Breaking the Silence

Well, it's been a hell of a summer and I finally have a minute to write. I've been caught up with work and spending so much time writing that there weren't any words left for this blog. In addition, I've been working on creating my ideal little home, which takes a lot more time and effort than I ever imagined. I have seen the inside of almost every furniture store in this city. At first I wandered through them completely baffled. I have never bought any house items from any where besides IKEA and garage sales. That means that usually there is only one or two items that I like and really the decision making process isn't too hard: Do I want this in white or black or crazy blue polka dots? Furniture sales people would come up to me and ask if I needed help finding what I was looking for. "I actually don't know what I am looking for," I'd confess. "I don't really know what I like, so I'm just going to wander around and try to learn what I like."

They'd back away slowly thinking, "Too much info. No thanks probably would have cut it, lady." But as far as I was concerned, it was better to be up front about it than to have them wonder what I was doing spending hours wandering from show room to show room and back again. Every once in a while I'd whip out my paint chips and compare them to the walls in the designed rooms and shake my head at how badly I could misjudge the color of paint on a wall. "Hmmm," I'd mutter to myself as the blue paint chip I held up to the wall suddenly forced me to realize that the wall was in fact green, and a green four shades off from the blue color I was holding in my hand.

I made a little book of pictures of rooms, furniture, art, and lighting ideas that I liked. I'd pull this out occasionally too as I wandered through stores. It saved me from buying the Mexican hand painted trunk and red, mirrored Indian pillows. I pulled out my book and saw that neither of them related in any way to my vision. The old me would have been at home with both, wondering why the finished product didn't look like anything I had in mind when I first started.

My booklet reminded me of the booklet my friend Larkin made when she went to meet with an interior designer. She cut out everything she liked from magazines and found she liked a lot of texture and richness. She told the designer, "Here is what I want my house to look like," she said flipping through the booklet. "And here is what I am worried it will look like," she said, flipping to the last page of a house completely overstuffed and overdone with colors, patterns, and just STUFF. "I'm going to end up living in Larkin's nightmare," I'd tell myself in order to convince myself to put down the gold tapestry and back away.

"If you buy what you love, then it will all fit together somehow," Abbie would tell me. "I think you have no idea the range of things I love," I'd tell her. "Believe me. The Japanese wood cutting, the Mexican trunk, the Indian pillows, and a gold tapestry, do not, under any circumstance, go together." But slowly, using my new found compass of my "vision", I am pulling together something I like. I am falling in love with my house. And just in time for autumn, when the shorter days and cooler nights are pushing me back indoors.