I still haven't finished painting the closet

but I have made serious progress on it. The scraping. The caulking. One coat of primer, and yesterday,

another coat. But then I got stuck for a few hours contemplating the ceiling. First, because I realized I didn't have any paint rollers, and painting ceilings, I've learned, is much easier with a roller (and much more professional-looking too). So, off I went to the hardware store to buy rollers, mid-job, and somewhat paint-spattered. 

Also, I had less than a quarter can of ceiling paint. Would that be enough? I paid for the rollers but passed on the paint, and let me tell you later, what a nail biter that turned out to be. But whew, it was enough. 

Ceiling done, and now all that's left are the actual walls, the part of "painting the closet" that most people imagine I'm talking about when I say I am painting the closet. 

Everything takes so much longer than I imagine at the start. 

The book I began writing three years ago, for example. A messy draft "finished," but it wriggled around all over the place, morphing into several possible books. The therapy I started last year, just a little tweak of the psyche, I thought, at the beginning, but it has morphed along too, spiraling in multiple directions, 

breaking me open in ways I never dreamed, and still, barely past the scraping and caulking phase, and nowhere near the finished product. I know I know, deconstructing the very core of your own self isn't like painting a closet. Or writing a book. 

I'd put that away for a while, (the book writing) and a few months ago, plunged back in, trying to trace the various potential storylines and finding what seemed to be two decent possibilities. A friend told me, Hey! Why not write both books? And I laughed and laughed, but then I seriously considered it. Why not? 

The brainstorming and revising, the caulking and priming, the tearing apart and forgiving—others, myself— 

maybe the point isn’t perfect completion, but gathering the tools, dipping the brush, moving past the beginning, and somewhere into the middle, 

where it’s good enough, for today. 

Painting the closet

seems like it would be a fairly easy goal, 

a small project to check off a to-do list. I mean, I've painted entire rooms, entire houses, so what's the big deal with a closet is what I was thinking, when I set this goal, last year. 

I can get it done over a weekend, I said to myself, 

fifteen weekends ago. This is a small closet in my husband's office. But first it was our daughter's bedroom, Year One of the Pandemic, when she bounced home and nested here, and it was such a terrifying, anxious time, but also, beautiful in a strange way. The closet 

was a magnet for things, a catch-all, and not just stuff belonging to our daughter. Boxes of papers. Photo albums. Framed pictures that don't seem to fit anywhere on the walls. Musical instruments from the time when the kids played viola in their school orchestras. 

It took me a good four or five weekends to think about emptying it, to do the actual emptying, to find places for all of these things. One long weekend of looking at the violas (For the record, we have two kids and four violas), of calling the kids to see if they still wanted them.  

No. I don't know. Maybe, they said. 

One weekend I dug out an old jacket of my daughter's. It fits me perfectly. Not my style at all—much more fashionable—but I wear it out to dinner one night and feel like I am a different person.  

Maybe the kind of person who can paint a damn closet in a weekend.

But first I have to scrape off the peeling paint. The house we live in is nearly one hundred years old. There are so many many layers of paint. And I quickly discover, as I begin scraping, a layer or two of wallpaper buried in there too. I manage to do one half of one wall before quitting. A few weekends later, I try again. 

Uncover another layer, what looks like hand painted flowers, so surprising me mid-scrape, that I have to quit again for three weekends, four. 

When did I become this person, 

who can't finish an easy task, who scrapes into the past, and gets stuck there, gazing longingly at the pretty pictures on the wall? I don't know, but weekend fifteen, sixteen, whatever this weekend is, I am digging in deep, back to my old self, forward to a new self,

settling somewhere in the present, 

a present where I don’t imagine painting the closet, but do it. 

I was going to say

that every time I paint a room in our new-old house, I hate the people who used to live here. But that sounds harsh and I don't really hate them. First, I don't know them, and all I'm going by to justify my harsh feelings are the people's questionable decorating choices. 

The orange ceiling, for example, in the dining room, the orange paint with glitter added to it, so it took two full coats of primer and two coats of ceiling paint to cover it, and even now, when the light slips through the windows in a certain way, you can see a sparkle.

Okay, that sparkle, I'll admit is kind of lovely. But did I tell you about the hole in the wall in the kitchen? This was left over from an old laundry chute, but the previous owners had blocked the laundry chute and put a shelf in its place and framed it, and now there was a random framed hole with a shelf in the middle of a wall and nothing 

you could really do with that space, and my husband chipped the frame out and pulled out the shelf--the idea being, we'd patch up the hole and have a more useful space and counter area, but when he pulled out the shelf, something plopped onto the counter, a long ago bit of laundry tossed in the chute and caught by the frame--

--a pair of women's underwear--and Oh my God who knows how long that was hiding behind the walls. There are all kinds of surprises when you live in a new-old house. Upstairs on my hands and knees, prepping to paint the hallway, but first, trying to scrub off the yellowed cigarette stains on the walls, noticing every scratch and nick in the previous layers of paint, a square of decades old wallpaper behind a light switch plate, I want to forgive these people

for living in our house, and ask forgiveness too, from the people who will live here after us. I promise we haven't tossed dirty underwear behind the walls or glittered up our paint, but being what we are, human, I mean, we will have committed other decorative sins. Go easy on us. Please. We do the best we can with what we are given. 

