August 27, 2014 · 9:39 pm

Window Licking

 

TartThe French have a name for it, that is, for window shopping in pastry shops: Léche-vitrines, translation: “window licking.” Well, if I left my imprint on store front windows in Paris, they certainly made their imprint on me. For, ever since we returned home I have never stopped thinking about tarts.

We are boating now in British Columbia, heading out The Strait of Georgia toward Homfray Lodge in Desolation Sound. Before we left The San Juan Islands I ordered a tart pan from Williams Sonoma, and any day now our contractor will be receiving the package for me.

Sometimes we need to walk away and let go, particularly my husband who has been on the site of our remodel every day of the week, every week, since mid May. We’re in good hands here with him at the helm, and our brother-in-law, Tug Yourgrau, who has mastered navigation. The house is in capable hands with our contractor, and whatever gets accomplished will appear to me, when we get back, like magic.

I’ll be starting from scratch with my tarts. I saw them as paintings in Paris, and only knew how they tasted through others. But if baking is anything like other arts, it is probably hard to taste your own tarts anyway.

I intend to make tarts for breakfasts. Tarts for entertaining. Tarts for the neighbors who have put up with all the construction and allowed us use of their parking spaces for the many trucks involved. Tarts for any new friends I make on island. And if all goes well, a tart table at the weekly Farmers Market in Friday Harbor amongst other bakers, produce growers, purveyors of fresh pasta, lavender, sea salt, oysters, grass fed beef and lamb, as well as goat cheese makers.

I’m thinking that baking is for me because I’m a recipe follower. I never learned to cook at home. Growing up, I was the runner for whatever ingredients my mother was missing in whatever she was making. Seems I’d just hop off my Schwinn with one thing in the wicker basket, and she’d send me back to town for another.

Then when I went away to school, the feminist who ran the school assured us, “If you can read, you can cook.” So as the years went by, I bought a lot of cookbooks and made some beautiful meals by following recipes.

Somewhere along the line my husband took creative control of the kitchen, and I was almost back to the girl on the bicycle. I knew to stand out of the way. But if there’s one thing he doesn’t touch it’s the dessert.

So I am going to master tarts.

I’m thinking baking works with writing. One can’t wander far when it’s in the oven. And this is berry country. It all adds up.

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August 14, 2014 · 4:42 pm

At Last

muse-goddess-thalia Neighbors of ours for a number of years in Seattle recently moved to another home, another neighborhood across the lake. When they first moved in they were a newly married couple. Now they’re a family of four, and their search was predicated around proximity to a choice preschool and high ranking public school system. As I watched the moving van roll off with the contents of their home, I felt an abiding sadness.

I wanted to be in their shoes, for I knew what to do then too.

Our first baby hadn’t taken her first step yet in San Diego, when I whisked my family off to take residence in the nationally recognized “Blue Ribbon” Poway School District. With children grown and gone now, it’s more difficult to know what to do.

Nevertheless, we’re trying. The house remodel on San Juan Island, I realize, is nothing less than a life remodel.

Perhaps because of the extensive area they cover, flooring and wall color took an inordinate amount of time. Good thing we called out hardwood floors throughout and one color for the walls. Initially my husband longed for a blond wood, while I was drawn to dark. What we wound up with is a wide boarded medley of grayed browns, reminiscent of weathered piers and docks. Both of us are at home on that.

Following floors, when the 9 1/2′ cut yew log went up as a mantle, the wall behind it cried out for rock. Until then we had been drawing up some sort of fireplace surround. It was our contractor, Shawn Kleine, who heard the cry. The entire wall should be faced with rock. It was, and it was good.

But I was in danger of being browned out.

If there is one thing I know about interiors, it is that a room should have a foot in both masculine and feminine worlds. By that I mean wood, rock, and steel, should be augmented by something light, soft and airy. So as wood planks went up on the cathedral ceiling, I whitewashed the boards. The cross beams were then painted out white. Benjamin Moore’s pure clean “Chantilly Lace White.”

I was getting happier, but it was still not enough for this rugged room.

Then the skylights opened up and the quartz island top arrived, basically a white with a bit of gray/brown/black. A gender-neutral gray quartz went down like a runway on countertops. And above it, Carrera marble subway tiles, reaching to the ceiling. Like a crescendo.

This is where my heart stops.

It’s like watching Rome being built. No better, classical Greece. Light seems to pour through these tiles as if they were made of liquid or glass. I have never been as inspired to cook as I am now, standing before this marble. I could dance.

