Warmth and Sun

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

Morning Daydreams

It’s getting to be that time of the year when I switch my living arrangements. It’s winter and in the interest of not paying Appalachian Power more than my mortgage, I’m moving upstairs.

The only way to keep the downstairs bearable is to crank the heat to 75 or 80 which turns the upstairs into the Sahara. In fact, I turn the heat down to about 55 at bedtime so that I can enjoy the cool bedroom I like while sleeping. It’s so delicious to burrow into the down comforter and feather bed without fear of heatstroke.

The barn has two temperature zones – cool downstairs and warm upstairs. During temperature extremes one floor of the house is insufferable while the other fluctuates between uncomfortable and pleasant. The reasons center on the cement slab the barn sits on along with the multitude of windows sans draperies.

By January, sometimes earlier, the downstairs carpet will be cold to the touch radiating proof that the slab is frozen. I abhor so the multitude of windows in the barn will also radiate unchecked cold. Indeed, my windows are dressed only in my dressing room so as to protect the mailman, the trash guys and the electric company’s meter readers from my brazen nudity. The airy lace panels do little to insulate. Nevertheless the dressing room is one of the rooms I will decamp to – that and the study with naps in the guest bedroom. Setting the furnace to a reasonable temperature keeps the shivering windows at bay most of the winter. On particularly frigid days, a space heater actually warms the room unlike its behavior on the first floor where the open floor plan defeats its abilities.

With the cold, dark days of winter I go upstairs not just in search of heat, but also light.  The upstairs is much less stingy with natural light than is the first floor.

Along with my dressing table, the dressing room is furnished with the completely ridiculous and much loved chaise. Oh how I dithered before plunking down a silly amount of money to buy it. I kept trying to justify the cost and couldn’t. While it was logical to think the room required something other than the vanity bench to sit on, the chaise was not the best choice.

One cannot just sit on the chaise. With its graceful s-curve, it invites a languorous and prone lounging. One is seduced by the comfort of the upholstery, there is no choice but to surrender and sprawl particularly since that s-curve makes just sitting uncomfortable. So the chaise is completely useless in facilitating the donning of socks or hosiery – my one feeble justification.

A chair would have been far more utilitarian, but much less fun.

Mmmm, sun-warmed silk.

Even with the lace panels, the dressing room is aglow with morning light. The winter sun hangs low in the sky streaming rays that make the chaise all the more irresistible. Its sybaritic splendor is further enhanced by a heavy silk kimono a dear friend gave me. There is a magic about silk that no other fabric comes close to imitating. I wrap myself in the kimono, lounge on the chaise and drink my morning coffee. I can lose hours on the chaise.

The study is also kissed by that morning light, but it’s a brief kiss. The mature oaks standing close to the house that give the room a tree-house feeling in the summer still manage to block most of the morning sun. At sunset, the study glows with the low hanging sunset sauntering in through the room’s one western window. The light is silky amber that compels the room’s furnishings to glow. The grain of the heavy oak twirls and preens while the metal of knobs, handles, stapler and ornaments shimmer. If not for the brevity of a winter sunset, I would lose hours sitting in the study’s outrageously comfortable chair.

The guest bedroom with its one window is the warmest room of the house. After the sun begins it rotation to the west, that room holds the afternoon light in clearly defined beams. The canopy draped over the bed holds the light in a web of glimmer. The bed is like being inside a prism. It’s a glorious place to nap.

In winter, I move room to room to follow the sun – the dressing room for daydreams, the study for deep thoughts and the guest bedroom for illicit naps.

Now and again I think I would love living in a small cottage – less to clean, less to maintain, and less to heat. It would be practical and free up a lot of time. It’s hard to justify one person living in this multitude of rooms.

Ah, but I am a space junkie – usually an unapologetic one. I love all of my single purpose rooms, nooks and crannies. From my son’s old bed tucked underneath the stairwell’s eaves to the tiny book nook under the stairs, each one has not just a purpose, but provides this hedonist with the pleasures of the well-defined ambiance of each.

