The Saturday House

 

My chocolate stash
uncovered when I  cleaned the junk drawer

That’s my name for the guest house/cabana that is being built directly behind my cottage. It seems to me the workmen only appear at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. By nine, they are gone for the day, and weekdays I really see any sign of activity. I know the owners are frustrated by the delay—they’ve explained it’s the supply chain—but I am frustrated by the timing. Fortunately, I can joke about it, because I am not sleep deprived, and by seven in the morning I’m just dozing and waiting for Sophie to come scratch at the side of my bed. Last week they installed the equipment necessary for a pool—large, complicated pipes, lots of them, and big objects that I have no idea how to identify—all smack outside my bathroom window. Jordan has a solution: we’re going to buy one of those panels of fake ivy you can clip to a fence. Real ivy won’t grow there—there is struggling honeysuckle right now, which tells you something. Honeysuckle rarely struggles unless it doesn’t get enough water, which is the case with this. But our water pressure is low, so I can’t see extending the sprinkler system, which would be expensive.

I keep referring people to the O. Henry story, “The Last Leaf” in which a young girl is dying a lingering death from pneumonia. She stares at the tree outside her window and declares she will die when the last leaf falls. An artist neighbor paints a leaf on the brick wall, The young woman recovers her will to live, but the artist, old and infirm, dies of pneumonia. Well, I don’t anticipate dying any time soon, but I wouldn’t mind a few leaves painted on that brick wall—above the pool equipment, of course.

I followed through and cleaned my junk drawer today and have now decided to open a candy-bar store. In all that junk I found an amazing number and variety of chocolate bars. Once when I said I wasn’t really addicted to chocolate, Colin went to that drawer, pulled out all the chocolate bars and fanned them to amuse whoever was with us. Remember “The Days of Wine and Roses”? I have always with trepidation remembered what Jack Lemmon said—he could have predicted that Lee Remick’s character would become an alcoholic, because if you can become addicted to one thing, you can become addicted to another. From chocolate to wine, a path too easy.

Enough of that. This was a satisfying day. I finished reading a good book today—Bitterroot Lake, by Alicia Beckman. It’s a braided story with deaths from the past woven into the mystery of today. Set in a Montana lake resort town, it involves family history, friendship, heritage, a new widow, estranged sisters—and so much more. It will draw you in. I gave it five stars.

This morning I experimented in the kitchen—nothing unusual about that. This time I made a batch of polenta with chicken broth, spinach, herbs, corn kernels, green onions, and cheese. It’s destined to be a one-dish supper and meant to have wells dug into it into which you break eggs. Then you bake until the eggs are the desired degree of done—like shakshuka but with polenta instead of tomato sauce. Jaimie Smith, a neighbor, is coming to eat with me and bringing a green salad. I’ll see how she feels about eggs. I’m okay with or without.

We decided on eggs, but it took forever for them to bake, and we finally turned on the broiler. I think that was a mistake. Jaimie said her egg was fine, but mine, runny underneath, had a hard crust on the top. What was fun about the whole thing was that Jaimie got as involved in the cooking as I did—we both watched those eggs all the time. This time it wasn’t the watched pot that never boils, it was the watched egg that never cooks. I loved the polenta but could do without the egg. And I don’t think I followed the recipe precisely. Maybe I’ll write about that later.

Jaimie brought a wonderful salad with strawberries and goat cheese and browned almonds (I passed on those) and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing. So good. I served mini-ice cream sandwiches for dessert. We were well fed and had a good visit.

Settling down with a good book for the evening. What book? I don’t know. I have an array to choose from.

Cleaning the junk drawer

 

My junk drawer

Cleaning the junk drawer for the sake of my soul

A friend recently wrote about how important journaling is to centering her in her world—overcoming the writer’s block (which she says doesn’t exist and is really fear), getting her in touch with her inner self. Okay, I get that, sort of. I’m not much one for getting in touch with my inner self—I sort of think it’s all one package, and what you see is what you get. I frequently say that blogging is my form of journaling, and yes, someday I may do the cheater’s method of a memoir, by assembling a selection of blogs. Then again, I may be fooling myself about what blogging does for me.

But I do recognize every once in a while, the soul needs a boost. Last night, I sent off to the editor my final version of Irene in Danger. Of course, it won’t be the final version when I get it back with comments, but still, getting there was a big accomplishment. This is the manuscript I started, stopped, started, put aside again, and then all of a sudden was on fire about finishing it, with ideas and scenes coming quickly (I hope not too easily). In addition, ten days ago it was really short, somewhere in that no man’s land between a novella and a novel. By last night, with my last read-through and plugging up some holes, adding recipes, it had picked up a whopping ten thousand words. Almost a respectable length. And as I read it through for the last time, I thought, “I really like this.” I hope others will too.

So there I was this morning: what should I do? Too soon to jump quickly into one of the other projects waiting on my desk. I don’t know if it was what a counselor calls my executive mind or what I call my soul, but I needed a bit of space. So I cleaned and sorted and straightened. I began with computer files—managed the payees on my bank account and deleted a whole lot that I will never use again; then I went through the pictures for my blog—a lot were stock pictures; others were ones that were clearly dated or had no long-term significance. I kept all the family pictures, and I’ll have to go back another time to delete all those food pictures I’m not sure about.

From the computer I moved on to the bookcase. A good friend dropped off a copy of Rodham, a novel based on the fantasy that Hilary did not marry Bill. My friend  recommended it, but right now I am deep into other books. Rodham is a thick book, and I literally did not have a space for it on my bookshelves. (And no, my cottage has no room for additional bookshelves.) So I sorted a stack of books and found enough to donate that I could fit the new one in. Now I burn to sort more books.

Finally—and this was a big chore—I turned to the two top drawers in my office file cabinet. They are not file drawers but flat, for papers and the like. If nothing else, I am the queen of that American institution, the junk drawer. The one I tackled today held thick stacks of really old manuscripts—I always thought I’d be environmentally conscious and use the blank sides, but since the computer has taken over my life I don’t do that anymore. And my notetaking is on legal pads So I discarded at least two reams of paper, destined for recylcing. The drawer also held batteries, and a couple of things I couldn’t identify but looked like computer accessories.

And an appalling mismatched, disorganized collection of assorted greeting cards. My big problem was I took them out and piled them on the worktable in the kitchen, but they kept falling on the floor. It is a royal pain to pick flat papers up off the floor when you cannot stoop or bed down to get them. I was breathless by the time I got them to my desk for sorting.

But sort I did, and discard heartlessly. If a card didn’t have an envelope or an envelope didn’t have a card, it went in with those reams of paper. For the time being, the drawer is neat, sparsely filled. I can’t wait to show it to Jordan. But the real work lies ahead tomorrow—the top junk drawer is an awful mess.

I feel sort of righteous tonight, having done all this. But as I took a picture of my junk drawer, I realized I should also sort and delete the photos on my phone. It’s like unravelling a knot on a ball of yarn—there is no end.

What about you? Do you have one or more junk drawers?