Please feel free to call me honey

I went to Aldi today to do the weekly food shopping and I went alone for once. I usually take at least one of the girls with me because Aldi is one of those bag-and-tote-it-yerself places and it's always nice to have an extra set of hands when you're sacking it all up and stowing it away in the car. But today I was on my own, which means I am free to enter into conversations with total strangers, a character trait which the girls discourage, my mother completely understands and my brother finds utterly reprehensible.

"I suppose you're one of those people who talks to people in line at Disney World and the movie theater and in the waiting area of the Outback," he said superciliously.

"Oh, yes," I replied. "I am particularly friendly at the Outback because I'm usually working on a Foster's draft."

I wasn't drinking a beer at Aldi when I was standing in line with my shopping cart full of groceries, but I struck up a little conversation with the elderly man behind me who was holding a gallon of milk in each hand.

"Why don't you go in line ahead of me?" I asked. "Your hands are going to get really cold standing there holding that milk and I've got an awful lot of stuff in this cart."

"Why thanks!" he said, smiling and nodding his head affably. "My hands were already kind of cold and I'd just got to the line."

He went up ahead of me and we chatted about the deliciousness of the Aldi brand green tea as compared to the way more expensive Bigelow and Lipton brands. When he was ready to leave, he turned and called out, "Thanks again, ma'am!"

It was kind of odd being called "ma'am" by someone who was clearly old enough to be my grandpa, but I smiled and said, "You're welcome."

Evidently it struck him the same way because he went toward the automatic doors, but paused and turned back around. "Ordinarily, I would have called you honey," he said apologetically, "but my granddaughters tell me I'm not supposed to do that anymore."

The cashier and I both giggled. "You can call me honey anytime you want to, honey," I said generously.

"Me, too," offered the cashier.

"Aw, it's just a good old world, isn't it?" he asked engagingly, and left with his milk.

Cityscape from my front porch

I took this from my front porch a few minutes ago with the wistful thought that it looked, maybe, just a little bit like Paris? Not the 7th arrondissement, which is home to the Eiffel Tower and the L'Hôtel National des Invalides, where Napoleon is interred, but maybe more like the 19th, where there are streets that look a lot like this one, as long as it's twilight. And I'm squinting. And humming something by Edith Piaf. I can see a little Paris on my street then, but that's the only time, and it is fleeting. All other times, it looks like home, which is not a bad thing at all.

Fainting from the painting

There's been a lot of this going on lately at our house. We've lived here for six years now and it was high time things were freshened up; when we moved in, the former owner had made everything all spiffy by covering it all -- chair rails, crown molding, staircase, doors, baseboards, everything made of wood or plaster he could touch with a brush or a roller -- in that shade known as Antique White. It's a buttery kind of color, very neutral and inoffensive, unless you choose that color in a very thin, flat contractor's paint which shows every finger mark, every nose print, every little bit of dirt that could possibly attach itself to a vertical surface. And it attaches in a manner that might as well have a very big sign with an arrow depicted in flashing yellow lights pointing at the dirt and screaming, "LOOK! HERE IS SOME DIRT ON THE WALL!"

It could just break your heart, especially since thin, flat paint is just about impossible to clean with Murphy's Oil Soap or Windex or water or even a little bit of spit. It all just comes off on whatever cloth you're using to wipe the dirt away, so that yes, you have managed to remove (some of) the dirt, but you also removed a splotch of your paint along with it, leaving the walls with a polka-dot appearance that I feel detracts from my home decor.

So we're painting with a lovely satin-finish taupe color (baseboards, crown molding and chair rails in a nice, crisp white) and I keep urging the dogs to press their yucky little noses against the finished walls so that I can have the pleasure of cleaning off the resultant marks.

But that, let me tell you, is the ONLY pleasure that comes from painting. The girls first showed a lot of enthusiasm for the project, an enthusiasm which flagged about an hour in on the first room.

"Painting crown molding is awful and this is just the first room!" groaned Meelyn from atop the ladder.

"At least you don't have to be all hunched over like a garden gnome painting twelve miles of baseboards," Aisling complained.

"My shoulder hurts," said Meelyn.

"My legs hurt," said Aisling.

"My legs hurt," returned Meelyn.

"My hand hurts," rejoined Aisling.

"MY EARS HURT," bellowed my husband, who was doggedly painting a very long wall attached to a very tall ceiling.

I myself was in the kitchen hallway, painting the louvered basement door, and for anyone who has ever painted a louvered door, you know that it's a good thing to start out when you're young and carefree and in the whole of your health because those louvers? With their finicky little hidden edges? Those things can BREAK YOU. Especially when they end up requiring three coats of semi-gloss paint.

We're moving along, though. This Thursday, my husband's day off, we have to start the dining room, which contains my desk, which has a hutch on top of it. And the china cabinet, another tall piece of furniture. A baker's rack, also tall although not really heavy, but loaded down with cookbooks and several bottles of wine and a number of decorative items. All those things are going to be a pain in the hindquarters to move, especially since all the china will have to be removed from the china cabinet.

