pegboard, domesticated

In the background of this picture you will see one of the greatest ideas I have ever had:

It's a pegboard.  But it's a pretty pegboard.  One worthy of many-colored spools of thread.  One that I'd be proud to have in the background of photos of my "sewing room". 

So I'll tell you about it, since of course now that you've seen my wonderful pegboard you want one too.

Here's the problem with pegboard in its wild state:

It's...just...it looks like it would be so lovely above the workbench in the garage, but elsewhere, not so much. But, being fiberboard, it takes paint beautifully, and so the first step is to grab a hunk of pegboard and paint it in a color that matches, or coordinates with, or accents, or whatevers, your room. 

Then, you'll want to rip all the chair rail moulding off of your living room walls...or, I guess, you could go down to Home Depot and get yourself some new moulding.  If you're into that type of thing.  And if you think chair rail moulding in a living room makes any sense and you want to leave yours intact. 

Now just choose the parts of the moulding least damaged by your removal technique, and cut the ends at a 45 degree angle with your miter saw.  Make sure you cut two sets that are the same length each.  Course, I guess, if you wanted like a hexagonal pegboard that's your business, but do send me a picture, okay?

Here's what we're going for right here:

And as you can see, my pegboard could benefit from a few paint touchups.  Even scuffed up, though, the white is a lot better than the melon color it was when I pulled it off the walls. 

The way you make a picture frame is pretty straightforward.  Cut two matching sets of molding at 45 degree angles, slather glue on the cut ends like your life depends on it, and clamp them all together.  I used a "band clamp" which looks so exactly like the ratchet-y tie-downs that Father Bird uses to strap stuff to the back of the truck that I wonder if they aren't interchangeable.  It's just a strap that goes all the way around, and cinches down tight to hold your frame together until the glue dries.

After that it's a matter of cutting the pegboard to be just smaller than the outside of the frame:

But not smaller than the inside of the frame.  Glue around the edges of the pegboard, place the whole shebang face down, and pile canned items in the middle of the pegboard's back to hold it down while the glue dries.  A stack of books will also do nicely. 

When you hang this sucker, make sure there's space between the holes and the wall, so that the hooks (which you buy in an assorted pack for a ridiculously low price at a hardware store) will have a place to sit.  To this end, I screw a little strip of wood to two wall studs, then screw through two of the pegboard holes into the strip.  And then stand around figuring out which hooks I want where.  And whether to organize my thread by color or amount left on the spool, or type, or brand....

~MB~

maps

I'm reading a book, The Scientist in the Crib, about the research that's been done into how babies' and childrens' minds work.  The authors discuss how the pathways in our minds are built from the time we're very small, and how the more an experience is repeated, the stronger a connection will be, and it reminded me so exactly of what we're doing right now in this stage of the moving process. 

We moved into our house on a pouring-rain evening a couple of weeks ago, and I held in my hand, as it were, my map of the area.  It was completely blank, except for one little dot in the middle of the page labeled "home".  The rest of the map was filled with fantastic sea serpents.  "Here there be dragons," I could just make out at one end.  I did have a very faint map from the time we lived here before, but it was from two towns over and at least four years old. 

So I cowered inside my house for a few days, making very sure everything in here was in its place, not looking outward, because I didn't know how to get anywhere.  But before long, as will happen with cooped-up children, my little people started climbing the walls and making me feel like climbing the walls myself. So I scrawled a set of directions on the back of a Costco receipt, squared my shoulders, and ventured out.  And we drew a faint, hesitant line outward from our "home" dot.  The first place we went was here:

(You have to love the two different tennis shoes)

When we're in an unfamiliar place, we try to find something that will put us at ease.  So the first pathway we laid down was to very familiar place.

