From the Inside Out

Vibes

2010-02-10T13:23:00.001-05:00

My teenage son and I had an interesting talk the other day about “vibes.” He’s always been perceptive, but in this conversation he described the depth of his perceptions with astonishing eloquence. Most of us know when something just doesn’t “feel” right, but less frequently we listen to those instincts, dissect them and react appropriately.

When I was negotiating the purchase of the house I now live in, I brought my kids over to walk through it. It was important to me to give them a picture in their heads about the place they were likely to call home. Of course, I warned them that the current owners still inhabited the place, but I had also unreasonably assumed that my children would be able to see beyond the huge furniture, dark walls, cloaked windows, and Hagrid-like interiors to the Harry-like home, and understand the space minus the people who were living here. My son (at age 11) couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t get out of this house fast enough and ended up in tears with deep unsettle. Nothing felt right to him about this house, and when I realized the perception he was getting, I didn’t blame him one bit. He was right; everything about the place in its current state threw horrible vibes.

My mother ended up having a phone conversation with him that almost immediately calmed him down. She later told me what she said to Jims: “I told him to trust you. I told him to wait until you get your hands on the place, because when you get done, it will feel like home.”

My incentive to do just that was enormous, of course. It's an absolute essential that my kids feel good in my home! From this experience, my whole perspective on design changed. It went from how can I make this look nice to how can I make this feel right. Interiors must throw good vibes. No fakers allowed.

Number Five

2010-02-03T11:15:00.001-05:00

I am going to renege. Sort of. Since August I have been retelling an old account. All of this blogging has been an effort of several intentional attempts in this order: (1) to help promote my business, (2) to keep you interested as a reader, (3) to keep me interested as a writer, (4) to document a tiny bit of history for my children’s posterity, and (5) to show the quiet evolution of something that I think we all can relate to if we take the time to try. However, in this process, Number Five surprised me and told me that it should be bumped up the list. In fact, Number Five screamed it at me.

I didn’t ever envision myself as or designer, or “sculptor” as one once described me, or an “artist” as another later would. But I am, and all this history that I’ve been sharing laid the groundwork for me to finally begin to own that. So now, with more than half this story told, and at a crucial turning point, Number Five is requiring me to finish this story first and share it with you and others later in a different format.

Therein lies the reneging. This blog will no longer be telling the story of how I became a designer, but it’s going to jump ahead and offer my personal—which naturally spills over to my professional—takes on the process. I will be writing in tandem for the next several weeks if not months, and I may, from time to time, share bits of the original story as it further unfurls for me in the privacy of my living room, but please bear with me as I try to keep this new tangent online interesting for all of us!

I love that you all are reading and I hope you wish me luck and stick with me as I try to fulfill Number Five’s demands while offering you different bits on this site. Hopefully one will sustain the other!

With much thanks and love,

PS-Heim: Uzticība.

The Creation of Destruction

2010-02-02T11:50:00.004-05:00

The rebuilding of the Girard house would become a very long process that would consume our lives for over a year. We optimistically figured that the fire’s damage had given us a clean slate to build something better. It seemed simple: cut out the charred bits and replace them with something new and fresh.

I was at the Girard house every day overseeing this process (and learning a whole lot about construction) when it occurred to me that I couldn’t prevent the smoke from seeping back inside. And we all know, where there is smoke, there is fire, and damage could easily be re-done. It was a scary feeling to realize "new and fresh" wasn’t good enough. It was becoming clear that not only the charred bits needed replacing, but the whole thing needed to become fire resistant. The destruction wasn’t over. Even though walls were being rebuilt and tall trusses were being lifted high, nothing was guaranteed against going up in smoke again, and I didn't like the odds. There seemed to be a festering dichotomy at work.

Someone, I wish I could remember who, recently pointed out to me the theory that “At any given time we are contributing to either the cycle of creation or destruction in our lives. Both are necessary, but just know which one you are contributing to.” Is it possible to contribute to both?

Smoke and the Suite Life

2010-01-30T12:20:00.002-05:00

We woke up the next morning thinking it was all a bad dream, but the musty burning smell of smoke followed us everywhere. The guest room at my in-laws where we slept smelled like it, the kid’s pajamas smelled like it, the inside of our cars smelled like it, and even the cats smelled like it. The effects of the fire reached every tiny corner of our lives and I couldn't wash it off my hands.