But the real treat is going to be moving the three floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Fortunately, the ceiling in the dining room is only eight feet tall, compared to the ten feet in all the other rooms, but the books. Ohhhh, the books. I think there may be slightly more than seven hundred books in those bookcases, many of them wearing hard covers. I get a sinking feeling every time I see those bookcases sitting there, giving me a Mona Lisa kind of look.

Thursday may be a dreadful day. My only solace is that we can dust and re-organize everything as we're putting it back and thus accomplish an early spring cleaning. Because I am NOT moving all that stuff again. My nerves can't take it.

Well, hello! And good morning!

I just got back from a therapeutic trip to the public library, checking out a little festive fiction to put me in the Christmas spirit and just kind of take a happy little break around lunch time.

But when I got there, I realized that for some people, it isn't lunchtime, although they do seem to be taking a break in a slightly eyebrow-raising way.

I'm talking about this man I saw while I was there doing the book-checker-outer thing. He looked like he was in his early thirties. He needed a shave, but otherwise looked clean and normal and like a regular person. Except for the fact that he was wearing full-on nightwear, right down to the slippers. His slippers were that corduroy kind my grandpa used to wear and he was wearing a dapper Black Watch tartan bathrobe belted snugly around his middle. Beneath the bathrobe's lapels and hem peeked a rumpled pair of pajamas in navy blue with white piping. A rolled up copy of the morning newspaper was tucked underneath his arm and as I tracked him with my astonished gaze, mouth hanging open attractively, I'm sure, he put on a pair of sunglasses and headed for the exit.

I turned back to the automated book-checker to see a library clerk on the other side of the counter staring at his back along with me. Our eyes met in a brief, amazed glance and returned to the young man, who was walking to his car, clutching his bathrobe up to his neck against the cold wind.

"And he's not even one of the weird ones," she said knowledgeably, and nodded me a good day.

Home is where the good smells live

I took this picture last summer, so it doesn't really reflect the way the house looks now. Because now? The grass is dried up and brown and feels crunchy if you walk on it. Also, the potted and hanging plants haven't fared so well this year because of the heat: every vining petunia I have is gasping its last breath and demanding to see its lawyer to that it can jot a few more bequests into the will and all are generally looking very sad and defeated.

Meanwhile, the impatiens -- featured on the east and north sides of the house where we don't get much direct sunlight -- are holding mad, raucous parties and spilling out of their beds and containers like a bunch of lusty sorority girls, all dressed up in their pink, salmon and scarlet cocktail frocks, the little tarts.

We haven't yet set out the pumpkins and hay bales and chrysanthemums and corn shocks yet because we don't do that until October 1. But today happens to be the first welcome, blessed day that is too cold to have the windows open and so I went ALL OUT and put a pot roast with potatoes and carrots and onions in the slow-cooker and the ingredients for a 2-egg brioche in the bread maker and the house smells so luscious, I swear I just want to eat the air.

It's always nice when our house smells delicious because I'm afraid that it often smells of dog. Which I guess could be a good thing. I mean, better the smell of dog than the smell of gunpowder or crystal meth cooking merrily away on a hot plate back in the laundry room. At least the smell of dog could be considered homey and pet-friendly, if not perhaps hygienic. To cover the smell of dog, we buy lots of scented candles from Bath & Body Works and yesterday I was burning one named "Kitchen Spice" and I kept wondering if I'd forgotten something in the oven.

As nice as that candle is, it's still the smell of fake food, which is what makes today's aromas so pleasant. Home-cooked food....home-made bread....I hope the girls will come across these fragrances in later years and, in that evocative way scent works in our minds, will immediately remember that this is what Mom and Dad's house smelled like, way back when.

Little bit of Rosalind on my mind

A few random thoughts, nothing enough to write an entire post about....

The Stratford trip is coming up in a week -- ONE WEEK -- and I am flying around getting things ready for the group and for my own family. Must not, on any account, forget to call the bank and tell them we plan to use our debit cards internationally. Also would be a good idea to remember to bring passports. And I need to get the mail stopped. Wondering about As You Like It and if the actress playing Rosalind will also be able to pull off her role as Ganymede.

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In my city, tattoo places are springing up EVERYWHERE. As the recession grows worse, other businesses fail -- a small used car lot, a former dry cleaner's establishment, a Midas muffler place, a Mom-n-Pop donut shop -- and abandon their premises, leaving them open for these awful tattoo place to move in. The one in the picture above is the nicest place of all, the one place out of all of them that doesn't look you could get a free case of hepatitis B thrown in with your new ink.

One of the others, sadly, is near my house in the historic district, in a building that used to be the office for the used car lot I mentioned. The car lot was small and cute and there were always flowers planted outside in tubs and in the tiny yard. But now? Ugh. The building has been painted black and the name of the joint is painted on the outdoor sign, unprofessionally. It looks like the kind of place that might send you off with the added bonus of typhus with your hep B.

How many tattoo businesses can one city of 60,000 people support?

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Today is our first day of school. I have a junior and a sophomore. PSATs are coming up next month, SATs in February. This is our tenth year of homeschooling. The dining room table is piled nearly up to the ceiling with school books. Meelyn is doing geometry and Aisling is working on French. I am trying to summon the will to soldier through the next hour until 5:00 p.m. when I will legitimately be able to have a glass of wine. I should go fold some towels. The only problem is that the refrigerator where the wine lives is on the way to the laundry room.

