My Favorite Carpet Stains

It was either 1986 or 1991 when the Divine Cabin's carpet was installed, and Demetrius, bless his heart, and I had it cleaned around 2003, when we'd just moved in and he still helped me move furniture. Since then I have despaired of its dinginess and invited fewer and fewer guests, such is my carpet shame. At first I cleaned any stains. Then the despair was such that I left them. Hot, humid days drew from the carpet the smell of pee from an elegant housecat who died of bladder cancer in 1999.

The stains tell a story. From bottom to top: a coffee stain. I never used to drink coffee. I never used to drink it in the living room until two years ago. Spilled it once and cleaned it but you could hardly tell. Next time I spilled it, left it. Next, another coffee stain, this one sneezed into being while I sat in my rockin' chair. Tried to mop it with a towel. The orange-pinkish stain is cough syrup taken on an empty stomach, so vile that I sold the ranch halfway to the bedroom and lay on the floor for an hour, unwell, as the pink soaked into the fibers. When the stain dried it did not bother me. No one else would ever see it. Cats ralph cold tuna and hairballs all the time and no one cares. The tobacco-colored stain at top left is not a stain but a shadow on a carpet so grimy even shadows are brown.

This year the landlord agreed I need new carpet. The measuring guy found asbestos tiles underneath the current carpet. No need for alarm; asbestos floor tiles were popular in the 1950s through 1970s, before people knew better, and if unbroken are perfectly safe. But he said if the carpet removal cracked or broke any tiles the installers would depart at once with the job unfinished. Hearing this, the landlord engaged an asbestos-removal firm to do the job the day before pad and carpet installation.

Thinking right now about a new-carpet party, but what if someone made a stain? Or is that just the way life goes? Happy Summer Solstice.

Raisin Rye

Hankering for Raisin Rye bread I went from bakery to bakery inquiring. The bakers, sounding puzzled, said "Raisin rye?" "No, we never made that," as if they never heard of it. In Hermann, MO, where the German bakeries are, I again asked for raisin rye. None. Strange; I used to have it all the time (good with tuna salad, or for breakfast) -- or so it seemed. Friends hadn't heard of it. Did the world run out of it? Had I dreamt it? I googled it and it was not a dream.

I probably never bought raisin rye bread in St. Louis. It's not a German bread. Some say it has French origins but my hometown 400 miles from here is full of  Swedes and Danes, and they bake and are known for rye breads (as are the Finns) because in Scandinavia wheat won't grow but rye will. Dried grapes from warmer places on the continent came to Scandinavian port cities, and somebody put them in rye bread where they are very tasty. It's a food from my childhood. Thus my instinctual and inexplicable craving for it.

This fragrant home-baked loaf is probably a travesty because I added density and bite with a tablespoon of pumpernickel in with the wheat and rye flours. Recipes include shortening, molasses, cocoa, sourdough, coffee, cardamom, pecans or walnuts, fennel, orange zest, the water you plump the raisins in, grated Vitamin C, cinnamon, icing, buttermilk and starter, to name a few; such an array that raisin rye seems like an edible canvas bakers paint with their favorite flavors. Lots of bakers won't work with rye; it has no gluten so it doesn't assume the same lordly shapes of classic wheat breads.

Look Through My Window

The cabin's original windows with original silica glass (single-pane, and it's wavy) look like this, a little scarred, but it's been 80 years and only two are left and there's no greater fun than yanking them open in good weather, yanking hard and maybe even prying with a butter knife, and letting the breeze in to sweeten the room, and thought I'd show you the view in summer:

And just so you don't get too romantic about living in a 1930s log cabin in autumn during a rainstorm:

The leaking problem is largely solved by a piece of thick translucent plastic Demetrius stretched into a wooden frame he custom-built to fit this window from the outside, a homemade storm window, but in the summer I remove it. In autumn when the window leaks--as the weather and precip is increasingly driven in from the north--I set the shield back over the window. Then I must seal every crack in the inside with those rubbery strips of foam or else cold wind whistles through the warpings. Yet it's all worth it. These have to be the coolest, strangest windows on earth.

Yes, these windows should all be repaired and maintained, but the owners don't think the house is worth maintaining. That used to annoy me until I realized what I treasure isn't the INSIDE of the house but the hundred acres it sits on and all comes with it. In the Manhattan penthouse I will someday inhabit, I will never look back on my life and be sorry.