On painting and powerpoints and psychopaths

The painting was of the master bedroom, a room I should have worked on first, because of how dark the paint was on the walls, a navy blue that might look okay in some rooms but only if there's a lot of light, and there isn't; never mind the peeling paint, the cracks.

I want something white, bright, pristine. Still, it takes a weekend just to gear myself up to start, move the furniture out, dust, vacuum. I have a million other things to do. Two school presentations to plan, five writing classes. My writing partner has a book due and she needs a last-minute proofread of her out-in-October novel Five Total Strangers, and that takes precedence over everything.

This book is good, like falling under a spell.

A page turner, but I try to read it slowly to catch mistakes. There aren't many, only a handful of typos, a dropped word here and there. The story, which I already know from numerous brainstorms and discussions, still surprises me and sucks me in. A teen girl is desperate to make it home to her mom, but a snowstorm grounds her plane. Her seatmate offers a ride and our MC pushes aside her doubts (she doesn't really know this girl; the weather is bad, there will be three others in the rental car--strangers-- and everyone is kind of weird... ) The trip goes downhill from there, everything that could ever go wrong on a car trip,

plus, a psychopathic stalker. I love books like this. Meanwhile my own book is stalling,

right on the verge of the climax. In a Rom Com, that's the break-up, and even though everything in this story has been leading to this point, now that I'm here, I'm hesitating, churning, rethinking the scene. These characters that I’ve grown to love over the past few months are about to turn on each other.

Suddenly, it all seems silly, what I’m doing, writing a book instead of painting my bedroom, instead of working on my school presentations, instead of marching in the streets. I don't know why we-- any of us-- do the things we do.

Because... it's what we do?

I send a corrected copy back to my friend, slap a second coat of paint on the bedroom walls, finish up a school presentation, take a moment to double check my voter registration, dive back into my book and watch the pretend people I love break each other's hearts.

How to Paint a Room in Ten Easy Steps

1. Prep-work prep-work prep-work! It's been said that 90 percent of painting is prep-work. Okay, I don't know if that's actually been said except for me saying it, but the percentage feels right. There's so much to do before you even start painting-- decluttering the area, dusting, vacuuming... Because the last thing you want is to find a cat hair painted forever against your baseboard.

2, This week is Paint the Kitchen Week and I am ready. Painting clothes on. Hair tied back.

3. Shoot. I forgot to take all of the light plates off the walls. Side note: PLEASE DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. Case in point: at the our last house, when I was removing the light plates, I realized that the previous owners had left the plates on and painted right over them. Total amateurs.

4. Primer everything. Wait. First, you've got to wash the surfaces you'll be primering. I got this tip from the guy who was standing behind me in line at the paint counter at Lowes. I was asking about primer, explaining to the Paint Clerk that the people who lived in the house before us smoked and now everything smelled smoky and what kind of primer was best for this problem, and the guy behind me piped up that he knew all about that, being a contractor and just having painted an entire house where six people had smoked up the place for twenty years.

The secret: a solution of water mixed with bleach and Dawn Dishwashing Liquid.

For the record: this is a messy yucky job and it takes a good part of a day.

5. Primer everything. Two coats. (This takes two days.)

6. Paint the ceiling. I have never painted a ceiling before but how hard can it be? I watch a bunch of Youtube videos. And I'm ready. Side note: It's not hard, exactly, but I do get a nice crick in my neck that reminds me of that summer I painted all of the McDonalds in Central Connecticut. 

7. Paint the walls! No, wait. First, you've got to tape everything off. I used to do this step religiously, but after painting what feels like a thousand rooms, I am more confident in my ability to paint a straight line. Still, it's a good idea to tape what you absolutely do not want to ruin. The kitchen cabinets, for example. This step takes a good two hours.

8. Paint the walls!! The color we've chosen is called Familiar Beige and I think it's lovely. Warm and brown. A few weeks ago I painted swatches of it on every wall to make sure we all really like it. We all really do.

But now that I've painted a wall,

I'm not so sure. Maybe it's clashing a little with the cabinets? No. It's fine. I keep going. I paint the entire kitchen and the back entryway. When my husband gets home from work, I ask him what he thinks and he hesitates. It looks a little red? he says. I argue with him that it does not look a little red. And anyway, what's wrong with a little red.

Nothing, he says. Forget I said anything.

I send him off to buy another gallon of Familiar Beige so I can paint the second coat, but as he's walking out the door, I say, Maybe we can change the cabinets?

He hesitates again.

Whatever. I AM NOT PAINTING THIS KITCHEN A DIFFERENT COLOR!!

We have a nice long bickery argument with our daughter looking on and shaking her head.

My husband flips through our collection of approximately 200 thousand Lowes paint samples and picks out another color, something called Salt Crystal that looks a lot like the color of the cabinets. He is so wrong about this color selection and I tell him 50 times and then I send him out to buy it.

