Just When Your Loose Ends Are All Tied Up, Something Unravels

Just When Your Loose Ends are All Tied Up, Something Unravels

Do you ever feel that you are stuck in the “three steps forward, two steps back” life pattern? Well, here I am, writing this a few days before my birthday. My 84^th birthday. Good Grief! How did I get to be 84? Wasn’t I just 42?

Let’s see-42-That was 1982-the year we put the “gazebo-shaped kitchen/family room” addition on the old Victorian house and spent the Summer pulling nails out of the beautiful quarter-sawn oak woodwork that we bought and rescued from the old Jackson School, by the Duluth Civic Center. We hauled at least 8 flat-bed trailer-loads of window and door frames (the old kind with transom windows over the doors) eight-foot solid oak doors, paneled wainscoting and some of the granite steps and wrought iron risers. After cleaning up the old shellac finish, it all found a home in the new addition.

All was well and beautiful, loose ends tied up, Open House party scheduled for the next weekend, until the ice and cold weather came and the pipes in the bathroom froze, thawed and flooded the new family room, all over the lovely wood parquet floor. Apparently, the old cookstove chimney that we had removed to make room for the addition, had circulated enough warm air to keep the bathroom pipes from freezing. Whoops!

But there was a bright spot and that was Fred, the guy we hired to clean up the wet, soggy mess. He became our “go-to” guy and every other week came to clean the old house and fix whatever had stopped working. Fred not only cleaned, he painted, re-built our front porch, helped re-roof the garage and even made props for the Ballet company. He also became part of our family and kept us from unraveling again.

In 1990, I was 50, Tom was 55. We decided in January that we didn’t have nearly enough stress in our lives, so we decided to build a new house. We bought 20 acres of land, north of the city and made plans for a large, Lodgepole pine structure. None of the contractors we talked to had ever built that kind of a log house before. None of the local banks had ever financed that kind of log house, before. But we were one up on them. We had never built any kind of house before, not even a chicken coop. Are you feeling the unraveling starting?

The thing that we had going for us was that we knew about construction “time frames”. The Victorian addition that was supposed to take three months but actually took nine months, was excellent practice for the log house that we started in January that was supposed to be all finished and “move-in-able” by October 1st. We weren’t fooled. We knew for an absolute fact that would never happen.

We actually moved in just before Christmas, when the water in our on-site trailer, home-away-from-home-while-we-were-building, was freezing up. There was no kitchen in the new house, yet. No interior doors and no tile or carpeting covering the gypcrete which held the in-floor heating tubes, which were not heating, yet. We had one toilet and a utility sink in the basement. Totally unraveled! But, like the bright spot that was Fred, this happened:

 Our kids and their spouses all came for Christmas. We camped out-or “camped in”, as it was, and cut a tree out behind the garage. It was a very tall, very ugly tree, but it was our very own tree. The ornaments were still in storage. We hunkered around the warmth of the fireplace and cooked in the microwave. It snowed about a foot on Christmas Eve but the guys were able to make the run into town for our traditional “night before” supper of Grand Duke chicken, egg rolls and Mongolian Beef. It was one of the best Christmases, ever.

So, I feel that this “tying up of loose ends” is somehow related to the “bucket lists” that people like to make.

I personally, have not written up a list, mostly because so many good and interesting things have already happened to me, I feel it would be greedy of me to want even more.

I have three children who all turned out well and seem to be happy. I live in a place and a house I love. I lived in Europe for two years and enjoyed traveling around over there. I have watched Mikhail Baryshnikov dance at the Kennedy Center and will never forget being in the X-cel Energy Center in St. Paul when Pavarotti looked right at me from the stage and sang “Nessun Dorme”. I have had the great joy of owning eleven dogs, and one not so much. I have gone dogsledding and stayed at Naniboujou. I have stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower, clutching the railings, and hung over my Paris balcony to view the Notre Dame-long before it burned. I have seen my costumes up on professional stages and my quilts hanging at International shows. I have lived in four interesting houses, have held my great-granddaughter and been to most of my children’s weddings. I’ve enjoyed being with Tom Myers for 63 years. And lastly, I’m still here with no signs of unraveling, yet. Well, maybe just a few loose ends.