Hands red
and numb with cold,
I lick my salty lip.
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I’m picking up the keys to our new place today, and I’m so excited I can hardly stand it. I’ve got the trunk packed with shelf-lining paper, brand new brooms and mops, our vacuum cleaner, my oil diffuser, and about 60 bottles of essential oils. I was thinking I’d take the laptop over and play Pandora while I pre-clean, but then I remembered our wireless isn’t hooked up yet. Maybe I can dig up a radio somewhere.
As much as I despise moving – it really is one of my least favorite things on earth to do – I can’t help but be thrilled for the blank slate we are given with each new dwelling. We mentally arrange furniture, visualize colors, work towards a sense of cohesion with artwork and paint and textiles. Towards creating a flow, and a feeling of ease and comfort. Not that we’re any good at it, but we try. And after house-sitting for six months, it’s exciting to think about the treasures we will find when we start opening boxes. We’ll see our dishes again, the rich green Denby stoneware from our wedding registry. I still love it after 14 years. And our paintings. And family photographs. And our books! God, I can’t wait to put up our bookshelves.
With this move, we know the house itself won’t be our forever home, but it feels so good to just move down the street. To stay in our kids’ school district. We’re not starting new jobs, or moving to new cities, or pulling the kids away from their friends anymore. We’ll just be moving houses in the same town we already know. Our forever home of Blacksburg.
And even though our stay in this townhouse will be temporary – 2 years? 6 years? – we’re treating it like we’re going to be there a while, and I can’t wait to make it our own. To scent it with the natural warmth of cinnamon oil, or maybe the crispness of douglas fir, while I clean today. To fill it with music. To sweep off the porch for the arrival of our lives tomorrow.
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On our drive to Ohio for Thanksgiving, I thought about socks. Six hours is a long time in the car, and you know, your mind wanders.
Specifically, I was thinking about the clothes our son packed for himself, which included a mismatched pair of socks – both were white, but one had a gray bottom and one had a navy bottom. I had just done all the laundry, so he should have had plenty of socks, but mysteriously, he did not. Those were the dregs from his drawer. So I got to wondering, where could his socks be? We just bought him a new package a few weeks ago, and if I had just washed everything, he should have had at least six clean pairs of socks in his drawer. And then I recalled the balled up sock behind the bathroom door. That one was red. And the sock I found in his sheets when he got out of bed that morning. I think that one was gray.
And then I recalled the socks we’ve found on the basement floor, under the couch, between couch cushions. On the oval rug in the middle of the living room. In a LEGO bin. And it was no wonder he only had three pairs of socks (one mismatched).
Then I got to thinking about my girlfriend telling me she has the same issue with her husband. He’ll be getting ready for work in the morning and holler, “I need new socks – I don’t have any” when she knows good and well he’s got at least twelve pairs. Half a pair is on the kitchen counter. Several dusty ones are behind the couch. There’s one on the coffee table, and three or four between the couch cushions. I think she said she has even found her husband’s socks between the mattresses.
I chuckled to myself in the car, thinking of her husband plunking down on the couch after a long day at work, settling into his favorite spot, clicking over to a Braves game, maybe munching on some chips. Then, feeling the need to wiggle his toes in fresh air, to free his paws after another day of work-shoe imprisonment, I could see him peeling his socks off as the final step in his putting-his-feet-up ritual.
Once we were in Ohio, I didn’t think much about socks, except to wish I had brought one more pair of black ones to go with my black boots. And then, the day after Thanksgiving, Aunt C plucked a sock from the end table in her husband’s football den, rolled her eyes and shook her head, and delivered it to its rightful place in the hamper. I laughed and told her about my sock musings in the car, and we teased about men and their socks, me feeling self-satisfied about my socks always being where they belong – in the drawer, on my feet, or in the hamper.
I was still chuckling about the socks when I walked into the living room and noticed, scattered across our hosts’ floor, a pair of slippers, two black bootlets, and tossed about like the kids had gotten ahold of them (though they hadn’t), a pair of tall brown boots. All mine.
* Our son’s birthday is Thursday, and we’re moving this weekend, and then our daughter’s birthday and Christmas will be upon us, so this is the sort of gripping content you can expect here over the next few weeks when I get a chance to post. Enjoy!
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I saw something this morning that stopped me in my tracks. On our bedroom floor were a wooden horsehair shoe shine brush and a brown tin of Kiwi shoe polish, the kind with the little boat-cleat lever for popping the top of the tin off. I don’t think the Kiwi tin has changed in 20 years, because as soon as I saw it I was a kid again, sitting in front of a crackling fire, polishing my dad’s shoes for a quarter.
I don’t know how often Dad would need them done, but I remember him periodically bringing all of his leather shoes, the ones he wore to work, and his shoe shine kit – a wooden box with a horsehair brush and several tins of Kiwi shoe polish, in black, brown, tan, and oxblood – down to the den for the 8pm family TV hour. He’d pay my brother or me to polish his shoes while we watched The Cosby Show or The Wonder Years, or maybe Cheers or Frasier.
