Setting up a household is more than just putting things in their places. It’s nesting, wallowing, combining tributaries of a life left behind, with glimpses of the journey ahead. It’s creating niches for mothering, joy, work, art, tears, sex, entertainment or even solitude.
Setting up a household is more than just putting things in their places. It’s nesting, wallowing, combining tributaries of a life left behind with glimpses of the journey ahead. It’s creating niches for mothering, joy, work, art, tears, sex, entertainment or even solitude. Much like cultivating a garden, moving in begins with that first step. The texture and smells of the soil send a message and the gardener, unaware of practicalities, begins to dig, scrape, saturate and mold the earth until it is ready for the first seeds. All done by feel. Lists of an orderly process are lost and have no place in an artist’s mind anyway. Mud - dry, cracking in some spots, then soppy wet and slippery in others, cover the gardener like a cape in such a way that normal folk wonder….”what has she been doing”? It appears she has been rolling in the mud and with so much to do yet. Does she have a work ethic? Truly it mustn’t be that hard to plant the marigolds all in a row, clean up and move on to the next project. “What gets into to her”, they wonder. Why does it take so long to move in. Really, why so many holes in the walls to hang just a few pictures? Why is it so messy?
Because it is. It’s messy and chaotic and simultaneous. It’s a dance around the kitchen fire with soup brewing on one burner, fish frying on another. Cookbooks are discarded in an unopened box while she, the gardener, the homelover, writes. She writes in chaos and slowly, ever so slowly….a riot of color explodes. Normal folk wonder….who came in the night and charmed this home with grace and color. The gardener knows; she always has. Amidst the muddy bogs grow roses with fragrances that intoxicate. The gardener smiles. She is not surprised.
