Oil Up with Golden Flax

It's a smell of after-hours, moonlighting, passion; it comes with images—slugs of paint in all colors, with a tactile sensation—the slide of oil paste beneath a thin metal palette knife, with a sound—a clinking brush stirred quickly in a baby-food jar of turpentine. Smell of linseed oil, and memories of watching my dad paint, after he got home from work and on weekends.

I spent a weekend recently rubbing linseed oil into the wood in my dining room, wood once covered in a lifeless shade of blue paint, which was only the latest of around ten layers I think I counted at one point. As I scraped I could sometimes see them all at once, like the rings of a tree, from wood to creamy milk paint to something scary from the 50s or 60s right up to the blue. I could almost hear the wood's sigh of relief as I scraped all that gunk off it.

I don't like paint on wood or walls. I like a nice plain of plaster with its fine grain, hairline cracks, and skid marks from the trowel. (I hope I can tolerate going back to the construction equivalent of fast food after living here, 'cause Sheetrock, USA is most likely where I'm headed).

Give me some raw woodwork and a bottle of linseed (I used it straight, but I also used a nice polymerized linseed oil by Tried and True in Trumansburg, NY). Give me a tablespoon of flax oil on my oatmeal every morning and I feel even better. You can make clothes out the stuff, too...flax and hemp, the basic needs-meeters.

People who come into our dining room now are moved by the scent; they comment on it. Either they are artists and they love it because they're at home in a linseed atmosphere, or it brings back a happy memory of making art or being near art making. There's no pattern in A Pattern Language for smells, is there? —maybe there should be: Lavender Drawers at the Top of the Stairs, Aromatic Pathways to the Kitchen, Pockets of Linseed Memory...

The Missing Prosperity Corner

^ BEFORE ^

It goes something like this...I am reading about feng shui, a sporadic hobby that coincides with my feeling like things are sliding out of control, in other words, my husband has been laid off again.

"Here's the problem, honey. No prosperity bagua! Look, that whole corner of the house is missing—there's nothing there but that brick patio with the moss and the tufts of grass."

My husband objects to the theory that the root of his professional rootlessness can be explained by feng shui. It's the economy, and before that it was the dot-com bubble pop, ya dope!

"Ah hah! But the last time I put a purple flowering plant in our prosperity corner, you got that job with the emergency notification people!"

Why did I lose that job then?

"Because the purple plant died when winter came, and I didn't replace it with another purple royalty object to draw prosperity chi to the missing bagua!"

My garbled, simpleton's rendition sounds strange even to myself, but I know there's wisdom in philosophies of color and placement in the home, whether feng shui, Vaastu Shastra, or just common sense. Lately, I'm willing to go around closing toilet lids, which everyone is always leaving open, draining chi out of our bank account. "Cluttered house, cluttered mind!," I have been known to snap at others (though I may be the chief pile-maker around here). I am not too proud to sleep with a box of coins under the bed, and there's that new energizing-red front door, mentioned in my last post.

Comparatively speaking, of course, my husband and I are materially and metaphorically prosperous. We are rich in children and the time to be with them, we are healthy and happy, and if neither of us has hit it big in the fame and fortune category, it's been because our definition of prosperity is what it is, what we've chosen.

But none of that stopped me from marking our prosperity corner with Plum Pudding Coral Bells the other day, in the hope of getting our asking price, in honor of spring, to summon a nice family to take over for us here, or as a wish that everybody everywhere, government and governed alike may be wealthy, healthy, and wise...take your pick.

v AFTER v Plum Pudding Prosperity Plant

All Hands on Deck

I think we identify with our houses like we identify with our cars (I can't be the only one who feels sated after a filler-up at the gas station). Working on my house, better yet, having a crew of other people work on my house, has always felt like self-care to me; the confusion runs deep enough that it didn't surprise me when a friend, offering to help paint, said "Benjamin Moore is my boyfriend!"

But the labor gives me sore hands and shoulders, so I've resorted to less metaphorical body work twice in the past two weeks. I'm fortunate to have had someone recommended to me—two years before I finally went to see her, unfortunately—who is extraordinarily gifted, and achy shoulders and that twinge behind my left scapula are already nearly gone.

