LETTERS FROM HOME: PEACOCK WALLPAPER AND THE FATE OF EARTHWORMS

Aug. 31, 1995

Dear Patty

I'm dreaming of a white Halloween, just to offset white-hot August. Temperatures in the 100s, no rain. Thirsty earthworms are abandoning the hardening ground only to fry and shrivel like bacon topside.

We've finally gotten the house air conditioned, thanks to DC's dad. When you want a job done right, I always say, call your father-in-law.

In this case, we needed a 220-volt electrical outlet installed on one side of the house. I turn screws and bolts around here but draw the line at dallying with effective means of capital punishment.

So I came home one night for dinner to find him applying a drill slightly smaller than a bazooka to our precious wainscotting. I know an omelet requires breaking eggs, but in that split second I thought of thousands of ways to live without air conditioning.

My family did it when I was a boy. Some people still do. Not out of choice, I'm sure.

He kept drilling.

The heat and lack of air conditioning have slowed our household projects (while somehow having no effect on my golf routine). Lately, I've come to think of our house as an adult version of one of those recreational obstacle courses the burger places and ice cream shops have devised to occupy sugar-powered children.

A 20-foot extension ladder blocks the front stairway. DC climbs it from time to time to apply plaster, which she later sands to create the fine white powder that covers our floor. It's kind of pretty in a white Halloween kind of way.

The dining room is home to our chair collection, a coterie of once-proud sitting appurtenances now requiring re-upholstering, re-caning, refinishing and rethinking. They seem to be waiting there against the background of cracking peacock wallpaper for the arrival of a dining room table, the character of which will decide which chairs are reborn and which exiled once again to the black hole of our basement.

The back porch is where chairs and tables go to be coated with goo that miraculously turns multiple coats of paint into lead-based pudding that then can be scraped off. DC likes doing that, the way the paint easily slides off to reveal beautiful wood grain. It's also one of those odd things human beings like to do, like popping bubble wrap.

Upstairs, DC and her dad are installing new weights in the window sashes in the rear bedroom. It's a big, time-consuming project, so we've temporarily moved in with the ghost in the middle bedroom.

Last of the unfinished projects is at the front of the house, where various exterior parts have been painted dove grey, jade green, slate blue and old silver. Unsure which colors to commit to, we're experimentally painting our house.

Some days when DC says, "I need some help," I warm to the fate of those earthworms.

But marriage is an experiment, too, one that sometimes seems a chaos of Hobson's choices and stretching to keep your balance atop teetering ladders. Committing time and care to a house and a future is still a relatively new idea for me. Old resistances and excuses are easily resurrected.

Pass the paint, baby.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.