The next few days were, of course, a crazy blur of activity and it was hard to know who to trust. There are protocols to these things, but when your house doesn’t catch fire every day, it’s a steep learning curve! We thanked God for our wonderful insurance agents on an hourly basis. They were a speed dial on my phone for a year after all this.

The fire department and insurance company launched investigations. Interestingly, the source of the fire was found, but the cause was never determined. The fire department closed the case and the insurance company opened one. With that, they approved restoration companies to take care of our belongings. I’ll never forget the little grandma-lady who showed up the next morning with such authority. She took my hands, apologized for my loss, asked about my kids, and then looked directly into my eyes and said, “I’m going to take your house, turn it upside down and shake it. Every little scrap that falls out I am going to label, pack up, clean, repair and store it for you until your house is ready to move back in. Then I’m going to unpack and arrange it exactly the way you want. Everything will be catalogued and returned like new, I promise.” This seemed like an incredible task, but that’s exactly what she and her team did over the next three days from the biggest piece of furniture to the lost pennies and paperclips found within the cushions. Another company took everything made of fabric—clothing, linens, towels, mattresses, sleeping bags, etc.They told us to put a weeks worth of clothing into special duffle bags and they would have them back to us clean and restored in a few days. They even offered to take the winter coats of our backs (they really smelled). The rest would be ready in few weeks and stored until we were ready to take delivery. Everyone promised that the stinging smell of smoke would be fullly removed from everything as they hauled it all away in a mountain of carefully labeled and numbered boxes. (By the way, five years later, I’m still clipping the yellow paper tags off the odd table cloth or rarely worn blouse, and peeling the identifying sticker off a serving bowl or picture frame.)

Not only did we need to oversee this incredible task of clean up and move out, but we had to find a place to live. Staying with my inlaws was certainly helpful in the immediate short term, but they didn’t have room for us to live there for any length of time. We needed our own space anyway. The insurance company again was wonderful and just told us to find whatever we needed, a long term hotel, apartment, or whatever, and it would be paid for. That was relieving, but still not easy. We looked at extended stay hotels and apartment complexes with short term leases. None of these things suited our family, and few of them would allow our kitty cats. Then we found the “Suite Life,” a small, very clean apartment complex in Royal Oak, across from the high school, that offered fully furnished apartments available for short term lease. They were marketed for month-to-month corporate use. Not only was this logistically convenient, but they had a two bedroom apartment available, a laundry facility, an in-ground pool that would be opened in the spring, and no problem with our kids or cats. The apartment was completely stocked with bedding, blankets, pots, pans, dishes, gadgets, towels and even a vacuum cleaner--Eureka. I just hoped we wouldn't stink it up. We signed the lease and paid the first and last month’s rent on Friday night, two days after the fire.

The next day, March 5, marked our 11th wedding anniversary. Grandma and Grandpa kept the kids while my husband and I moved our very few belongings to the Suite Life--we were back to 100 lbs. of home. Then we did something we hadn't done together in years: we went grocery shopping. It was fun, but also pretty obscene. We had to buy everything from toilet paper to salt. The Suite Life had no consumables. After filling three huge carts, we brought everything into the apartment by passing it through a window to save us from hiking back and forth through the parking lot and around the complex. It was comical, but felt good to have some control again.

When it was all put away, we went out for dinner. We drank to our 11 years, our very recent blessing of safety, our resilient kids, and yet another adventure together. Sitting in that restaurant, exhausted, but able to exhale for the first time in three days, we figured that if we could get through this, we could get through anything. (As if we'd never done anything hard before.) At that I wiped a tear from my eye, but I could still smell the smoke.

The Scene

2010-01-27T09:40:00.003-05:00

Girard Avenue was covered in thick ice and flashing lights when I pulled up 20 minutes later, a drive I only remember as white-knuckled and fast, trying not to show panic to my kids. My husband had arrived just ahead of me. We deposited two very nervous kids into the warm and calm arms of Laura and her husband. Laura said that she saw thick, black smoke coming from the soffits of our family room. After calling the fire department (immediately before calling me), she learned that neighbors on the street behind us, more than 350 feet away, had already reported the billowing smoke coming from our house.