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Today is Nanny and Poppy's 48th wedding anniversary -- two more years 'til the Big one. It will take at least that long to convince Poppy that Pat, Angie, my husband and I should throw them a party. It may take that long for him to agree to having a nice little write-up in the Courier-Times. I should get started on this, like, yesterday.

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The girls are practicing saying "à tout à l'heure" really fast so that it won't sound like saying, in English, "I'LL.....SEE.....YOU.....LATER!" They were laughing and laughing, but both of them stopped when I said, "I hope you'll be able to use this admittedly limited French when you're in college; it would be so wonderful if you could both go abroad to study for a semester." They both looked at me like a couple of owls. "Wow, that would be really far from home," said Meelyn, a worried look on her face. "Sacré bleu!" Aisling breathed solemnly. Awwww....they are mes petits choux, alors.

The tale of two blue pitchers

I am really drawn to two specific shades of blue -- a kind of cobalty and/or periwinkle blue. First of all, I just like to say periwinkle. It's one of those names that belongs to a fairy, isn't it? I feel that Will really missed out in A Midsummer Night's Dream by not naming one of Titania's fairies Periwinkle, although Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustard-seed are all very nice indeed.

Secondly, I have these two pitchers, both in pleasing tones. The one on the left is a new one purchased for FOUR WHOLE DOLLARS a couple of years ago. Although it's made of plastic, it has a graceful design and holds almost a gallon of shivery cold water or iced tea with lemon or whatever else you care to put in it. The other pitcher is very old, having been passed from my Grandmother Marshall to my grandma to me. It is of a more rustic design, glazed inside and out, but with no kiln mark on the bottom: my great-grandmother loved pottery and bought whatever caught her eye and I have to admit, that pitcher is a beauty. I estimate that is is maybe sixty or seventy years old? Hard to tell.

Unfortunately, neither one is very usable.

The new pitcher, the plastic one? It looks very nice sitting on the dining room table, filled up most of the way with ice and the rest of the way with water. The problem is that any liquid left in the pitcher for longer than, say, the time it takes to eat a family meal begins to take on the taste of petroleum or whatever it is that plastic pitchers are made from. Which? No, thanks. If I want to drink harmful chemicals, I'll just open up a can of diet soda.

My great-grandmother's pitcher is fashioned out of thick, sturdy clay. The very bottom of the pitcher is unglazed and the clay looks pretty red to me; could she have bought this when traveling out-of-state somewhere? The thing that worries me is the glaze, though. I wonder about the vast quantities of lead that might be leaching from the interior into our lemonade. Not to mention that the pitcher, empty, must weigh ten pounds. Yes, ten pounds. At least eight. Serving drinks to guests from that thing -- and I always picture sangria -- would cause the hostess to emit an unladylike grunt as she hefted the thing off the picnic table, and pouring would definitely be a two-hand maneuver.

So while both of these pitchers are beautiful, tinted in a hue that always suffuses me with well-being, I can't really use either one. Instead, I use a big ugly gallon container with an aesthetically offensive red lid that I got at Wal-Mart. Its functionality is unquestionable, but its appearance leaves a lot to be desired.



[I took this picture behind our house on our lovely little slate path, original to the house, which a roofer smashed into pieces just before we moved into the house by dropping a bundle of shingles on it. I'm always so torn about the clover that's growing in the cracks. One the one hand, weeds growing in sidewalks cracks is yucky; on the other hand, have you ever seen anything cuter than that clover growing in the cracks of that bit of slate?]

See this pretty flower pot?

It has taken me four years of careful tending to turn that flower pot from something that looked like a piece of crap I got at Wal-Mart for $3.99 into an object that I fondly told myself looked like a fine aged piece of Tuscan terra cotta. You can imagine the pardonable pride with which I planted that beautiful geranium, which will have fabulous pink blossoms when it blooms, and then displayed it on my front porch.

Four years of nurturing, developing that chalky and be-mossed exterior. FOUR YEARS.

It took Zuzu exactly thirty seconds to shoot out the front door like a rocket and get her leash wrapped around the little table the pot was sitting on, sending the whole kit and kaboodle crashing down the steps, table, geranium and pot flying every which way. Actually, my pot flew in about fifty different ways and low and fervent was the vulgar language emanating from my ladylike lips as I picked up the pieces and tossed them in the bin.

I kind of wanted to toss Zuzu in there, too, but we already spent that money on her shots.

Knee high by the Fourth of July

You can only imagine the deep sighs of disapproval I heard yesterday when I asked Meelyn to pull over by the side of the road so that I could get out of the van and take a picture of a little corn plant growing in a field.

The sighs were almost as gusty as the wind, which was blowing yet another chilly rainstorm over us at the time. But I am an intrepid photographer (who seems to be taking pictures of an awful lot of plants lately, hmmm...) who can brave the weather both inside and outside the minivan, so here you have this dynamic shot of corn growing in the mud underneath a grumpy grey sky.

