, and in my mind I have furnished it, set the table, lit the candles, and carried in the food. I need only to call my guests. It could possibly look like this. Yes, this would about do it, I think.

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

Tell me, fellow beggars, what is your horse, if you had a wish?

A Bouquet of Glass

Until last week we did not have any of the beguiling bouquets  of glass that I have seen in the houses of many bloggers. Oh, how I have looked at them with greedy thoughts, but there was not a single chandelier in this farmhouse except for a cute but cheap little white metal one hanging over the kitchen sink that can barely claim to be called a chandelier, although it attempts to emulate its betters with a few dangly prisms and crystal beads. I love it, especially at Christmas when I hang old silver ornaments from it. Don't be fooled by this picture below of our kitchen chandelier as the glam comes mostly from the Christmas ornaments.

I remember when R.H. questioned my choice of this poor little wannabe chandelier before shaking his head and putting the box in our basket. "Are you sure? Are you sure you want to hang a chandelier over a kitchen sink?" He came to like that baby chandelier almost as much as I do. Recently he shook his head at the location I chose for a new chandelier, one that comes much closer to claiming to be a chandelier, even though not a vintage one.

This one came with gloves to handle the prisms and instructions as to where each piece of glass went.

And this honest-to-goodness chandelier now hangs in my bathroom because one of life's little disturbances happened about a month ago. After taking a shower I saw that water was pouring from under the baseboard. Not a good thing to happen, except that it compelled us to do something I'd been wanting to do for a long time, paint my bathroom and dressing room. It had not been painted since 1995 when we added on this bathroom.

We moved everything out of both rooms, stashing them as we went in the bedroom, living room, office, small dining room. In came building materials, tools, paint, and a new shower. This was a short project compared to the five month long project when we built on a new kitchen and laundry room eight years ago, but these weeks of working on this bathroom seemed like months with my things moved into my husband's bathroom.

R.H. has worked on this project in his spare time, joined much of the time by our son Gurn, and son Zack helping a few days.

The old shower had to be torn out, exposing rotten wood in the floor and walls so it was a matter of taking it down to the studs.

Three times the new shower was put in and taken out until they finally got it just right. This is not a tiled steam shower with multiple jets. This is a small bathroom and we were working on a budget anyway. But I love this new shower even if I did feel as if I should say "Beam me up, Scotty" the first time I stepped into it.

I hope you'll enjoy the pictures of my newly refurbished bathroom. I won't miss this....

It and the adjoining dressing room are small but were a luxury when we added it on in 1995 after four of us standing in line for one bathroom the first five years we lived here. And that one small bathroom most likely seemed a luxury to the family who built this farmhouse in 1920. Who knows how many years they made do with an outhouse. And the concrete frame for that is still in the ground out back. Flowers grow really well in it.

I wanted this bathroom to look like it was added on when we built it and so R.H. left the exterior lap siding.

R.H. used bead board around the shower this time.

He replaced the old chrome knobs on all cabinetry with glass knobs that Lowe's was closing out. This cabinet got glass bridge drawer pulls, and I got that idea from Dixie at French Lique, Texas blog http://frenchlique.blogspot.com/2012/10/planning-perfection-and-kitchen-bling.html. Pop over there and say hi to her and look at her beautiful green glass knobs in her kitchen. Many of hers are original Depression era knobs collected slowly over the years. Dixie, we used your white paint, Behr's Pot of Creme to paint all the cabinets and wood trim.

We wanted the ceiling to show the wood and rafters when R.H. built this bathroom, and they look even better with the new green paint.

I love this bathroom. It represents such a sacrifice on my husband's part. He finished building it originally in 1995 after blowing out his knee at work and wore a leg brace for two weeks while waiting for knee surgery, still working like crazy to finish the bathroom. You just can't keep a good man down.

This time we quickly nixed our idea to replace the flooring, deciding it would be fine rather than go to the expense and time to put down new flooring. Cabinets and fixtures, other than the shower, were kept the same, other than repainting the cabinets.

I'm enormously pleased with the paint color I chose. It is the first time we've painted a room green in decades but I feel serene looking at it. In House Beautiful's Color section featuring dining rooms one month, I fell for a color called Green Barley by Pratt & Lambert. Couldn't find that paint near us so off R.H. went to our favorite Benjamin Moore Paints where they figured out that a green of theirs was a close match. No name on this, simply a number, AF-450. Excuse the wrinkles in the paper!

I wanted a green similar to this old green hamper.

And the green of this great chair, one of two the previous owners left in the smokehouse when we bought the place. These shades of green remind me of the green handles on the old kitchen utensils of the 1940s.

I have to show you the little lamp that sits on the back of the toilet. You might think it's a Cinderella lamp but the figures on the faded lampshade are more like Colonial men and women. It is marked Japan on the bottom and I bought it in an antique store almost thirty years ago.

Since I won't often be inviting you into my bathroom, I must show you a few more things. Here are three small McCoy vases that sit on top of the medicine cabinet. Its brown color got a white paint job this time around.

This little Lenox vase was a gift from a sister.

And the small teapot travelled back from London with her for me.

This green sugar bowl and the two matching plates behind the faucets are English and were bought decades ago purely for their celadon green color.

The angel was a gift for the garden many years ago from Gurn and his family. I wanted to bring her inside but she looked entirely too new. I bet you guessed how she became so nicely weathered...buttermilk poured all over her and then a garbage bag slipcover for a few weeks does the trick. I've had to repeat this several times over the years when she starts growing younger.

The small glass compote holds old pearls and a luscious silk flower pin, in the center an old jewel, made for me by a sweet, talented daughter-in-law.

The silver mirror from Pottery Barn was a birthday gift a few years ago from our children. I love how it and the mirror on the white cabinet triple reflect the new chandelier.

There it is, my little green bathroom with its beguiling bouquet of glass. I'll try to show you the small dressing room next week as a followup. It will be short because you've been so patient through this long post.

I must include these words from my favorite garden writer, Beverley Nichols so that you'll see that the title of this post, A Bouquet of Glass, is not original to me but another jewell I've plundered from Mr. Nichols in All I Could Never Be.

She could never resist a chandelier, even if it was broken and falling to pieces. Some of my most hilarious memories of Catherine are driving back to Piccadilly down the bumpy streets of the Camden Road, crouching on a back seat surrounded by an immense bouquet of glass, which jingled and jangled at every hold, causing startled passers-by to jump as though they had just collided with a lamp post. Once home, the lustres were carried in basketfuls up to the top floor, and deposited on a small and ever-growing mountain of glass which one day she was going to turn into a series of perfect chandeliers. I don't think she ever realized this ambition. The nearest she got to it was just before the war. At that time, when everybody else was thinking about black-out curtains, Catherine perversely surrounded all her windows with glittering chains of crystal. It was delicious, mad and typical.

Thus did Beverley Nichols write of the Baroness d'Erlanger who later lived in Hollywood as Catherine d'Erlanger and was quite a quirky lady.

Thank you for looking at my new bathroom. Can you tell that I am very proud of it? And thank you so much to R.H. for indulging me in this bathroom makeover and this lovely chandelier. He spent many hours, many days working on it, often after work. And thank you to our sons for all their help.

Sometimes what at first seems like nothing but trouble--a leaky shower--is such a blessing in disguise!

"Beam me up, Scotty."