A Time of Transition.

I once read that life is most interesting at the margins, where one thing is busy changing into another.  Where prairie turns to forest, where high school turns to adulthood, where complacency turns to planning.  That's where we're at right now, in that last bit, and it is indeed interesting.  We have a buyer for our house, and have begun the purchase process on a new one.

A Loquat tree at the new place!  Japanese Plum.  I've studied up...they're supposed to be delicious!

Well, not new...it was built in 1965 but the current owner has done a wonder of renovations and we'll be happy to live there.  We will transition in the form of scaling down--in the square feet of the house and in the size of the lot.  We currently live on a country lot of 1.3 acres and are moving to a city lot of .25 acres.  The changes coming around require lots of shifting...of furniture, of landscape dreams, of traffic patterns.  But we're ready.

Iris: "Dauntless"  We'll be starting (another) new iris bed!

Having moved fifteen times in eighteen years has us a little too nomadic, and four years in the same place is odd.  This moving feels like waking up, stretching, yawning, and warming up those muscles that have gone unused for a while.  But it's all good.  We seriously hope to get used to stationary living...as much as we make fun of ourselves--the last three houses we've bought were supposed to be "forever" houses.  Not so much.  This time we're not calling it a forever house, but more of a "Ten Year House", and are willing to see what happens.

I've been busy saving starts of plants all around, herbs, perennials, vines, etc.  Our cannas, the ones we have dragged around for almost twenty years...yes, they're going too.  I've joined a garden site that has no end of expertise and camaraderie, and threatens to overwhelm me in Garden Fever.  But it's all part of the transition, and I'm not going to fight it too hard.  I mean, why should I?  A new yard!  New plans!  Roses!

Saving seeds...one great thing about the garden website I've joined...they all trade plants!

The effects do tell on me once in a while, taxing my energy reserves.  So today I took advantage of a quiet Sunday afternoon...took a nap.  Of course Willie and Schultz took advantage as well...and roosted on me while I slept.  That's okay...I like to think they were conveying a little energy to me for the upcoming weeks of hard work, painting, moving furniture, and alllll that digging of new flower beds.

Life really is pretty interesting in the margins.
Where are the margins in your life, and how can you make the best of them?

Creative Withdrawal...or, Having An Art Attack.

Last November, after our Thanksgiving trip to AZ, we started in on the house, getting it ready to sell.  It wasn't in bad shape, it just needed to be decluttered & depersonalized, because when we live in a house, we really LIVE in it.  So all the stuff was packed away, the bright colors neutralized, and (this was the hardest part) both of our studios put into storage.

Big mistake.  I did leave out paints and paperclay, a little lace and some sewing thread.  But I put away all the fabric.  Box after box of fabric.  Yeah, someday I'll enroll in a program for fabri-holics, but for now, let's say I wasn't really thinking things through.  It's easy to stand in the midst of chaos, knee-deep in boxes and packing tape, and think "Oh, I won't really need this stuff until, what, next June?  July?"

Aside from the fact that I have several requests for dolls to sew, stuff, sculpt, paint, and dress...there is the move itself.  I'd forgotten what Nesting in the New Place does to my creative mind.  It's NOT a matter of hauling furniture from one place to another, and plugging in the toaster.  When we move, I always have an Art Attack.  Sometimes several.  Here are some examples from over the years:

Painted child's rocker...it has bugs all over it. 

A box with a Celtic Green Man...my Mother In Law keeps cloth napkins in it now.

My daughter's room, the year she wanted clouds.  And vines.  And butterflies.

The entryway of our house up in North TX.  Note the painted footlocker, lower right.  Ancient and rickety, but colorful!  I painted the urn and grapes while the hubby was on an errand for building supplies.  He didn't make me paint over it.

I often pull down closet doors and install curtains.  This was my son's room; textured and painted to look like a dungeon.  Not my fault...it's what he wanted!