Those Who Ironed Before Me

In 2008 I emailed Mom about the old wooden family ironing board I still use and printed out her answer, taping it to the underside: “bought for $2.00 in 1955 in a State Street junk store.” She and Dad were newlyweds, and it was the golden age of ironing. I first saw her cry, over a neighbor's rude remark, while she was ironing out on the porch (it was summer). I was between ages 3 and 5 and horrified. That’s my first memory of this ironing board.

In the '70s the heavy awkward thing became mine and I hauled it to the 10 or so places I lived until settling here in 2001, by then ironing at most four times a year. A week ago I saw the board’s butt end had been soaked and its cover shredded, and thought: Buy a new ironing board? Naw. I’ll simply buy a new cover. So I did. Stripped the old cover off--it had been stapled on--and saw the full-length crack in the board’s “table,” rendering it worthless but not useless.

Googling, I learned this three-legged style was first manufactured around 1914 and that metal legs replaced wooden ones in the 1940s, giving me the board's approximate age. I turned the board over looking for a manufacturer’s label or stamp. Nothing. But besides the note I’d taped to the underside was writing I’d never noticed before. Handwriting. Only some of greenish lettering was readable.

This much was clear:

 ________ d A. Dixon

______________________ Wis.

Probably the previous owner who’d junked the thing! With light and magnification I finally confirmed the name as “Fred A. Dixon.” No, not “Freda.” That “A.” is clearly an initial. Plus I cannot imagine any female so attached to her ironing board she’d write her name and hometown on it. What, is she taking the ironing board to camp, or worried it'll be confused with someone else's?

Where the ink had worn away, faint impressions in the wood allowed me to confirm the first letter of the town as “W,” resembling the fancy “W” in “Wis.” (My hometown with the junk shop begins with “R.”) Fragments of other letters were just visible. Might it be two words?

The town name’s final letter, I thought, looked like “h.” “Beach”? There is no Wisconsin town called anything “Beach.” Or did it say “Fish”? That was more likely. The top of a capital “t” was followed by the top of a capital “e.” The answer was probably “Whitefish”. . .

But there’s no Whitefish, Wisconsin. Whitefish Bay is in the next county to the north, but believe me, no native calls it Whitefish because then we can’t make the standard joke about that wealthy suburb, calling it “Whitefolks Bay.” There’s a Whitewater, Wis. But the final letter before the “Wis.” was not an “r.” The storm outside had knocked out my Internet, so I pursued this puzzle, thinking that “h” might be a “d.”

Then I saw it: Waterford!

Waterford is a village in the same county as my hometown.

Census records from 1940 list the household of Fred A. Dixon, 57, of Waterford, Wisconsin as himself and his wife Lulu, 56; their son and daughter-in-law, ages 31 and 29; and three children under age 4. They used the ironing board a lot. So did Mom, who sprinkled water on clothes and rolled them in towels before pressing them, and also darned socks over a light bulb.

So Long, Suckers

I  could have a vine-covered cottage, but there's plants enough around here, and invasive vines shouldn't receive encouragement, so I set about pulling down the several vines growing roofward on the south-facing wall. I don't know what they are, but they have the neatest little feet--suckers--they use to climb the wall and hold on. They cling so tightly that when ripped from the siding it sounds like Velcro, and they take the paint off. For good measure I tore the roots out when I could and cut them when I couldn't.

Who cut the hearts into the cottage's nonfunctional shutters I don't know, but at different times they please me and other times make me ill. I used to know, way back when, an old man, German immigrant, a former Nazi Youth. He had heart cutouts in his shutters just like this. He apologized to me for the Nazis who imprisoned my dad for four years. He didn't know any better, he said, back then. I believe him. I'm seeing how politics can sweep people up. But now I have difficulties loving the heart cutouts and often don't even see them.

Mice Ate My Lipstick

I'd vacuumed up all crumbs, cleaned and bleached the kitchen and its trash can, even tightened the tops of the spice jars and the toothpaste, all because a very bold and demonic mouse or mice for weeks had scampered across my living room and eaten peanut butter out of my traps, without triggering them -- and, the final straw, had scrambled across my bed one night while I was in it. With my house sparkling clean, I then left for eight days, and returned to mouse droppings just about everywhere although there was no food. Wait; I'd left out some makeup, a suite of Sephora brush-on lipsticks ranging from pink to red. Every color had been nibbled, clawed, and messed with. Disgusted, I declared war, and told a friend. She said perhaps the mice had wanted only to look prettier.