I’ll never forget my first approach to our house. Artificial light gave a creepy illumination to soot-covered snow and layers of ice. Strange people were stalking our property with uninvited determination. Our belongings were being haughtily thrown out of the door way and windows. I saw my grandpa’s chair leaning against the fence, completely charred and missing an arm, opposite leg, and half of its back. A clear casualty. The gravity of the situation hit me then.

The firemen were reluctant to spend too much time with us at that moment because they were still working inside. Men were in danger inside our home. We asked if there was any sign of our two cats. There hadn’t been, but we couldn’t believe the quick response they made to find them. Within minutes a fireman produced our shell shocked kitties and said he found them huddled together under our bed. We brought them to Jims & Sis thinking that the four would benefit from some mutual care.

When the all-clear was given, we could assess, but there was still chaos. (Talk about creating tension with black!) Someone shoved a business card in my hand and told us his crew would take care of everything. What? Crew? Who are you? “An emergency construction service. We’ll cover the broken windows and doors and come back and repair your house in the morning.” We seemed to have little choice in the matter. Things were completely out of our control.

My husband went inside to assess the damage, and when he came out, he reported that there was no way we could spend the night here. The fire was very localized as was the firemen’s inflicted but necessary damage, but the smoke damage was very significant and permeated the house. I wanted to see.

When I entered our house through the family room door in the back, with the flashlight, most everything in that room appeared untouched, but the stench was overwhelming and stinging. Nauseating. My slight fear was that I’d forgotten to unplug the iron and that it started this whole mess, but I found the iron on top of the ironing board with the cord and plug wound neatly just as I had apparently left it. (Phew) We found Sissy’s very best friend, a stuffed polar bear named Lacis sitting on the family room couch. She would later cry with relief and reluctantly acquiesce to giving him a bath later that night.

When the scene (and that’s really what it felt like: a dirty crime scene, not my home) shifted from the family room to the dining room and kitchen, I almost couldn’t look. A gaping hole had been hacked in the corner where the fire had originated exposed the outside. Icy water was everywhere; things that once hung proudly on the walls were littered all over the floor and covered in sludge; Winnie’s dining room set was not only amputated of my grandpa’s chair which was left out to die in the driveway, but also was veiled in the white film of water damage and huge gashes among countless lacerations. I moved on quickly to gather essentials in the bedrooms. Furniture in all the bedrooms had been tossed and closet contents flung wide in the firemen’s effort to find the cats. We grabbed my jewelry box, passports and birth certificates, filled a duffle bag with a few clothes, found Jims’ Tiger and fish blanket, and my husband moved his valuable map collection to our neighbor’s house for safe keeping. Beyond that, we could only hope that the contents of our lives wouldn’t be looted over night, and we left to spend the rest of the night at my in-laws.

Routine at Stake

2010-01-26T11:03:00.000-05:00

We were waiting for building permits to be approved and for our contractor to wrap up another job before we could get to work on our addition. March 2, 2005 was a Wednesday. As per Routine, we spent Wednesday evenings at church for dinner and family activities. Routine dictated that I took the kids and that my husband met us there directly after work. He hadn’t yet arrived that evening at about 6:30 pm when I got the call.

My next door neighbor and friend, Laura, knew our Routine, so I thought it strange to see her name pop up on the caller ID of my mobile phone. I answered her with a friendly chirp, although it was hard to hear because of all the activity going on around me. She sounded a bit strained and asked if we were at church. Yes. She asked if the kids and my husband were there with me. I explained. Then with very calm and deliberate words, Laura delivered this:

Come home now. Your house is on fire.

Routine was being burned alive.

Build Up

2010-01-23T12:00:00.001-05:00

Our life on Girard Avenue was about three years old when we decided it was time to think about putting on an addition, and the plan was ambitious. We wanted to build up and put a second floor on top of Girard’s walls. Routine was about to take a sabbatical, thank the Lord. We sketched and scaled and came up with a plan to add two big bedrooms, a loft area, a kid bathroom and a mechanical room that would not only house the furnace, hot water heater and laundry, but also another full bathroom. It would add about another 1000 square feet.

As soon as the new 2005 got underway, we started interviewing building contractors and found one who not only shared our vision, but had architectural plans drawn up to prove it. We intended to live in the house as the addition was being built, and the prospect of the whole process was exciting. We were reliving something here, and this time, we felt it would be for keeps. So we had a good and planned adventure on our hands! Or so we thought.

