Groovin' and Dreamin' while Scrapin' and Paintin'

     Layers of paint - dusty pink, yellow, mint green, linen white.  Layers of wax.  Layers of dust.  Layers of time.
     I own an 89 year old house.  I would love to know its beginning.  Who chose the pink for the walls?  I imagine it was a color that was very much "en vogue" in 1926.  I think that electricity and indoor plumbing may have been an afterthought.  Many of the houses in my area (The Old North End) have wells on their property.  I don't know that mine ever did, but I'm sure wells were quite necessary at the turn of the century.  The bathroom on the main level (I added on to the back of the house about 20 years ago) is wedged between what used to be two small bedrooms.  And apparently there was no need for closets larger than a refrigerator box!  Each room has only one electrical outlet, no matter the size of the room.  Oh, how times have changed.

My great-great-grandparents: Captain Daniel H and Maggie Page

     Layers of time are all around me as I work on the house.  I have gone through all of Mom's old photo albums and made copies of old family photos that I have sent to my 18 first cousins!  Some of the photos are of our great-great-grandparents and were taken around 1900.  Those are "layers" of me.  I have furniture and other wooden items that my dad made in high school, so I have those "layers" as well.  And love seeing my mom's bluebird collection and my dad's blue glass collection.  Layers and layers.

My grandmother, Maude Boyles Ooley, is the baby

     I have found that I work well while listening to "Golden Oldies"!  There's a cable channel on TV that plays them and I love it!  So I'm "groovin'", as the Young Rascals so eloquently sang, as I scrape and paint.  I sing along and it seems that the work gets done a little faster. (The "whistle while you work" adage?)   These are songs from my teenage years and even before.  I remember the Christmas that I got a little pocket transistor radio with earplugs!!  Oh, how I loved it!  I could fall asleep listening to the local Rock and Roll station.  That was the same radio I took to school after lunch on November 22, 1963 so that I could listen to the updates on President Kennedy while I had cross-walk duty.
     The past, present and future intertwine while I'm working on the house.   I see the past all around me as I clean out rooms and dressers and desks.  As I scrape and paint and renew the floors.  Certainly the present makes itself known as my lower back complains about all the climbing up and down the ladder and reaching up to scrape and paint! 
     But the future is always in my thoughts.  That's why I'm doing all this work.  I dream about what it will be like to do this work on a house in Gascony.  Perhaps a 300 year old house like the one we stayed in last September.  Will it seem like work then?  I'm sure there would always be something to work on.  But there will also be many things to explore.  Just think about all those bends that I have yet to find!

The 300 year old farmhouse in SW France

     My muse, Francis Mayes, summed up her linkage between past, present, and future by writing that "any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. . . I'm here  because I climbed out the window at night when I was 4."  We are the sum of all those bends that we have been around in our lifetime and all the bends that are yet to come.  And I, for one, am excited to see where those roads will take me.  Thanks for joining me on this journey!  Merci!