Summer projects

Some people go camping. We change the view by taking up landscape-modification projects. These projects start innocently, a whisper of an idea, a comment in passing… I gather inspiration, we trace lines over the grass using butcher’s twine, or rope that once served as a clothesline on a camping trip West. And then Christian gets to work…

We converted an expanse of lawn into a rock garden, as it seems to be the fashion in these hot, dry years.

I organized my pantry too, and this time, I swear, it’s “once and for all”. Has that ever happened to you, where the system you put into place, which makes you glow with satisfaction, slowly gets overtaken by the creep, creep, creep of store-bought bags? Here, (I’ll proudly point) here are my newly organized spices! But then, a week or so into the pretty jars from IKEA, (labelled too!) I realize that the tablespoon doesn’t fit into the mouth of the jar, and then six months later, cinnamon stands on its own, and I’ve started a little collection of spices in bags that I’ve not emptied into their appropriate container. When bay-leaves risk falling into your pot of boiling pasta again, it’s time to consider assuaging the nagging need to do. When you can’t find whether or not you have unsweetened coconut for making granola, and each time you make couscous the items you have to remove to get to it pool on the counter, it’s time to take the ennui seriously. To this end, I’m using canning jars: large ones and small ones. If it works for sad_papi, it works for me!

Statue

This is the story of how we housed a statue of Ste Thérèse for 15 years.

Fifteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Alice, was alive. She was a solid lady with thin white hair who pushed a walker with the determination of a person with hip-replacements who would not slow down. She befriended a lady forever referred to as Mrs. Teece. I don’t know how the name is spelled, but that is how it sounded. Mrs. Teece came into possession of a statue of Ste Thérèse. Having come from a church, the statue was four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds. At some point, maybe at Mrs Teece’s death, the statue was passed along to Alice who put it in her bedroom, or had it installed there, among other religious articles and porcelain dolls. And then one day, when one of Alice’s great grand-daughters was visiting, she noticed her effusive love of Ste Thérèse and decided that the statue should go to this great-granddaughter in Quebec next.

Death didn’t come immediately of course, not even sneakily in the night for Alice. It loitered a bit, sending her to a care home for a few months and then catching up with her in the hospital. The statue being what it was, heavy, and made of plaster, could not accompany Alice to her final bedrooms, and so found a stay in our house, being that my husband was this great-granddaughter’s uncle. We put the statue in a corner of our dining room. It felt like having a visitor, since our dining room was reserved for visitors and we normally ate in the kitchen. Seeing a giant statue in someone else’s home tour pushed me to consider Ste Thérèse a bit of unique decor.

I dusted her black veil and the crevasses in her dress folds and the creases of the roses that clustered around the crucifix she held. A visiting priest once took interest in the statue and appraised its solidity by examining the paint for hairline cracks. Meantime, she popped into pictures. Meantime we repainted the walls and changed the decor. We moved Ste Thérèse downstairs. We stopped paying attention to the angles of our picture-taking.

And then, just the other day, it was arranged that these people from Quebec, coming to Manitoba by air to pick up a vehicle bought here, could bring Ste Thérèse with them, to have her, as it was intended 15 years ago, given to this great-granddaughter. The internet recommends bubble wrap and tape. I found videos on lashing packages. Double boxing can be done for delicate things, but seemed like a step too far. Christian bought bubble wrap. He brought up the 80 pound plaster statue from downstairs. I wrapped and taped the Ste Thérèse and tied a mask to her face as a Covid precaution. Her life-size realism sometimes made us think of her as a character in our house. Would she rather stay here? Could divine events make it so that her story ended with us? Could she crumble into pieces as protest?

Christian loaded her into the car and I added bubble wrap to her base. After supper, I drove to St Boniface and found the Quebec visitors talking around the cleared dinner-table of their friendly hosts. I sat with them. As the sky darkened we eventually left the chairs, eventually also the apartment and the building for the parking lot and the statue was taken from my car to their van as rain wet the asphalt. She was seat-belted into place and I took a picture that was nothing but a blur under street-lights.

Three things three kids have taught me about décor

Years ago, when I read a short biography about Diana Vreeland, one of her quotes devastated me. She wrote: “Of course, one is born with good taste. It’s very hard to acquire. You can acquire the patina of taste.” Perhaps she was being snobbish, I thought. Or perhaps I was being optimistic. I like to think that anything can be within reach, even good taste. 
    I learned that Seth Godin has a great cookbook collection*. He says books are a bargain because “for fifteen or twenty dollars you have something that might change your life.” Some people are bad at cooking he argues, because while “it costs very little to find out, lots of people are afraid to find out.”
    The thing is, fear applies to decorating too! I remember when I was expecting our little girl, I was stressed that the room wouldn’t be magazine-picture ready for her. I printed pictures off the internet (this before the delightful Pinterest!) and hoped I would find myself infused with style wisdom. I wasn’t though… We painted the walls yellow and hung wallpaper, and fitted a white crib with a plain pink mattress cover. At my request, my friend brought a sheepskin rug from Toronto for a carpet and we borrowed a glider because it was within reach. I discovered that I didn’t like yellow, that sheepskin is tough to clean when baby throws up on it, and that gliders are wonderfully comfortable even before the baby arrives. You see, there’s nothing like experience and the only way to get experience is to take risks.
    Taste is formed in part through exposure** and that’s the perfect excuse to indulge in the impulse to scroll through blogs and ogle over pretty Pinterest boards. Books provide the commentary that allow you to notice details you might not have, the chance to understand the components of the author’s vision. 
    Taste is also re-invention. When I was little, I used to think that a perfectly decorated room was the ideal you reached after enough purchases. But it’s not so. Décor is the pleasing expression of a practical way to use a space; but the way you use a space takes time to find out. Uses change and evolve. As I write I have toddler boys, born a year and three weeks apart, who endlessly test the endurance of every decor decision in my house.  The hardwood floors are suffering… But I can credit them for causing me to streamline the de-cluttering. While I would like to put something pretty on the coffee table, or even on my bedside table, I know more about décor than I did as a newlywed.
    This is my advice:
1.    Tackle it! Have a vision, daydream, make a plan, create a budget and go! No excuses! No “I’ll wait until the kids are older to make my house pretty.” Make your home in the now, even just a little bit at a time.
2.    Learn from it! Emily Henderson says there are no hard-and-fast rules, just “tons of tricks and tips” and she’s right! Points of view abound from one book to the other, but eventually you find out what you appreciate. Every experiment builds confidence.
3.    Have fun with it! Having children is the best excuse to decorate, to explore colour, pattern and texture, to build projects and take them down. This is your kingdom and you are queen of your castle!

* Interview on The Tim Ferriss Show (February 10, 2016) 
** This article: http://davidlewis.svbtle.com/can-taste-be-taught

I love books! Here are some of my favourite books about décor in no particular order:
Design Sponge by Grace Bonney
Big Book of Small Cool Spaces by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan
Domino The Book of Decorating by Debora Needleman, Sara Ruffin Costello and Dara Caponigro
The Perfectly Imperfect Home by Debora Needleman
Design Mom by Gabrielle Blair
Styled by Emily Henderson
The IKEA catalogue... :)