Corn is good to eat, I can tell you that. I have no way of knowing if this particular field is going to yield sweet corn for roasting and buttering and salting or field corn for feeding the pigs. Or, you know, maybe even popcorn! In which this field would be like a wondrous dream and I would have to frolic through the mud, kissing each little plant. Which. I don't really think I'd ever do, but it was fun to type it.

Anyway, the corn is supposed to be, according to pioneer folklore, "knee high by the Fourth of July." It acutally gets much taller than that now, probably because of, I don't know....better seed? Better fertilizers and herbicides? Anyway, it's more like thigh or even waist high by the time the fireworks are going off at Memorial Park in New Castle.

For those of you who don't know about corn, did you know that it gets really, really tall? In the musical Oklahoma, corn is reputed to grow "as high as an elephant's eye," and if that's about eight feet tall or so, I'd say that an elephant's eye is a good measure. And spiders grow in it, spinning their webs between the plants, so that if you're walking through a cornfield, you can end up with a sticky mess -- and maybe even an arachnid! -- in your hair, which is something that used to make me go, "AAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!!!! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!! GETTIT OFF!!! GETTIT OFF!!!! OFF ME!!! AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!" back in my cornfield walking days, which ended precisely after I got that first spider web in my hair.

Around and around and around they go

My husband and the girls have joined a local running club, the kind of organization where some people are in there training for marathons and others are just out for some pleasant socialization as they trot along. The elite people in the group have names like Boston and New York tucked under the waistbands of their, er....very brief shorts and there's also a large crop of kids from the local high schools who run with the club in the off-season from track and field.

The group meets at a very beautiful park that is about six blocks from our house. This park is tree-filled and be-flowered, but its best feature is the running/walking path around the pretty little lake. Once around is three miles and from what I hear, this takes you past a great deal of central Indiana flora and fauna. Some of the fauna are very tame and like to come, in squirrel form, and sit on the paths waiting for a little tribute in the form of popcorn, bread or peanuts. If the treats aren't forthcoming, the runners are treated to a fervent cussing in Squirrelian.

This particular view of the little bridge and the rain-wet path and the green, green grass looked especially sumptuous to me today, the kind of view that might beckon a person into a secret garden or the land of the faerie - it looks so mysterious, doesn't it, making you wonder What could be around that bend?

As it happens, I can tell you. If you go around the bend and take the path a little farther on, maybe a quarter of a mile, you'll get to the marina, where you can rent a pontoon or a two-person paddle boat or a canoe. The comfy seat cushions double as flotation devices; life jackets are required for all boaters under the age of eighteen. You can rent a grill for an extra sum for the pontoon, but those aren't recommended for the paddle boats or the canoes. You'll just have to bring your own snacks. Unless, of course, you want to eat some meal worms from the bait shop next door. Don't go there.

On the way to piano lessons

I was driving to pick Aisling up from her piano lesson today and saw this pretty little picture at the side of the road -- the delicate wildflowers, the graceful grasses, the rugged post-and-wire fencing -- and was moved to hop out of the van and take a photo. It just looked so very Indiana, and it reminded me of Ma and Grandad's place out by Springport when I was a kid, and the way the golden patches of sunlight and the cool pieces of shade had their own beguiling way with you, out walking on the side of Prairie Road, up to the barn or down to the graveyard.

Just to prove that it really is spring...

Here is a cute little tin planter with some impatiens in it, sitting on the little French bistro set we have on the front porch.

IF IT EVER GETS WARM, the impatiens will grow bigger and spill over the edges of that container, dark pink, pale pink, green, and it will truly be a delicious little amuse yeux.

My husband and I are of sharply divided opinion on that bistro set, which is painted the palest celadon green, enhanced with spots of orangey rust. While he doesn't mind the bistro set, the rust on the table makes him occasionally black out; he can't understand why anyone who isn't a slacker, a wastrel or a layabout would purposely allow outdoor furniture to acquire a patina of rust.

I, on the other hand, find it charmingly shabby, far more interesting than a perfect chairs-and-table that one might find under an awning outside a Carmel lunchery. I like it rusted. It was that way when I bought it, actually. I saw it on a sidewalk outside an antique shop in Pendleton as I was driving through the town one day on my way to somewhere else. The bistro set was temptingly displayed with a cheerfully decrepit old mirror propped up against one chair. I was at a stoplight, and in one speedy maneuver, I whipped the van into a parking space alongside the road and said, "Meelyn! Will you hop out and see how much that bistro set is?"

She obligingly climbed out, took a look at the price tag that was dangling from one of the chairs and returned to the van's open door to say, "The whole set is $40."

Cha-ching! went my brain: It was only a week until my birthday, and so far as I knew, my husband hadn't bought me a gift yet. I yanked my phone out of my purse, hit my husband's number on speed dial and said to the girls while my phone was ringing, "Mee, run in there and ask them if they'll take a check - I don't have any cash on me. Aisling, get out and sit in one of the chairs, I don't want anyone else trying to buy it while I'm talking to Daddy."

"Hello?" my husband said.

"Hi," I said, dispensing with all further salutation. "Have you bought me a birthday gift yet?"

