Notes from Maine - 2023/08/05

There’s just no good time to remodel a kitchen. I guess if you had a team of skilled professionals, it wouldn’t matter as much, but I’m working alone. At the moment, my kitchen has a toaster oven, a sink, and a dishwasher. The food is packed up in boxes in the dining room, the refrigerator and microwave live in the laundry room, the oven is in the basement, and about half the cabinets live at the dump.

And my family is in town. 

Like I said—there’s no good time. 

Hopefully, I can replace the floor and start building things back up in the next month or so. Until then, I’ll be standing in the living room, trying to remember which direction I’m headed. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and you can’t remember why you came in? That’s the feeling I have all the time except I can’t remember why I came in and I don’t remember where I put the thing that I was looking for.

Mom was concerned that my dining room would be even less accessible from the kitchen with the new layout. I guess that means I will go from using the dining room once a year to maybe using it once a year but it will be slightly more inconvenient. I’m just not “dining room people.” When Dad was convalescing here a few years ago, we used the dining room regularly. It was a way of breaking up the day and changing the scenery. But it normally sits unoccupied except for Thanksgiving.

I’d like to put in a breakfast nook somewhere. In the morning when the dogs are eating breakfast, I sit at the counter and work on something until they’re done. It could be fun to have another cozy place to write. Maybe I’ll think about that more once the kitchen is finished.

I haven’t lived upstairs since Finn had his knee surgery. I’ve been up there a few times, especially to put a couple of rooms together for family, but not for any period of time. I don’t miss the upstairs anymore. At some point I’ll replace the blue bedroom with a better version of itself and maybe then I’ll want to live upstairs again. I’m beginning to wonder which of these projects will never get done. It took me twenty years to start the kitchen. If I wait much longer to remodel the attic, it feels like there’s a strong chance that I’ll never begin that project at all. 

I really want to keep changing this house, making small improvements each time, but there has to be a limit. Eventually I’ll decide that I can live with the shortcomings and I won’t have any motivation to keep working.

In my wildest dreams, one of my future renovations would include expanding the house down. I would hire someone to dig down and pour concrete in old part of the cellar, and then maybe put a couple more subfloors under everything, expanding the subterranean footprint of this house to absurd proportions. I love that concept. It’s probably not even remotely legal.

Have I mentioned my cousin’s house?

He and his family have this enormous house that used to be a church. I was lost instantly when I took the tour. They have a gym with a basketball court in their basement. They have a giant, industrial kitchen down there where you could cook dinner for sixty. It’s amazing.

It’s not that I want a huge house, but I do like a good labyrinth. I like liminal spaces that have been repurposed into work nooks, or secret hideaways. Because I live, work, and spend most of my time in the same house, I like to be able to move around a bit, and haven’t made that many changes here over the past few years. With all that in mind, I finally started tearing apart the kitchen. It might be a little inconvenient for the rest of the summer, but that’s all temporary.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Book Fair on August 5. I met a ton of interesting people. It was the launch of the event and featured fifty authors, so I’m sure it will only get better as time goes on. Several people came up to my table, looked at the titles, and said, “Oh, I can’t do horror.”

That’s amazing to me. If a book doesn’t have something frightening, paranormal, or bizarre, there’s little chance that I’m interested in it. I guess that’s not entirely true. Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Tyler, and Robertson Davies are some of my favorite authors. But I rarely turn down a scary book. I suppose we’re all different. A friend of mine said that they couldn’t read one of my books because children were in peril. That same person was later in love with the Hunger Games books. Good thing no children get hurt in those! Admittedly, the Hunger Games books were quite good.