I remember sitting on the burber carpet, newspaper spread to protect its cream color, my dad’s shoes lined up in pairs beside me. I’d take the first shoe – always the left, then the right – and place it over my left hand, my little girl fist inside where my dad’s toes spent their work days, the sole of the shoe facing the TV, the upper facing me. His shoes smelled of rich, warm leather, and with a fire crackling and snapping next to me, and with my family all together in the family room, shining Dad’s shoes was a ritual of comfort and contentedness.
With my right hand, I’d sweep with the soft bristles of the horse hair brush. Swoof swoof swoof swoof, I’d brush the dust off the toe cap, the sides to the heel, and finally the eyelets and tongue. Then I’d put the shoe and the brush down, turn the wing-nut to pop the lid off of the polish tin, and grab a soft cloth (maybe one of Dad’s old undershirts?) that I’d wrap around the first two fingers of my right hand. I’d dip into the waxy paste, its consistency like tinned lip balm, and with a gob of it on my clothed fingertips, I would rub it in small circles over every bit of leather on his shoes, staining the scuffs away. I’d brush them off one last time, then buff with a cloth til the shoe shined.
It was always so satisfying to wipe the dried polish away, the scuff marks replaced with a fresh, even coat of color, the shoes so smooth by the end of their buffing that they looked like they could be new. Like the man who wore them would be as polished and confident and ready for the world as they were, with their new shine. And the smell of the polish, its pungent scent rich and leathery and masculine, would linger in the den, and on the rag, and on my fingertips, a reminder of the hard-working shoes that took our dad to his job every day, and brought home food and clothes and family vacations.
It makes me wonder, do many men still polish their shoes? I’m not in the world of men much, and when I see them, they are usually wearing sneakers or canvas or some sort of shoe that doesn’t require polish. It would be a shame to lose the ritual of shining shoes, of the manly scent of leather and shoe wax, of wearing quality footwear that will not fall apart, and can be cleaned and conditioned rather than replaced when it begins to show its mileage.
I am thrilled that my husband has shoes to shine, and that he plans to shine them. I am looking forward to hearing the swoof of the brush, and the pop of the tin, and smelling the warm scents of leather, and shoe polish, and timeless quality again.
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You would think that in November, when the trees are stripped bare, and the mountains are gray with twiggy branches, and the ground is brown with dead leaves, you would think that the color green would be hard to find. At least, that’s what I thought, until with green on my mind for a photography project, I found it everywhere. We hiked the Cascades yesterday, an Appalachian waterfall about 30 minutes west of Blacksburg, and the stream-side trail was resplendent in winter greens. We saw mosses, lichens, rhododendron, hemlock – life, ever green, persisting beneath the naked skeletons of deciduous trees. We saw ferns, bridges and stone signs tinted green with algae, pools of green where the crashing down of waterfalls aerated the water, green M&Ms in our trail mix. And always at hand to capture words, my tiny green Moleskine, its lined pages scratched with haiku.
Water splashes
in sunlight –
scent of wet stone.
This is my entry for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Green.
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“Oh, please. He’s not dead,” Cordy replied, and then, butterfly-minded, poked our father with her heel and changed the subject.
– Eleanor BrownOkay, so I lied about counting pages. I’ve frantically counted pages in two recent books I’ve read, not because I was slogging through them, wondering when they’d ever be over, but because I was so into them, I never wanted them to end. The first was The Paris Wife, which I borrowed as an e-book from the library. I highlighted so many passages in it (more than 40) that I bought it ten minutes after I read the final page. I needed to own that book. Plus, I had to transfer all of my highlights before my loan expired from the library.
The second book was The Weird Sisters, which I just finished reading for the second time in less than a year. Why? For the line above. For the adjective that is the namesake of my blog. In this quick, minor line, in one adjective, I found permission to be who I am. As I’ve written about ad nauseum, I’ve struggled for a long time with my identity. I tend to blow with the wind, immersing myself in interests, hobbies, subjects til I’ve learned as much as my attention span will permit, and then moving on to the next interest/hobby/subject. After making a couple of quilts, and recognizing I didn’t have the precision for quilting, or knitting a few hats and realizing I didn’t have the patience for knitting, or working in ecology labs and realizing I don’t have the analytical and mathematical mind for scientific research, or any number of other dabblings (soap-making, jewelry-making, photography, nutrition, organic living), I was feeling pretty bad about my inability to commit. I’d beat myself up that I couldn’t seem to stick with one thing long enough to become truly skilled, instead flitting from one new interest to another.
But when I read that line about Cordelia, my favorite of the three Shakespearian-named weird sisters – the bread-baking crunchy hippie wanderer, the loveable one, the one I wanted to hang out and laugh with, the one who flits – I think I may have actually gasped. Butterfly-minded! What an elegant descriptor! An adjective more sophisticated than “flighty,” more likable than “fickle,” more beautiful than “generalist.” An adjective calmer than “restless.” The perfect word to make someone who flits feel good and light and loveable for being so changeable.
Butterfly Mind 