"Uhhh.....uhhhh....." he said, obviously casting about for the right answer, maybe even trying to remember how many days he had to go before zero hour came along to tweak his nose.

"Okay, I can see you haven't. Anyway, you just bought me a bistro set, so thank you! I love it! You're the best husband ever! Bye bye!" I hung up, giggling, as he spluttered, "Wha-...?? But....HEY!!!!"

My phone rang as I was getting out of the van.

"How much?" he said tersely, dispensing with some pleasantries of his own.

"Forty dollars," I replied lightly.

He sighed in relief. "Oh, good. That's fine. And you're welcome! Happy birthday, honey."

The girls and I had it all lovingly set up on the front porch by the time he got home from work and we were sitting out there drinking peach iced tea and nodding amiably to the people walking by on their way to the little theater that is two doors down from us.

"This is the bistro set you paid forty dollars for?" he asked dubiously, sounding a little strangled.

"Yes," I said fondly, stroking one of the chairs. "Isn't it just so Frenchy and adorable?"

"Adorable? It's rusty!"

"I know. It looks like it came straight from la Belle Époque, doesn't it?"

He snorted. "More like la belle chicken pox."

"You just don't know what's cute, that's all," I replied with dignity.

My husband tested the table to make sure it was sturdy. "Evidently not. Will I be able to put a beer on this thing, or will it all just fall right to the ground, seeing as how its eaten up with rust?"

"I'd prefer you put a glass of wine or maybe an espresso or even a cup of tea on it, but yes, it's perfectly strong. I checked it out and that's just a little surface rust. Everything else is sound. It even all folds up for storage in the winter."

He heaved a heavy sigh. "Okay. If you're happy, I'm happy. But could I just...."

I stood straight up and looked him in the eye. "NO SANDPAPER."

"Are you sure...?" He picked slightly at a fleck of rust and looked pleased when it came right off.

"None. And no Rustoleum in some awful color, either."

He looked crestfallen, having the possibility of a Fun Project taken away from him. "Well, if you're sure...." he said in resignation.

"I'm perfectly sure," I assured him. "And I'm very happy. I love my birthday present. Nobody else has one like it."

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "I bet we could find one out at the city du-..."

"DO NOT GO THERE, either literally or figuratively."

That was four years ago and he asks me every spring if he can sand it down and spray paint it, but I keep on saying no. He tells me that I can't expect it to last forever if it continues to get even rustier, but sometimes you don't want something to last forever, right? My marriage, yes, I'd do it all over again. My love for my children and family, no question. My friendships, of course. But maybe the little bistro set is just supposed to be beautiful for a while, a little time, and then when it finally just crumbles away, I'll have lovely memories of how I found it and how it looked, a little bit battered, on my front porch with a tin pail of impatiens on it.

Maybe then I'll find something I like even better.

The gift that keeps on giving

Now this is my idea of flowers for Mother's Day - the kind that last not but a few days, but for an entire season. My husband bought me these two hanging baskets of vining petunias, one of the few types of plant I cannot kill, to grace the back of our house. They're looking very pretty by our statue of St. Francis standing in front of our adorably dilapidated little fence, the one that my husband keeps insisting we remove from our property, but which I keep chaining myself to and hollering, "Nooooo....!!!!"

Later on this summer, when the petunias are spilling over their containers nearly down to the ground and the grass is a green carpet and St. Francis looks more than usually content with his position as guardian of our driveway, that scruffy little bit of fence will provide a very picturesque backdrop for the people driving down the busy street just beyond the top of the photograph.

Thank you, honey!! I love the lovely baskets!

My favorite things

This is the door that leads into our upstairs bathroom and if we ever leave this house, I'm hoping that our landlord, who is a doll, will be okay with my taking this entire door with me. I love it so much.

We only have two pressed glass doorknobs like this left in the house. The rest are either really old brass ones that could just break your heart with the polishing and all the rest are awful modern ones that have no soul at all.

But this doorknob is something special, as is the one that graces the door to the storage area off our laundry room. Every time my hand touches that doorknob, every time I see the patina on that Art Deco door plate -- every time I see the generations of paint that have been applied to that six-panel door, my heart just soars.

I just love that whole door, with an unreasoning, unrequited affection that my husband finds endearing and my children find amusing in a "Isn't she a funny old dear?" kind of way.

Is there something in your house that you love?

The view from my window

A little while back, I posted a picture of the view outside my bedroom window,

which can be seen here and if you click on that link and take a peek at the first picture, you can see that much has changed over the spring.

The verdigris bell tower on the church is still the same, but there are lots more leaves on the trees.

And as for that ineffable blue sky? Well, obviously another thing that has changed is that today? We are getting ready to have a big ol' banger of a thunderstorm. Batten down the hatches!

The view from my window

When we were thinking about moving to this neighborhood five years ago, one of the first things I noticed as we toured the house was the view out of the west window in the master bedroom.