Tossing the lipsticks and the traps that work so well on my stupider mice, I bought at Dickey Bub's another, sneakier, super-hair-trigger mousetrap which holds the peanut-butter bait farther out of reach. This morning I beheld the very satisfactory results, and proof that at least one mouse (the one with the glowing eyes) was in fact demonic.

Things Mom Did That I Don't

• dust with Pledge.
• towel-dry the dishes and put them away. To this day I ask her why not air-dry the dishes. She simply doesn't like leaving them out.
• percolate coffee.
• sneezed violently all day instead of using antihistamines.
• her own taxes.
• set her hair in brush rollers pinned with pink plastic pins, and then sleep wearing the whole assembly.
• wear a real rubber girdle--a sheath with pinholes for ventilation--and when rubber ones were no longer made, she wore a spandex girdle. When I was a kid I asked her why women wore girdles and she said it wasn't nice for ladies to wiggle.
• have children. She made it look extremely difficult.
• hung clothes and sheets on a line. We used to steal the clothespins and make puppets out of them.
• make and fry doughnuts. The five of us ate them all within minutes.
• remove mice from traps. I toss the trap with the mouse still in it.
• had a cookie jar.
• darned socks and sweaters, inserting a light bulb and patching the hole over it.
• canning, always on the hottest day in August, with an electric fan whirring to no effect.
• put clothes through a wringer.

Cold and Bright, or Dark and Warm? Pick One

From the inside

From the outside

Last winter, the coldest since' 98-'99, I froze in the Divine Cabin despite weatherstripping, caulking and heavy, doubled plastic sheeting  taped over the windows, a special problem because most windows here are single-pane. They're original, I wouldn't want them changed, but gollywogs, all the propane and space heaters couldn't make up for it and I ended up living in a hooded sleeping bag for two weeks.

This year I began winterizing in August, hoping to use bubble wrap as window insulation--the Internet said it was great. I'd done major spray-styrofoam and caulking when a smart and personable, loyal, humorous, and occasionally prosaic engineer friend visited and said bubble wrap wouldn't work and that in winter he put foam-board insulation over his north-facing windows.

So he did it for most of my windows. The bedroom has pink insulation and some daylight does get through it as you can see. I insulated two doors and left one door and window clear so I could watch the road and the bird feeders.

From outside the house looks either abandoned or under construction, but I don't live outside, I live inside. Or want to. I'm hoping, hoping, because tomorrow comes the test: The season's first polar blast.

What's the Most Bourgeois Thing You Own?

This question came up in conversation: "What's the most bourgeois thing you own?"

I said, "Let me go on vacation for five days and think about it," and flew off and upon my return nominated among all my bourgeois items, which include a fanny pack, a terracotta garlic keeper, and one Coach handbag, my portable Maytag dishwasher I was not quite bourgeois enough to have disassembled and cleaned at a cost of $85 for a housecall plus $85 per hour, when I thought I could and oughta do it myself.

 I laid all the pieces out exploded-like.

Unskilled and unsmart, I took a plumbing wrench to the plastic screw that holds down the entire wash assembly, and immediately stripped it -- it was soft, like clay! Unable to proceed, with shame I called the Maytag repair place and said, "My Maytag portable dishwasher leaves particles on the dishes and I have very hard water. I think it needs to be cleaned out."

The holy of holies, clean.

"Aww," said the woman who answered the phone, "just buy a bottle of C.L.R. and pour in a cup and run through the cycle three or four times." Without telling her I had stripped the screw, I said I thought I needed more help than that and asked to talk to the repair person, who jeered and tried to put me off by saying it cost $85 just for him to come to the house and C.L.R. was all I needed. That's country service for you.

Caustic C.L.R. (Calcium Lime Rust) did not fix the worsening problem. Every two months or so I watched You Tubes about dishwasher repair. I showed a friend the stripped screw and he managed to undo it, and today I took the whole assembly apart, unscrewing layer by plastic layer, scrubbing their calcium deposits into the slop sink with a toothbrush. The nitty gritty was guck caught in the fine filter at the very bottom. By sheer luck I wiggled its retainer loose and cleaned and reassembled the whole thing, and now it purrs like a kitten.

What will I do with my saved $85? Get a gel manicure and an Internet signal booster.