After we'd found our library, it was time to draw little lines to all the other places we regularly go.  We needed a couple of grocery stores, a church, fabric stores, a beach or two, a line up the coast to the house where our cousins live, and one down the coast to the museums at Balboa Park.  Bit by bit our map is growing outward, like the slow capillary creeping of a juice spill soaking up into a paper towel thrown over it.  And it's a funny map, really, because the lines that are the thickest, the blackest-with-ink, the lines that threaten to bleed through the paper to the other side, aren't necessarily the freeways, like they'd be on a regular map.  They're the much-loved, well-worn tracks from our home to the beach, to the fruit stand, to the library, and, always, home again. 

Our map reminds me a little of the handwriting papers my younger sister used to bring home from school.  She was so careful and intense that she drew letters on her pages that could be read like braille from the back. And, after all, the map really is like the connections built in our brains when we're little.  At first we cling to directions given us by someone else, then we make maps of our own, and soon we can read the map with our fingers like braille while we look somewhere else.  After a while we won't need the scrawled instructions anymore, but would be able to drive our beaten paths blindfolded if we had to. 

And we find that there are, in fact, no dragons, no sea serpents, but a place that is, in all the ways fundamental to us, very similar to the place we've just left.  Oddly enough, we also find that all the places we've been, all the maps we've drawn before, are not separate from the one we're drawing now, but are countries on the map that's drawn on the flyleaf of the book of our lives.  It's a map that has many discovered countries, but also many that are unexplored. 

So we continue onward, pushing out the boundaries of what we don't yet know, and deepening the tracks of what we do, all our lives drawing out our maps.

~MB~

on friendship

Just over a year ago, I was in my garage working on the last house touch-ups before Father Bird's family came for Christmas.  It was a steel-gray day, and I was bundled up against the cold, cutting lattice for the screened porch with my circular saw.

I didn't hear my closest friend's car driving carefully down my long driveway.  She was out of the car and coming toward the garage before I saw her.  I put down the saw and came out to meet her.  She was leaving for Christmas and I was going to take care of her chickens and bring in her newspaper while she was gone.

"Here are the keys," she said.  "The chicken feed is in a bin in the garage.  And, when we get back from the holidays...we'll be moving away."  Just like that.  Something about a new job, in a faraway state, and I murmured congratulations and turned back to cutting lattice with a throat that was suddenly thicker than before.  The sawdust must have gotten in there and made it feel tight.  Yes.  That was certainly it.

I know that there are people who have many friends.  I'd hazard that most halfway-sociable people have many friends.  I am, and I suppose I'll always be, a one-friend person.  That's not to say I don't have many acquaintances, but very few of them reach "dear friend" status.  I do not know why this is.  How lovely would it be to have two people that you could call when you feel a migraine coming on, to say, "I don't know where my children are, and would you please come take them home with you for the night?" and know that they would come?  I don't suppose I'll find out, because for some reason friendship for me is a serial proposition, not parallel.  There seems to be room in my heart for only one dear friend at a time. 

It must be exhausting to be friend to a one-friend person.  I suppose if you didn't know it wouldn't be as worrisome, but can you imagine the pressure that's placed on a friend if she knows she's all you've got?  What if I do not come when you have a migraine?  Who else is there to come, after all?  A one-friend friend cannot fail. 

When my beloved friend moved away a year ago, I carried a private ache around with me for weeks.  It felt a little like losing a tooth used to feel.  I knew that before long another tooth would grow in its place, that I'd be able to go on chewing with my other teeth in the meantime, but now, in the moments after the tooth was lost, there was a raw spot, a little bleeding.  I wanted to keep my mouth shut so no one would see, would ask, would poke around and sympathize.  I wanted to nurse my hurt all alone, to take surreptitious glances in the mirror to see how the loss had changed me.

Soon, as I knew would happen, another friend did grow into that spot, and the bleeding, tender place became a quiet memory.  I had not forgotten my first friend, though she was far away, but my new friend was here, was standing in my one-friend-sized friend slot, and oh, how I loved having her there.  She was the one I could call when my day was going haywire, and she would steady me.  She called me when things were nuts at her house, and it was wonderful to lean, and provide a place for leaning. Sometimes I felt a little worried that perhaps I ought to reach out, ought to include more people in my little closed circle.  I told myself I didn't have time, but I'm not sure it wasn't just because I didn't have room.  Why, after all, should I bother, when that space was filled so well?