I wonder why, when some of the most gifted healers we have are massage therapists, reflexologists, and people who fall under the hazy but nonetheless invaluable rubric of energy work, our plans for better national health coverage don't include these modalities as 'preventive medicine?' Preventive medicine is still viewed largely as screening programs, which are fine as far as they go, and sometimes fitness club memberships or a nutrition class here and there, which are also fine as far as they go.

I can feel the pain draining down my arm and out my fingers as I write this. Massage is good for the muscles, the lymph, the adrenals, the spirit. Maybe it could be the tar and paint job for our ship of state, too. With the stress of economic and other upheavals, with all our knots and blockages related to addictive military spending and gay rights, with all the bold and subtle signs of imbalance around us, mightn't our body politic benefit from a crew of massage therapists?

Kingston Retrofit

For a time I considered calling this blog "Kingston Retrofit," and focusing on our slow and careful process of remaking our 19th-century Victorian house into a 21st-century sustainable refuge. I decided instead to blog about whatever interested me on any given day, but as I look back over the years writing this blog, which is mostly about my children's youth, our field trips and holidays and dreams, our unschooling experiences, and our aspirations toward living more sustainably, what I've blogged about has always circled around the house. It's the column that's supported our life for seven years, and like any good column, it shifts with the movements of the earth, it's sturdy yet flexible. "My staircase, my spine," as I called an early post.

My husband and I have loved living in an old house, and all it has to offer: the craft involved in the building and all its details, from mouldings to plaster to stone; the great ventilation that makes an absurdity of an idea like air conditioning; the pride of preservation. We've had a great life here, and it's ending a little sooner than we thought it would. Halfway to adulthood, our children find their parents looking for a new place to raise them, when we thought it would be here, just here.

Speaking as one of millions of people putting their homes on the market right now, I have to say the hard part is dealing with change and uncertainty. We don't know where we're going, if we'll buy again, whether we can keep some bigger things like our piano. All we know is: smaller place, lower expenses. I'm having to get used to not knowing, and not forcing the issue before its time.

Meditating helps. Contemplating impermanence helps. But what triggers anxiety about impermanence and change more than the loss of home? The word "home" is a promise of stability, reliability. Home is a repository of memory; without the home, where are the memories? Home represents the meeting of all the other basic needs: home is shelter, food, warmth. This is why homelessness, and a country that doesn't address homelessness, is such a core issue of justice and compassion, why "foreclosure" sounds like "murder" to many of us.

So right now I'm scraping and painting, sifting and weeding and ecycling, raking and edging and planting, making nicey-nice and staging. I'm finishing household projects (for someone else) begun years ago (for me). I'm re-reading books about feng shui and hoping the chi starts bum-rushing this place soon. How do you like the red front door, by the way? I can feel the pumped-up chi traffic already.

I'll blog the journey, knowing it's one a lot of us are making these days.

Aria Grill, Kingston, NY

It took me six months too long to check out Aria Grill on Broadway in Kingston.

Its owner, Peter Barak, is also owner of Peter B's, a deli run by his parents and brother (the family moved here from Queens several years ago) on Wall Street in Kingston, a good place to pick up warm bagels and a cup of coffee.

Peter returned to his roots to make the menu for Aria, which serves Afghan and Persian foods in a soothing, candlelit open space. My two children, my husband, and I had sambosa with yogurt sauce, naringe palau (rice with saffron, orange peels, almonds, pistachios), shrimp kabob, and lamb korma—all delicious and prepared with care. We sprinkled just about everything with a table condiment we had never tried before, but are now devotees of, made from dried, ground sumac, commonly used in Mediterranean kabob rubs. The Afghani green tea spiced with cardamom, hot and fragrant, came in a nice big kettle. Peter visited the table to chat and see how we liked everything. We gushed.

We were too full for bakhlava, firni (rosewater pudding), or sheer biringe (rice pudding). Lunch special is $8.99; it could become a habit.