A purple hall closet curtain, and the entertainment center my hubby & I built together.  I had a blast carving the knotwork down the front. 

This was Florida, and I'd been bitten by the colors on the beachfront boardwalk.  Hubby wasn't thrilled about a pink kitchen.  I'm wasn't thrilled about that awful picture of myself.  But the table on the freezer behind me was fun to paint and sold at a local art fair.  We were in base housing, so I had to put it all back to white before we moved.

Lady Sydney, on our bed.  She loved towels warm out of the dryer.  Phil made the headboard and I painted it.  The Cat in the Hat was a gift, and I made the sock monkey (who is in storage and whom I miss a lot)!

When we bought land in New Mexico, I found this chalk-ware lady...so I made her a little shrine-house.  Phil still shudders when he thinks what an awful woodworking job I did...but the painting was fun.  See the orange and purple shed off in the distance (upper left)?  We've left a trail of sheds from Florida to Montana and everywhere in between.  Now it's time to built another one at our new place!

Sooooo, we've found a house, and have it under contract.  Supposed to close toward the end of April.  Before we found it, I stayed busy enough, what with the yard work and the house work, but with a new house on my mind, dreaming has turned into a tortured sort of planning, and I MUST PAINT SOMETHING NOW OR I WILL DIE!!!

I must analyze the new-house spaces for best use, repurpose (repaint?) dressers, chairs, tables, etc. for their new rooms and new uses.  Sew new curtains and maybe crochet funky tie-backs with beads and buttons and whatever.  And that doesn't even count the possibilities of a brand new yard!  Oh the bird houses and wind chimes and silly garden whiz-gigs that need making!  But the studio is packed!  The furniture has to stay as it is while we sell this house!

Oh my.  I need a creative outlet, or I really might explode.  What a mess that would make...and here I am trying to keep this place tidy.

Yesterday I cut out fabric for twenty dolls, and if buyers don't like our house a little "busy" with ongoing projects, well then too bad.  Better a prospective buyer sees a clothesline of painted doll parts than me, hunkered in a corner, muttering with a mad gleam in my eye, like Ophelia counting paintbrushes instead of broken flowers.

You might ask, "But I thought you stored the fabric?"

Well...what're a few more yards in the grand scheme of things?  The rest of it can wait til I can get to it...and it won't go to waste, I promise.

Here's to my spousal unit!

This weekend I had a doll show, (it went well in some aspects, and less-than-stellar in others) and while I was gone, Phil had people in to see the house.

When we have a showing, we get kind of militant with the white glove thing, because why list a house if you're not going to show it at its personal best?  But I was gone, and while Phil is very dedicated--sweeping and straightening and all--he is not quite as, well, perhaps manic would fit--as I am.  I turn the towels around so the tags don't show.  Shine the faucets.  That kind of thing.  My inner control freak worried the whole time I was up north, with all that crucial stuff possibly undone!

But Phil went above and beyond.  Not only did he scoop the cat's poo-palace, he HGTV'd the bed.  Seriously.  With the throw thrown and everything.  I think I will marry him all over again.

We have bought and sold a respectable number of houses, he and I...and now that we're launching as partners into housing for others, we'll buy and sell a considerable number more.  I've missed our common career thread, the shop-talk after a day of same-but-different jobs on the Air Force Training podium.  With realty, we already know our strengths and weaknesses, how to work together, and we LOVE shopping for houses.  What's not to love?  Okay, yeah, there's paperwork...but I confess some of it is kinda cool, in a sort of obsessive hide-the-tags way.

This weekend  I got to take pictures of Phil all dressed up in a suit for business cards, and I wanted to share my favorite.  It was fun messing with the backdrop, making him turn this way and that while I fiddled with lighting. 
The cat goosed him a few times from behind the backdrop, so I got some involuntary smiles--all that Air Force training is hard to overcome.  

He's got more lines and gray than he had when we met twenty years ago, 

and every bit of it is dear to me.