Maybe everything is going to be alright.

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August 7, 2014 · 4:52 pm

The Right White

blues_and_mt._rainier_seafair_archive

Every year at this time I have to get out of town. It was Seafair in Seattle, when Blue Angels buzz us from overhead. I had stopped by our house-on-the-market to open windows, water plants, mow the lawn and pull a few weeds. Gardening at sixty miles an hour, I call it. When the I 90 bridge was closed for their practice runs, I knew the Blue Angels were right on my tail.

We are moving to the ends of the earth, a world away in The San Juan Islands, and sometimes I can’t make it out there fast enough.

Now, where were we?

Our island house had been gutted and stripped down to a bare canvas. The ceilings were primed and sheetrock walls taped and mudded. It was all like so much white bread. And as much as I hungered for color, what I had to do was find the right white for the walls.

I also knew that there is no such thing as “the right white.” That is why there are more varieties of white than clouds in the sky or fish in the sea. My pockets were full of paint chips, and walls splotched with tests. Finding the right white can take a year off one’s life.

Nothing was right. Every white turned either pink or yellow or green if you looked at it wrong.

I closed my eyes and remembered the way I felt in my friend’s house on another island. Serene is the word. Despite the fact that her home was custom designed by the esteemed architect, Thomas Bosworth, whereas our house is a remodeled modular, I attributed nearly everything to the color her architect appointed for this and for all his residences. Described in Western Interiors as “a gentle white and virtually shadowless,” that was the white I wanted.

But the formula for “Bosworth White” is a guarded secret. I know because my friend tried to get it for me.

Our walls are done now. In the hopes of saving a year of someone else’s life, Benjamin Moore’s “White Dove” came the closest. Although I still don’t think it’s anywhere near.

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July 16, 2014 · 5:26 pm

Where There’s Music

Cabinet 2 Nothing’s changed and yet everything is changing at our remodel on San Juan Island. We are still strung between homes and living on a boat in Friday Harbor. I commute to Seattle once a week to water plants, sweep walks, collect mail, and run my writing workshop. There, I sleep in my clothes because realtors have been known to come to the door for showings in the early and late hours. I try not to mess a thing while the house is on the market, but to leave it picture perfect. Not really home anymore.

It’s too silent.

And the job site is still just that, a job site. Not home either. If anything, Friday Harbor Marina is starting to feel like home. Ferries come and ferries go, and the rhythm of it all…. One day I’ll be looking back at this time with a certain nostalgia, that I know.

Life is simpler on a boat. It’s amazing how much stuff one doesn’t need. Just the book you are reading and the clothes you are wearing. The elbow-to-elbow closeness of neighbors sharing the same dock. Blinded by fog, and glowing in sunsets together.

The sway of the boats in currents and gentle rolling with waves. The symphonic sounds of wind whipping through halyards and mast stays (flutes). Hulls against rubber fenders (violins). Creaking of pilings against the dock (a cello). Humming of stays (clarinets). And sleeping in our berths on board boats that are talking to each other in the night.

Things are going up, however, at the house. Until now, I had to close my eyes to picture anything we had specified. Now, with the kitchen cabinets in, I can start to see with eyes wide open. How handsome they look in an expresso brown that’s nearly black, standing about like so many waiters in a cafe wearing white shirts and long, pressed black linen aprons over pants.

The kitchen was central to our plans; it’s only right that that go first. And as the materials go up, color and texture start to come in to play. Followed by music. One can almost hear it.

Café music.

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July 9, 2014 · 4:43 am

Good Housekeeping

good housekeeping

We’ve been out on the island for about four weeks working on the house. Well the contractor has been working on the house, and we’ve been doing whatever we can to help move things along. After all, we are expecting houseguests end of the month.

After ferrying over from the mainland 2000 sq ft hardwood flooring, 300 sq ft tile, and 70 gallons of paint, Paul painted the eves and trim so the men could start shingling. Then together we whitewashed boards for the vaulted ceiling in the living room, and assembled some kitchen cabinetry—who knew it would arrive unassembled? And no, we didn’t buy at IKEA. Having fallen in love with the kitchen in the HGTV Dream Home 2014, Lake Tahoe, we drew inspiration and ideas from that. As its cabinetry was from Cabinets to Go!, that’s where we went. The salesman worked with us on customizing it to our space and our needs, but never mentioned it would all come in pieces. Lucky for him, my husband enjoys building.

