IN WHICH I PICK TULIPS AND THEN TAKE AN ABSURD NUMBER OF PICTURES

ON TAKING OFF PAINT AND EATING MY WORDS

After spending hours spread out over months on the room I call the studio, I said I would never take on such a project again. What made the studio such a big job was my determination to do everything in the best way possible, and it seemed like stripping all of the five layers of old paint from the baseboards and the trim around the windows and doors was the best way. All of that's behind me now, and I can't say with any certainty whether all that work was necessary.

Go ahead, ask me what I'm working on now. Yes, I'm stripping many layers of paint off the baseboards and trim in another room, eating my words every day. Never is a dangerous, portentous word.

I've tried various methods, but the one I prefer is to pry the old paint away from the wood with a tool intended for applying putty. It's mostly slow going and results in a lot of paint-chip debris all over the room, and after so many hours devoted to the task, I feel like I ought to have made it into a metaphor with far-reaching implications for life - peeling away old layers to make way for new, working endlessly without knowing when to call it good enough and move on to the next step, cleaning up after a day's work only to litter the room with shards of decades-old paint the next day. Maybe I should be contemplating all the work that was done by people who are long gone, considering what it means for me to be undoing their work, wondering who they were and how they decided on the precise shade of blue that occurs between layers two and four. 

Today I have a small visitor napping upstairs, so I'm left to muse about the work instead of getting it done. And I'm trying to decide why I started on this project in the first place. There's no one checking up on my work or grading the finished project, but it turns out that it's harder to report to yourself than to someone else. With no one to say how good is good enough, I keep working, always thinking that I'm close to done, always telling myself just a little bit more and then you can start painting . . .   

When this bedroom is finished, I am never scraping paint off of anything ever, ever again.  

IN WHICH I SPEND A LOT OF ENERGY ON SOMETHING OF MINOR IMPORTANCE

I've learned from adventures in having-a-house that small things can be more bothersome than big things.

A day or two after we moved in I started to pull off wallpaper at one end of the living room.  I pulled off a lot of it, actually; more than I intended to, and more than I should have. And then we realized that the wall underneath was a mess, and the wallpaper removal wasn't going to be a picnic either. So we pushed that off for future consideration. Mark sometimes calls it the "designer distressed wall," but it really just looks like an abandoned, half-begun project. It's looked like that for a year and a half.

The wall doesn't bother me at all. The tiny, unphotogenic coat closet off the kitchen - that has been a consistent downer, especially during the winter, when we make trips to the closet daily. Months ago I started painting the inside of the closet white, but I stopped halfway, mostly because it wasn't improving anything.

I had a lot of paint, of a dark, almost-black color left over from a project last year that was never finished. (Do I do this often?  Yes, constantly.) In much more recent history I had a brilliant idea for using that paint. I'd fix the problem of the unattractive closet.

It's a small thing in a not-so-small house, but there's something satisfying about hanging one's coat in a posh-looking closet. Making your closet look posh is simple: a few coats of navy blue paint will do the trick.

Oh, and keep your spare lightbulbs in baskets.  That helps too.

ARIE AND THE COUNCIL OF THE WOODEN BIRDS

This is Arie.  In the past few months he and I have gotten to know each other quite well; I go to his house twice a week to keep tabs on him while his mom teaches art.  On the days I don't see him, he goes to the house of a small friend.  Three days out of the week he has a playmate his own age; the rest of the time he has me.

Last week his small friend was visiting family out of town, so Arie and I got to see each other every day, and he came to my house.  Arie calls it "my house" too, not because of any misunderstanding on his part, but since I always refer to it as "my house," he's deduced that that's the name of the place.  In our conversations he calls his own home "your house" for the same reason.  Pronouns are hard when you're two.  

In my house, a collection of wooden ducks and one wooden goose lives among the books on the shelves in the living room.  Three of them were my grandma's and presided over the bookshelves at her house, and one came from Mark's mother to round out the collection.  I like to think the wooden birds add sophistication to the room, but maybe they just give the impression that I have a strange fixation with ducks.  Most adults don't say anything, but no one younger than three who has visited has failed to comment.

Arie was particularly interested.  I brought the ducks and goose down from the shelves one at a time until they were lined up in a row, all looking at Arie, as though he had been called to appear before the Council of Wooden Birds and was speaking to them about important matters of state.  He sat with them for a long time (as time is reckoned with two-year-olds).  He counted them carefully (with varying results - sometimes four, but often five) and seemed quite comfortable in his position as ambassador to the Bird Council.  The birds, if I read their wooden expressions correctly, approved of Arie as well.

