Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, March 7, 2003:
Decorating

We all know that I’m a girl of few talents. I am uncreative, and I accept that. After all, the world needs an audience to appreciate and enjoy the work of artists. You famous people would be nothing without the fans, remember. So don’t hasten to reassure me that I have hidden creative depths. I don’t. I don’t have any depths, creative or otherwise. It doesn’t get more shallow than me.

So the rare creative things I do are important to me. Cooking is one, and I guess this blog could be counted as another (thanks, Mitch, for the reminder). But today, class, we are going to discuss decorating.

I believe that I have a talent for decorating and for creating a comfortable and pretty home. [Digression: what Victorian talents for an independent-minded 21st girl to have!] I look forward to coming home to our clean, lovely apartment at the end of the day. It’s one of the small pleasures in life. I like being surrounded by nice things, and things of sentimental value: family photos, paintings and objets d’art acquired on my travels, the rocking chair my great-grandfather made, my father’s books. Some people might find it cluttered, but I think it’s cozy and charming.

The desire to enhance my surroundings is almost a life-long one. Before my younger sister was born, so before the age of nine, I wanted to paint my room a lavender shade called (and I still remember this, though other, far more important things have vanished forever from my memory) Fantasy Orchid. Mom and Dad did not agree with me on this decorating notionette and said no. Being a fairly biddable child, I forgot all about it until coming home from a visit to my mother’s parents to find that my father had painted my room the desired shade in our absence to surprise me, in which he succeeded. And for the record, I never did get tired of the color before we moved from that house.

I have painted and otherwise worked on every apartment I have ever had. I learned the hard way not to ever refinish hardwood floors by myself ever again. With the optimism (read: stupidity) of youth, I thought it a good idea to rent a sander and refinish my floors in the height of an East Coast summer, with all the heat and humidity that entails. If you have never undertaken this sort of project yourself, let me just say that the sander weighed as much as I did and the floors must be sanded three times and then varnished. You will not be surprised to hear that when we renovated our apartment a few years back, we hired people to refinish the floors. I may still love to decorate, but I have learned what my limitations are!