It is winter and I’m in nesting mode. Besides a thorough cleaning, I plan to use these months to tackle the painting of the stairway and the living room/dining room. These two areas of the house are among those that most irritate my hedonistic self. While I do abhor draperies, I am thinking of installing some in the living room/dining room The planned ambiance of that room may require substantial ones that will wrap around the windows rather than covering them, yet can be pulled closed when winter sneaks up on me. It would be nice to have a winter-livable room downstairs.

Between glorying in morning sun, napping in afternoon sun, and marveling at winter sunsets I’m going to need razor-sharp discipline to excise my predilection for sitting around doing nothing for hours at a time. [I was genetically predestined to be one of the idle rich and something went terribly wrong.]

It will be a war of wills with my hedonist me waging battle with the industrious me. I’m already alternatively nagging and promising my hedonistic self that a few months of industry will provide years of sitting year-round in a room that provides splendid sunlight from noon on. A room for reading and gazing out the atrium doors. A room for fine dining on fine china with friends and family. A room to adore a Christmas tree. And a room to watch summer rainstorms and winter snowstorms. .A room in which the pleasure of those activities is not diminished by the sight of needed work.

A new trend in female grooming?

/ wvfurandroot / 11 Comments

It really gets tiresome.

I collected a machete and box of Band-Aids and took them to the bathroom. I got out the razor and the shaving cream.  I sighed.  For 38 years, I have performed this unpleasant and, sometimes, dangerous task.

I shaved my legs and, while doing so, wondered who, exactly, introduced this practice. I also wondered why it went viral. And I wondered if it was ever ever ever going to be passé.  [Note:  I do know Ancient Romans were into de-haired legs.]

Immediately following the car wreck of 2007 and for months thereafter, I had heaps of medical appointments. Between the chiropractor, physical therapist, podiatrist and orthopedist, I was to-ing and fro-ing much too much. I think the record was 8 appointments in one week. Bear in mind, I owned a body that had been infiltrated and colonized by pain endorphins. Work and doctoring were all I could manage. Shaving my legs was not physically possible and even if I could have managed it, I probably wouldn’t have. There’re only so many hours in a day.

During these appointments where I sat naked wrapped in paper with my hairy legs chill-bumped, I would read whatever magazines were in the exam room. It seems that doctors’ patients are uncommonly fond of gosspip rags. Either that or the docs are. [Exception: my shrink’s office is filled with the New Yorker and Car & Driver. Go figure.]

I wonder how often Miley shaves?

Slowly, inevitably perhaps, I became well-versed about Lindsey Lohan, Brangelina, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and all those paparazzi-chased folks.

Perversely, it started to interest me. I would tut tut when reading about LiLo’s latest boondoggle. Sneer at Paris Hilton’s cluelessness. Horrified that Jessica Simpson doesn’t brush her teeth daily.  I also looked at the fashion faux pas and fab fashion pics – sometimes thinking the fab was more of a faux pas, but those folks are never going to hire me to be the fashion editor.

Eventually, the myriad of medical appointments came to an end along with my celebrity gossip. I started itching to know the recent state of Brad and Angie’s marriage and whether or not Lindsey had learned how to disguise her alcohol monitoring bracelet as a cool fashion accessory.

I started going online for my gossip. While not as satisfying as a magazine, it more than meets my needs.

[Of course, you understand how much it pains me to admit to all this, but it is germane to leg shaving and I will get to that.]

I started reading the Huffington Post regularly during the last presidential election. They have one of the greatest celebrity gossip pages around. When I click on a link, it will often take me to a gossip rag or blog I haven’t heard of. It’s like a treasure hunt.  [Angelina Jolie may be pregnant again.]

Tonight after the unpleasant hacking at my legs and sick of the election (and sick about the election), I went gossiping for some fluffy, banal entertainment. One link led to another and then another and I found myself reading an article with the blaring headline – Natalia Vodianova Reveals Hairy Legs at Harper’s Bazaar Party. [Let’s not even get into how bizzare it is that a major magazine has nothing more important than this to publish.]

