fun in threes, sometimes fours
around the house
“Oh, look!” Babcia exclaimed, “they’re x’s!” I can’t recall the Polish name she called the little weeds growing in our front yard, and I don’t have a clue what they’re called in English. I call them weeds. She calls them flowers.
They have blossoms, so they’re flowers; they’re unwanted, so they’re weeds.
Which means just about anything could be a weed for someone.
About the only time I was indoors all day was for this shot, taken as I was finishing up my coffee and heading out to
In short, a perfect spring Saturday.
Nothing about the house makes sense, but it’s obvious it was once the best house on the block. Or at least it wanted to be. In the days before McMansions, this must have been something of an intermediate step. But a strange one.
The addition at the back of the house is almost as big as the house itself, but there seems to be little living space in it: the top floor is one enormous room with a wall of glass that overlooks the swimming pool; the first floor is a series of garages.
But what’s more impressive than the garages is the brick wall and cement pads around the entire property. A double-course wall complete with lights, it must have cost well over several thousand dollars when it was made decades ago. And there is no backyard: it’s all been cemented — another several-thousand-dollar project.
It just doesn’t add up: You’d expect to peek over a wall like this and see some great mansion, something Chateau-like. Instead, it’s just a typical suburban brick home from the seventies, a home with a large addition but no central air as evidenced by the multiple window-unit air conditioners.
According to the realtor sign that has been in the front yard for years, it’s now under contract. K and I walked during the snow break last week, discussing much of the ideas above.
“It’s in such bad shape, though,” she sad, looking at the rotting wood and the remnants of previous owners.
Perhaps the house is worth it, despite its dire repair, just because of the brick work.
Sometimes, rooting about in the crawl space, taking care of mold in anticipation of new insulation being put in, you find something you just wish you hadn’t found. Like a dead bird. Or something worse.
Saturday is usually a day of hustle and bustle in our house, a day of constant movement and seemingly unending motion.
Yard work, repairs, cleaning, cooking, child care, soccer games, shopping -- it makes the day pass in a flash. And I never really notice just how busy we usually are until we aren't. With both kids a bit sick, today became a stay-at-home day.
And except for some cleaning and a bit of cooking, with some grading squeezed in here and there (40 out of 50 complete) and the Girl's Polish schooling, it was an uneventful day.
It's hardly something to complain about, though. Nothing on occasion is just fine.
It's been a project we've wanted to complete for a very long time. It's been something that's shifted up and down our priority list. But eventually, we reached a point that either we get the lower portion of the driveway redone or what was unpaved would end up down the hill after repeated rain.
The great thing about it is that it included a bonus: not only is it a great place to park a car now (obviously), but it's also a great place for everyone to roller skate, to ride a scooter, or to engage in a million other wheeled- and non-wheeled- activities.
Babcia made a list — a “To Do” list.
First item down.
Sort of.
There is no other way to get rid of branches and such is to burn them. There’s no “leave them at the edge of your property and the city will pick them up” option.
The Linden tree in Babcia's yard is in full bloom now. The number and richness of the blossoms is astounding. Equally incredible is the constant and unmistakeable sound of bees buzzing around the blossoms.
| Under der linden an der heide, dâ unser zweier bette was, dâ muget ir vinden schône beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. vor dem walde in einem tal, tandaradei, schône sanc diu nahtegal. | Under the linden tree on the open field, where we two had our bed, you still can see lovely both broken flowers and grass. On the edge of the woods in a vale, tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale. |
Or in another cultural context: "Dragostea din tei" ("Love from the Lindens" according to Wikipedia) which became the famous "Numa Numa" video.
Rains, clouds, floods, puddles, mud, grey, damp, smeared, uninspired, uninspiring — after days and seeming days of this, to have a morning that looks like this is better than the cup of coffee in my hand.
We head down to our once-lake-front and take a look at what thousands of gallons of water flowing over a small area in a few minutes can do.
Mud, sand, limbs, leaves, cans — this is what it looks like after a flood.
Plants destroyed, swings caked in muck, belongings strewn through neighbors’ yards. I can only imagine what a real flood would be like.
We go out into the neighborhood, checking on what gifts others received, eventually heading over a couple of streets to a house we’d looked at when we were house hunting. It had been love at first sight. The yard was magnificent; the kitchen/dining area was open yet homey, almost cozy, with a fireplace in the corner. The full basement was finished on one half that opened out to a fenced dog run. Yet a friend advised against it: too much cracking in the foundation walls. “It won’t be a problem now,” he said, “but in a few years, it will cost some significant money to fix.”
We were heartbroken.
As we walk through the neighborhood, I remember that on the other side of the dog run was a small creek — a draining stream just like the one that runs behind our house, and so we head over to see. I couldn’t remember how much elevation there was between the drain and the house.
Not enough.
Talking to neighbors across the street who were out in the yard, we learned that the owners had well over a foot of water in their basement, and that the water had risen to just below the bottom of the window on the outside. I suddenly became very thankful for the two or three inches we found welling up through the slab in our basement.