Light on a whitewashed wall, coming through a western exposure window at four in the afternoon, striking with stunning luminance to ignite a complex golden glow. The “light in Italy” effect, the color of autumn afternoons, liquid gold. I’ve wanted a kitchen, painted that color, my entire adult life.

Well, it’s not quite done, but I know that if I wait for it to be done to post pictures, I’ll never post pictures. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll leave this house for good someday thinking, “I wish I had – I never got around to -” but you know what? In the meantime, I have a kitchen that makes my heart sing when I walk into it in the morning. I’m not waiting for the “right” time, waiting for my life to start, anymore.

The archways and floor trim are still to be painted terra cotta, and some other areas of trim (none of them actually visible in these pictures) the same green as the vintage tiling. Some touchup and tape removal remains to be done and the doors of the breakfast nook cabinets still need painted and re-hung – it’s a fussy taping job, inside and out, because they’re six-paned glass-front doors. I’m looking at a mural of a chile ristra on the back of the door into the hall, or possibly on the pantry doors. All of the atomic steel handles and pulls from a mid-50s remodel will be replaced with wrought iron, and I want some kind of big open wrought-iron (probably resin faux) artwork above the stove and counter to break up the vast expanse of butter yellow. The stoneware utensil holder will be replaced by one that matches my beloved Tunisian dishware. There are other small bits of styling to do, mostly adding color. Plenty of work still, and each small improvement will make the whole room come together better, but the essential transformation is done.

I know, you’re saying – wait! The last post wasn’t about the kitchen, it was about the basement studio! Whatever happened to the basement studio?!? Don’t worry, it’s progressing apace. In order to move forward on that project, I needed to move some furniture temporarily into the breakfast nook, which meant getting the breakfast nook and kitchen painted either first, or not for months. I just wasn’t willing to wait. I’m juggling renovations on three rooms at the same time – the kitchen is farthest ahead, the studio about half-done with major work, and I’ve barely started peeling, scraping, patching and prepping the bathroom. And I’ll leave you with this teaser:

On Wednesday morning, I woke up to four inches of snow. It kept coming, all day, topping out at about eight inches in town and upwards of two feet in some of the higher-elevation communities.

And then, as it will do in this part of Colorado, the sun came out and it all melted. It’s gone now, and it’s supposed to be in the seventies again for the first half of the week, but it was lovely while it lasted.

All of my life, I’ve made do with whatever space I could scrounge for art. I just remembered, out of the blue, that for several years I had a studio set up in a bedroom closet, a foldable drafting table hinged to the back wall and a bookcase for a little storage. My studio has been a walk-in closet, half a dining room, a drafting table in the corner of a living room or bedroom. For the past seven years, since I have been in this house, it’s been a 6×8 breakfast nook tucked between the dining room and kitchen.

I have always dreamed of SPACE. Room to work on truly big projects, or several different projects at once. Enclosed space, not shared with some other purpose. Enough storage. Equipment – looms and spinning wheels and easels. Enough space to move around comfortably, or accommodate a guest or family member in leisurely company.

I am finally, finally getting that. The pictures below are my “before” pictures – the tiny room I’m currently in, and the 15×18 half-basement that I’ve just started renovating. The floor will be primered and the walls repainted before the weekend, and then the fun begins – turning a big white box into the workspace I’ve always wished for. There will be more posts, and more pictures as I go. I’m also playing around with Pinterest, on the recommendation of my wonderful best friend; there isn’t much there yet, but you can follow the this project at pinterest.com/edgeofcenter/studio/.

After work on Friday, with an hour and a half of daylight left to us, we just drive off in no particular direction, down an unfamiliar county road, winding up and away between the volcanic foothills rising from the valley floor and the lower slopes of the encircling mountains. The world tilts, seen from a different angle, revealing unfamiliar planes and shadows.

We roll back in to town just as the sun slides under the rim of mountains, out of breath, laughing, entranced, awed.

