Scout Moves

I've never had a garage sale or yard sale before, and now I see why. They are a heck of a lot of work! Last week, I flew to Atlanta to help my family with a sale—my mother moved in with my sister, and the house she left behind, which has been sold, was filled with stuff. Earlier in the year, we had cleared out the house itself and moved everything to the garage/basement (the house is built on a hill), so we gathered again to organize and open the big doors and take the cash. On Thursday, Karen and I worked like pack mules to sort the stuff. After months in that musty room, everything seemed to take on a layer of grime and dust, so we aired it all out and put things with things. You know, like picking up an aluminum pan and walking over to set it down with all of the other aluminum pans and finding a box of glassware and hauling it over to the table with all of the other glassware. We had a section for silk flowers, one for kitchen pans, sewing patterns all the way back to 1948, kni...

Well, here we are, selling off my mother's belongings. In January, my mother moved in with one of my sisters. At the age of 85, she had reached a stage in which she should not be living alone, and although the move was not managed against her will, she was in no way happy about it. We've wondered if she was secretly relieved, and that may be, but that relief didn't stop her grumbling about having to give up her independence and her things. Who can blame her, really? To my own children—be warned. If I live to be 85 and am alone and need to live with one of you, you will hear plenty about how I enjoy my independence and don't appreciate your going through my things and either throwing them out or selling them off. Back in January, my family helped my mother (when we weren't working behind her back) to sort through her many belongings and to get her moved in to her new digs, and we set aside a pile of stuff to sell at a yard sale at a later date. This weekend is the da...

In doing research for a newspaper column, I came across the television lineup for the major networks between the years 1970 and 1976. Keep in mind there were only three major networks and very few minor networks at the time. In Chicagoland, we had NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and WGN. I spent most of my time watching WGN because it was the source for movies and cartoons. This is what I had always believed, at least, because when I came home from school every afternoon, this is the channel I flipped to. Gillian's Island, The Flintstones. The Mickey Mouse Club with Annette Funicello. But after I looked at the lineup of evening shows, and as I responded so enthusiastically to it—"Oh, my gosh! I remember that show! I loved that!"—I realized I must have spent most of my waking hours in front of the television, one with just a handful of stations and a channel-changing knob on the side. You actually had to get up off the couch and make physical contact with the TV. Now that I think about...

More than three months ago, we got the ball rolling on a remodeling project—we decided to recreate our living room. Here is what it looked like last Christmas (the spot on the wall is either a poltergeist or dust on the lense. Which do you prefer?): We basically altered every surface. We replaced the carpet with hardwood floors; painted the walls a different color; switched out the window shades for wood shutters; replaced the furniture with cozier stuff that has people facing each other instead of sitting all in a line on a long couch; installed surround-sound speakers; replaced the wood mantel with a stacked stone wall; and hung a TV where a print used to be. The whole thing took nearly three months to complete, and although this may go without saying, we did none of the work ourselves. If we had, we might still be living in rubble. Here is an example of some of that rubble; and here is what the room looked like for a couple of weeks while the work was being done. I was disturbed and...

Over a year ago at least, my mother was visiting, and she was watching me cook up a storm for dinner. "I've never seen anyone go to so much trouble for supper," she said. It really wasn't that big of a deal, as I recall, but when you live alone and eat microwaved chicken pot pies, I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. Then, she suggested I put together a cookbook made up of our family's favorite recipes. My sisters and nieces and nephews cook as well, so why not put our heads together and share our treasures? Good idea, don't you think? So, I contacted the family and asked them to send me their favorites. They did, and I got to work typesetting everything, but the project died in the early stages because there just didn't seem to be enough material to bother with. For example, we all cook with beef, but not one of us offered a beef recipe. So, there the cookbook sat...in loose pages...on my desk...half produced...gathering dust. But then I f...

Last night, my orchestra performed its final concert of the season, its 75th season, in fact. But I didn't play. I sat in the audience, and for those couple of hours, I felt as though I weren't watching my orchestra. I wasn't sitting in my usual seat on stage and hadn't practiced the music or attended the rehearsals, so I could claim no ownership. I have to say, I didn't appreciate that one bit, and I'll admit knowing my replacement for the evening is a better horn player didn't help ease my uneasiness. But I did appreciate the performance. My group or not, they performed very well, so much so that they received a standing ovation. A word about those—you can never tell when an audience is going to be moved to stand with their applause. I thought the previous concert was just as moving, just as well done and just as deserving of an ovation, but only a handful of people agreed. This was a gospel-meets-symphony concert, with a church choir from Akron and a grou...

I'll be leaving for home tomorrow morning, and here I sit with a full Berkeley day ahead of me. What should one do on such a day, you might ask, with the sun shining and the sky as blue as the bluest sky? Why, sit in the chair and write blabber on a blog, of course. No, actually, I'll be going out in about an hour to have lunch with No. 1, and since I'll be wearing my walking shoes, who knows where I'll end up. Probably right back here, but you just can't tell. The child will be on campus until late this evening, so the door is wide open. There are certain things one should do when visiting this part of California—you should visit Telegraph Hill, eat your way through the Gourmet Ghetto, wander the streets of San Francisco and have sour dough bread, visit Alcatraz, spend a few days in Sonoma/Nappa. Well, I have done all of those things, more than once, even, so I don't have an urge to go sight seeing as if I'll never be back again to see the sights. I really ...

I've noticed something—when you stop posting to your blog, people stop visiting. I've taken the week off from my spot in Blogville, and the doorbell has hardly rung while I am away. That's OK, though, because most of my visitors don't leave comments anyway. This week, I am back in Berkeley, California spending some time with No. 1. Here is poor Tiger the cat sitting and pathetically staring at my empty chair back home, the photo thoughtfully sent to me by Husband—I'm not sure what Tiger is thinking at the moment, but I suspect Husband is thinking, "She's not here, you stupid idiot." This was a spur of the moment trip, which I can take because I have become a woman of leisure. Small Town Newspaper hardly uses freelance writers anymore because their budget has shrunk to the size of a coin purse, and the ESL class is winding down (that's another story all together). So, I find myself looking for things to do, like learning Chopin on the piano and lear...

So, here's my new thing: I want a dog. It's not such a new thing, actually, because I have always wanted a dog. I have always wanted a house full of mammals, but with the daughters out of the house and the cat population down to one, I've been thinking specifically about a dog. For a year or two, Husband said that if we didn't have cats, we could get a dog. He wanted one, he said, if it weren't for the stupid cats. Big Mike was the real issue because he wouldn't have handled having a dog move into his territory, unlike Tiger, who I think would make the adjustment and take a nap. Well, it turns out Husband doesn't really want one beyond just saying the words. Dogs are a lot of work, he says, especially puppies, and they can chew up a house and poop in the yard a lot and keep you from going away for the weekend on a whim. All of those things are true, but I still want a dog. Today, just for the heck of it, we went to Pet Smart because the store was hosting a p...