I Love To Go A Gardening
Growing Our Life in Northern Michigan
Paint Memories
This morning I paid bills while I drank coffee and ate breakfast. Then I went outside to paint the garage.
Well, first I had to scrape off the old paint. The garage is actually quite weatherbeaten so most of the old paint was already off. I just scraped off most of the remaining loose bits from the front and one side. I couldn’t get the peak of the garage because it was out of my reach. I don’t know how I’m going to paint there. I really, really need someone taller to help me–or someone with a taller ladder who isn’t afraid to climb it. I start getting scared at about the second step up our stepladder, but I force myself to climb to the top–not the very, very top, but the next step down. EJ had called a former co-worker who did home improvement on the side to see if he’d finish the drywall and maybe paint the garage, but the guy never stopped in to look at what we wanted done.
I was eager to paint, so after I scraped as much old paint as I could from two sides of the garage, I began painting the front. I’ve been wanting to paint the old garage for years and EJ had considered siding it and fixing it up, but we spent most of our efforts working on the inside of the house and never quite got to the garage. The garage is dilapidated so I don’t have expectations of making it look good. I’ll be happy if it’s just looks less bad. We had chosen a tan color to match the trim on our house, but it turned out being a bit more yellow. With all the zillion and one paint choices available, it’s really difficult to get the right shade to match the old. This presents a problem because I was going to use the leftover garage paint to paint the outside of the back porch because the paint is peeling there. So if I paint the back porch, I will have to paint the trim of the whole house so it will match. Sigh.
Before I started painting, I put on my paint clothes. My paint clothes are old clothes that I use to paint in. They end up getting splashes of paint all over them. I never wash them so over the years they have splashes of all the paint from all the painting projects we’ve done. It’s sort of like “paint memories.” It is fun to remember that we had once painted our bedroom that color, and the bathroom used to be this color. I had to find new paint clothes because the old ones stopped fitting and one day in a frenzy of cleaning, I threw them out. So now I am starting over with “this is the color we painted the old garage where we used to live.”
Thinking of paint splashes reminded me of a time years ago–JJ might have been 9 or 10 or so–when he and I painted the porch. At some point, one of us–I’m not sure exactly who–accidentally painted a streak of paint on the other. That one said, “Hey! You painted me!” and retaliated by painting a streak of paint on the painter. “Don’t paint me! It was an accident! I’m going to paint you back!” It wasn’t long before we forsook our painting altogether and used our paintbrushes as weapons, painting each other with abandon. By the time our paint battle was over, we were both covered in paint. It was lots of fun.
It was sunny and warm (in the 50s) so it was very pleasant to paint–at least until afternoon when it got a little cloudy and a bit chillier. But I really enjoyed painting, and as I painted I thought about my guys up north. Yesterday EJ had texted me, “I’m the happiest i’ve ever been in my career. I look forward to going to work, even on Monday.” He had also texted, “JJ says he is wonderful, very happy.” It fills me with joy to know that my guys are so happy.
I really enjoy painting the front of the garage, but I was really tired by the time I was finished. And hungry. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I put everything away, took a shower to scrub off the paint from my skin. Then I eagerly started making myself food, but before I could finish the mortgage officer called to warn me that I was going to receive a call from the structural inspection people to get permission to do their inspection. The woman from the structural inspection company called a short time afterwards and I gave my permission to do the inspection. The cost is coming out of our mortgage, but if we pay for it up front it’s much cheaper than if we wait for closing. I paid for it with my debit card, and then turned off the stove and oven so I could drive to the next town to transfer money from our credit union savings to our bank checking account before the bank closed. I had enough in the account to cover the cost of the inspection, but I didn’t want to risk our balance dipping too low. While I was in town, I stopped at the grocery store so I’d have food for EJ and JJ when they come home tomorrow night.
When I finally got home, I was beyond starving so I grabbed a raw steak from the freezer and started gnawing on it. Ok, no I didn’t. I actually turned the stove and oven back on and finished cooking my food, which I devoured.
Finally I took Danny for his walk. He thought I had forgotten, but I hadn’t. While we were on our walk, Danny tried to eat some food that had been dropped on the ground. Danny is always finding dropped food on the ground and eating it. I try to prevent him from doing it–because who knows what he’s eating? But I have a retractable leash and I let Danny sort of roam and he is sneaky. If I pull him away from food one day, he will remember it the next and meander over to it when I’m not paying attention. Chomp. It’s especially bad for the month or two after Halloween because the kids eat their candy and drop some of it, which Danny finds. I thought that that’s one thing I won’t have to bother about when we move up North. We will be in the country and Danny won’t find so many dropped candy, cupcakes, ice cream, pizza, or whatever else he gobbles down before I notice.
While we were on our walk, I also saw a bumblebee. This made me think of the poem I learned as a child to recite every spring. I still say it every spring.
“Spring is here,” said the bumblebee.
“How do you know?” said the Old Oak Tree.
“I just saw a daffodil dancing with a fairy on a windy hill.”
Now I am exhausted. I will spend the rest of the evening relaxing.
I Love To Go A Gardening 
It sounds better every day your improvement on the old house and the new way of living in the Emerald city of JJ and EJ Happy for them and for you. Hope that you are able to move very very very soon…. ❤
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