AROUND THE HOUSE ON A SATURDAY NIGHT AFTER AN ILL-TIMED EVENING NAP

REFLECTIONS ON MATERIALISM

There are more heartwarming contexts for the phrase "the best things in life are free." Wouldn't it be nice if I was here to talk about a child's laughter or a kind gesture from a friend? But apparently I'm more materialistic than all that, because what I got for free recently was a loveseat, and that's the reason that my cup runneth over this week.

Maybe I'm just a material girl, as I tell Mark from time to time.

We didn't know the loveseat in question existed until about four o'clock in the afternoon last Saturday. I was reading ads in the free section of Craigslist (a new hobby of mine) and found one with an address about three blocks from our house. One red loveseat, left on the curb, free to anyone who would haul it away.

I was feeling like a very material girl that day. Once I'd seen the loveseat in person, I wanted it.

All well and good except that there wasn't a snowball's chance in Florida that it would fit in our car. It took about ten minutes to arrange to borrow a friend's truck, but we'd have to get over to his house and drive back to where the loveseat that was soon to be ours was sitting in the remains of the most recent snowfall. I was half afraid that it would be gone before we could get to it, and half afraid that it wouldn't be. The latter fear is the one that was realized, but by then I couldn't back out. I'd have to let my materialism run its course.

It had looked a lot smaller on the curb and even in the back of the truck than it did once we'd wrangled it into our living room. While I was feeling buyer's remorse over something we'd got for free, Mark was weighing the options. What if we pushed it up against the radiator, in front of the window, between the bookshelves, like so . . . ? We agreed to leave it there for a few days, and if we weren't satisfied, we'd cash in on the money-back guarantee.

Which, since it had been free, would mean moving the loveseat out to our own curb, at the mercy of somebody else's materialistic urges.

I had a friend over on Sunday afternoon and we sat cozied into opposite corners of the free loveseat while we drank tea and talked. It was so snug and idyllic, and I thought that maybe this had been a good idea after all.

It didn't take long to become attached (maybe re-attached, given the initial attraction) to this, the warmest, sunniest spot in the living room. A good place for reading or napping or writing, making use of a previously empty space under the window. I can hardly bring myself to sit anywhere else. I'm sitting there at this very moment.

It isn't actually materialism at the root of this story - it's the journey to making a place where all the best things can happen. The best things in life are compelling conversations, afternoon naps, long hours with a good book. All free things. And they happen on a free loveseat.

OTHER PEOPLE'S BIRTHDAYS / / / BILL PEET

I've decided to resurrect this series to celebrate the birthday of a man named Bill Peet. His birthday was on Friday, and if he was still alive, he would have turned 101.

You don't recognize his name? It's a pity, because he wrote and illustrated some of the best children's books out there: stories about trains and dragons and animals who run away from the circus or accidentally set their hair on fire. I grew up on these stories, enthralled by the things that lurked in Bill Peet's dark forests and his narrations of the secret, complex lives of creatures both real and imagined. Sometimes when I asked to have a book read to me, I was told that I could choose any book as long as it was a book by Bill Peet. Those were the best ones anyway, so I never minded.

Friday was also, coincidentally, the anniversary of the day that Bill Peet left his job at Disney. Before his career as a children's author, he worked as an animator and storywriter for many of the most iconic of the Disney studios animated movies: Cinderella, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians. He was the mind behind The Sword in the Stone, the person who drew Merlin to resemble Walt Disney and who gave the wizard Disney's own softhearted-grump persona. They became friends of a sort, Bill Peet and Walt Disney. During the early stages of developing The Jungle Book, they quarreled and parted ways. It was the last movie that either of them worked on.

Today I baked a cake with chocolate frosting in remembrance of the man whose stories filled my childhood. Here's to you, Bill Peet. Here's to your fantastic creatures and their amazing lives, to the pictures and words that helped shape my idea of what a story ought to be.

And three cheers for having an excuse to bake a cake!

To see my other celebrations of literary birthdays, click here.

IN WHICH I GIVE UP ON COFFEE

For a while I worked on drinking coffee. It seemed like an important part of navigating an adult social life, and if drinking coffee was what it took, a coffee drinker I would become. I gave it the old college try for a few months, and although I wasn't sure what goal I should be working towards (an inability to function without the ubiquitous beverage?) I worked valiantly toward something.