Me, not so much. Lucky for me, our nephew flew out this week to assist. Now I might write. Remember writing? It had been getting away from me with all the remodeling.

So now we are three people living on a boat. Three people and a dog. It’s cozy. Both men are slim but tall. The dog, fortunately, is small.

Last weekend we had our first visitors at “the job site,” my name for the house. Bare to the bone, colorless and dusty, nothing but subfloors, scaffolding, sheetrock walls taped and mudded, electrical wires and boxes. Nevertheless, some friends from Seattle came to see what we’ve gotten ourselves into here.

What I would have given to be a fly on the wall of their Saab as they drove away!

The gardener in Lynn would be wondering why anyone would turn in a lovely patio and garden in Queen Anne for a rugged piece of old growth forest, and lose everything I will plant one day to deer.

The writer in Malcolm envies me the writer’s hut—a shed on the property that will be cedar shingled as well, and refurbished with windows, French doors, heat and electricity. While I didn’t care for the house at all, I was mad for the shed! (More about this dear little building later. Much more).

Teri, I think, would be doing the same thing as me in a heartbeat.

And Dan, the psychologist, thinks we are crazy to uproot ourselves at will and start all over again. I knew it by the eloquent way he kept commending us for our “bold vision,” and for striking out on “such an adventure”, i.e. better you than me.

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July 2, 2014 · 7:08 pm

A Work in Progress

White Point Entry

 

The ugly little house in the woods by the bay is nearly all shingled now in red cedar. Its trim has been painted a clean bright white, reflecting light under the eves rather than the sickly green of the former siding. The roof always was in good shape.

“A good roof? Well, that’s a start,” chuckled my father when we told him of the house we had purchased on San Juan Island.

Now our house looks at home in the old growth forest where it stands. Its scent is as sweet as the trees. We started on the outside with this house, and are working our way in with a remodel. Closeness to nature has always described this move. Forgetting how late it stays light here, it’s easy to keep clearing brush well into the night. And working by the water’s edge hardly feels like work at all.

When the interior is complete, we have every intention of being back out and into the cathedral hush of the trees, mucking about on the water’s edge, or out to sea.

Living on a boat, we eat out more than we ordinarily would. One evening, climbing the darkened staircase at McMillin’s in Roche Harbor and being a little night-blinded myself, I reached for the handrail and marveled at the feel of it. Now how often do you come back to the dining table raving about the handrail? But a Douglas fir branch, debarked and organic in shape, seemed like something I had to have and to hold forever. So that will be coming into our home too, as handrails, wherever we have the opportunity to use them.

“This is the time of year to peel logs, when the sap is running,” Brian Prescott at the Egg Lake Sawmill & Shake informed us. “Otherwise, in winter, the sap goes into the roots.”

Along with eating out too often, we are also ferrying to and fro the mainland more than we would like. Sometimes in our wagon, often a rented UHaul, but always carrying material or household possessions to store in the garage. On one occasion, having picked up slate tiles for a floor and Carrera marble tiles for a wall, we fell in behind a large flatbed truck carrying logs—a common enough sight in the Pacific Northwest. But something about this particular load caught both our eyes, that plus we had over an hour’s ferry ride to stare at it.

I noticed the flower-like shape in the cut of the trunks, not like any log I’d ever seen. And my husband, for his part, must have noticed everything. For later, while out at Egg Lake Sawmill & Shake, he spotted the very same truck. It hadn’t been offloaded yet, and sure enough, it had just come across on the ferry.

If you’ve never seen a man fall in love with logs, you are missing something. The logs, we learned, were Yew, trucked up from Oregon, and Paul just had to have one. Our Yew is nearly ten feet long, milled, planed, ready to be trimmed a bit and mounted as a fireplace mantle on a yet-to-be-built rock wall that was inspired by the long log.

One of the things I love most in design is similar to what I love most in writing: the way you don’t know where the inspiration will come from, or where it may go. This happens every week in my writing workshop. Flushed faces all around the table, having written our stories, shared and enjoyed them, when everyone started without a clue that there was anything in us at all.

Paul and I didn’t know we had this house in us either.

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June 18, 2014 · 5:07 pm

A Circle of Six

6 Chairs

My husband and I are between homes and living on a boat in The San Juan Islands. Our home of the last seven years in Seattle is on the market. We left it looking picture perfect for a remodel project that we go to every day, on island. First we fell in love with the island, and then with the property: a sloping side of old growth forest on a quiet bay.

