Cafe Curtains

Never say never, as my mother would tell us.
I’ve never wanted café curtains: if a prowler is taller than 5 feet (and what prowler isn’t), he’s going to be looking in from the dark scary night to our lighted home, anyway. Curtaining the bottom two-thirds of the window blocks sunlight and my view of what’s happening outside (a rabbit crosses the lawn, a squirrel considers hacking off a geranium head for his lunch, and decides it resembles cauliflower: don’t bother). But just lately, with the noise aspect of the house, I’m thinking café curtains are not as evil as their pseudo French origins.

They’d keep the dogs from looking out. Dogs behave on the pack mentality: you bark, I bark, we all bark. You have a treat, I want it, and of course it’s mine. We can have three dogs barking, but their combined din sounds like thirty, reverberating off the uncarpeted floor (with all those little feet tracking in dirt, who needs carpeting).
Curtains would keep the squirrels feeling safer, the grass able to blow without canine commentary, and the human lives quieter. Quiet is good.

Trimming the Size of Dreams

Over the summer, we built an Arts & Crafts style bookcase: solid wood, heavy as a piano, six feet tall, and bearing that sweeping curve combined with straight lines that sing Arts & Crafts. At the same time, the family room was undergoing a facelift, with board and stile paneling. The two projects would look beautiful together. When we moved the bookcase in though, the extended stiles plus the decrease in wall width of 1.5” meant that the bookcase didn’t fit in its designated niche. We could have moved it to the center of the wall, where it could be admired (who needs a sofa anyway). We could have displaced the tv (but the sports teams would have missed us).
We moved the bookcase to another room, and said, “We’ll build another with adjusted dimensions next year.” Maybe we will; maybe we will be following another project’s lure. [Arts & Crafts style end table with a cabin underneath for the dogs.]
We could say that we muffed the project: should have, could have. We say, we built something that we enjoyed building. We’re happy it turned out as well as it did. We learned things. And we had fun.
This dream turned out to need a decrease of 6” to fit easily into the space; we chose to use another space. That’s okay. I’d rather start with a dream too big, than one too small; rather want to earn enough money that I have money to share with others, than earn just enough to pay my bills, budgeting to the penny each month.
If we have a dream that’s too large for the existing space, maybe we need to look for a larger space. Don’t dream too small. Yes, we need to ensure that the dream is right for us. We need to find a dream that we can devote our energy and time to. We need to match our dreams and our souls. But we also need to remember that when we trim the size of our dreams so they don’t require us to stretch our beings, then we are settling, not dreaming.

Gender Roles

In the Women’s Lit class, we’ve been discussing (arguing through) gender roles. Each participant has her or his own concept of what those roles are, and how we should meet expectations. In between online discussion, we at home have been getting ready for dinner company.

He’s scrubbing the floor, and I track through the kitchen, an extension cord looped over my shoulder, a 3/8” variable speed drill in my arm, the metal 25’ retractable tape and the extra screw eyes in my hands. The dogs follow (one set of big footprints, many sets of small foot prints) because they harbor suspicions about the floor scrubber eating their toes. If we had framed the 40 x 60 inch poster in the garage that wouldn’t have been necessary, but the only empty space large enough was the extended dining room table. Tonight, with guests coming, we need to clear off the woodworking project and bring ourselves up to standards. [Whose standards? I ask myself. Yes, but nobody wants to eat on top of the picture, I answer.]
This morning, he made a grocery store run for milk (tonight’s dessert) and liversausage (what makes the dog world go ‘round).
While he slept, I baked a cherry pie and formed the first two layers of Millie’s Butterscotch Dessert. He will cook the meat, because he's better at it than I am. I could have gone to the store for milk; instead I did laundry and worked on the college lit class.

The bottom line is that I can run around with drill and tape measure, my hands smelling of 30 year old hardware because he makes it possible by electing to scrub the floor, and he can sleep late because I enjoy early the everything’s possible potential (and its resultant ability to get the baking finished) of early morning. It works because we want it to, because we have learned over time (and usually remembered) that gender roles exist, but they exist to serve us, not the other way ‘round. Each of us doing what we like to do best - mixed with love and compassion - result in a world turning ‘round the right way, and good things to eat for us all.

Thievery without Conscience

Once or twice a summer, we have the Boy Scouts to swim: an exuberant bunch of mid-teen boys, who arrive vibrating with anticipation, and spend several hours splashing, yelling, diving, and pretty much being boys, in the pool. As part of this, we make a cookout: burgers, brats, hot dogs, and one of the things that mothers avoid: dessert to excess. We know that sugar plus male adolescence makes an even more exciting time, but we do it anyway.
This cookout, we had 15 scouts, three semi-portly scout masters, one Scout master wife, and the dogs, who could be counted on to make noise, get underfoot, and be tired enough by the end of the day to sleep deeply. We also had 5 pounds of jumbo hot dogs, 5 pounds of brats, a vat of potato chips, 7 12-packs of assorted soda, and 6 boxes of Hostess cupcakes, Twinkies, Suzy Q’s, and Zingers (chocolate and salt are an unbeatable combination), though we did include a large bottle of ketchup (lycopene?) for health.
We’d set out the cookie trays of grilled meat and refilled the largest mixing bowl (the one I use to bake bread) with potato chips. The boys descended on the food, were silent for ten minutes, swinging their water wrinkled toes at the picnic table and the patio umbrella table. Then the thrash and bustle began: back to the water, jousting, diving, jumping and thrashing with all the energy accumulated in a few minutes of quiet.. The adults sat in fat-embedded satisfaction and watched. Water sparkled, sun shone: we were mostly all happy.
Just then, we saw something we could not believe: a whisk of movement at the umbrella table. Rosemary the dachs was on the table, scrounging among the plates. Before we could reach her, she removed the remainder of a jumbo dog (more than the length of her nose) from someone’s plate, jumped from the table to the chair, to the patio, and trotted past us, the jumbo dog projecting from her mouth. Rosie and hot dog rounded the corner into the grass, where she feasted on her ill-gotten treat.