Valiant might be too strong a word to describe my efforts. I did develop a coffee appreciation after a while, but I never became a certified, card-carrying coffee drinker. Maybe I would have gotten there with more time. But it's winter and I need something warm to drink on cold mornings, and I felt no desire to fill my kitchen with the many accouterments of the coffee preparation process. One week I had tea at the homes of two friends, and I decided coffee had had its chance.

I went to the store. I came home with a blueberry green tea that, I'll admit, I bought mostly because I liked the tin it came in; I also bought a box with a variety of fruit teas, so that I can begin deciding my preferences. That was all it took - at home I already had a kettle, an assortment of mugs, and a small pitcher in which to keep a dedicated supply of sugar-for-tea. Tea is a simple, undemanding drink. Now I can feel like a proper adult without all the pressures that coffee drinking seemed to carry.

I've had a small painting of a green teapot on my counter for a long time, a gift from my mother several years ago. Now my small collection of tea sits alongside it, and it looks like it was meant to be. If anyone asks, I might pretend that I planned it that way all along.

IN WHICH WE GO TO CALIFORNIA AND BRING A BIT OF IT HOME

We've just returned from a week in California. All of my extended family lives in the San Joaquin Valley, and when Mark discovered that he'd be attending a conference in Los Angeles, he planned a longer trip so we could spend time in the valley. So for the first time since I was two years old, I got to spend Thanksgiving in the land where everything grows.

In the mornings there was frost on the walnut orchards that surround my grandma's house, and we ate breakfast with her in the kitchen, just the three of us. When we'd finished eating we'd usually get out a couple decks of cards and eat tangerines while we played. In the evenings my cousin and her husband would join us, and we'd eat dinner together, play more cards, and work on the enormous puzzle that Grandma had in progress. Mark and I have a longtime friend who recently moved to the valley, and one evening he made dinner for us in his apartment, and we workshopped a game concocted by my cousin, something that combined Monopoly with Risk to form a colossal taking-over-the-world endeavor. These were good times: eating, playing games, eating, and more games. A proper vacation.

And we ate well! You associate Thanksgiving with eating, of course, but this is the central valley we're talking about, and all the good stuff grows there. The tangerines and oranges that grow behind Grandma's house were becoming ripe, and there were persimmons to be picked, and walnuts -- walnuts everywhere. The main event, however, is the tangerines. I associate them with Christmas because it falls right in their prime season. As I was growing up my family visited California every December, ostensibly to celebrate Christmas with everyone out there, but the tangerines are nearly reason enough to make the trip. Thanksgiving falls early in tangerine season, but I was able to eat my way through a couple dozen during our stay.

I was seized with an idea one morning while spitting out seeds. It's too cold back in Iowa to think of planting a tangerine tree in our yard (more's the pity) but why not try growing a few plants inside? I did a little research and learned that it's unlikely for plants grown from seeds to bear fruit, but I may as well try it and hope for the best. The day that the idea struck, I saved the seeds from every tangerine I ate, but the internet told me that the plants would grow better with seeds straight out of fresh fruit, so a few tangerines came home with me intact. While I was at it, I nabbed some lemons from Grandma's tree. They're now part of what I'll call The Great Citrus-Growing Project. 

Most likely is that I'll nurse a small collection of plants that will never provide us with food; at worst none of them will grow for me at all, but at best, we'll start to have a very small-scale version of the San Joaquin Valley's abundance living in Iowa with us. We'll see. It's a nice dream, and if nothing comes of it, we'll just have to go back sometime for a few more rounds of card playing and a few more tangerines.

SAGA OF A CEILING

A complete history of our kitchen ceiling would begin long before we lived here, and would probably include many twists and turns which we know not of. We can only guess at its probable sordid past. It may have borne witness to scandal and intrigue that time has forgotten.

When we moved in two years ago, the ceiling was a poorly installed layer of something cheap and synthetic that was meant to look like wide planks and succeeded only in looking unprofessional. It also supported a light fixture that resembled a canoe. We removed the canoe and my father painted the ceiling, and while it didn't look perfect (you could still make out the outline where the light had been) it looked fine enough.

At this point the saga moves upstairs. For a while during our first year in the house, the shower preferred not to provide hot water, and had to be coerced every time, with the faucet handle cranked up as far as it could possibly go. One day Mark, in a desperate attempt to bully the faucet into working, cranked the handle just past its breaking point and, in a fit of superhuman strength, yanked the whole apparatus clean out of the wall.