The house itself was hideous, but we knew we could do something with that. “There never has been a house so bad,” noted Elsie de Wolfe, “that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile.” Elsie was the woman who practically invented Interior Design.

But back to the land. Afterall, it’s all about the land and the sea. That’s what calls us here and holds us here. We reimagine our lives with each move.

My philosophy in moving–I’ve moved often enough in my life to have developed a philosophy–is to create a zone that I can go to initially, where everything is ideal. I can’t tell you how often these “rooms” have been outdoors.

In San Diego I found a shady spot out back under a trellis draped in grape vines where I contemplated growing everything in mossy, old world pots. It was my sanctuary.

And when all the house was covered with drop cloths in the tumult of renovation on Mercer Island, the deck was what pulled me through. Out there I saw how well the orchid plants were doing, resting on the rail overlooking the lake after their cross-country move in a truck. We had flown in, how could I complain?

Here, I created my zone by carrying up rocks from the beach and building a fire pit in a clearing. Around that I envisioned a circle of cedar Adirondack chairs. It was as simple as that and we built it.

So our pow wow is up and ready, long before the house. This is where I sit under the cathedral of trees and remember why I am here. I will learn the bird calls by day and find my way among the stars at night. And it will all be so clear.

Everyone has their own immigrant story, but at one time we were all indigenous people somewhere. Come, count yourself among us.

 

 

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June 5, 2014 · 4:46 pm

Meeting Maya

Passing Time

Your skin like dawn
Mine like dusk.

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

Maya Angelou

 

Every now and then, perhaps just once in a lifetime, we are in the presence of someone who, we suspect, must be a god. She walked into the room donning a long brightly colored African caftan, her hair wrapped in a turban, holding herself high, seemingly floating on grace. Elegant and eloquent. Each word carefully chosen, as in her poems. The clarity with which she annunciated. Offering words up like holy communion.

I met Maya Angelou before I knew who she was, before many of us knew her. It was 1975 and Random House had just published “Oh Pray My Wings are Going to Fit Me Me Well” and she was on book tour in Hartford CT. The Public Relations department at G. Fox & Co., a large department store, was sponsoring the event in a reception room.

I was on my first job out of college as Communications Editor at G. Fox & Co. With a Polaroid camera strapped over my shoulder, pen and steno pad in hand, I interviewed managers and covered rallies and events for material in publishing “Fox Tales,” the monthly in-house magazine. It was the day of literal cut and paste, and that deadline was perhaps the only time I could be found at my desk. Otherwise I got to run around, and I especially enjoyed covering events such as this that had nothing at all to do with the retail world.

Back to Maya.

Her every word, her commanding presence, demanded we listen, just listen. I remember her attentiveness to us. Her joy in reading. It was like being at a sermon where you get it. And the congregation comes floating out, higher than they were when they came in.

A woman who was silent for so many years. A silence that must have been cleansing like a fast. Thus her purity of words. How could I not think she was deity?

When our daughters were young, we toured the United Nations in NYC. A friend of the family, a delegate, had arranged for us to go behind the scenes. It was spectacular—all the art, the etiquette, rich in languages and men in robes. Ten year old Jackie believed she was in the presence of “kings of many lands.” No one could dissuade her and no one wanted to, for her awe and respect was beautiful.

I felt much this way meeting Maya.

I took her photograph that day and came away with a signed book. That photograph is pressed somewhere in the pages, and that book is packed because I am moving. And now she has died, and I long to hold it.

 

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May 27, 2014 · 6:31 pm

Crazy Making

Garrison Bay 2

Moving is crazy making, especially when we bring it on ourselves. Anyone who knows me or has been reading me, knows how fond I am of Seattle. But in all our excursions to the San Juan Islands, we found something. So I am leaving the city I love for a little home in the woods on a bay. In a perfect world I’d have a pied- à -terre in the city too.

Preparing a home to go on the market, on one hand, and remodeling another house with the other, I lost my stride of a weekly post in blogging. Other bloggers are running circles around me, and because I must jump back in, here it goes:

I have to try this. My romance of living on the water and writing in a hut down by the water’s edge. The wind in the pines and water over rock. The fresh smell of cedar. The smile of a rope hammock hanging between trees. The quietude of kayaks. The grilling of fish, and the taste of the ocean in each raw oyster and boiled crab. Growing our own everything, and what we don’t grow, purchasing from people who do. Adirondack chairs circling a stone fire pit. Watching the fire and watching the stars at night.

