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Home
Improvement
by Elizabeth Bussey Sowdal
"It is the strong marriage that survives
each spring without a tremor or two." |
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Ah,
Spring! The days are growing longer and everything is fresh and bright and new.
Flowers bloom, warm breezes waft (here in Oklahoma "wafting" is anything less
than 50 mph. You don’t want to know what "blowing" is), baby lambs wobble on spindly
legs and, to quote Tennyson, ". . . a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts
of love." A middle-aged man’s fancy, however, lightly turns to thoughts of home
improvement. Don’t believe me? Just cruise on past your neighborhood home and
garden center some bright Saturday morning. You don’t even have to go in the store.
The testosterone fumes in the parking lot alone will be enough to set your eyes
tearing and your nose running. You thought it was cedar pollen, didn’t you? Nu-uh.
Pure, unadulterated testosterone. AAA-Choo!
It is the strong marriage
that survives each spring without a tremor or two. My husband and I are well matched.
We complement each other in most ways. I am a fly by the seat of my pants kinda
gal. Go with the flow. Michael is definitely a "measure twice, cut once" kind
of person. So we have different styles; most married couples do.
One summer
I decided it was time to "do" the dining room. My sister and I got busy scoring
the walls and then sloshing soapy water on them and scraping off big swaths of
layer after layer of old wallpaper. Then we got to talking and sloshing water
and scraping and having a cup of tea, and fixing the kids a sandwich. The next
thing you know, smoke was slithering up out of the light socket. I ran to flip
the breakers off and Mary called the fire department. It must have been a slow
emergency morning in OKC because we got two fire trucks just chock full o’ big
handsome firemen (tell me who is better looking than a fireman? NOBODY!!! I love
‘em!). Anyway all these firemen in various stages of gorgeousness piled out of
their trucks and came barreling toward our house, axes at the ready. "Come right
on in!" I fluttered and cooed. I had momentarily forgotten some things. Like my
age and marital status. And the fact that I was fetchingly decked out in a pair
of my husband’s old sweat pants held up with a cubscout belt and a T-shirt that
proclaimed, "I’m not fat, I’m well insulated." Plus, I was covered in specks of
wet antique wallpaper. Have you ever smelled old, wet wallpaper? Mmm. "Hello boys!
Where’s the fire?" FYI: firemen don’t think that’s funny.
So, in they
trooped with their boots and axes and checked out the no longer smoking light
socket. They were very good-natured about the whole thing. They couldn’t stay
for a glass of tea (dash it!), but trooped out of the house laughing and teasing
us while my sister (who was no better groomed than I) and I twittered and giggled
and waved bye-bye like two twelve-year-olds who’d had a surprise visit from B2K.
Now, contrast that to scraping wallpaper with my husband. There were ground cloths
and safety goggles and those funny white paper coveralls. The neighbors probably
thought that somebody had finally reported my refrigerator to the CDC and that
they’d found an old tupperware container filled with something heretofore unknown
to modern science. Finally we were properly garbed and the room was all draped
and taped and ready and we commenced scraping. Mike left the room for something
– possibly a filter mask or some other safety related gear – and I got started,
sloshing and scratching and scraping. I wasn’t aiming water at the light sockets,
but I was wondering if I ought to find an attractive sash to spice up my paper
coverall when my husband came back into the room. "Good heaven’s Elizabeth Anne,
what are you doing?" My middle name is not Anne. His ex-wife’s middle name is
Anne. So I know when he accidentally calls me Elizabeth Anne he is perturbed.
"Well honey, I’m scoring, sloshing and scraping."
"No, no, no! You score
your area," he demonstrated, "then you moisten your area," he gently daubed water
on the wall, "and then you scrape away the old paper . . . (get this, now!) ONE
LAYER AT A TIME."
I am not joking. He wanted me to remove the wallpaper
one layer at a time, while wearing a paper suit and space goggles. Safety first.
Needless
to say, we didn’t have to call the fire department during that project. |
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