I’m a homemaker, and I don’t mean a housewife (I was terrible at that) or a working stay-at-home-mom (also awful, but at least it earns an acronym: WSAHM), rather one who makes homes. I am not an architect or a builder, which would be cool and I aspire to be in future lifetimes which for now comes shed-by-shelf, but one who basks in the artful process of converting houses to homes. A home-cozier if you will, a DIY decorator, an extreme example of my Cancer crab zodiac of the homebodily-inclined nester.
As my nest nears emptying—only a few years to go before both kiddos have packed up their shower puffs, “Stranger Things” posters, and retro lava lamps for college, but who’s counting?—I find myself increasingly padding the walls. I just went through the spice cupboard to ensure that all spices are transferred to the same size black-capped jar. I’m replacing old soiled duvet covers and bought a rust stain remover for the basement carpet. The medicine cabinet finally lost all the disintegrating meds I had been hoarding since pre-childbirth (save for some anti-diarrheal which bought us time on our recent trip to Mexico, sorry, TMI, but it’s real-life here in this nest.)
I like nothing more than making a home my own. Converting colors and styles imposed to things that better suit me. It took a while to find my way to this, to knowing what that even meant. Case in point: when I was buying this Sleepy Hollow home in 2017, I was also coincidentally emptying my parents’ house of all their decades of detritus. Once my dad had died earlier that year, it was clear that my mom couldn’t stay in so many rooms full of whatever alone, so it was time to clear it—which I did weekly on manic nonstop weekends to the tune of murder podcasts for months. As I analyzed the inventory, I sorted. Most things were for Savers or the the Good Will or whatever store she had nearby that was willing to accept stuff by the carload which we did Subaru by Subaru umpteen times. Other things were for my mom to move to her new life—for now to my brother’s house next door, but someday hopefully soon, her own new small and forever uncluttered (pretty please!) apartment. Some things, like the best tools, my brother claimed. Finally there was my pile. Objects I might need as I left my marriage and the marital home and found my own space to fill. With what? I didn’t want to empty out everything that had been picked out together for this mutual family endeavor, but could only claim things that predated marriage, or were dearly clearly mine. From my mom’s house, I took innumerable kitchen items, some lesser tools, furniture and some decor, like a carved elephant with real ivory tusk (sorry) from a time predating when people knew that was wrong and reminded me of my grandparents and their house. And, this couch that used to be the end-all-be-all piece in our “fancy” living room, this wild 80s sectional of orange and turquoise, which no one ever barely sat on. This wasn’t a space where anyone spent any time, so the couch remained pristine, a dusty time capsule. I remember when we picked it out.
And now it was item one in my new home. The beginning of all pieces which would kind of determine everything around it, and subsequently everything everywhere, because you can’t just dabble or clash with a tangerine and turquoise sectional. The way a designer has one item (like a vase) as the starting point for the whole scheme, this is what happened with this alpha couch which set the pace for the whole marathon. Suddenly walls were being painted turquoise and I was specifically selecting only orange and blue things from my mom’s abundance. None of this was about me, except for my proclivity for being endlessly resourceful. Making use of what’s available.
My house for years endured this vivid tropical orange and blue identity, seeping into everything: the kitchen wall was orange. We live in Sleepy Hollow, after all, so certainly there should be a Halloween tinge to everything as if pumpkins grow here year round. I would even wear bright orange t-shirts seasonally as if anyone can look good in that.
Sure enough, pandemics have a way of changing the perspective on everything. The decor that was fine for years became by 2021 intolerable. So I upgraded, all of it, for the cost of a few hundred dollars. Sold the sectional on Facebook Marketplace. Replaced by a free set of red leather couch and chaise that just required some TLC repair after a dog had scratched it. Hey same with my couch and a cat, but I could flip cushions just the right way so all was not lost to painful underseller negotiation. It went to a vintage dealer and would squat in a shop for a while, back in its homeland of CT, how sweet! Meanwhile in redville, I had already revamped my wardrobe (post on this forthcoming) so I knew what my palette was now. Navy, bold red. Black, white, gray. That’s it. It seemed logical to me now that the same should apply to my house. My favorite colors should seep through all of life. So the walls got reprogrammed. New carpet, some new furniture pieces or a repainting. It was all coming together. And now it was me, it was mine. My nest. My home. My taste. Not the ramshackle style I gathered by default in desperation but the new chosen one.
There’s always the fun question to ask in getting to know a person, “what would you do with a million dollars?” Never mind that a million dollars is nothing nowadays, because it’s still a lot to me, dammit! And what I say is perhaps a sign of my great mental health and contentment, my gratitude and appreciation for what I already have (or my “scarcity mindset”). I say, “I wouldn’t change anything. I would just improve it. I would still live right here. I would just get to hire a few more folks to do a few more things. I would make the cool things I have even cooler.”
Like my alien.
I know everyone’s interested in an update on what ever happened with my detainee é, the metal alien sculpture my kids bought for me and dragged from Georgia to New York. It may have thought it was pretty exciting enough to land in a haunted, headless place like Sleepy Hollow—but no, this was just a stopping point. There was another road trip to bring my new alien to my patch of shady land upstate. Here I planted it inside a tire. But that didn’t feel nice enough. So over the course of a few weeks between here and there, I prepared a platform and then I made a sign with the new name of the property, alien-inspired, and painted an icon face on the back of my RV.
Behold the newly decorated home of the alien known as é.
Everything is temporary, I always say. And I know my home isn’t necessarily a forever-home though I choose to treat it that way. And this land isn’t mine to keep though I treat as such for now. Wherever I go, this place is the height of my life, presently, my greatest achievement. I can’t imagine leaving, until I do. For this alien, who is so far from home, billions of miles, eons of lightyears, I am just trying to make his stay here as welcoming as possible. I’m not kidding when I say I sit alongside him in the dusk and firefly light to tell him my troubles. He doesn’t offer any advice, which is fine. He’s a good listener, a rare quality. He’s not here forever. The platform is meant, with its red circle, to draw attention to his presence to some passerby spacecraft above. Someday when he’s beamed up and departs, I’ll mourn his absence and find some other rusty metal creature to hug.
[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]
Your alien looks happy there.
I was in a relationship in NYC and my girlfriend noticed a little white man high up in one of the sycamore trees in front of the apartment. Best theory being he'd been on the string end of a balloon and somehow got wrapped up there, but that seemed like a stretch. I think he just flew in. He seemed an omen for us. He would disappear for weeks at a time, then reappear in the same spot. Not long after we broke up, he disappeared for real, beamed or flew elsewhere to bless another couple as well as he was able.