I hadn’t a clue who Natalia Vodianova was, but I was rather intrigued at a woman who would show up at a Harper’s Bazaar party with unshaven legs and, presumably, wearing something that revealed such.

Peach fuzz, I tell ya.

Frankly, it was a lot of hullaballoo about nothing.
Because Natalia (who is a super model, I learned) may have a habit of this, the writer thoughtfully provided another link proving she’d done it before.

Well the accompanying photographic proof got my attention – imagine being a super model and doing a fashion shoot in short shorts and NOT shaving your legs. Still and all, my primary thought was if the hair on my legs looked like that I would never shave.

But in the same article, there’s a reference (linked) to something called Team Mo-‘Nique. In the interest of research, I clicked. Mo’Nique is an actress or something. But she has some bodacious hairy legs (I can relate) and flaunts them regularly. Lately, it seems she presented her hairy gams at the Golden Globes.

She says, I must show America what a real leg looks like . . . because it’s too much in the morning, every morning, to shave, to cut, you got Band-Aids baby, she said. I really think hair on a woman’s legs is a black woman’s thing.

Girl! We could be twins!

If she’s right, I may masquerade as a black woman. But probably not. I’ve been conditioned to think a hairless leg is more attractive than a hairy one. And I can’t figure out how it is that she isn’t walking around scratching all the time.

She and I have pelts of similar hairiness. If I go too long without shaving, it itches and ingrown hairs develop and it’s altogether unpleasant.- more unpleasant than contorting my body in the bathtub or shower on a regular basis.

Which means, of course, that if Natalia and Mo’Nique are trend setters that are going to start a viral change to female grooming, I’m still going to be pretzeled in the shaving-legs asana – perhaps not as often as I do now, but still… Being the trendy person I am, I would hate to commit such a fashion faux pas as displaying smooth, denuded legs.

Clearly, if Team Mo’Nique sweeps the Olympics of Personal Grooming Habits, I’m going to have to wear pants on the days intense itch provoked shaving instead of wearing pants on the days I don’t shave. Either way, I am not going to be able to wear dresses as much as I like lest I assault someone’s, perhaps my own, standards of female pulchritude.

 [And don’t get me started on the price of razor blades.]

Mashed Potatoes and the Internet

/ wvfurandroot / 14 Comments

Today, a Facebook Friend said

 ♥ instant mashed potatoes. Yeah I do.

 Now I haven’t met this person in real life, but one of the wonders of Facebook is that such details aren’t all that important in cultivating a real friendship.  However, I told her that this love of instant mashed potatoes might be grounds for our breaking up.

Mashed potatoes are not just a high-glycemic carbohydrate.  When the tuber is boiled, combined with milk and butter, and mashed, the resultant gestalt is home, family, nurture and nature – in short, love on a plate.  If the potatoes contain a few lumps, the effect is intensified.

Piffle - NOT a great value.

Instant Mashed Potatoes go with take-out Thanksgiving Dinners and gas station champagne.  Just because somebody sells it, doesn’t mean anyone should buy it.  Some things are travesties of the spirit. 

I was a small child during that era that Mad Men is making trendy.  Dinner was at 5:00 and involved meat and potatoes most days of the week.  Sure there were buttered noodles and converted rice as well as fried, baked or boiled potatoes, but mashed potatoes were the norm. 

When we moved to Hawaii in 1967, we were met with the potato problem.  Getting spuds to the islands was expensive and they arrived rotten.  That first box of mashed potatoes entered my mother’s kitchen.  Mashed potatoes were such a norm it didn’t occur to anyone to eliminate such from the menu in the absence of real potatoes.  I suppose if for some reason Thanksgiving found me without a home-cooked feast, I would succumb to Bob Evan’s take-out offering just as I have, on occasion, succumbed to gas station champagne.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and champagne my favorite party drink.  Still.  These are travesties of the spirit.

