Home Improvement

Today my super, bless his heart, helped me out by putting up these window blinds that I bought from Huge Scandinavian Furniture Store. I feel almost as exhausted by the whole process as if I had done it myself. Well, I did get up early to move all of my clutter out of the living room and dining room into the rooms that have closed doors. (Because it won't do to have the super think one is not a neat person.) Then I managed, amidst all my hurrying about, to set a big plastic serving spoon on fire in the kitchen. Slightly scary, but I doused the fire successfully and managed to clean the burnt plastic off the stove and get all the burners going again. Then, after the super and his assistant arrived, there was the anxiety about whether the blinds would actually fit. They do, although not exactly the way they are supposed to. Measuring windows is trickier than it looks. Apparently, my windows are a tiny bit smaller than the standard size I thought they were (because of the molding, the super explained)--and the blinds that I bought, labeled as being that size, are actually half an inch wider with the brackets. So, the blinds are sitting a little bit in front of the individual window frames although still within the deep frame that goes around all three windows. And because they had to be mounted in the ceiling of the frame, there is no room for the esthetically pleasing wooden piece that is supposed to cover the head rail. Oh well. Live and learn. I think they will be fine overall.

After that whole drama, I still had to go to work in the afternoon and then to my teaching gig at night. Before class I was so tired I wanted to cry but then teaching got me energized again in that way that always seems semi-miraculous. Class was good and I felt peaceful on the way home on the subway. But I'll be pretty happy to go to bed soon.

Reading

The other night I stayed up late reading this story from the current New Yorker. (If you are reading this post sometime in the future after the link has expired, the story is called "Foster," and it's by Claire Keegan.) It was a week night, and my plan had been to go to bed early, but I thought, well, I'll just take the New Yorker to bed with me and have a look at the fiction. I read the story once, and it was a long story, and then I had to read it again almost all the way through to try to put things together that I didn't understand. So it was late when I turned out the light, after midnight, and I kept thinking about the story as I fell asleep and then it was the first thing I thought of in the morning, and I went to work thinking about it and wanting to write about it.

The story takes place in Ireland, I can't tell when exactly, but I would say some time in the last half of the last century, the 20th, that is. The setting is rural, and not very modern, but there are cars and TV and margarine. The narrator is a young girl who is sent, for the summer, to live with distant relatives of her mother's because there are too many mouths to feed at home. We get, very effectively, the limited perspective of the young girl, the things she doesn't understand about the people she is with, her fearfulness and then her growing comfort with them, because they are good people. The story is haunting, ambiguous, troubling, with lots of texture. I loved the way the Irish speech patterns are rendered: "And what way are you, Dan?" "What happened at all?"

One of the themes of the story is secrets, and at the end, when the girls has to go back to her less-than-happy home, she has promised herself not to tell her parents about what happened to her over the summer. But there is some ambiguity about what it is she must not tell. When I got to the end, I thought, okay, I need an English teacher to explain this to me. Then I remembered, wait, I am an English teacher. Then I had the impulse to reach for the instructor's manual, but of course there was no such thing.

So, instead, I invite you, my readers, to follow the link and read the story, and if you feel like, share your thoughts on it in the comments. I did come up with an interpretation of sorts, but I'm curious to see what others think before I post it.

Oh, and I have to share also that the piece of the story I will quote below, describing the daily work of housekeeping on a farm (in whatever period this is), made me abashed about my complaints about housekeeping chores.


From "Foster," by Claire Keegan:

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out to the yard to milk the cows, and myself and the woman make a list out loud of the jobs that need to be done: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot-press, hoover out the spiderwebs, and put all the clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, weed the flower beds, and, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields to the well. Every evening, the television is turned on for the nine-o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I am told that it is time for bed.

Winter Light, Apartment Style

This blog has been a little image-deprived lately, I think, so, to remedy the situation, here are some photos of life and light in the still-newish apartment.





Okay, so technically this one is a view outside the apartment. "They" are doing some work on the terraces in front of the building, and this elaborate scaffolding has been in place since early November. Of course, as soon as the cold weather descended, all work ceased.





The scaffolding does create interesting shadows, though.

And here is a shot of the living room, looking more lived-in than the last time I posted a similar shot. As you can see, I have yet to put up anything on the windows. I did buy some lovely wooden blinds just last week, though, at Scandinavian behemoth furniture store, now in Brooklyn, and I expect to put them up (or find someone to put them up for me) soon. And, although there is a much better place for the TV, in the corner of the room on the other side of the piano, I spent so many years, in my other apartment, watching TV from the right side of the sofa that I have not been able to get comfortable watching from the left side! Not that I watch very much now, since I don't have cable in the new place and thus no reception to speak of. I do watch movies sometimes, though.