I’m kidding.

We haven’t gotten around to buying the tarp yet.

But: She is vintage, she is adorable, and she is ours. I treasure every perfect yellow inch of her.

Yes too, perfect: I love her more this way than if she had come to us brand new. She is worth our effort and our time; and she’s addictive the way any unfinished project is– I am made silly with hoping and too many cleaning products in a closed space.

It is possibility made tangible, and I react similarly to fabric on the bolt, office supplies, unfinished sweaters, dresses I see online but haven’t tried on yet, seed catalogues, shelter dogs, shelter cats, Craiglist, my own pantry and just lately, the human baby.

Minnie is a 1957 Oasis and I feel like she’s unsure what to make of her recent move from a woody little trailer park in Oroville, California to the fence next to our fruit trees. You’d think she would have taken all my scrubbing for love, and would understand that it wasn’t that I didn’t *like* her bench seats or their friendly inhabitants, I’m just pro public health.

Maybe I’m projecting, but she’s probably also worried “restore” means 60s beach kitsch, cottage kitsch, luau kitsch, 50s diner kitsch, chrome-tread-floors-and-wheel-well-flame-decal kitsch, route 66 kitsch or any other subcategory of crime against the trailer. I reassure her: no bunting. no cupcake stands. brown alcohol only, punishable by expulsion. I describe my vision of camp blanket/brass eagle/pheasant hunting chic, but it’s probably hard to picture.

The bench seats are the first project, the ones that go on either side of an adorable little table and fold down into an extra bed. They’re wood framed, with cushion stuff on the inside and all held together by covering on the outside. If you’re discouraged by my highly technical assessment, don’t be. The take-one-look-and-quote-$700 professional upholster’s assessment did amazing things for my conviction that this is something I can manage rather flawlessly all by myself.

My kitchen floor is not that dirty. Instagram did that.

There are no before pictures, except kind of in the background in this one, but you can’t tell that the whole chair is painted with matte yellow HOUSEPAINT (who does these things?) and who is looking past all that swinging baby up front anyway? I sent the metal off to an autobody shop willing to powdercoat away all manner of sins, and I recovered the seat and backrest with vintage fabric and that fickle mistress of home waterproofing: iron-on vinyl.

Bees!

Yes, it is sturdy. Yes, I am making a safety harness. Yes, the stupid vinyl makes it kind of wrinkly in places and I should probably try again, but I figure that since you can distract from sort-of-wonky baby handknits by wrapping them around an adorable baby then the effect might translate to amateur vinyl jobs as well.

So:

Cover for me, little arm dimple. Atone for maternal shortcomings, attempted motor skills. Beguile away.

And it comes with chairs. In fact, it’s a sibling set, being ousted from some linoleumed nook in Palm Springs that you may even be able to see when you go to pick it up. Right now, they are $100. Rationalize this by saying $60 is damn cheap for a table, and $10 a chair is a steal.

Maybe you’re not feeling it yet. That’s okay. Picture your nook. There is wood around and there are houseplants. Your laptop is there too because, be honest, the desk in your living room is for piling the mail on and that’s it. There is are no tablecloths because you, idealized future owner of this table, are not a tablecloth person.

Those glazed ceramic tumblers you wanted? The salad bowl you bought when the world went crazy for wood burl? They can be there too because this is the only vintage kitchen table in the world that works with them. You have coasters? Placemats? Layer them on. There is no over the top with this thing around. The kitchen of tomorrow wears pants and this is the right pair.

Here’s your auction; my photo credit.

Gone for months and then back with a table. I should apologize? I suspect a garden variety home blog crisis, complete with nagging threat of public journal narcissism and an annoyance in evaluating life by fitness for consumption. I’ll be back more often, or not. I hope it’s the former because I’ve liked doing this. I like the companionship, such as it is. Other bloggers, do you ever get stuck like this? Those of you who read blogs but don’t have your own, what’s your explanation for why we share what we share? What do you get out of it, really?

self-made bed

breakfast

daring one of the UPS trucks to turn down our street

turkey egg

BBQ

last of the spring chard, giving into the heat

anti-pastel campaign in full deployment

feedsack swaddle blankets

garden haul

more vintage baby clothes, because I can’t stop ever.

I spend a lot of time in bed during the day. The little babies, they like to snuggle and not a whole lot else. I have audio books, real books, that big blue cardigan to knit and the wide, wild internet. My bee hive is a straight shot through the window, and ever since Bill built big beautiful screens for our windows, I can leave the window open and listen to them buzz away and back all morning. When it gets up over 90, it smells like honey wax.

In a cloying stroke of luck, a pair of little red finches built a nest in the crook of a drain pipe by the kitchen. When I’m tired of my bees, I can watch both parents scouring the garden beds and bringing all manner of squirmy things home to the ugliest triplet of baby birds I’ve ever seen. Mama Finch’s world clearly turns on that tiny, squawking axis, naturally to my empathy. Those birds aren’t what they’ll be soon, more noticeably than for all the other things of which that is equally true.