I cannot stress this enough, I am never going to post in my Facebook status that I  ♥ either one.  Let’s not get silly.

When we were stateside again, the return of real potatoes to the table was a delight.  My brother was beside himself.  He was so young when were in Kaneohe that he had no memory of real potatoes.  He fell in love with Idaho’s export.  The first thing he would do when presented with mashed potatoes was to look for lumps. 

 My mother did not use an electric mixer to mash her potatoes.  We had the tried and true masher.  And those things take work.  Only someone with a great hatred of lumps in the mashed taters would use one of those things long enough to eradicate every potato chunk.  Lumpy potatoes became a sign of non-instant potatoes.  Whoever mashed the potatoes in our house, and we took turns, did so intentionally leaving lumps.  Lumps made my brother happy. 

Lumpy potatoes = good. = great = love =somebody cares about me.

As a family, we talked about this. Lumpy mashed potatoes were explicit in our family culinary lore.  Besides lumpy, we liked our taters with enough backbone  to form a bowl to hold the gravy or the butter – none of this whipped into frothy, drippy frenzy of tortured tubers.  Oh no!  Our potatoes had character and a stiff backbone. 

My dad’s spaghetti sauce was legend.  The homemade pizza pert near.  And we were known for the taters.  Some folks ate them politely, but with varying degrees of puzzlement.  After all, we didn’t look like slovenly folk who would half mash the potatoes and be stingy with the milk.

 As my burgeoning interest in cooking collided with my anachronistic interest in 50’s music, I became obsessed with Dee Dee Sharp’s Mashed Potato Time.  A good friend and I, Charlene, made up our dance we dubbed the La Hava” which we could even do on roller skates.  We had to make up our dance because You Tube didn’t exist and we couldn’t find anybody to teach us the real Mashed Potato. 

The La Hava was very versatile and worked for lots of the 50’s songs we loved – Leader of the Pack, Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love and The Last Kiss.  We must have been quite a sight – our teeny bopper suburban hippy selves rocking out to my mom’s music.

Joy to the World

But before La Hava and Charlene, there was Nancy and long afternoons in my living room with a Monopoly board, iced tea, and the top-40 radio station.  We were wildly, giggly, obnoxiously in love with Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog as was much of the country.  [I was also wild about Patsy Cline, but Nancy teased me about it and I remember one horrible fight over it.]

I wonder if she remembers the day she and I, my mom and some more of our friends (including Charlene) danced around the living room to Three Dog Night.  My mom had the tambourine.  Nancy and I were using wooden fruit for microphones singing loudly and unabashedly off-key – drunk on happy music and the ridiculous sight of my mother with a tambourine.  Or maybe it was Charlene and I singing off-key.  I have this tiny, incomplete memory that Nancy may have been musically gifted.  [To this day I still don’t know why we had a tambourine – we were not then nor are we now a family gifted with even the semblance of musical ability.]

I found Nancy on Facebook the other day.  Quite by accident.  After 36 years, it will be like building a friendship.  I haven’t spent any of my adult life with people who knew me as a military brat.  Who knew me before life started settling into predictable patterns.  It will be interesting to see how building a friendship with someone I was once close to compares with building one with someone I’ve never actually met. 

Dancing to Mashed Potato Time wouldn’t have been as much fun if we hadn’t had to invent the steps.  I’m grateful You Tube didn’t exist.  I’m delighted that Facebook does so that I could reconnect with Nancy.  I’m also delighted with Facebook’s penchant to bring me friends I’ve never met.  I’ve switched to a Kitchenaid to make my mashed taters these days.  If you time it carefully, the lumps remain.  Technology preserving the old ways in new ways – if you time it carefully.

I can ask Nancy if she remembers.  I can also ask her if she knows where Charlene is.  If the La Hava becomes the next viral line dance, you’ll know we three hooked up in a bar somewhere.