Tennessee

4/23-05 #5

Before the dream of the art film, my ghost dreamt she could live in smoke. It was the kind of smoke that crept beneath mountains and filled up the hollers. The kind of smoke that rolled under itself in a cold night wind, pushing back into the burning barn. The kind of smoke that rose from the hair of a burning horse. Horses running, lighting up the canopy of the woods, smoke filling the trees. The trees, for a long time, smelling of that smoke.





4-23-05 #6/1

I forget that before she was a ghost, she was a little girl. The little white house below the mountain, rocks rubbed through the earth, the fast creek by the road. Mama stooped in the rows by the barns, rights herself and smiles at her. My girl, she's running in the tall grass, chasing one of the goats laughing, wild, barefoot in a white dress. There's heavy fruit hanging in the trees, barns lilting golden in sunlight, Papa swings her onto his shoulder to pick an apple.


4/23/05 #6/3

I've seen the house, they stopped keeping it boarded up long ago. Broken windows and wild grass over the crumbling porch. Barns collapsed in a sigh. The apple tree's empty ragged limbs thrust to heaven, guarding the tiny plots enclosed by the rusted iron fence. On a full moon, they say you can see her from the road, a small figure in the tall grass watching you as you drive home.



5/6/05 #1

In her film, Route 93 is the sad road. Cue the music, scenery flashes by, indicating somber introspection. Rocks rubbed through the small hill's grass, indicating Appalachia. Goats. My pickup truck and me, whistling through it, the radius of a curve next to an old church. The one brokedown farm house off Poor Farm Road, with chickens and a small girl brown hair in a white summer dress in the yard. I wave to her tiny, hurried image, and she waves back. One small hand borne aloft on a pale wrist, the sleeve falling back over her shoulder.

5/6/05 #2

It could be that she really just wants her babydoll rescued from the well, and then she would be at rest. She could sing Frère Jacques every time her spirit manifests itself into glowing apparition. She could be so small that I could pick her out of the numbing water, clear and pure, with no effort and warm her next to my chest. Shivering under my chin. I could murmur to her, it's okay, I've got you. I won't let anything bad happen to you, ever again.


--Ghost Poems, collaborative effort via email with Jay Snodgrass inspired by the movie The Ring

Tennessee

~

Ada Doom

Whoops!

Be Good

More of the Paperstone Shelf

With it's cousin, "the sink."































Our electrician friend, Don came out and wired it up today. If you can't tell, I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

Tool Box

I used my recent "down-time" due to my fucked-up back to get some pictures off my phone.

Contractor Grade

Image courtesy of J. Waff IV

Ce-Ci's De-Luxe Kitchen

Elliptical Richlite peninsula









Wainscoting and richlite bracket underneath










Paperstone shelf







Routed out underneath for under-cabinet lighting

Report from the Floor

I threw my back out somehow this weekend, I think due to a combination of many weeks of stress, humping furniture, toting boxes and hanging pictures. Not to mention I due construction work for a living. I wasn't able to walk most of yesterday, so I spent the day on the floor or couch, eyeballin' the various items around the house I needed to be working on. The most interesting thing of not being able to walk was trying to plan my movements, determining how to get from point A to B, by a combination of crawling, or hanging onto various furniture or walls or six-year olds.

I have found that after a couple of weeks on a large job, I find I have an exaggerated sense of the house I'm working on: all the various areas that need attention, how the light moves through a space, what is the natural flow that a person makes through it. Some of the problem areas get put in the percolator, so that ideas can bounce around before whatever decision is needed for that particular area. It is both an overwhelming and somehow comforting feeling to gain this omnipotent sensation of a place. For example, when we first moved in, we found the cabinets in the kitchen to be covered with years of grease both inside and out. Since we don't have thousands of dollars to pay my friend Tim to build new ones, I sprayed six cans of Easy Off oven-cleaner on the worst spots and then sanded the entire group of cabinets down to raw wood and applied two coats of polyurethane (marine varnish actually, using up a can I'd been carrying around for years) on the shelves. The doors and face-frames will get painted later. Two days of this put me into every nook and cranny both inside and around the cabinets, giving me a new sense of intimacy with the geographies that make up our kitchen. To say the least, crawling around on the floor added to the sense of what this house is about, and what it needs.