8. I paint the entire kitchen again in Salt Crystal. Twice. It's creamy and delicious and makes me think of buttercream frosting and damn it all to hell, my husband is right. I do something I rarely do. I tell him he is right.

9. Paint the trim. Twice. (Two days)

10. Peel off the painter's tape. (Two hours)

Wah lah!

Now it is time to paint the dining room.

Painting over cracks

this weekend, after a week of workmen tromping through the house, repairing drywall and measuring for new carpet, freaking out the dog.

She's not too thrilled about the painting either. So much disruption, moving around the furniture, the loud vacuum. Also, she's wary of the stepladder. I climb it with my paint brush, painting the same walls I painted twelve years ago when we first moved into this house. You really get to know a house, make it your own, when you paint it,

that close examination of the baseboards, the crawling around on the floors and reaching toward the ceilings. The kids were in school back then, jumping into the middle of a school year in a town where there aren't many new kids.

I'm listening to podcasts while I paint. Fresh Air interviews. A man who wrote a book about climate change and how our window to save the planet is closing. The emotional lives of primates, how chimpanzees have masculine societies and bonobos are led by females. We don't know what to make of that, says the interviewee, so scientists tend to focus more on chimpanzees.

There's a heap of dust behind our bed when my husband and I move it away from the wall. And ha! Now I know where all of my missing bookmarks have fallen, night after night, reading in bed. Our daughter's room has three layers of paint. The purple color I originally painted it--it was the first room I worked on-- trying to make her feel at home in our new home. A sunny day in October, her first day of school, I walked to pick her up (Walked!!! I had been so tired of the forty-minute car drives) She refused to talk to me about her day. Crawled into her bed and sobbed and what do you do to fix a pain like that, except to say,

You made it through. 

A few years later she asked me to paint her room a cheery blue. And when she went off to college, I turned it into my office, painted the walls what is called Sand 3, the same color I used in the house we lived in before this one. Like the iris bulbs from the previous garden replanted here, the lovely sand paint will move with us again.

This time I need my reading glasses to do the painstaking work around the trim. I listen to an interview about the Spanish American War. Paint the walls marred by the built-in bookcase, and did you know our government tricked the Philippines into thinking we would help them defeat the Spanish? More Filipinos died in that war than in the American Civil War.

The most tedious part of painting is the prep-work, the removal of light switch plates, the patching of nail holes left behind after taking down all of the pictures.

Only we know what hung on these walls, the graduation photos and family trips, a visit to the college my husband and I both graduated from, that time we took the kids to visit the place, the four of us smiling against a backdrop of ivy covered bricks, the children so young then. It was right before we uprooted them to move here, I think.

A podcast about the Russian hacking of our election. A discussion about what makes kids resilient. We'll be back at the same college in a few week to see our daughter graduate, the four of us together again.

A quick trip before moving on to the next house with new walls to paint.

The roof is higher than it was the last time

I was up here. I have a thing about ladders. Going up isn't so bad, throwing your leg up and over. It's the climbing down that gets me. I have to brace myself. Look straight ahead. Imagine myself already on the ground.

In the meantime I stay low, inch my way up to the roof peak and down the other side, keeping in the narrow strip of shade. Did I mention we've picked the hottest weekend of the year to paint the house? Why did we decide to do this again? my husband asks.

(Because we never hire people to do things we can do ourselves)
(Because we're cheap)
(Because we're idiots)

I like this paint color. Brownish gray. Once I get over my initial terror on the roof, I settle into a rhythm. Dip the brush into the can, scrape off the excess, smear it onto the house. I can see all of my drippy mistakes from the last time I was up here ten years ago,

when we'd only recently moved here and the house was royal blue. We went for a more muted tan color, priding ourselves on wrapping up the entire project over Labor Day weekend. This year, I can already tell we won't hit that goal. Ten years from now...

yeah. We're probably going to hire out.

I can see my garden from up here. The asparagus plants I planted on a drizzly cold spring day, my son watching from the porch, laughing when I told him that it might be seven years before we'd have a good crop of asparagus. But I'll be in college by then, he said. I don't know about him, but I couldn't imagine that. Now

he's been through college and out. He lives on the opposite side of the country, not here to eat the asparagus, which truth be told, never took root or spread how it was supposed to. I planted sixteen plants and today there's only two left.

Recently, I cut one perfect stalk and ate it standing right where I'd plucked it. Stretched out around me were the raised beds planted with food that grows way better than asparagus. Lettuce, for example, which is set in rows, now hiding the spot where my daughter once practiced hitting a tetherball.

The spring I planted the asparagus she was obsessed, wanting to master the game the kids at her new school were playing. But it was a brief obsession. By fall, when she started middle school, my husband took down the tetherball pole and built the raised garden beds. I do this a lot

flip back and forth in time

see myself digging asparagus holes in raw drizzle, hear my son's laugh and my daughter's smack of a ball, and me, on a roof, painting over the past, bracing myself for the climb down.