Today I want to share with you a few images of my joy, my bane, and my constant project: our home. It seems only fitting to break my month-long silence with these photos, since the primary reason for the silence has been using my weekends to work on our house instead of doing things like blogging. (In my ideal world, I would manage to fit quality time with family and friends, chores, house beautifying, creating, and blogging all into every weekend. Unfortunately, this world does not exist.)

Considering that I have lived somewhere different every fall for the last five years (and very likely will live somewhere else next fall as well), it is perhaps understandable that I have a love/hate relationship with setting up house. As an order- and beauty-loving creature, I cannot help but desire to make the space I live in orderly and beautiful (and be stressed out when it is disorderly and ugly). But when it takes half a year for bits and pieces of time to add up to a semi-ordered house, the project becomes frustrating—especially when, as in our last apartment, we might have to pack up and leave right as the pieces are starting to fall into place.

This frustration, as trivial as it is, seems to be just another echo of our Deep Frustration: everything we strive after in this life is susceptible to moths, rust, thieves, and death (along with mold, unforeseen circumstances, and our own sin). And the solutions to both seem the same: to continue striving as best we can, and to remember Who has promised to save us from this life of frustration. So I will continue taking steps to set up our home wherever it may happen to be, and I will continue trying not to forget that setting up a perfect home is not the ultimate goal toward which I should be striving.

Here is some of what I have done lately. (For a few more photos see the full set on Flickr.)

I set up our creative area (which is a corner of our bedroom):

The pockets under the window were a gift from Gil’s parents (who have apparently completely pegged my style ). I am using them currently to store my scraps of pretty paper out in plain sight. The white bookcase with all my crafting supplies and books on it is resting on two file cabinets that my Dad helped me renovate last summer; I spray painted them yellow, and he made the wooden bases and tops for them. Here’s a better shot of them:

I originally had the table and chairs from this post against the wall opposite the file cabinets, but as suspected victims of the mold-tastrophe (and, frankly, big space-hogs that accumulated clutter), I decided to bid them farewell. Instead, I set up my little blue armchair and a bookcase full of notebooks, magazines, and art supplies. This has turned out to be far more conducive to creativity then a table piled full of said notebooks, magazines, and art supplies.

Moving on to our living room/entryway… Here’s a view looking from the middle of the living room, out over the couch and towards the front door.

Next to the door is the sewing machine that I mentioned in this post. As you can see, I don’t have the typewriter on it anymore. I only recently set up those wire cubes next to it… they aren’t the most aesthetically appealing thing in the world, but they successfully keep all that clutter from being all over our dining room table and coffee table instead. So, in that light, they are quite lovely.

Now, turning around and facing the living room over the back of the couch:

The mantle decorations and the little turquoise bookcase are my newest additions to the living room. Here’s a better view of the mantle:

I pulled this together from odds and ends that I scrounged around our house to find; hence its ecclectic nature. But I am nonetheless pleased with how it turned out. (A couple of you may recognize things that you have sent/given me in this arrangement. ) Here’s a closeup of the buttons under the (backwards) canvas frame:

And here, for those of you who follow me on Twitter or are Facebook friends, is the result of the bookcase renovation Dad and I were working on earlier this summer (in this shot, looking out from the bathroom door into the living room):

I have to say, I’m crazy about this little bookcase. It was a piece of garbage when I found it at St. Vinny’s, but by adding trim to the sides, top, and bottom and painting it this scrumptious shade of blue, it is completely transformed. (And I couldn’t help but choose books to put on it by color. Because, really. Just look at it.)

So, those are all the photos I have to share for now. At some point if it’s clean enough I may take photos of the rest of our house too. I hope you are all well, and enjoying your transition into the beautiful season of fall. (Even if it feels like summer was too short!)

It’s the first and easiest question to ask an acquaintance this time of year: How is your summer going? Around these parts it seems especially on the tip of everyone’s tongue because our summer (unlike, apparently, the poor rest of the country’s) has only just arrived. The sun and (semi) warmth are very welcome visitors after this incredibly rainy year, and you can see the lift they put in everyone’s step.

But that does not necessarily make it an easy question to answer. A good friend asked me how our summer was going just last night, and I had to pause—what have we been doing this summer? It feels like a blur of workdays and weekends, unfinished projects and unmet goals, and good intentions to hang out with friends that have not yet come to fruition. The sad truth is that this, my first summer not a) facing another year of school in the fall or b) planning a wedding, feels… just like the rest of the year.

When I was a kid, summers were about building imaginary trains out of lawn chairs in the backyard and riding around the neighborhood on my bike. In middleschool and highschool, they were about catching up on unfinished schoolwork and tagging along with friends to creeks and swimming holes. In college, summers meant a whole variety of things (including shooting weddings, for a couple of those years) that all amounted to counting the days until we started classes again.