That copper-roofed tower is connected to the historic Presbyterian church that is not quite a block away from our house -- that ginormous yellow-sided house you see in the foreground and an equally huge blue house stand between us and the church, directly across the street. The church is so beautiful, not just the building, but also the landscaping, which at this time of year is an absolute colorful riot of spring flowers. And the added bonus? Now that we have the windows open, we can hear the bells in that tower chiming every hour and half hour.

In the past five years, then, I've stood at my bedroom window in times both happy and sad and looked out at the verdigris cross on the roof of that church. It's a very pleasant and comforting sight in whatever kind of weather we're having, but especially beautiful set against the ineffable blue of a warm April morning.

No foolin'

We moved into our house four years ago today, and a happy four years it has been.

Four years ago, I went to bed in this house for the first time and I already knew I loved it -- I just wasn't sure if it would love me back. I had, after all, spoken disparagingly about its basement. And I looked askance at the practicality of having big, huge rooms with a meagre one or two electrical outlets each, but those things paled in comparison to the fact that the house was full of light with its big windows and tall ceilings and that it had a subtle air of quiet happiness about it, contentment and well-being. We could hear church bells ringing the hours when the windows were open, and children playing outdoors. It felt so full of peace. That was something we all really needed at the time, having just gone through the screaming, churning hell of bankruptcy and foreclosure; we needed a place to rest and regroup and sort ourselves out.

This house has been a wonderful place to do the sorting. This has been, so far, the best place I've ever lived.

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

We really do live in an amazing neighborhood, this historic preservation jealously guarded by the National Historic Register, which means I have to get special permission to paint my back steps their original color (dark red, very attractive with our butter-colored house) and which also means that some of the houses are so gorgeously well-maintained with their Victorian paint colors and their immaculate gardens that our house is almost embarrassed to be near them, and some houses so unutterably dreadful that a self-respecting meth cooker wouldn't squat there.

Our house, which is just a plain old mid-Victorian gentleman's residence, sits on a corner. It was built, in its current elevation, in about 1880 or thereabouts, although our living room, which boasts walls nearly eighteen inches thick, was originally constructed as a log cabin in the 1830s, according to the former owner. And then there's the basement, which looks like it's been there since Dracula was a young lad, cruising the strip with his friend, Ra Ankh-Hamen, whose internal organs were removed from his body and put into decorative canopic jars shortly before his corpse was wrapped in fine linen. I don't go down there, because mummies and vampires? I do not care to mix with their ilk.

The house next door to us is actually an apartment building, constructed in the 1920s. Back then, it was built as an upper and a lower, with the most amazing tiled fireplaces and built in bookcases and china cupboards and little leaded-glass windows on either side of the chimney piece. The same man who used to own our house also owned this apartment building, and he cleverly divided the upper and lower flats into four separate apartments, the two front apartments being large two bedroom places with the original wood floors, refinished and glossed to within an inch of their lives, and two studio apartments 'round back where the servants' and tradesmen's entrances used to be, and those were intended to serve students at the local university.

Our house is separated from the apartment building by a very narrow driveway, juuuust wide enough for Anne to creep down, hugging her side mirrors all up around her ears, as it were. This passage was originally intended only for a buggy, so it's understandable that a plump girl like Anne might find it a bit of a squeeze. The buggy shed, which used to sit behind our house in a state of wanton disrepair, was torn down in order to make room for the parking of modern cars, since it, with room only to house the buggy and the horse that drew it, was not deep enough for a newer car. While it's always nice to have an artistic horse around the place, it would be wrong to have a tumbledown building out back just for him and his easel, oil pastels and gum erasers, which would mean we'd have to park our cars on the roof.

You might wonder if I have a point to all this, and if I do, when I'm ever going to get around to letting you know what it is, so I'll tell you that this piece is about our neighbor in the lower apartment next door and her deplorable tendency to peek out of her bathroom window and into our kitchen and dining room.

This young woman and her husband and baby moved into the lower apartment a few months ago. They're a nice young couple, quiet and pleasant. This past winter, when I was outside with the dogs, she came out to sweep the snow off her generous front porch and confided to me in a honey-and-peaches accent which ended every statement in a question that she was from Florida? And had never seen snow like this before? I apologized on behalf of the entire Hoosier state and told her that this amount of snow was uncommon even for us, and that I fervently hoped neither she nor I would ever see this much again.

She seemed nice enough.

Three weeks ago on a Saturday, the girls and I were getting ready to leave for Mass, which involves a lot of gathering up of music books, and urging Aisling to hurry and urging Meelyn to stop yelling at Aisling to hurry up, and reminding Aisling to put on her shoes, and reminding Meelyn that she is not Aisling's mother and if anyone is going to yell at Aisling for trying to leave the house wearing pink pig bedroom slippers, it will be me.

Meelyn and I were standing in the kitchen and Aisling was in the kitchen, with the swinging door open between the two rooms, and I was in mid-flow in my speech about how if Aisling would put her shoes where they belonged, she'd be able to find them when she needed them, when all of a sudden, Aisling said, "Look at that lady!"

Meelyn and I looked where Aisling was pointing, and sure enough, there was our neighbor, framed by her bathroom window, gazing into our house and at us with unabashed frankness. Well, until she perceived that we could see her just as clearly as she could see us; as soon as our heads swiveled in her direction, her mouth formed a round O of horror and she immediately dropped out of sight below the windowsill. I presume she made her way out of the bathroom by crawling on hands and knees, for we saw no more of her after that.

