Postage Stamp Quilt--Signed, Sealed and Delivered

And here it is--the quilt that I started in Tbilisi, Georgia, sitting in my first floor sewing room on a busy street, listening to passersby exclaim, "Ra, Bicho!" and the like. Sometimes our kids would be down there, too, helping to cut the little squares and laying out the blocks. I am so proud. The binding and quilting was done by Lisa Mowery, and it came out just beautifully. What a lot of blessings I am enjoying this week! Old floors and a finished quilt!

More Floors

DH and I spent the weekend removing the paint-stained plywood that had served as the floor for the second-story hall and the sewing room since we moved here three years ago. We thought that, after taking out the plywood, we would cover the sub-floor with the hardwood we reclaimed a few weeks ago from the house that was being torn down next door (see June 9). Very early on, though, we discovered that what we thought was a sub-floor was actually a really great old floor. Even through several layers of peeling paint, we could tell it was a keeper. I was so excited to find a hundred-year-old floor already intact and just waiting to be sanded and refinished (okay, and patched in a couple of places) to become the floor of my dreams. In my mind's eye I could see the workers who built this house pounding the nails into that floor. I'm not sure why I'm not as enthusiastic about the workers in the 1970's who pounded the nails to lay the plywood, but somehow they don't inspire me the same way.

Now I feel really silly that we didn't take that plywood off when we first got here. Three years of trying to cover up ugliness that I saw every time I took the stairs anywhere. It wasn't that easy, though; I'm pretty sore from pulling out nails. And of course we chose two blistering hot days to do this work, so we were both sweating buckets, but every time I look at those six-inch planks I know it was worth it.

The pictures above are the "before" and the "during." Stay tuned for the "after."

My Fury, Final Chapter

You may remember a previous post in which I detailed the history of my very first car, a Plymouth Fury, sold to me when I was a college sophomore by my friend Jon Wesick, who was graduating and moving to Maryland. Jon is now a well-respected poet in California, but I digress. When I went overseas the first time I lent the car to a family member who abandoned it on the family farm, where it has sat since 1979. Buried to its axles in mud, DH and I tried twice this spring to remove it, but heavy rains, bad tires, a broken spring in the trunk, and a steep narrow incline up which it had to be towed kept the car right where it was, lodged in the woods behind an old Corvair and a Chevy truck.

I documented our first couple of visits in this blog on February 6. A few weeks later, our son came along and the two he-men wrestled off the four doors, the hood and the trunk lid, which brought about $40 at the recycling place. We had to leave the rest of the car. DH inflated three of the four tires but one was too far gone to hold air. On that visit we almost mired our own truck in a muddy patch just before the incline.

Today we returned with a replacement tire, and the third time's a charm, as the cliche goes. DH re-inflated all four tires and hooked the car up to a cable behind our red Dodge truck.

"I need you to steer the Fury," he said.

I looked doubtfully at the driver's seat of the old car. It was covered with dirt, leaves, pieces of rubber foam and who knows what else. I imagined mice, or worse, snakes, living under the floor. "I'll stand outside and steer it from there," I said.

"We have to go fast to get up that hill."

Glad to have a baseball cap to protect my scalp from whatever was hanging from the ceiling, I brushed off the seat and got in the car. I could feel a couple of inches of skin exposed on my back and prayed the snakes wouldn't notice and bite me there. It took all my strength to move the steering wheel. The car jerked into motion. I strained to keep it going in the same direction as the truck in front of me. We slid around in the muddy patch, but didn't get stuck, and started up the hill. I kept my eyes on the Dodge's red taillights and wrenched the steering wheel from left to right to avoid hitting any of the other junked cars in our family's scrap metal graveyard as we raced up the incline. Intent on keeping the car on track, I didn't notice until too late that we had made it up the hill and were headed back down. DH parked his truck and, without brakes, the Plymouth rolled right into it.

Fortunately there was no damage to the truck and we hugged happily and changed places to tow the car the rest of the way off the farm. We put it on a tow dolly at the end of the driveway and took it straight to the scrap metal place, where I proudly explained to the young guy on duty that it was my very first car. He looked me over and I imagined him thinking I didn't look to be in much better shape than my old car. After dropping the Fury near the scrap pile, we got back on the scales and discovered that the old car weighed 3,480 pounds even without all the pieces we had already removed.