Now, I’m having to learn a new year-rhythm: Working for five days (or sometimes more) and then resting (theoretically) for two. Counting the seasons not by school terms but by changes in weather and scenery and produce available at the farmer’s market. Enjoying summer not as a break from responsibility but as an infusion of warmth and encouragement to keep going with the responsibilities that won’t let up as the year goes on.

If I make this sounds gloomy, I don’t mean to. It’s true that in some ways this new rhythm is stymieing to the projects I would like to work on and the friends I would like to spend time with, but in others it is a great relief from the pressure of impending school deadlines. And it it is certainly not without its moments of levity or joy, or its opportunities to create (even though every weekend feels nine times too small to fit in everything I would like to). Here are some of the things besides working that Gil and I have been up to this summer:

• Reading books. Gil, for his thesis, has been reading many books on the structure of story, especially those by David Mamet, Joseph Campbell, and Owen Barfield. I have been taking a bit of a break from the heavy-duty nutrition literature I had been reading, instead currently reading The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. (And we’ve both been reading the plentiful supply of superhero graphic novels Gil keeps flowing through our house from the library. Just in case you forgot we were nerds.)
• Watching movies. In keeping with Gil’s reading, we went on a David Mamet movie kick early this summer. His movies have been hit and miss with us. I would most highly recommend The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main. Gil would most highly recommend Redbelt, because he is a martial artist. Our latest movie kick is somewhat less cultured but a whole lot of fun: Marvel superhero movies. We’ve watched Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2. Now we just need to see Captain America and we’ll be all set for The Avengers next year.
• Cozying our cottage. As part of our recovery (thank goodness) from our latest mold-tastrophe, I have been getting, one by one, to those projects that I just kept putting off—purging and organizing our closets, sorting through years-old school binders and chucking most of the contents, and finally setting up my creative corner. I have also, with the help of my dad, been renovating a little bookcase I found at St. Vinny’s earlier this year. I hope to have photos of it soon.
• We’ve also both been working on personal projects; trying to write more, draw more, exercise more, etc. And I have been mulling and mulling over my thoughts about nutrition as all the reading and talking about it I have done meet the day-to-day act of actually eating food. It is a complex and (I think) important topic, and as soon as I can figure out in what form to do so, I hope to share some of the “mulling” I have done.

So… that is our summer thus far. I hope that whatever “season” of life you are in, you are finding ways to enjoy this summer too.

(Unless you live in the southern hemisphere. In which case, well… I hope you enjoy summer when you get to it.)

One year ago last Saturday, in the beautiful wilderness of Mt. Pisgah, Gil and I were married:

Our first year has been filled with work and school and “fun” adventures like moving and fighting mold (and our fair share of skirmishes, I’ll be honest), but all in all the vast majority of the problems we’ve dealt with this year have come from outside our relationship and not from within it—for which I am very thankful. I would marry him over again in a heartbeat.

Last weekend, we used our camping supplies (many of which were wedding gifts) to camp out on property belonging to some very gracious friends of ours. So on the morning of our anniversary, we were in the forest once again:

Here are our silly camping faces:

Campfire coffee with raw milk (YUM):

A campfire cutie:

We came home Saturday and spent the weekend watching movies and eating the rest of our S’more fixings. Oh, and ordering a Dehumidifier, which is currently sitting in our house doing its duty. (It filled its full 30 pints on our first day using it! Yikes. But it makes me glad we have it.)

And, finally… no, I didn’t quite finish my thank-you notes on time. I am deciding to forgive myself for this. I hope, if you are one of the (gulp) many who will hopefully be receiving your thank-you notes in the next week or two, that you will forgive me too.

Did you hear that? It was a huge sigh of relief. Order is finally being restored to our little cottage in wake of our mold issues, and after a nine day stretch at work which I concluded this evening, I have FOUR days off to spend with my sweetheart as we celebrate the first anniversary of our wedding (this Saturday, already). And so, because I am ready to get down to the business of putting our house back in order and then relaxing, I have just a short post for you tonight.

I wanted to share one of my favorite photos, which I have never posted here:

(view larger)

I took this almost two and a half years ago, during a season of transition and re-evaluation in the middle of my Gutenberg career. (It was, actually, just before Gil and I started getting to know each other. Hmmm.)

Those familiar with this walk will have recognized it immediately, but that red, pointed-roofed building in the background is the school I called home for four years, and that wonderful gnarled-wood fence in the foreground belonged to a Jewish family who lived down the street from it. That family recently moved (and they took their fence with them), and soon Gutenberg students may not live in that red brick building either. Time clips along, and people and their belongings move in and out of these places we call home.

