A perceived oversight

The other two at lunch yesterday said they did not remember seeing pictures posted of the finished bathroom.

Probably because pictures of a 6' x 8' bathroom are even smaller than the bathroom itself.

Once bathroom accouterments are in place

there is little room for frivolity,

and less for pictures.

Only a straight and narrow shot to the business end of the room.

The shelves just inside the door.

Wire "dorm baskets" for the girls' dental hygiene,

Baskets for cleaning supplies, wash clothes, the like.

My shower. I love it, and you can see so little. Another shower head is not visible.

Oh, well.

The window, which now has proper cottage framing and a proper window sill.

The little wall that covers the stack pipe has a trinket Aunt Flo gave me;

a little diorama she brought back from Nova Scotia.

My clock on the back wall.

The view from the toilet. My new glasses.

The mirror. I must remember to find matching light bulbs for the light fixture;

the one on the left still has construction sawdust on it.

The art on the wall; a print and an artists' proof, both by local artists.

No room to take a complete picture of anything in the room, not even the toilet.

That's what you get in a 6' x 8' bathroom.

The end.

Mom in Las Vegas

Mom came by her wandering foot genetically.  She was born in 1918 and on her father’s vacation excursions.  Niagara Falls or the Pacific Ocean, all the same to him, from Cleveland, Ohio.  I wonder what my grandmother thought of lugging bedding for a family, and probably guests, from one set of tourist cabins to another.  I do recall Mom telling of one vacation in which she had cherry pie for breakfast every morning.

Travel and vacations were important when I was a child.  A trip of several days to St. Louis when I was about six or seven involved motels and hotels, and probably tipped my frugal mother (and father) into the camping mode, the accommodation I recall from my childhood.  Some of my first blogs recounted family camping, and especially a tent my dad fashioned of a parachute, marbles, and a tent pole.

Mom budgeted for the annual family vacation.  She had a shoe box with envelopes, each labeled with something she was saving for.  One envelope was the vacation fund and the figures would accumulate down the outside of the envelope.  On one very cold winter morning the engine block of the family car cracked.  But by cashing some bonds and using the vacation fund our family left behind the 1935 Dodge.  My brother Walt and I were not sorry to be sitting in the back seat of a 1948 Dodge.  No more sheet metal slicing the backs of our legs.

When we moved to this house Mom was seventy, and still travelling.  In the preceding decade she had visited friends and relatives in Missouri, Texas, Florida and points between, accompanied by friends or her sisters-in-law.  Camping days were over, but I know Mom looked for the best motel deal available.  I have mental images of her at a motel counter, with tiny, white haired Aunt Helen Rita, negotiating a better rate.

Our Uncle Hank retired after we moved here, and mom noticed him and Aunt Flo taking a lot of little weekend trips—by bus.  Their church senior group organized the jaunts and mom was welcome to join them, if there was an unsold seat left.    After missing a few trips she would have enjoyed mom took matters into her own hands and joined Uncle Hank’s church.

The senior group of the church organized tours that required air travel and although Aunt Flo and Uncle Hank could be off to Disneyland or Broadway, mom was not interested in those tours.  Until the trip to Las Vegas came up.  Her cousin Tommy and his wife Mary would be coming from Texas to join them for several days in Las Vegas.  Mom was so excited she bought a new suit case. 

It would be my mother’s first ever airplane trip and I said I would see her to her gate and wait until she boarded (1995). Well, she could figure that out by herself!  It’s a long trudge to the gates at Cleveland Hopkins, but she only allowed me drop her.  As I slowed down, knowing my mom, I handed her two dollar bills and said that the approaching man, the Sky Cap, would be carrying her bag, and please tip him, and everyone else who helped her.  That’s how they earned a living.  I could not get out of the car in time; she got her suit case and marched right past the outstretched hand of the Sky Cap.

When I picked her up a week later she handed me two dollars, announcing she had carried her bag herself.  Everywhere. She and Tommy had a wonderful time.  In my files I have a picture of others in the party facing their machines, pulling handles, but Mom and Tommy sitting shoulder to shoulder, backs to a machine, chatting like long lost cousins.  I may never find the picture to illustrate the story, but you can see it in your mind’s eye, I know.  Oh, yes, she didn’t waste any money on those casinos, either.

Mom and Uncle Hank on vacation, about 1931

Quilts our mother slept under

We lost four of the last five of Mom’s generation in a year and a half of 1996 to 1998, including Uncle Hank, mom’s brother.  In 1998 Aunt Flo became the last of my parent’s generation. Uncle Hank was married to Aunt Flo.  They lived in Cleveland and their son and daughter-in-law lived in Colorado.    We kept Aunt Flo involved with the family, and drove her to family doings.  It probably was twenty minutes from our house to hers.

