Down to the Bone

25Nov09

or maybe just the bare skin.  Since we made the decision to move to West Virginia (and in some ways before that, while we were contemplating), we had been stripping things away.
The summer before we retired, once we knew we were selling our house, we packed away all the knick-knacks.  We have tried not to [...]

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Being There

24Nov09

Our house is the last on the street before it starts downhill toward the West Fork River.  The ground slopes away all around the back, so we look down on the roofs on the next street.  Our grown children, raised on the flat in Texas, arriving at night when they first saw it, said “You [...]

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Hill Home

23Nov09

During the years we were looking for a place to live in West Virginia, we looked at many places, in the country and in town.  It became a running joke with my brother that all of them were too close to the road.  And then we bought this place, with just 25 feet or so [...]

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Turtles All the Way Down

27Apr09

Robert was outside moving the old bricks that were dumped next to the side of the house, so that he could get the ladder in there, so that he could work on the library window – the windows were not only painted shut, the bottoms had been caulked on the outside – so that we [...]

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Garden Treasures

06Mar09

Thursday was 60° and sunny, after a low of 8° Tuesday.  With rain predicted for Friday, it seemed like a good day to abandon the library walls and work in the yard.  Raking leaves and pulling up what would seem to be acres of English ivy, if the lot weren’t only half an acre, I [...]

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Morning Porch

15Jan09

Dave Banta, a poet who lives in Plummer’s Hollow, Pennsylvania, has a Morning Porch blog, where he reports on each morning in haiku-like poetry.  I too go out each morning to greet the day.  In Austin, it was first on the front stoop, and later on the back screen porch we built.  The view was [...]

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Floors Finished

12Dec08

The floors are glowing in many shades of honey.  I can’t wait until the sun shines on them.

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Locksmith

11Dec08

Locksmithing is apparently one of those dying trades.  I’m not sure why, since there are ever more doors and locks.   I called a locksmith after Robert spent half an hour going up and down Main Street trying to locate him from the address in the phone book.  The neighboring businesses disavowed all knowledge.
“Where exactly [...]

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Trapped

10Dec08

This is why many people choose to have their floors refinished while they are out of town.  I  am in our bedroom, the only room on the first floor without at least one open doorway, with our three cats and the litter box, where I will remain until the first coat on the floors is [...]

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Floors!

09Dec08

The floor guys, father and son, showed up bright and early Monday morning to sand and finish the floors.  We had hoped they could just be stripped, but after 90 years, at least 50 of them under carpet, it would have taken weeks of hands-and-knees stripping.  And the hands and knees would have been mine [...]

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