It has been one hundred eight days since we left our home to begin a renovation, and I am just now starting to feel settled in our temporary residence--my mother's little house across the street from the local church. After my father died, she wanted to live closer to our family, yet she was not quite ready to move in with us. During an eighteen-month-long house hunt, she told every real estate agent within a five mile radius of my house that she only wanted one thing--to be extremely close to a Catholic Church, close enough to hit it with a stone. Now that I have had a chance to live here for three months, I understand more than ever before how smart she was to look for a home with such easy access to Mass and the sacraments. She was a smart woman.
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February 2010
February 25, 2010
February 24, 2010
Re-purposing
Over the course of a long legal career, my father amassed a great number of plaques that once decorated the walls of his judicial chambers. They are too sentimental to part with, but also too numerous to properly display.
My wonderfully organized friend, Tracey, suggested I use them as lapdesks for the children to assist them with their school work. They are exceedingly sturdy, perfectly smooth and have a taut string on the back perfect for holding papers and pens. My father--scholar that he was--would approve!
February 20, 2010
Goodnight Brown
Years upon years ago (OK, roughly a dozen), my husband and I were looking for our first home. We were expecting our third child (now twelve-year-old Margaret), and our young family was bursting out of the one-bedroom apartment that had made such a perfect honeymoon suite. All through the weary winter, we scoured real estate ads and pounded the pavement, hoping to find a house in time for the new baby's birth.
Then one day, we toured a certain tidy colonial on a postage-stamp lot in a nice neighborhood. The house had nothing in particular to recommend it--it was neither beautiful, nor ugly--and, to tell the truth, I was not especially interested in it. That is until we entered the last of three bedrooms. The walls were an appalling shade of crayon green--you could not even pretend that it was something pretty like Kelly or Chartreuse--and the floors were a deep dark red. Anyone else would have backed quietly down the stairs never to return again, but I--young mother that I was--could only stand on the threshold to that room and sigh, "In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon."
Suddenly, my dreams of a pink frilly bedroom for the girls departed with a "goodnight room," and I imagined myself in a rocking chair, the quiet (young) lady whispering hush. The room we would have and all its appointments were already etched in my mind from a thousand bedtime readings--bears, chairs, kittens, mittens, clocks, socks, house, mouse. In less than a week's time we were sitting at our lawyer's kitchen getting ready to sign a contract, not on a house really, but on our own personal setting of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown.
I do not even remember a single other thing about that house we almost bought in back in 1997. Just as we were about to sign on the dotted line, I felt a wave of indecisiveness. Our lawyer sent my young husband and me to a diner to talk it over, and two cups of coffee later, we phoned him to say we would keep looking. My husband promised that if ever we did find a house we wanted to buy, he would give me carte blanche to paint the girls' bedroom in any garish colors I liked.
It is funny to think how nearly that simple picture book came to charting one of the earliest courses in our lives. Literature has a way of affecting us deeply, but perhaps not so demonstrably as that.
Goodnight Moon was not a book I ever recall reading as a child, and, to be honest, the first time I thumbed through it, I could not for the life of me understand why it had such a following. But anyone who has ever read the book to a child knows that Goodnight Moon is like a battered lamp lying forgotten in a cave. It goes unnoticed until some childish Aladdin sits by your side, rubbing the lamp by way of his rapt expression as you read, "Good night light and the red balloon"--words that seem mundane without him there to show you otherwise.
Not far from where we live on Long Island, there is a cozy little restaurant with paneled walls and horse finials standing guard over each booth. Until becoming a regular there and reading a newspaper feature framed on the wall, I did not know that Margaret Wise Brown was a Long Islander and that she enjoyed fox hunting on foot--or, more accurately rabbit hunting--not far from where we live. Sometimes, I like to imagine the rolling hills, the blare of horns, and the yip of dogs so different from Long Island today. (Might some hidden hollow of rabbit kits sniffed out by her eager hounds have inspired "the great green room"?) Margaret Wise Brown looks radiant in the photo, and I love that her two male companions are drinking tea from cups and saucers. Perhaps one of them was her fiance, a Rockefeller no less.
As you can see from the blurb about her life, she died tragically and young--actually at the very same age I am now. She never did get to marry that fiance--or see the books she had written brought to life by the rapt expression of a child of her own. From now on, when we read her book--especially when we read it before bed--we will say a prayer that she rests in peace.