One time Jan went to pick her up Aunt Flo had Jan put a large metal case in the car.  When it was opened at our house Aunt Flo explained it had been stored by Grandma Rolf in her attic and contained quilts she believed Grandma Rolf “had made for herself.”  She added she had shown the quilts to a friend who admired one and paid her $200 for it.  We did a lot of tongue biting.  At least she had the courtesy to return the balance to the proper people.

My Grandma Rolf was a fine needle woman, but quilting never interested her.  Her mother-in-law, Grandma Troike, was the quilter, and passed the love and skill a generation to our mother.  The metal box was full of quilts we know were made by Grandma Troike and some early quilts of Mom’s.  The missing quilts that mom slept under and never knew what happened to them.

The Missing Tulip Quilt is fascinating.  It surely was made by Grandma Troike and was on mom’s bed on West 21^st Street.  Mom remarked on the loss of that quilt; she had no idea where it went.  Before we moved here she decided to replicate it, from memory.  Like the great majority of her quilts, the Tulip Quilt is appliqué.  She would trace a pattern onto fabric, cut it out and fell it to a background.  With invisible stitches.  I never mastered invisible stitching.  The needlework gene went to Jan; she’s a beautiful stitcher.

This is Grandma Troike’s Tulip Quilt, The Missing Tulip Quilt,  that was on mom’s bed on 21^st Street. 

The quilting uses a tulip motif.  There are no sashings and the blocks have a red frame.

This is Mom’s Tulip Quilt, reproduced from memory sixty years later. 

The quilting has a tulip motif. Mom used red sashings and a green border strip.  She drew essentially the same tulip for her pattern.  Incredible.

 Mom used it on her bed in this house.

Mom's brick fund

We bought this house in 1988, when Jan and I started a business and needed one studio.  We moved in stages; it’s a nice house that needed a total redo.  I moved here in June and lived in the construction dust. For a time I even climbed a ladder to the second floor bathroom.  Mom and Mark moved in September, in time for Mark to start school.  Jan and Tom came in October.

I had a deck built the length of the back of the house, with a door from the kitchen that had been a window.  The deck is fifteen feet wide and about forty five feet long.  It’s on the north side of the house, facing a little back lawn and the woods.  Very shady.

Mom and I had an exchange or two about the deck; she thought I was making it far too long.  She even countermanded my contractor; I came back one day to find he was building a twenty foot deck, on Mom’s instructions, as forty five was too expensive and far more than “she needs”.  I’m sure moms are moms the universe through and through.  I reminded the contractor who would be writing the all checks; end of problem. 

Not ready for prime time, spring 1989 on the deck.  Aunt Flo (married to Uncle Hank) concerned, Mom coughing, Beth smiling, me not, Jan hiding, Shelly blinking

Over its length the deck is five to eight feet above ground level, depending on the slope of the hill.  That fall mom told me the ground under the deck needed attention or it would become a mud pit, as the north side received little sunshine, not to mention all those trees.  “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, I’ve started saving to have it paved with bricks,” she said, with slightly tight lips, as she set about rescuing me.  “That will be nice,” I replied.

In the spring a load of brick was dumped in the front drive.  “You can start laying brick now.”

Neither Tom, Jan nor I knew a lick about brick.  “I’ll show you how to do it.”

We all trouped around back, Mom with her cane as she was only a few months from being sprung from a wheel chair for an injury involving telling Dutch, a young Doberman she had on a leash, “Let’s go home.”  Dutch took her down three stairs and over a motorcycle on the way. 

We started in the small section under the stairs, putting bricks wherever mom pointed her cane.  She was not pleased and dismissed us:  “I’ll teach Mark how to do this.”

So, an old lady taught her sixteen year old grandson to lay a basic basket weave pattern in brick.  They did a fine job and we had the best brick pavement under an overhead deck in all of Summit County.  Sadly, my brother and brother-in-law contrived to store every piece of manly junk they could hoard there, out of sight of the neighbors, until the bricks were inaccessible to any ray of sunshine.  Some ultimatums produced a dumpster this summer and it is now fairly cleared out.  It won’t look like it did twenty years ago, but maybe I can get some grandkids working on it next year.

Mom’s brick fund didn’t end there.  Over the nine years she was here we’d hear “We need new gravel in the drive.  There’s enough money in the brick fund.”  “Let me pay for (something we needed to buy).  There’s enough money in the brick fund.”   A year or two after she was gone Mark got into some wrong place, wrong time scrape and spent the night in jail.   In the morning I bailed him out with the last of Grandma’s brick fund.  She probably would have known a bail bondsman at midnight and had him out at 12:01, but I did the best I could.