According to Google, that quote, \u201cMay you live in interesting times,\u201d is an English translation of an old Chinese proverb which is as much a blessing as a curse. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been doing for the last month an a half\u2014living in interesting times.<\/p>\n
The day after the last event for The A List, we headed for Arizona to empty and pack up the Tucson house in advance of an early May closing. It was a daunting undertaking. While I was off on tour, Bill and the dogs had lived though a construction siege while the hardwood floors in a flood-damaged upstairs bedroom and the hard wood portions of the downstairs were sanded and refinished. While in Tucson we made the decision to bite the bullet and complete the job by installing hardwood flooring in the carpeted portion of downstairs. That meant that when the moving truck arrived with all the goods from the Tucson house, they mostly had to be unloaded into the garage because the downstairs rooms weren\u2019t ready.<\/p>\n
Eventually the furniture and rugs came inside. Boxes of dishes, pots and pans, and books are still in the garage. You\u2019ve heard of one day at a time? We\u2019re talking one box at a time. A few things are still AWOL. Hardware pieces for our platform bed and the electronic piano have yet to surface. Bill\u2019s an engineer. He managed to find and install substitute hardware. And some of my genuine treasures, like my Founder\u2019s Award from the Tucson Festival of Books and a wonderful Chinese bowl have yet to surface. They may be in the bottom of the glassware boxes from the library in Tucson, but right now there\u2019s nowhere to put that extra glassware and those boxes have yet to be sorted.<\/p>\n
The biggest problem was the art. We love art. We\u2019ve had art in both our houses. There\u2019 are the pictures Bill has painted over the years, and along the way we\u2019ve collected many works from our favorite Sedona-based painter and friend, M.L. Coleman. But here\u2019s the problem, how do you fold the art from two 4000 square foot houses into one? Fortunately, our interior designer, Jim Hunt, who also happens to be Beau\u2019s and Mel\u2019s interior designer, was a man with a plan. \u201cYou have high ceilings,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll just stack \u2018em.\u201d<\/p>\n
So for the past week, while I was doing copy-editing on Sins of the Fathers, we were also undergoing a major art installation, and stack them we have! When our grandson Colt came over to visit last week he said, \u201cGrandma, it looks like an art gallery exploded inside your house!\u201d And it does.<\/p>\n
The one living room wall is like a travelogue of our married lives. An M.L Coleman Grand Canyon sits atop the pyramid. The first trip we took after we married was to the Grand Canyon in honor of my parents\u2019 50th anniversary. There\u2019s an oil painting of Ascona, Switzerland, a village on Lago Maggiore, where we stayed in the mid-nineties while taking European delivery of Bill\u2019s Porsche. There\u2019s the painting of the Alps Bill painted on the balcony of our room at the Palace Hotel in Lucerne after a Rhine River cruise, and another view of the Alps that he painted from our room in St. Johann, Austra. There he was painting while I did the editorial letter corrections on Kiss of the Bees. There\u2019s a Coleman painting of poppy fields from northern Italy and another from Tuscany with San Gimignano showing in the distance. I love the painting, but my reaction is colored by the unfortunate fact that San Gimignano is where my purse was stolen from an Internet Cafe while we were on a Rick Steves tour of Italy. In other words, if you come to our house, don\u2019t expect us to haul out our slide projector. We\u2019ll just seat you in the living room and give you the tour.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sitting in my chair in the family room to write this. There used to be three pictures hanging in this room. Now there are eight\u2014and I don\u2019t even have to turn my head. There’s lots of glass\u2014windows and sliding doors–in the house which limits wall space. So now there\u2019s art hanging in the stairwell leading upstairs.<\/p>\n
Our house used to be on the cold side\u2014with lots of glass art. Now, with paintings on the walls, it\u2019s more warm and cozy. It\u2019s art that we love, and art we can live with.<\/p>\n
And for right now, while I need to buckle down and get to work on the next book, all those boxes of books will have to stay right where they are\u2014in the garage.<\/p>\n
Interesting times, indeed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Google, that quote, \u201cMay you live in interesting times,\u201d is an English translation of an old Chinese proverb which is as much a blessing as a curse. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been doing for the last month an a half\u2014living in interesting times. The day after the last event for The A List, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-ua","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1874,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions\/1874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}