House Beautiful

"House proud" is being overprotective of the appearance and cleanliness of one's house, for example hating to have people sit in your chairs or eat at your table or enter your front door -- and it afflicted many in my parents' generation (now flattered as "The Greatest Generation") and many fewer members of my own generation. Yet heretofore I was too house-proud to winterize the Divine Cabin by putting plastic on its exterior, while for 10 years I have faithfully, with blood, tears, toil and sweat, plasticked or double-plasticked from the inside the single-pane, airy, leaky, original windows, using cellophane -- and shut off from the rest of the house the beautiful but horribly drafty 30 percent of the house called "the Studio" from October to March.

The Studio's picture window made it a wonderful work room and  guest bedroom, and last year with our freakishly mild winter and the house's new heating ducts and frantic caulking and one electric heater, I actually used the Studio in winter for the first time (after 10 years' occupancy) and fell in love with it. But although it was cellophaned from inside, elusive drafts still shivered the cellophane and me.

Knowing that this winter would have to be colder because it couldn't possibly be warmer, I put on exterior plastic and tape, and this is how it looks now. Martha Stewart wouldn't approve. The plastic is translucent so I've lost, for the winter, my meadow view.

But after I finished the job, the room was so much warmer and draftless I thought I was imagining it. Came back later. No, the plastic was working. Seriously working. So I can seriously work in the studio. Useful is beautiful.

The hanging plant is my surviving basil plant, also beautiful and useful.

The Almost-Finished Poem

I have this little paradise of almost-finished poems: a file called "Completed Poems - Almost."

When I have time I draft like crazy, writing big, big, long, sloppy, inclusive first drafts. I let it all hang out. I run the idea into the ground. These drafts are raw material. I mark each of them "Draft 1" and print them out. They go together in an envelope marked with the approximate date of composition (such as "Fall 2007").

When there's another spot of time (at least six months later) I delete and toss the hopeless drafts. Those that still stand are so long & sloppy I can refine them simply by cutting. If after that I still care, I print these drafts out, mark them "Draft 2," and then the intensive crafting work begins.

When a poem is almost finished -- when it's whole except for, say, one nagging word, or one line, or a closing line -- it is promoted to the file "Completed Poems - Almost."

I visit this file with pleasant anticipation, when I have time, usually every six months or so. Often I can immediately see what the poem needs, supply it, and promote it to "Completed Poems." Those I print out and put in a binder.

A really sticky "almost-poem" I'll read aloud. My sense of embarrassment, boredom, or distaste tells me exactly where to apply my crafting efforts -- or whether any further efforts will be in vain.

Some drafts do hard time in that "Almost" file. But I like that file even better than "Completed Poems" (whose drafts are disposed of). A completed poem is satisfying, but the adventure of making it, the romance, the wild guesses, the risks, the faith, the Nikola-Tesla-like moments of revelation, the experimentation -- is so OVER.