One week to the day later, I was at the kitchen table with my back to the window, eating a bowl of tomato soup for my lunch. I was already dressed for Mass, and since I knew that a slurp of soup would be attracted to the front of my nice top the way paper clips are attracted to magnets, I had taken the precaution of tucking a kitchen towel in the neck of my blouse. It's a good thing I had, too, because just before I stood up to get another bowl of soup, I spilled a spoonful right down the very front of me, making myself look something like a gunshot victim.

I turned around to go to the stove when my attention was arrested by the fact that someone was watching as I dabbed ineffectually at my bosom. You know how you get that weird, prickly feeling? Well, I had it, so my head snapped up and I met the eyes of my neighbor across the way, looking in at my discomfiture, soup running down my front and a bowl in my hand.

Again, she got that look on her face that clearly said "Busted!!!!" I was rendered extremely peevish by this -- who does this girl think she is? Harriet-the-friggin'-Spy? -- especially at being caught at wearing a messy bib and being greedy over my soup. I reached over and smartly switched the window blind closed.

Closing the blind is not a permanent solution, though, because my kitchen is as dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta, only not as dangerous. It was built, of course, in a time when the thing that was done in a kitchen was cooking, whereas the homes of today often combine an entertainment feature as part of their kitcheny goodness. All I can say is that if anyone wants to come out and sit at the table and watch me roast red peppers or peel potatoes, they're welcome to do so, and there's a jar on top of the microwave requesting donations for my Paint the Kitchen a Tuscan Sort of Yellow Project. That should brighten things up.

So the blind is open. Right now, for instance, it is open. And, I couldn't help but notice just a few hours ago, so is the neighbors' bathroom window. As I was sitting here typing while Meelyn and Aisling were at the YMCA, I caught her at it again -- standing there as bold as brass, watching me type.

Finally, I decided that I'd just let her look. Heaven knows, it's always nice to find someone who finds you fascinating. So I jazzed up the typing, flinging my hands into the air in a theatrical manner, as if I were playing some difficult but transcendant piece on a Steinway concert grand instead of on a Dell computer keyboard. I mussed my hair into an artistic disarray and bent forward, with my nose so close, I could have typed QWERTY with it, then throwing my head back and typing like a virtuoso, helped along by Johann Christian Cannabich's Symphony No. 57 in E Flat Major, which was pouring like wine and sunshine through the speakers in the living room.

Oh, I put on a show, I did. If she's going to be such a Stary Mary, she might as well get some entertainment value for it.

I'm thinking about having my husband build a marquee above my kitchen window, with lights, and announcing daily performances:

LIVE! TONIGHT FROM THE KITCHEN! MEELYN AND AISLING DO THE DISHES!

TUESDAY AT 3:00 PM - DON'T MISS SHELLEY SCRATCHING HER UNDERARM WHILE READING THE LIST OF INGREDIENTS FOR A NEW BREAD RECIPE!

Or, more to the point:

WATCH SHELLEY TYPE A POST ON HER BLOG ABOUT YOUR MANNERLESS, NOSEY PARKER ANTICS.

Although come to think of it, she's already seen that. I don't want to go into re-runs quite so soon.

Nosy neighbor

Next door to our house is a very lovely Craftsman-era apartment building that used to be two luxury apartments (upper and lower), complete with servants' entrances, when it was built in the early 1920s, but is now four apartments. The two front apartments, upper and lower, are big, beautiful two bedroom apartments with fireplaces surrounded by hand-painted ceramic tiles, and gorgeous wood floors waxed to a glossy glow, plus ceiling beams, knacky little leaded glass windows on either side of the chimney, and re-wired original light fixtures where they could be salvaged. There are also built-in bookcases which cause me no small amount of envy. The rear apartments are one bedroom beauties with galley kitchens and little baby bathrooms with pedestal sinks.

We have lovely neighbors, all of them. We all say hello and talk in the driveway or on our porch and in spite of the fact that the upstairs front neighbor, an artist, is a very bitter ex-Catholic, he likes us anyway and always sends over gorgeous braided coffee cakes and cookies at the holidays. He also gave my husband and I each a rosary that he bought for us at the Vatican when he vacationed in Italy last fall and gave us an oil miniature of Father Christmas which is so beautiful, I couldn't bear to put it away with the other Christmas decorations and left it sitting on my desk where I can see it.

Here's my thing: the former owner of that apartment building completely restored it, putting in all new kitchen and bathroom fixtures, taking care to choose items that wouldn't be too jarringly modern in the gentle confines of these beautiful spaces. He did each apartment over with enormous attention to detail so that they'd be pleasurable to live in, but he also added some modern conveniences. Like garbage disposals. Mini washer/dryer hookups. And central air conditioning, which is an enormous boon in a building that is almost one hundred years old.