Breeding in the Dark

Spring cleaning reveals that much has gone on in closets, cabinets, baskets, and drawers that I did not have a clue about. Certain items reproduced themselves. Perhaps at your house a similar laxity of morals and discipline among your inanimate objects has caused the same situation. I dealt with them ruthlessly. The culprits at my house included:

Throttled and sent to the cleaners

1. Hangers
2. Gift bags
3. Forks
4. Socks
5. Condoms
6. Hoodies
7. Key rings
8. Lip-care products
9. Pesto cubes in the freezer
10. Spice jars


Also, certain species have diminished, died off, evolved (in the Darwinian sense), ran away, or vanished into the Great Wheel of Karma:

1. Spoons
2. Scissors
3. Shot glasses
4. Pens
5. Drinking glasses
6. Safety pins
7. Ammo

The Recipe Box Collection

 Housekeeper Debbie and I spent two days cleaning and winterizing the Divine Cabin, now 85 years old with cracks in the foundation big enough to stick my hand in, and to fix them I emptied my cobwebbiest closet of boxes packed during my move here 12 years ago, unsealed the boxes to see what to throw out, and found, carefully wrapped in Taste of Home Magazine pages from 2001, my cherished recipe-box collection, mostly of tin and manufactured between 1950 and the 1970s, many of them by Ohio Art Company of Bryan, Ohio, maker also of tin toys.

If bought at yard sales or on eBay a box might yet be crammed with some homemaker's recipe cards, newspaper clippings and notes, telling an intimate story of her household and her kitchen, heart of the home. And the heart of the kitchen is--it must be--the recipe box! I have made some of their recipes, such as Orange Chiffon Pie. Many recipes, reflecting their era, require canned soups. My mother owned the same box as the red one pictured, and I laid out for you a sample of the unknown former owner's recipes: a clipping on how to make Arthur Treacher-style fish and chips; a handwritten recipe for 24-Hr. Salad, on its reverse a handwritten recipe for "Chicken Cha Cha," a dish credited to Della Reese, the singer; and a note saying "Calgon & water - mix to remove wallpaper." Just visible inside the box: "Potato Chip Cookies."

My brain's pleasure center lights up seeing their colors and imagining their stories, and I welcome the recipe boxes (the only items I have ever actively collected) back wholeheartedly into my daily life.

The Field of Battle

Sorry if the picture makes you queasy but it's a lot worse in person. I buy mousetraps a bagful at a time. I've stuffed mouse thruways and hideaways in this house with steel wool. I've tried poisons, glue traps, live traps -- nothing works as well as a classic Victor spring-loaded trap, which I haven't been able to find for a whole year. Instead, Victor now sells the "Easy Set" (TM) model with the large yellow plastic bait platform supposedly scented with invisible mouse attractant.

After a year I am qualified to say that the new model does not work well. The "cheeselike" platform, complete with Swiss-like holes, has never worked; I dollop the platform with never-fail peanut butter. The trigger is so stupid-sensitive I have to hook the end with a pliers to set it. Worst of all, it doesn't kill mice outright. Good traps kill mice instantly, snap, by breaking their necks. I hate meeses to pieces, but worse is hearing the trap snap beneath the sink and then hearing struggles within.

These two mice were caught within 20 minutes of each other. The one at the top went first, and writhed and knocked around for 10 minutes while I fought to hold my dinner down --because as much as I hate any mouse, I won't pour bleach on it or hammer-crush its skull to put it out of its misery, nor will I put it to sleep in my freezer, as some humane people do. So I have to listen to it die (meanwhile fearing that it won't die, that it'll get away). The other body shows the problem with the "Easy Set" model. Instead of hitting the mouse on the neck, the large platform permits the mouse to nibble from the edge where the trap hits not the neck but the "craniofacial" region. This is not a quick, humane kill. They wriggle, bleed and convulse. I like the older model which they don't sell in the hardware stores around here any more. They do sell it online, though.

Do You Think It's Time?

It's growing out of the garage gutter, 12 feet above the ground, too high for any but a skilled handyman to reach, and anyway the garage roof is too sharply pitched for me to dare to climb on. I planted sunflowers in the meadow when I moved here 11 years ago and deer snapped 'em up before they even bloomed. Didn't try it again. This sunflower is a volunteer, and the only blooming sunflower on this property because it's out of deer range. The garage gutter, to my knowledge, has not been cleaned in a decade and is full of broken twigs and branches flung from the very dead oak you can see in the background. I sent this photo to the landlord to say that while I enjoy the flower, maybe it's time to do some upkeep.

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.

Bird Dishes

Besides not knowing the words, hummingbirds can't do dishes either, so once a week I'm scullery maid to a pile of nectar feeders gluey with drowned ants, moldy sugar, and germs that God made invisible because He knew we'd freak if we could see them. Bird systems are tiny, and feeding responsibly means washing their dishes, especially in very hot weather. Black mold grows most cleverly in the crevices beneath the feeder "blossoms." Do scrub there, topside and underside; it's the nectar-feeder equivalent of washing behind your ears.

