Stuff here I like.

[mrissa]

Things that were bad yesterday are bad today. You can ask on e-mail if you like. I'm going to talk about other stuff here, though, because the hard problems I'm dealing with right now are not hard problems because I haven't talked and thought about them enough. They're just inherently hard. Sometimes distraction is a good and reasonable thing. (Let's hear it for escapism! Forty-third verse, same as the first!)

One of you said, "I'd like to hear about what you adore most (or about some of the things you adore best) in your house (outside of the people)." Good idea: inside of the people, it's too dark to appreciate some of the things I adore most. Specifically, one of the things I love most about our house is that it has most of our books in it. I love having a library with books on all the walls that will take books and comfy blue furniture to sit on when we're reading (or talking). I want to finish replacing the current shelves with cherry stained shelves, I want to buy a new lamp, and I want to get it painted blue instead of yellow, but the way it is now will do very nicely.

I like -- can we switch verbs here? because I'm too Minnesotan to keep on with "adore" without squirming -- I like a lot of our house these days. I like the paintings my aunt gave us, one in the library and the other in markgritter's and my bedroom. I don't much like the living room -- it has awkward door/window/fireplace placement for our usage -- but I like the red couch that's coming a week from today. I like the prints we've hung and are going to hang soon: Budapest and Minnehaha Falls and snowy trees and tapirs and stuff. I like stuff on the living room mantle: the Mexican pottery immingpool gave us when they were here when Ellie was a baby, the three stylized hugging people, the little lizard bowl we picked up at a craft fair with porphyrin's crew.

I like the pitcher seagrit made me and the bowl with dragonflies on it that makes pameladean crow every time I serve her things from it.

I like -- no, actually "adore" is the right word here -- the little green tile that hangs next to the front hall closet, that porphyrin and Mike brought the very first time they met us, because it was just the right thing, just our kind of thing, and it went so nicely in that spot, and there they were, just our kind of people, too. I don't much believe in love at first sight, but I loved that little tile and the little hands that gave it to me pretty much right away. And the big hands, too.

I like the color of wood in our bedroom furniture and the way I can tell which kitchen chair someone just sat on by how it creaks.

I like our two pianos with their different stories and their identical lamps and the iron dragonfly and the little blue hippo and the bead calendar on them.

People are on against materialism, but we haven't just randomly grabbed material things and thrown them at our home. The things we have here are our things for a reason. And we like a lot of the same stuff, so it's not like I have very many things I'm sneering at going, "Well, that's his, not mine."

What do you like at your house? What do you like at my house?

Comments

[rosefox]

I like our secondhand furniture. It will make it easy to make the living room feel like a small café, which is the eventual plan. (I like writing in cafés, you see, and there isn't one in the neighborhood.) I like that every piece of it has a story that's really the story of us starting our life together: this is the couch that we got when the neighbor died and his family didn't want his stuff and told us to take it all, this is the table we found on the corner and carried home and said we would sand all the varnish off of so that our friends could carve their initials in it with ballpoint pens, this is the folding chair a friend gave us because she knew we needed more chairs, these are the bookshelves I scored off a Wall Street firm that decided to get rid of all its furniture on Freecycle, this is the dining table sinboy named Spiny Norman and hammered nails into so that the legs would stop falling off, this is the lovely swiveling hand-wrought iron shelf some silly person left on the street that holds our tea and thus became our Tea Shelf, Bertie Iron. (I adore this pun above and beyond all other puns.) As we put these things in place, we made our house into a home. Someday I will be deeply glad to get rid of the aged, worn couches and acquire bookshelves that match, but until then, the memories give them a special gleam that makes me very happy. Plus, as they're all secondhand, I get to be a good environmentalist, and that makes me very happy too.

I love our cats. I love the way they sit on the windowsills, basking in warmth from the radiator below and the sun above, stretching and yawning and falling asleep with their black fur gleaming like obsidian. I love the way they sit on my bed at night after sinboy has gone to sleep, content to simply coexist with me. I love that they greet us at the door when we come home. I love waking up in the morning and wandering out into the living room to see them on the couch, suspiciously close together, as though they only bicker when we're watching and are great friends the rest of the time. I don't love their somewhat stormy relationships with the litterbox, but nobody's perfect, and having a warm purring cat curled up on my feet watching me type makes up for just about everything.

We've lived here almost a year and I haven't put any art up on the walls yet. This is highly unusual for me. I think it's because the whole place is mine in a way that no other place has been. The whole place is sinboy's too, of course. I've just never lived anyplace where the shared space was so genuinely shared. I don't need to stake out my territory and label my space, here. (Almost all of my art involves roses.) At some point I will--possibly after I snag some paintings from my mother's apartment when she moves next month--but it's so nice not to need to. So I like the bare walls, even though I don't usually like bare walls, because they're my bare walls and I really just haven't decided what to do with them yet and I have all the time in the world to figure it out.

I like the thickness of those walls, too. Hooray for pre-war apartment buildings. And when I do hear neighbors, I hear them making music--the pianist next door, the operatic soprano on the first floor--and that's a lovely thing.

I like having all my books unpacked and on shelves for the first time in memory, all sorted and accessible and right there when I want them (except for the ones in the big unruly stacks that have been recently read and need to be reshelved). I like that we don't have a television because there isn't room among the books. I like that we found room for a stereo anyway.

I like the way we've arranged things in the kitchen. There's a rolling butcher block, and two big wall racks that we hang spoons and pans and spice racks and measuring cups and other cooking tools from. The cupboards make sense to me, and I can reach everything I need without getting on a chair. There's a gas stove and a sufficiently large fridge. It does everything I ask of it and is full of happy memories of cooking with sinboy and baking with regyt.

I'd like to see your house sometime. It sounds lovely.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have had time to figure out our walls, too. I liked it all right when they were all bare, but I also like it that they're getting not to be now, because we've had time to make good decisions, I think.