The water did not stop flowing, and there was then no handle with which to turn it off. Somehow the water was now coming not only out of the faucet, but also out of the pipes inside the wall, and therefore trickling down into the inner workings of the house.

And eventually, down into the kitchen below. While I stayed upstairs and tried to divert the water out of the wall, Mark was down in the kitchen, where the ceiling had sprung a leak. He quickly ran out of buckets with which to catch the drips and was using pots and pans and mixing bowls and anything else that would hold water. (Did I mention that our wood counters were newly installed and had not yet been waterproofed?) In his spare moments he searched in the basement for the place to shut off all water in the house, and couldn't find it.

I was stuck sitting in the bathroom holding a cut-off piece of a plastic bottle, with which I was able to redirect about half of the water from the pipe in the wall into the tub; the rest was fueling Mark's panic below as our kitchen became increasingly waterlogged. Finally a plumber arrived in response to a frantic phone call, and he, with his plumberly insight, found the place to shut off the water almost immediately.

After he'd installed a new handle on the shower faucet and gone, we started to wonder if there wasn't a pool of water still lurking inside the kitchen ceiling. While a ceiling full of holes wasn't an appealing idea, the thought of the things that might begin to grow out of sight in the dampness appealed to us even less. Mark drilled into various parts of the ceiling and released even more fountains of water into the strategically placed pots and pans. Eventually we were convinced that we'd evicted the worst of it, and we put up fans to dry out the rest.

For over a year the ceiling looked like someone had attacked it with a few rounds of buckshot, which is good fodder for tales of a fictional kitchen showdown, but not the look we were going for. Until now. Now, finally and at long last, there is a very smooth, very beautiful, altogether unremarkable new ceiling in our kitchen. I would not formerly have suspected how much deep satisfaction this would bring. After all, who comes into a kitchen and looks up? No one besides us will notice it at all, which is how it ought to be with a ceiling.

The man who installed this shimmering masterpiece did the work while we were out of the country, so we returned after two weeks away to find all evidence of past escapades completely erased. As far as anyone can tell, the kitchen ceiling has been a bland wasteland all its life. The ghost of the canoe is gone and the holes exist no more.

And those were souvenirs we were glad to be rid of.

IN WHICH WE HAVE RETURNED HOME FROM FOREIGN PARTS

"The summer that I turned twenty-four," it will say in the history books, "my parents took all of their children to England for two weeks." But things get left out of history books, so I feel the need to keep some records of my own.

What stands out in my rememberings on this, the second day back in Iowa, are these things:

The woods in the English countryside are dense, and the roads slip through them politely, not wanting to disturb the native greenery, carving out only as much space as is needed for the cars to pass through, sometimes barely enough. Things are old in England, and everyone lives with and uses the old things, but not so much because they revere the old - just that they've always been cohabiting with the oldness and there doesn't seem to be any reason to push out a roommate who has been minding his own business for hundreds of years and keeping the rain out just fine, thank you very much.

And then London, where you mostly walk around inside the 21st century but the 15th century pops in for a visit every few blocks, and underneath it all there is a parallel world called the tube that is a law unto itself.

At some moments England didn't feel very foreign - people, cars, trees, grocery stores - nothing unusual. When you ask for a band-aid and then have to explain that what you want is a small adhesive bandage and learn that what you're looking for is a plaster, then it seems that you've emerged by accident into some near-miss version of the real world. The road signs gently ask you to "give way" instead of commanding you to "yield!" but somehow that gentleness fails to offer the guiding presence you've come to expect from road signs, and you find yourself wishing that whoever made the signs wouldn't have assumed (wrongly) that you need only gentle nudges to reach your destination, and would instead treat you like the incompetent fool that American highway engineers intuitively know you are. 

We only explored a patch of the bottom third of the country, and we focused our time particularly in London, so I think it's disingenuous to think that we've seen England. We saw some of it, at least, and I understand now why the English write about the world in the way they do. The world feels a certain way over there - old, small, interconnected and leisurely, unless you're in London, which might be its own universe.

I can't explain why being home now is so good. I felt when I was there that I could have lived happily to the end of days in a tiny English village, but Iowa feels more like home than it ever has after our sojourns on the other side of an ocean. My old house is young in the eyes of the ancient buildings we've now seen, and it knows me in a way that those stone giants never could. I loved that world, but I didn't belong there.

And now again we have yield signs and band-aids. Simple comforts.