And then there was a day when I had to say to my second friend what my first friend had said to me.  After everything we had helped each other through, I had to cause her a pain that I knew I wouldn't be around to help her bear.  I had to reach over to one of my most loved people, and knock out one of her teeth. 

I knew how it felt to have a dear friend leave, having just been through it a year before.  I hated, so badly, doing it to someone else.  But I did not know, or didn't remember, how it felt to leave everyone, friend and acquaintance, that I had known, the entire network of people whose smiles, encouragement, and friendship had lined and padded our lives.  If I had had one tooth knocked out when my friend moved away, now I've lost a couple of rows at the same time.  I still have the molars, my husband, children, parents, siblings, who will be in my life the same amount no matter where I roam, but all the rest are gone.  I can write them, I can call them, but for everyday chewing, they are lost.

And, oddly, I find that this time I don't want them to grow back.  An ugly cynical streak suddenly shows itself, something I didn't know was there.  I feel the impulse to keep my mouth completely shut, to hope that my gums grow hard and tough, strong enough to chew on their own, without the need for the painful growing (and possible, eventual, inevitable loss) of new teeth.  I don't want anyone to look until I'm sure I'm fine on my own, and can do it all by myself.

But at the same time I find it can't be done.  A knock at the door brought a plate of cookies, borne in the hand of a new friend.  A concern for my family was expressed while I looked into the eyes of someone who was, suddenly, no longer a stranger.  A shared laugh, as welcome as an arm around my shoulders, poured sunshine into my heart and made me open my toothless mouth, just a little, in a smile. 

Yes, another set of friends will grow in the places left empty by the ones I've loved and lost.  Already I feel them growing there.  Some will be lost again, in their turn.  And I wonder.  Does this cycle, the growth, and loss, and regrowth, leave our gums, each time, a little stronger, or do they bleed the same each time?  Are we more, or less, willing to reach out and bring new people into our lives and hearts the more time goes on? 

Eventually, I know, I will have another strong set of working teeth, and be able to chew, with their help, whatever I need to.  But I don't know about that one space.  I'm more reluctant to fill it than the others, remembering how much I love the friends who have stood there.  How long will it be empty, and will it be a surprise when I discover that it no longer is? 

No matter how long it takes, that is a tooth worth waiting for.  And in the meantime, one by one, the everyday chewing teeth are slowly growing back in.  Before long, whether I want to or not, I'm going to have a beautiful smile.

~MB~

the burden of knowledge::part 2

Several months ago, we watched "Up". 

The airship in the movie inspired many questions about airships, including the question, "Why don't people use airships for commercial travel anymore?"

Which inevitably led us to the YouTube video of the Hindenberg disaster, with its wrenching black-and-white newsreel and desperate, heartbreaking commentary. 

After which, I put the subject away, as having been thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly for our age group) discussed.

Last week we were here:

At the beach, poking around, finding odd things like the spiral-pasta-shaped bit of seaweed washed up among the rocks.  It was peaceful, really, soothing after the stress of moving, the endlessness of the road.  The gulls soared low, checking to see if we had any lunch for them before sailing on down the strand.  The children called excitedly to each other at each new discovery, and always the sound of the waves rose and fell in our ears.  A blimp sailed lazily into view, advertising insurance to beachcombers like us.  The children, facing downward, didn't see it.  "Look!" I called, "a blimp!"

My 8-year-old son stood straight upright.  His shell bucket forgotten, his face a mask of horror, he held his hands helplessly up toward the sky, "Oh no!!" he shouted above the sound of the waves, "Don't they know what could HAPPEN?!?"

And the subject was reopened.

~MB~

beachcombing

We have a new favorite activity.

~Mother Bird~