IN WHICH MARK SHOVELS SNOW WHILE I TAKE PICTURES

IN WHICH WE DISCUSS NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS (AND TIME TRAVEL)

I only made a few resolutions last year, but one of them was to read 100 books (which maybe ought to count for more than one).  By the end of the year I had read almost forty books, which, by the numbers, sounds like failure. What I liked about last year was that I spent a lot of time reading.  It didn't feel like failure.  Even so, I'm making the same resolution again to see how much better I can do.

What I like about New Year's resolutions (besides getting to make a list, which I dearly love) is the process that goes with it: thinking about all that unknown future time in which you might do amazing, wonderful things. Resolutions are glimpses into a possible future - nearly as exciting as time travel!  You're imagining yourself one year older, by then having become a self who has done All The Exciting Things On The List.  I started compiling my resolutions back before Christmas; I was that eager to plan out my List Of Exciting Things.

Not that things like reading a lot of books sounds exciting to anyone besides me.  Lots of people to whom I've mentioned this goal have skipped enthusiasm and gone directly into questions about what "counts" (could I just read one hundred picture books? they ask curiously).  They've gone off the rails and sidestepped the point entirely. Nothing will happen if I don't meet my goal; I'm really just attempting to beat myself at my own game.  I make the rules and play both sides of the board.

For 2015 I made fifteen resolutions, which in itself feels pretty stretchy.  The list reads like a series of ultimatums. (I'm a harsh taskmaster.)  It's like being handed the syllabus on the first day of class: "You will write a ten-page paper on the classic American novel of your choice," while you think, Will I, now?  I looked over plenty of syllabuses with a sinking feeling, but there was always the possibility that in a few months I would have done all the assignments, currently uncompleted, with such unrivaled panache that all future syllabuses would bear my name.  

All the naive ambition that went into writing my fifteen resolutions is what I want to keep with me throughout the year. The list is a time capsule from a time when I thought, This is possible!  I may end up laughing at my past self who thought I could tackle fifteen separate resolutions (when just one of them was to read 100 books) - but I may emerge triumphant!  Only time will tell!

SHOUTING IN THE DARK AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WHOLE

It's odd that we put so much stock in the passage of one year to the next - which, after all, is just one day passing into another.  But that is what all momentous things are: singular moments that stand for more than themselves.  Looking back on an entire year is an oversimplification by necessity.  We take the moment between days and make it stand for the old year and the coming one.

So here: I'll play this game.  I'll choose one moment that defines the year.  It's ludicrous to make one story stand for twelve months, but will my admitting that it's ludicrous make things better? At least all my cards are on the table.

Mark and I went to a movie a few months ago, just because.  We looked up the movies that were showing and picked the one that sounded most promising, knowing nothing about it.  (May I note: this is the best way to go to a movie.  Great expectations often lead to great disappointments.)

We enjoyed ourselves.  We were almost the only people in the room, and when the credits rolled, the three or so other people left pretty quickly.  As is our habit, we stayed and discussed the plot and the characters and the general execution of the movie, and a dark room with comfortable seats is one of the best places for such discussion.  (We often lie in bed at night and hash through the plots and plot holes in various stories, which explains why we are so sleep-deprived.)

And the exciting end-of-movie music was playing, and it was just us, so there was no point in keeping our voices down.  After a while we started reading off names from the endless reel of credits.  "Peter Chadwick!" we said to each other.  "Theodora Windelsen!  Second assistant to the cameraman, and an excellent job of assisting it was!"

All the way to the end we sat there, shouting out as many names as we could read off and extolling the efforts of each.  It was late and we were having a good time and getting sillier as it got later.  While it was freeing to be shouting into a dark, empty room, it was also humbling to think that we were sending out our punch-drunk praises to real people.  This movie upon which we had spent a few spare hours - it had been assembled by a huge army.  At some point we passed from giddy exuberance into genuine appreciation of the work that had been done.  Gordon Fines, whoever he is, had worked hard at being the best boy grip, whatever exactly that entails.

Lots of things happened last year, of course.  It was twelve whole months.  As surely as it takes an army to make a movie, it takes days piled upon days to make a year.  You can't commend everyone, but you can call out as many names as the upward crawl of credits will allow.  I'll mention watching Olympic figure skating at the house of friends, running through a field on a summer evening after participating in a wedding, caroling at the house of neighbors who stood on their porch barefoot in the freezing cold and not only sang along, but harmonized - and you'll know that what I'm really talking about is something too complex to be neatly summarized.  Some parts were terrible.  Some parts were worth remembering.  One time, we shouted appreciations to an empty room.

And now, we start again.