Washing aerial tableware.

Glass feeders last longer than plastic and get visibly clean. Use regular dish detergent and a dish brush. Remove traces of mold inside the bottles with an old, clean toothbrush. For stubborn goo I dunk glass pieces in an extremely mild bleach solution, but one must then rinse rinse very very well and allow the feeder to air-dry completely so the fumes dissipate.

• After handling bird things, anytime, wash your own hands really well.
  

Homemade nectar: Add one part sugar to four parts boiling water and stir until dissolved. Boil three more minutes. Allow it to cool. Do not add color; they don't need it. Never use any sweetener except white sugar. (Honey is lethal.) Proportion three parts water to one part white sugar if you want more hummers or you want your hummers livin' large.

The Zen of Caulking

To save heat I caulked the Divine Cabin's doors, windows and baseboards, and around the fireplace and anywhere else I could feel a breeze indoors. This has not been done since 1930. It took 3 8-hour days. I am now enlightened. Please avail yourself of this dharma transmission:

• Confucius say, Cheap or expensive caulking gun are the same.
• Caulk, like fingernail polish, comes in many shades. If you are a novice like me, buy TRANSPARENT caulk; that way, if you mess up it doesn't look as bad as if you used white or gray. Transparent comes out white, but it eventually turns transparent.
• It's pretty clear that you'll  have to clip off the tip of the bottle, but don't forget to also then stick a long (tenpenny) nail down in there to puncture the foil seal so the caulk can get out. Withdraw the nail and check its point to make sure there's goo on it, proving that it reached down to the caulk.
• Wear plastic gloves.
• Clean what you're caulking before you caulk it.
• Caulk is not Reddi Wip.It's taffy-like. When caulking, squeeze, move the tip, and relax slightly. Repeat and repeat.
• Don't try to use the bottle tip to smooth out the lumps and bumps. Instead...
• ...carry around some craft sticks/tongue depressors to smooth out the lumpy spots.
• Fill a crack from right to left so you can see where the tip is going.
• The more you caulk, the more caulking you see needs to be done.
• Stay awake. Don't, like, caulk your windows shut.
• Goo, debris, excess, and unsightly extraneous dollops can be removed with a dry cloth while it's fresh, or picked off with the fingers when it's cured (after 24 hours). In between, just accept it for what it is.

Woodpecker Apartments

Tried the Flint Quarry Trail hoping to see a flint quarry. But instead I saw Pileated Woodpecker luxury highrise apartments. Woodpeckers pair up, and you'll notice they all have the same address, but each pecks out his or her own place, giving each other space. This must be what keeps them cheerfully whooping and yammering, biggest and noisiest birds in the forest, always raising more kids just like themselves, and my favorite birds of all time.

Nobody was home.

Friend of mine once said the best name for a human apartment building would be "The Balzac Apartments." I never laughed so hard.

The Eight-Year Garage Cleaning

It’s a 2-car garage and 2 cars will fit if I move the 50-lb. bags of potting soil and green sand. 106-lb. me did this by rolling them onto an old shower curtain and dragging the curtain. Tried to move the full-sized wheelbarrow. Couldn’t. And then the old barbell weights, the plastic ones filled with concrete: 350 lbs of those stacked against one wall. But I can’t get to the pile ‘cuz of the chest-high box of jumbled parts for a huge, useless computer table. Not to mention dust, dry leaves, mouse droppings, spiderwebs.

Interesting things I found: Box of short stories written by friend now passed away. A solar-powered calculator. Bag of pink sheets. Dutch door for porch. Brand-new reel still in packaging. That I can use; I got my ’09 Missouri fishing license just last week. Five-gallon leaky red gas can stuck solidly to the garage floor. Bags of concrete mix so old that they are now solid concrete. A hard hat. An inflatable raft. A bluebird house.

A house is about hopes, but a garage is about plans: Gonna. Will. Wanna. Ought to. I’m All Set.

Debbie the Housekeeper

Meet Debbie, who visits the Divine cabin every month for a full day and helps get it clean and organized. Her family's lived in Missouri a long time. She charges me $12/hr and needs more work than her current clients have. She supports her mom and attends community college. Email me if you are in the STL area and have some work for her. She'll use your cleaning implements and potions. She has no car so she'll need a ride back and forth if she can't take public transportation. She's a self-confessed cleanin' fool and I enjoy her work and her company!