Truly, We are living in our own

Golden Age.


~

I Feel It All

--Feist

Our House

Sits in a cluster of brick ranchers. My neighbor Ida has told me that she and ten or so other black families bought and built on this block simultaneously in '61. They paid $100 a lot. It seems that most of my neighbors are the original inhabitants of these houses. I expect we'll meet them once spring comes and everyone gets outside again, I just hope the yellow motorcycle and white pick-up truck parked in the yard haven't given anyone a bad impression.

There is a concrete slab that steps down from the main structure of our house on the west end which holds the laundry/mud room off the kitchen and a little wood-paneled den off the living room. There was a "window" with two hinged and paneled doors built into the wall over the sink in the laundry that peeks into the den. We have puzzled over the logic of this feature since we first came in with our real-estate lady. Also, on the floor of the den the builders set those old-school tan and brown flecked industrial vinyl tiles. If the light is right, you can see the tiles have hundreds of little round impressions dented into their surface, left as if by a cane or pool cue.

I dreamt the other night that black craftsmen came from all over the city to build these houses down by the river, and that this house was built for a man who's wife was a painter. The guys came and laid up the walls, got it dried in, hung the sheet-rock and ran the trim. An old man built the maple cabinets on site and ran them in place. The couple would come by occasionally to check on the progress, the tradesmen thought fondly of them, eventually finished and went away. The woman set up her easel in the den and would rotate it to catch the variations of light as the day traveled across the house, the feet of the easel leaving small indentions as she turned it. As she finished her work she would pass her brushes through the small opening in the wall to be cleaned in the sink on the other side.

First Three Weeks

I have no idea where my cameras are. We "moved in" about the first of the month as it was too time consuming to get the children back and forth from the apartment we are renting to the house. Plus they decided they liked the new place better and refused to go home most nights. I started demolition on the main wall January 1st. It runs the length of the house opposite the big window seen below and effectively bisects half of the house. The weekend before last I removed most of the framing from it and installed headers (2x10s) just under the top plates to create two large openings from the living room into the kitchen and dining room. This wall is load bearing (but not by very much) so I had to install a temporary wall of 2x4s to support the weight while I installed the new framing. It is pretty difficult to do this kind of work on the weekend with the kids around: Henry (age 6) and May (age 2) but on good days, when everybody is not too tired, it makes it really pretty cool. When I installed the header leading into the dining room I got Henry to climb up on the ladder to help hold the tape for the measurement, and when we installed the beam, Mary held one end in place and Henry handed me up the framing nailer. We've had our friend Ronnie the plumber out to remove a radiator that was in the kitchen (most of it done in the crawl space with Henry helping) as well as my friend Don the electrician to help rework all the outlets various outlets and switches that I exposed and had laying around on the floor for two weeks. All of this has opened up the space considerably, it's probably the fastest and easiest improvement I think I've ever made to a house, and I'm surprised that none of the previous owners thought to do it. Last Sunday it was somewhere around twenty degrees outside and I napped on the couch in the living room for an hour or so. I don't think the furnace cut on once. I believe this is because of the sunlight coming in from the window is now able to warm the whole of the house and not just that one room. Of course now I have to figure out a way to keep it from cooking us in the summer, but I got a couple of ideas on that. All of this work will segue into the kitchen job, which has been cleaned, stabilized and put on temporary hold. I hope to get something on the subject of the kitchen as well as some pictures up soon. However we've got two rooms to finish up painting before we move the rest of our stuff in from the old apartment that we have to be completely gone from by the first. We need to get that security deposit back to be able to pay for material and tradespeople. Oh yeah, last thing, for some reason I've found myself while doing the majority of this work listening to the soundtrack to the movie Batman Begins. I strongly believe this is due to the fact that I'm the fucking Batman.