It’s been a long time since I did one of these. Photography is easier, when I’m just unfurling again after a dark fallow time, than other forms of art – it’s like listening when you’re not quite ready to speak. It’s reconnecting, regrounding.

I have a new quilt in progress in my studio, and a head full of ideas, and some free time, coming up soon, to stretch and play. And apple blossoms.

In lieu of actual content, pretties.

Working diligently on some exciting projects. Not spending much time online. Refining, as ever, the balancing act.

It’s partly about anticipation, but more about process – the active engagement with a thing in emergence, with plans and stages, learning and research, pieces coming together and that moment when the big picture suddenly snaps into focus. The breathless flurry of the end-game, the basking in delight of the thing accomplished, that quiet moment, and then, just before quiet becomes boredom – what’s next?

What’s next is Thanksgiving. Because I really only go grocery shopping every other weekend, real prep work began yesterday. I started a while ago, collecting recipes and restocking my autumn pantry with smoky spices, winter squashes, frozen turkeys, and other signs of the season. But with this weekend’s shopping, active planning kicks into high gear.

This year, I’m doing a “tilted traditional” feast, something I’ve wanted to do for years – all of the traditional trappings but with trendy new recipes, fusion flavors, local-regional highlights. Ten years ago I would not have had the skills to carry this off, but now I think I’m cook enough to rise to the challenge. It’s exciting.

Hors’d'ouevres

Fall Bruschetta
Spanakopita
Baked Brie with Ginger-Lime Spiced Cranberry Sauce
Pumpkin pie truffles
Hibiscus-pomegranate Italian soda and blackberry mead

Table

Wine-smoked Turkey
Michael Symon’s Cornbread Stuffing
Chile-glazed Sweet Potatoes
Fingerling Potatoes (from my garden!) with Smoked Paprika
Broccoli with Garlic and Lemon
Cheddar-Thyme Gougieres and Apricot-Pecan-Blue Cheese Boule
Green Chile Relish and Onion-Mushroom Balsamic Relish
Extra Ginger-Lime Spiced Cranberry Sauce for table
First Blush and Black Swan shiraz

Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings
Dark-Chocolate-Studded Pumpkin Pie
Gingerbread Flan
Port, brandy, and coffee

the last gasp of my garden – fingerling potatoes, golden beets and roots,
and chard, harvested the morning after the first frost.

Last weekend, I scrubbed my living room floor… and there are few things that will throw one head-first into a visceral appreciation for the lived experience of pre-modern women like scrubbing a wood floor, on hands and knees, in long skirts.

(Why would anyone do that? Of course you’re wondering. It’s pretty simple, actually, in two parts. First, I have a severe chronic back pain condition, and it is far, far less painful – both while I’m doing the work, and for hours or even days afterward – to get down there and scrub than to push a heavy mop from a standing position. And second, the weather’s just a little too cool for shorts… and given the choice between tucking my skirts up around my hips and having wet, dirty, naked knees that I can quickly wipe off when I take a break, or wet, dirty, sticky jeans that I can only escape by peeling them off completely… yeah. I’ll take the former every time. In fact, when I’m doing any kind of serious cleaning, I’m almost always wearing either a sarong or an old, beat-up broomstick skirt.)

It got me thinking again about something I’ve been toying around with for years, but never really articulated – the idea of cosplay, historical re-enactment, and amateur experimental archaeology as a feminist act. The idea first occurred to me while reading Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s famous anecdote about the Hallstadt Plaid reconstruction (you can read it on Google Books, in the introduction to Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) and again throughout the book, but the seed was planted a few years before that, watching Rob Roy with some friends, commenting on Jessica Lange’s discreet and effortless pee stop while out on the moors – so discreet that one person didn’t recognize what she was doing until we laughingly explained it. Someone else said, “Oh, I always wear skirts when I’m camping! It makes things like that so much easier!” I was twenty-three, and it was a rabbit-hole moment.