There’s life beyond jam and baby these days, though my camera roll would try to tell you otherwise.

I go for a beautiful walk every morning in a maternity sweater I can still button up around the front of the baby carrier. We pass a community garden that appeared overnight behind a church parking lot and an enormous victorian house: a holdout from some past neighborhood era with two dozen goats and a handful of grid-planted walnut trees fenced up in the last half acre it has to its name.

At home, our own garden is spectacular despite our distraction– we’re calling the squash, eggplants and green beans “Wave I” given that we have literal hundreds of unripe tomatoes gathering speed by the back fence.  Inside, there’s a devastating surplus of chicken eggs now that my workplace distribution routes are distrupted by maternity leave, and rampant experimentation with zip-front, poly-blend dresses from the century’s more forgiving decades. Nothing earlier than 1965 is remotely humane to new mothers, but even privation can be welcome given the right kind of returns.

Yesterday, Tamera got me thinking about jewelry. Not so much the whole drawer of goods, but the stuff you wear so often it hits a bedside dish overnight if it comes off at all. Most of what I wear daily I took off late in pregnancy, which felt approximately like walking around with teeth missing.

Beyond internet memes, it’s rare to see someone’s collection laid out: it tends to evoke a whole personality from a dish and is disconcerting to see inanimate.  Repetition turns out to be a powerful thing.

Every day:

• My wedding ring. We found it at the Alameda Antique Fair the morning after Bill proposed– one of the first I tried on. That would seem unusually expeditious, except we also bought one of the first houses we looked at and one of the first dogs we met at the pound. We tend, it seems, to be so much in love the idea of the thing that we see it in everything we look at.
• My Lee Hale rose thorn earrings. A gift from Bill, after he saw me wear these every day for a year and a half.
• A little rosey gold ring that belonged to Bill’s great grandmother, similar to this one. It’s as thin as paper around the bottom, and I adore it.
• A trio of Fay Andrada peaked bangles. They run small enough to become a semipermanent installation when my hands swell in the heat. The fact that I don’t mind this at all should be taken as a sincere compliment to the artist.

And not every day, but close:

• I have a collection of vintage rhinestone bangles that I wear reliably in turn. Lucite and rhinestone clamper bracelets by Weiss are my favorites– the the internet’s ever rotating selection makes me wonder if my single needs to become a stack.
• New, but very much loved: a little filagreed pendant circa 1910ish, given to me this mothers’ day. It’s set with the tiniest blue-grey pearls I’ve ever seen.
• This shouldn’t count because I rarely wear a watch, but when I do I wear my great grandmother’s. There’s an odd intimacy in realizing you’re standing close enough to someone to hear their watch tick. I don’t wear perfume, but wonder if a good little watch isn’t the auditory equivalent. I listen to Bill’s tick on his bedside table at night.

fava harvest

towel entourage

vintage dresses

birth-day cake (as seen here, of course)

as close to hands-free…

…and as close to sleeping in her bassinet as our daughter allows.

Speaking of parenting:

We snuck our turkey poults under a broody hen in hopes she’d default to an assumption that they were a) baby chickens and b) her baby chickens.  Considering the downy little things are destined to become 30 lb giants among fowl, it’s kind of the trojan horse approach to poultry farming.

The hen in question has dutifully adopted the pair but seems to know something is amiss. They don’t quite look, sound or behave like chickens, but she seems resigned to the fact that whatever they are, they’re hers to make the best of.

As for us, we are also learning how to parent. Along with many more important things, I am finally intimately acquainted with the anatomy of baby feet and realize I would have made all the socks totally differently.

…but I’m so glad.

I was very tired, and I remember trying to figure out whether the cat or the barbie was for sale.

Either way, we agree that it is a keenly brilliant marketing strategy.

—–

Images (and the opportunity to make this vintage ken doll and his little flesh-colored pants your own) courtesy of SeeDollyRun on Etsy.

1.  Start baby. (not pictured)

2. Find wool. Baby yarn is widely on offer, but don’t forget that proximity to the real stuff instills great virtue at a tender age.

3. Get to work. Blankets knit from the center out are trying companions: they go lightning fast at first when you have only a handful of stitches in each round, and then slowly increase in size until it takes an hour or worse to finish a single row. Fair warning that during your third trimester, this will seem a cruelly parallel trajectory to the gestational process.

4. Have baby. (not pictured)

5. Assemble.

Ada Elizabeth, born April 23rd at 10:07 in the morning and immediately subjected to hand knits.

Your name is like a birthday wish that we can finally say out loud.

They are a notoriously needy little subset of the animal kingdom. Time is consumed and we are so completely happy. You understand.