As I looked at my old car one last time, I said, "I don't know what I was thinking when I bought this big heavy car." Then I saw the crunched-up left rear corner and remembered.

In the summer of 1978, five of us IU students took turns driving my car out to Fort Riley, Kansas for Army ROTC summer camp. One of us turned out to be a pretty terrible driver; while the rest of us slept, he pulled the car in front of a tractor-trailer. It could have been a deadly accident--both vehicles were going about 60 miles an hour. The metal over my left taillight folded like cake frosting, but the taillight still worked and no one was hurt. The tractor-trailer sustained considerable damage and had to be towed away. Maybe I didn't know what I was doing when I bought that big, heavy car, but my guardian angel was hard at work as usual.

I stayed in the truck while DH went inside to collect our money--a whopping $261. When he came back he said, "They asked if you were crying."

I laughed.

"I told them you were glad to see it go."

UFO Finished At Last--But Do I Wear It?

Two summers ago I was living alone in our former house in College Park, Maryland, working every day for our government and preparing for a two-month assignment in Africa. I started a little turquoise dress with yellow piping from some cotton I had picked up for a song at G Street Fabrics (a great store, if there ever was one). The pattern I chose was McCall's M4768, which from the picture looked like a classic princess-line sheath, but there was something very strange about the seaming around the bustline, and I could never get it to lie smooth. I bought a little yellow nylon lace sweater to wear over it, thinking to cover up the poorly-fitting bodice, but I was dissatisfied with the entire enterprise and never finished it.

I pulled the dress back out the other day and finished it, very thankful that it still fit. I clipped the princess seaming and the facing to get it all to lie a little flatter, but it's still not perfect. I also dug out the little yellow sweater, which reminds me more of Grandma's bed jacket than proper clothes, and which got a polite thumbs-down from DH. I put it all on this morning and asked DS to snap a few photos. I will only wear the sweater in desperation, but here's what the dress looks like. I need some brutal honesty now because I'm becoming fond of how comfy and cool it is: Do I look ridiculous? Or shall I keep this one?

Saving the world, one board at a time

Yesterday DH and I removed flooring from an old circa 1900 house that is being demolished next door. I had been looking for hardwood floors to reclaim for a long time--for some reason our second floor stairwell has no flooring and we have been living with paint-splattered plywood for three years already. The doomed house used to be the thrift store for St. Vincent's Catholic Church next door, until this year when the church constructed a tin building to replace it. I won't editorialize here about the prevalence of tin sheds in downtown Bedford historic districts, much as I would like to. Anyway, the old house next door was coming down, and we needed floors, so Fortune smiled on us.

DH and I started early--the floors were on the second level of the house, under the eaves, so we knew it would be hot work. Fortunately yesterday was a beautiful day. Temperatures were in the 70's and we stayed pretty comfortable. My job was to hammer a pry bar under each of the nails so that DH could come through with his saw and stick the blade in the space I created and cut the nails. We kept most of the boards in the room to stand on, then at the end threw them all out of the window to be loaded onto DH's dump truck.

I had no idea how many people visited that thrift store until I watched them come and go all day. Parking is pretty tight, so inevitably every time I wanted to throw a board out, I had to stick my whole body out of the window to make sure I didn't endanger anyone with falling wood. Then of course I would hit my head coming back in. At one point DH said, "It would have been a lot easier to just buy hardwood, but no, somebody always wants to save the world."

Everything went great until about 2:00 in the afternoon when my hammer hand started to go numb. At this point we were almost done getting all the boards loosened and nails cut, so I stayed to finish that part and left DH to load the truck. After a shower and a nap I felt a lot better and this morning I'm sore but completely functional. Added to the wood DS and DH reclaimed last week from the first floor of the same house, we now have enough for our whole second floor stairwell and my sewing room, too, I think, so life is good, as long as I don't think about how much work there still is to do to remove all those cut-off nails and then actually install the floors. Saving the world is a messy business.