Our house, as I mentioned before, is around 150 years old. It is a wonderful house on the inside and the outside, but I wouldn't even agree to look at the inside until I found the pot of gold on the outside: a great big brand-new AC condenser. As I type, the thermostat is cranked down to a perfectly chilled 70 degrees, making me feel like a fine and cherished wine. You would not believe how nasty I am when I'm too hot. Ever had a mouthful of warm champagne? Well, I'm even worse than that. Bitter, harsh and completely incompatible with everything, with a tendency to bring tears to the eyes.

However, none of our neighbors except for our upstairs artist friend have their central air on. How could this be? Are there people out there who don't mind the heat and humidity? How could they not? How could a person wake up in the morning with the sheets kind of sticking to the legs and walk past the thermostat, yawning his or her way out to the kitchen for coffee, saying tohimself, "Oh, I don't think I need to turn that on."

This is as far from my way of thinking as it would be if I found out our neighbors slept on bales of straw instead of beds.

One neighbor told me that she only likes to turn it on when it gets into the nineties outside and is really unbearable because she "likes to hear the birds."

Don't get me wrong: I like birds as much as the next person, but if I want to hear birds in the summer, I'll get one of those clocks from the Harriet Carter catalog and it can sing to me once every hour. I want my air conditioning.

None of them ever appear to be hot and sweaty, which confounds me. Even the neighbor who is six months pregnant. It may be because they are all skinny and I'm, well...not. The last time I was skinny, I was eighteen years old and I had braces on my teeth and a bad attitude and I didn't like being hot then, either.

I don't think I'll ever understand it. But I do figure that by the time I hit menopause, we should be able to hang meat in the living room, no matter what the neighbors are doing.

Open Windows

It's hot today.

Despite a good breeze and overcast skies, it's hot. I keep looking longingly at the thermostat, knowing that if I turn on the central air in April -- April! -- my husband will be very disapproving. But I don't like being hot. It changes my personality from one that is generally cheerful to one that is morose and grumpy. Sweat is unseemly. I find harmony with the statement of Orson Welles, who, when told by a reporter that his bride, Rita Hayworth, was sweating, replied with all the biting hauteur one would expect from a cinematic genius, "Horses sweat. Ladies perspire. Miss Hayworth glows."

Orson, I understand completely. Only I don't want to do any of the three. I want to feel cool and pampered, sitting in the lovely, peaceful afternoon shade of the foyer, reading my book and drinking iced green tea. I don't mind sweating if I'm at the swimming pool because if I get too hot, I simply grab my trusty float that the girls named the Blue Burrito and go in for a cooling dip.

So we have the windows open. When it isn't hot, I love the open windows. We have lived here for two years, but I am still in awe of our windows, which are not only wide, but also tall; eight feet tall in our ten foot ceiling rooms. The noise of the downtown traffic whisking by is very soothing. Children ride by on bicycles; mothers walk by pushing strollers. The lawyers whose law firms reside in grand mansions walk back and forth from city court, swinging their brief cases, their suit jackets thrown over a shoulder. Of course, we can see all this when the windows are closed, but it feels so much more participatory in the life of the neighborhood when the windows are open.

We can also hear the church bells down the street chiming out the hours. All the windows in our house are original except for the one in the kitchen and even after all these years, they are still so well-fitted that the bells are completely drowned out, as are the sweet songs of the birds that live in the trees that line the streets. Matins, Prime, Laud, Vespers...it's all lost to us with the windows closed.

We used to have a neighbor, Nancy, who lived in the first floor flat of the Craftsman apartment building across our narrow driveway (leaded glass windows and heart-of-pine floors that have been restored and buffed to a glossy sheen), who favored the music of Carly Simon, which I could hear as I stood before my open kitchen window, loading the dishwasher.

"You're so vain," I'd sing along. "You prob'ly think this song is about you."

Unfortunately, when the windows are open so that we can hear things outside, people can also hear us. I often wonder uneasily what the neighbors think when Aisling, as tempestuous as Beethoven but without the crazy hair, sits down and pounds out Für Elise with much dramatic interpretation, her hands leaping up from the keys like frogs from lily pads, her small nose practically touching middle C. Whatever Elise this piece was für, she must be somewhere covering her ears with her hands and flinching a little bit.

I also wonder what people think when they stroll by to go to the little theater that is two doors down from our house, headed toward an evening of culture and refined entertainment, and hear the girls squabbling in their room, right next to the window.

"I didn't put it there. You put it there."

"I didn't either put it there. You put it there and I saw you put it there and you put it there yesterday and you told me you'd pick it up but you never did!"

"I never did any such thing. I always pick things up when I say I'm going to pick them up, unlike some people I could name who are so lazy and spoiled!"

"I'm not spoiled. You're spoiled!"

"You're spoiled so bad, you don't even know you're spoiled, like a big old potato!"

At this point, the passerby may well be entertained by me as I stick my head around the newel post of the stairway and attempt to make myself heard in a genteel fashion, calling, "Girls! Girls, please stop that bickering!"

There is no response, but a further vehement tirade surges down the stairs like a flow of lava.

"GI-I-I-I-IRRRRLLLLLSSSSSSS," I shriek like a banshee, "shuuuuuuuuuuutttttt uuuuuppppppppppp!!!!!"