Yesterday we drove by a building in which our church met when I was a little girl. I’ve driven by this building often, and not often thought about it. But yesterday I happened to catch a glimpse in one of the windows, and suddenly I could smell the carpet on the staircase—I could taste the nerves as I waited backstage for my part in a children’s play—I could feel the weight of those red hymnals on my lap and the pride I felt at raising my voice in song (more clearly and beautifully than anyone else’s, I hoped). Years melted in that glance.

This photo, that experience, and the effort Gil and I have been putting into making our current home home, have left me with half-baked, percolating thoughts about home, and what it means, and these strange ties that we have to buildings and objects in this life. We can’t, after all, take it with us—and yet spaces have this strange power to bottle up our memories within their walls and hand them back to us when we come back to them.

Anyway. Half-baked, as I said. Do with them what you will. And please feel free to add any of your own thoughts (baked or otherwise)—I look forward to hearing them.

Already I neglect my blog-posting schedule. Maybe you didn’t realize I had a schedule, but I do, and I’ve been neglecting it. It is just hard to know what to post when everything going through your head is a hissing, snarling, complaint about your “terrible life.” (As if.) You know the saying: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. So I haven’t been.

It is also hard to write a blog post when all of your spare moments are spent trying to bring some semblance of order back to your upturned house.

Let me explain. Everything needs attention in order to thrive—even the backs of closets and the bottoms of mattresses—and MOLD has become the character that sneaks into my life and seems to punish me for my inattention to such details.

It began in our first apartment, which we moved into last summer. I don’t remember when exactly we found and fought the first outbreaks of mold in that apartment, but afterward we tried to keep the air circulating and dry—especially in the bathroom. But it only got worse, culminating, in January, with the discovery of copious mold on the wall behind our bed, covering the boards of our bed frame, and on the bottom of our mattress. This explained why Gil, with his allergies, was starting to wheeze—and it was the reason we beat a hasty retreat from that apartment, carefully discarding or cleaning any of our moldy items, and landed instead in our adorable “cottage in the woods.”

Imagine our dismay, when, a few weeks into living here, we found that my Birkenstocks had molded in the closet. Had molded in the closet—or were moldy when we brought them with us? Either is possible, though the second is more likely. In any case, I had to throw them away and pray they hadn’t spread to anything else.

Long story short, we found mold on a few other items before we finally checked under our mattress and found that the mold had re-grown right where we killed it. So we did what we should have done before: we hauled our memory-foam mattress (a wedding gift from my parents) to the dump. And now we’re sleeping on an old mattress of my parents’ that they happened to have around—currently on our living room floor, while we finish cleaning and airing out the bedroom.

Now, I realize that on the scale of possible life catastrophes, this whole thing really only registers on the side of “slight nuisance.” But the fact is that while we’re here in the thick of it, it’s making me want to tear my hair out, scream, and hide under my covers until it all goes away. (Because I am still five years old.) Every time I come home from work and look at the contents of closets and shelves that have been shaken out across the floor, I feel stress rise inside me like a tsunami. Everyday chores (which I have a hard enough time with, as you know) still need to be taken care of, but I can hardly walk two steps without tripping over a laundry basket or pile of books: my nightmare situation. Couple that with the niggling fear that even after we sort this all out and put everything away we will somehow have missed some mold or that it will come back, and this is all just a recipe for headaches.

But.

Enough complaining—even in the midst of this frustrating mess, I can see (if I look very carefully) that it is in many ways a blessing. I thought about this as I was vinegar-and-tea-tree-oil-mopping  the bedroom floor the other night. Let’s start with little things: I have been wanting to finish cleaning and organizing our house for ages, and now it’s being forced to the forefront of my attention. Also, now I don’t have to worry about the mattress all the time anymore.

But there are bigger things, too: this is all a reminder, as Dad pointed out to me, of why it is good that our treasures are not on this earth. On this earth, thieves, or rust, or moths, or mold can and will take even our most precious possessions away. Dealing with all this can’t help but loosen my hold on all of our stuff; especially when I have to get rid of things I never would have imagined throwing away. And that perspective, I think, is a real blessing.

Also, I just have to say that my husband has been incredibly helpful with this whole process. In addition to helping with all the tasks that need to be done, he has been ever the anchor keeping me from running around squawking and flapping my arms. It is a blessing to have such a partner, and it is a blessing to be reminded what a blessing that is.

———

P.S. Any advice you have for dealing with mold would be greatly appreciated. What I have gleaned so far, from articles like this one: a) don’t use bleach, because it makes mold come back quicker, b) mold needs moisture to grow, so focus on keeping things DRY and well-ventilated, and c) mold spores are everywhere in the air, so don’t even think about trying to totally remove them from your space. Just focus on making it so there’s nowhere for them to grow.

Does anyone have anything to add to this? Specifically, do you have any advice for how to keep difficult areas, like the bathtub and shower curtain liner, dry? Thank you in advance.