I also got one of DD's charcoal drawings framed this week at Acorn Valley Frames. Gene Abel does such a good job. Here's the drawing--it's of a jacket she bought in France that she wears all the time. DH thinks it looks like a crazy bunny and is too creepy for our old haunted house. I like it, but if she wants to take it this fall for her new apartment that's okay with me. What do you think?

Lovin' the Fiskars Weed Remover

I have never been much of a gardener, and lawn care has always been DH's thing, not mine. As a matter of fact, he has the lawn mower so personalized that I couldn't fire it up if I wanted to. I normally try not to obsess about our yard, but this year I just couldn't ignore the dandelion infestation. Ten minutes after mowing (okay, maybe two hours), a forest of ugly dandelion stalks towers over the grass.

Not wanting to endanger the health of future generations with toxic chemicals, I searched for manual solutions on line. Some people suggested pouring boiling water on the pesky devils, but that would have required 100,000 trips in and out of the house carrying a steaming teakettle, so there was no way I was going for that option. Other people swore by the vinegar cure, but that sounded smelly and would require gallons of vinegar hauled from the grocery store to the car to the yard, and then the disposal of all those plastic vinegar bottles (more toxic chemicals).

I was convinced by the folks in the "rip 'em out by the roots" school of thought, and learned that there was such a thing as a dandelion puller (who knew?). Sunday evening DH and I went over to Lowe's and after considering all the options, I chose a Fiskars Weed Remover. There's a picture of the thing ripping a dandelion out by its roots right on the cardboard wrapper, plus I own several pairs of quality Fiskars sewing shears, so it was an easy choice. DH approved of the heavy-duty blades, but complained a bit about the price (around $30), but I was determined.

This morning I finally had a chance to take the new weed remover for a run, and I love it. I worked for about an hour, completely addicted. Only two caveats: if you don't center the blades over the plant properly the first time, you might have to go back a second or third time to get the roots out. Also, don't believe the picture on the back--the blades should be open when you push it into the ground, not closed. Once you get the hang of it, it is ridiculously easy to use and involves no bending or stooping. You will have to sacrifice some of your topsoil, though. The ground was a little wet this morning, so I think I'll try again when it's a little drier and see if more of the soil stays in the ground.

The pictures above are out of order; on the bottom you see the "before" and truthfully, I didn't take the "before" until I had already pulled a few, so the problem was even worse than it looks. Mr. Fuzz is modeling the "after" (and yes, I know the grass needs to be mowed, but that's beyond my control--I'm the dandelion removal specialist, not a lawn mower mechanic). What a difference! I'm a sweaty, but happy, camper.

Mr. Fuzz and the Patio Furniture

My return flight from Tbilisi in 2007 was complicated by our three adopted Georgian cats, Mr. Fuzz, Vicksters and Snow Puff (all named by our children). Poor Snow Puff was killed by a speeding car a few months later, but Vicksters and Mr. Fuzz have proven remarkably adaptable to the mean streets of Bedford. Vicksters is sociable and has made friends in the neighborhood, but Mr. Fuzz is loyal and spends most of his time on the front porch.

I love having a cup of tea or dinner on the porch, watching the neighborhood go about its business, and my generous sister-in-law donated a set of patio furniture to the cause. Unfortunately, Mr. Fuzz likes the furniture as much as I do, and has a lot more time to spend rubbing his furry self all over the cushions. I have tried a number of strategies to ensure the human beings who want to sit on the porch don't have to sit in a nest of white cat hair, but none of them have been successful. My most recent attempt was to drape the chair cushions in sheets and tablecloths, but these mismatched covers looked like laundry drying in the breeze from the street, reinforcing the "Beverly Hillbillies" look I have been trying studiously to avoid.

This morning I had a new inspiration, and draped the seats only in pillowcases that are less likely to fly around. I have some great fabric I bought in Africa two summers ago, so if this works, maybe I can recover the cushions and achieve that put-together, non-Granny Clampitt look I so covet.

Here is Mr. Fuzz, dirty as can be (he's really white!) enjoying a fresh new cover.