About a House

I have worked so hard on my Lompico house.  This is a very dark and blurry photo, taken at night, of the kitchen and living room.  Sorry it's hard to see things, but it was eleven pm when I took the picture. The house is very spare and very neat and clean right now.  I like it that way: after too long of letting this little house get neglected, I want to care for it always. It is humble.  It is simple.  It's not a showpiece, but it's mine.  I wish I could have been more brave about m. being here, but there was some instinct I had.  I did not want to be mocked and made fun of, and it was what I feared.

Hard to see, but near the refrigerator, there is a little bookshelf by the wall, and next to the window, an antique maple table and chairs, with a teapot embossed with a sunflower, and salt and pepper shakers shaped like a tomato and an onion.  They are on a colorful dishtowel.  Nothing fancy.  In the dishrack are some of my grandmother's Franciscanware set, in the apple pattern.  I wish the photo showed a little more of how the house is responding to my care.

By the way, a lot of my wall decorations and other things are down as the walls are being prepped for painting, and my cleaning supplies and water are out.  And yes, there are mismatching covers on the old couch.  So it goes.  I do plan to get either a new couch or a nice slipcover.  My sister showed me how to put a slipcover on a couch; I had no idea such things existed.  I plan to get nice curtains once everything is painted.  Considering painting the kitchen in a warm color. 

I was too ashamed to show m. this place, because I was afraid he would have ridiculed me about it.  S., my boyfriend from long ago, used to work on the place. He never treated me badly over it; he loved me and wanted to help out, the way I helped him out so much with his girls and with acceptance of him, also.  He was a very compassionate man, an ICU nurse, and though we had a hard breakup, he checked up on me for literally years to see how I was doing; we still have short communications from time to time.  I had given him a beautiful Honey Pot yellow rose for his birthday because he once had a rose garden in another home and missed it.  After we broke up, he sent me photos of it in bloom, and told me it was beautiful  He wanted to see me again then, and I was still too angry. I don't think either of us really understood why we broke up, in the end.  So it goes.

At any rate, here is my house, humble as it is.  It will, in a few months, look better.  A couple of years ago, I had no idea how to tackle the task of cleaning and repairing it, inside and out.  Now I know that it is done in small steps, and one of those small steps is learning not to be ashamed. So many small steps later, and I am on my way to having a house I can be proud of.