A friend gave me a Better Homes and Gardens magazine last night.
I looked through it when I got home. I was too tired to knit, too disinterested in the television to pay attention to the program, so a flip through a magazine worked just right.
As I perused the pages filled with "decorated" houses and yards. I could not help but compare my own abode with this so called "ideal".
The rooms in the magazine were certainly pleasant to look at, though they began to fade into taupe toned camouflage after a while. It's like they were so "well balanced" and coordinated that the over all effect was invisibility.
I looked around the room at my mismatched furniture in dismay. And when I say mismatched, I don't mean in a charming "Shabby Chic" kind of way. I mean in a "I Picked It Up Along The Way While Living My Life" kind of way.
The only things that actually ... go ... together are the two couches and the chair I bought after my summer job two years ago. You know that job almost made me lose my marbles? Everything else is as haphazard as it gets.
We have a sort of Danish Modern dining room table we "stole" one day at a Montgomery Wards discount center for 79.00. There are two bookshelves made by someone my husband knew years ago, a handmade hutch constructed by another family friend made out of knotty pine, an old fashioned bread table refinished by my parents, an old dilapidated folding granny rocker recently acquired that has some serious cleaning issues. An elegant cherry finished grandfather clock that is 7 feet tall, given to us by my husband's mother because she did not want to have it shipped back to Hawaii..... for the second time. My computer desk, an indestructible government issue walnut veneer, weighs a ton and a half, bought for twenty five dollars at the surplus warehouse wonder. My drop leaf work table in here by the computer that was made out of plywood and two by fours by a former father in law and finished by my mother and myself. The mismatched bedroom furniture that I took one whole summer to refinish. Four pieces are honey colored maple, and the four poster bed is varnished dark mahogany. In that bedroom it's sort of a study in the sublime and the ridiculous.
It's a furniture zoo.
And the unfortunate thing is, I do not have the gift of being able to pull all these things together. To make it look like I meant it to be this way. Instead, it feels like Robinson Caruso around here. This is the stuff we salvaged from the shipwreck, thanks be to God.
Maybe someday I will be able to hire an interior decorator to help me with my yard sale, discount center, handmade menagerie. But until then, I will just have to call this conglomeration "My Eclectic Stuff" and be done with it.
Better Homes and Gardens, it's not.
But it DOES feel like home.
Maybe if I painted one of my walls taupe, something miraculous would happen.
Only thing is, I hate taupe. Taupe is the color you paint something when you simply CANNOT think of another color. Taupe is the default setting in home decorating school. Taupe is one of the answers to ALL of the multiple choice questions on tests. "You can't go wrong with taupe." is the school motto I'm sure of it.
Well, I've rambled enough. Time's a wastin'.
We will end on a more sane note from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: