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| Not My Home* |
While I still can't wear it, my home is filled with it. Not blaring girl scout uniform green, but the lovely garden shades of trees and shrubbery: Our living room is green, the kitchen cabinets are green, the master bedroom is green, the ceiling in the upstairs bath is green. We just (more-or-less) painted the front of the house green.
What rooms are left (there aren't many) are filled with greenery, like the black and white solarium-wintergarden-aviary with its palms and the (rarely flowering) hibiscus and my free-flying parakeets Shakira and Vinnie (Vinnie's the girl, by the way. Who knew? And now it suits her. She's such a thug).
But then there's the foyer. Over the last 28 years the walls and ceiling grew a network of cracks and peeling chunks from traffic in the alley alongside the house; from construction of a collection of very expensive townhouses in the old schoolyard behind us; and from 100 years of sloshing water out of the claw foot tub in the bathroom overhead.
The foyer has been my most prominent example of hanging a little ivy -- diverting attention from an eyesore. To obscure the damaged walls I sponged burnt sienna over baby shit brown in random daubs (I could have written dabs but isn't daubs lovely?) Up the walls I went and over the ceiling and up the staircase to the second floor landing. More cracks? More paint. It really was quite theatrical. Visitors thought I had deliberately created the look of a long ago ruined Italian villa.