Since then, I’ve been poking at the dual beliefs that women in history have had little agency in defining their lives, and that it’s impossible to know much about the day-to-day lives of pre-modern people – and especially women – because so little is written, and material culture studies are so hard. There’s a core of truth in both assertions – but it’s as overarching narratives that they come to actually interfere with the practice of archaeology and historical cultural studies, and it’s in challenging them that we begin to reveal just how much can be known, and just how much women could and did shape their own lives and the world around them. And much of that challenging takes place, must take place, in the embodied and experiential modes of study. It’s in the wearing of the veils, the fermenting of the beverages, the warping of the loom, the execution of the rituals, the donning of the ornamentation, the singing of the songs, that we begin to understand. Knowledge that was never passed pen to paper to eye, can still be uncovered, hand to object to hand.

So much of what I do, in artistic and scholarly terms, takes so much time. That’s part of the point. I spend days, weeks, months – not hours – intimately navigating material meaning, speaking the body-language of my ancestors, practicing it, experimenting with it, repeating the same movements and motifs over and over – and only then expanding on it, flourishing. One begins to understand how a design can remain unchanged for a thousand years. One begins to appreciate the elegance, the evolution, of things.

(It always makes me laugh, when people express astonishment that I wear corsets by choice. “European women would not have submitted to four hundred years of corsets if they weren’t comfortable and functional.” Women who have never donned a corset in their lives insist I must be wrong. Who are they to say?)

When I strive for precision and authenticity in the making and wearing of historical costume, as I do in my medieval re-enactment hobbies, I am honoring the lives of the women for whom it was merely clothing. (And, not incidentally, honoring the labor of those scholars – also mostly women, mostly unknown outside their specialties – for whom it has been a life’s work. Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Margarethe Hald. Audriene Bliujiene.  Janet Arnold. Valerie Steele. So many more they can hardly be counted.)

When I explore the possibilities and boundaries of historical costume, as I do in steampunk and fantastical cosplay, I am honoring the imaginative possibilities of the female experience, juxtaposing the roles women really did and continue to play with all of the infinite and varied roles that they might.

And when I integrate historical textile technologies into studio work, turning handspinning, handweaving, embroidery, yarncraft, and piecework into fine art, or creating functional fine art garments, I am contextualizing those technologies on a continuous spectrum – not History divorced from Present, but living handcrafts, continually reinvented. Women’s work.

The artwork is inseparable from the life work – the wildcrafting, gardening, canning, cooking, cleaning, practical sewing and knitting, childrearing, that also connects me with generations of kindred. And finally there’s the writing, the privilege of my generation that I can do all of these things and put my stories down in words that I choose. That these things will not be forgotten. Pen to paper, hand to hand.

My last day in Florida and I am alone and I spend an hour and a half in downtown Sweetwater Park, taking off my shoes to crawl among the shore plants and gaping at the Spanish moss draped among the treetops. Gainesville is, I truly believe, one of the most beautiful cities in America.

Leaving this time was harder than it’s ever been before, and the wanting to go back is not abating. I see it in my dreams.

I am barely out of the back door of the office and my pumps are suddenly, irrationally oppressive; I stand in the middle of the parking lot and peel them off, start walking, shoes dangling from my fingertips by their toes. It’s hot again. There are clouds building up in the west, but it doesn’t feel like rain. At 6,000 feet, there’s not much to buffer the unrelenting sun, dull the movements of air; there’s a quick breeze that does nothing but lift the sweat off the back of my neck, a small and fugitive relief.

The heat under my feet feels good, reminds me of feral summers. I’ve softened, I think; I’m wincing, stepping carefully around cracks and through cobblestones and driveways. The child I was could have run flat-out on blacktop in 110 degree weather – like a water bug, nothing can hurt you if you move fast enough.

I’m slowing down now. Working on really paying attention, being in the world. My art and writing have been lying fallow these last few months, and I always find, at these times, when I start coming back to myself, that it’s less about fatigue than about detachment, getting in a rut. When I pay attention to what is happening around me, or to the experience of memory, I can feel the well starting to refill.