This is not going to come by staying put.

It is important to note whether one is moving-towards or moving-away. This is a moving-towards. Only a couple times in my life have I felt the need to move away. Once was from St. Thomas U.S.V.I., and had nothing to do with St. Thomas or The Virgin Islands. The other was from Los Angeles, and had everything to do with LA.

Long ago I set off on a journey with my little neighbor, Tony, into the woods behind our homes. We couldn’t have been more than five or six. I was sure it would lead to somewhere. That we’d come to some place magical like Oz, if we just persevered. Tony, however, turned around and headed home.

This girl kept going. And before long the woods did come out somewhere, but it was just another nice neighborhood in Connecticut. One that looked much like mine, but wasn’t. I was lost. So I did what Dorothy did and knocked on a front door.

It was the age of women at home, and so I was in luck. A kindly lady invited me in, seated me at her kitchen table and fed me milk and cookies. I didn’t notice, but she must have slipped out of the room to call the police and report a lost child. For it wasn’t long before an officer arrived at her house too. How cool was that? I got to come home in a cruiser! 

Look at all Tony missed by turning around.

 

I recently wrote my daughter:

I am sixty-two years old and live, as you know, on one of the “hills” in Seattle in a lovely little English Tudor home where a chandelier is reflected in a Venetian mirror. And I just bought a waterfront house in the islands that’s a total rehab with a trailer dumped on the lot. And all I want to do is go out there and clear brush! Am I nuts?

And she answered:

The best kind of nuts! You’ve lived in plenty of lovely neighborhoods, but you’ve never lived by the sea on a remotish-island. I am so excited for you.

 

 

 

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April 30, 2014 · 10:24 pm

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Duftkräuter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am sitting in a coffee shop at San Francisco International Airport enjoying an expresso and the calligraphic quotations that wrap around the room high on the walls like crown molding:

One day if I do go to heaven… I’ll look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” Herb Caen. Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible. Walter Cronkite. San Francisco has only one drawback. Tis hard to leave. Rudyard Kipling

Caen, Cronkite and Kipling. I’m in good company.

Aside from the fact that San Francisco is fast becoming my second city, I feel remarkably at home in this establishment of dark cherry tables, counters and woodwork atop a vintage black & white mosaic tile floor. Twenty years ago while working as an interior designer, I did a kitchen in this scheme for a client in San Diego. It was a grand house and my client was in over his head.

In the end, that traditional kitchen was what grounded the house.

It was the age of McMansions. Architects ran away with themselves upon the drawing board, and builders followed. Custom homes popped up in developments like track housing for the sheer newness of every home, the immaturity of landscape, and in many instances, the lack of land. Gluttonous sweeping driveways, elaborate portico entries, patios, pools, pool houses, sports courts, as well as the enormous house itself, consumed the lot. As a designer I inherited a few of these projects, and the challenge was to turn them into homes.

I’m glad those days are over. Apparently, we do learn.

But whether we learn fast enough, remains to be seen. Who would have thought, twenty years ago–when architects were drawing with a liberal hand and builders were building whatever was drawn—who would have thought we would go from a consumer throw-away society such as ours, to one where everyone learned to recycle?

A handful of idealists, that’s who.

Any gardener worth her salt has done her share of dumpster diving in the course of planting and cleaning up. Invariably, a plastic pot or tag gets tossed into the yard waste bin by mistake. Down, down, into the bin we go, making every effort to fetch it.

It always struck me as hypocritical that the growers, the nursery industry, were plastic dependent. So in planting my herb garden this spring I was delighted to see so many plants packaged in biodegradable pots. All we have to do now is go after the tags.

It’s easy to find fault, but let’s not overlook all that we are doing right too. People are walking where they once drove. Hopping on buses for longer stints in the city. Moving into the city or into town in order that we might reduce our environmental footprint.

In the city of Seattle, our collected yard waste fuels the city buses. Single-use plastic bags are illegal, and we carry our own totes to stores. San Francisco has now passed a law against single-use plastic water bottles as well.

With each passing year our recycle and yard waste (and food scraps) bins are larger, and the trash containers diminish. A generation ago, who would have thought that one day we would all pick up after our dogs? In biodegradable bags, no less.

Now we just have to go after those plastic plant tags.

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