Meet Routine

2010-01-22T13:00:00.002-05:00

In the next few years, obviously the Girard house conformed to fit our family. And I wasn’t the only one with projects. My husband built a cool tree house for Jims in the willow with rope rails and a bird’s nest which became a pirate ship, a space ship, an alien planet, and a dreaming place. There was a shed in the middle of the yard, too, which we decided to turn into a play house for Sissy. With Grandpa’s help, they dragged it from one end of the yard to the other, dug a trench from the garage to pull electricity to it, sided it with new T1-11, built a front porch and a Dutch door, and I painted it blue—like our Jaunmarupe house. Inside they laid vinyl flooring and installed tiny double-hung windows. I made frilly curtains in pink and green and we put all the little kitchen furniture and plastic steak and eggs inside. We made ice rinks and had soccer teams practice in the back yard.

Not long after all of that, my husband decided it was time for more space and that it should start in the garage. With little effort and expense, we contracted to add 12’ to the back end of our deep 2-car garage. This allowed room for a work bench and tool chests along with a new “freezer room.” Before the addition, the garage had a little room framed inside with a sliding glass door and indoor-outdoor carpeting. We ended up putting a big chest freezer in there along with items we were storing that we didn’t want exposed to the otherwise dirty elements of the garage. Since our house didn’t have a basement, this clean storage was handy, so we made sure we rebuilt this space with the addition. Even though it was a garage, the extra room was luxurious.

We did all the things one would expect. My husband started graduate school, the kids were involved with school, sports and lessons, and I was heavily obligated (with enjoyment) to church activities. Busyness abounded. We finally had reached that state of un-flux. I was convinced that this kind of consistency was surely the key to building a happy, stable family. No more waiting for the other shoe to drop. No more chasing. It was clean living at its best, for sure, and we had what we wanted and worked so long to attain. So there was no explanation for my restlessness at night. I would try to conjure sleep by praying for forgiveness for wanting more than what had generously been given. I had an ache for richer, not in an ungrateful way, but in an unsatisfied way. This is utopia?

I’ve written a lot about tension. How a little is necessary and too much is chaotic. How for me, the tension of static we always seemed to find ourselves in was usually relieved by cooperating through it, and how that cooperation usually involved a major move or decision which required a great deal of planning. That was the reliable rhythm. It made me feel the most productive, and ironically, I found comfort in it. However, it had been made clear that only a girl with pretty big, selfish issues and unrealistic expectations could be left unfulfilled with the life we’d been given. Routine wasn’t my friend, but I when I would fall asleep night after night in that willowy room that I made up, I begged her to be.

Project Girl

2010-01-19T11:38:00.004-05:00

At this point, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not good at sitting still for very long. If nothing else, I’d never before had that luxury, but here in Royal Oak, that notion of being “settled,” or having “arrived,” or “resting” was becoming a reality. My husband saw almost immediate success and was deemed valuable to his new company, which offers a great deal of security, but also, the kids were making friends, enjoying new kinds of freedom, and we had a wonderful and growing network of family and friends nearby. Two years in the virtual holding pattern marked in Evanston went by in a flash, yet to say we recently moved back from the Former Soviet Union seemed somehow inaccurate now. Regardless, we now had what we wanted: a home that was our own, a community we were enjoying, and no more excuses to not be happy and fulfilled. Strange.

Over time I took on little projects in the Girard house. One night I decided to repaint the small kitchen. I took advantage of others’ mistakes and bought returned gallons at Home Depot for half price. I mixed a new color for the walls which enlivened things immediately, but made the painted cabinets look shabby. So I mixed again and repainted those, too. I came up with a light-value, murky green for the walls and a fresh but very muted yellow for the old cabinets. It all played with all the cobalt blue I had sitting around in canisters, dishes, and little vases.

Then, it didn’t take a year before our bedroom carpet was getting to me. It was a creamy-colored cut pile, but it felt rough and itchy under my bare feet even after being cleaned several times. I thought it smelled, too. So I pulled it up to find almost perfect hardwood underneath. After that, a little inspiration hit and I decided to completely redecorate. The walls and closet doors became a willowy green with the textured ceiling (which I loathed) just a shade lighter. I painted the trim in the palest color on the paint chip and the whole room was instantly bathed in the light you’d find sitting under our own willow tree outside the window. I found a long fallen branch in the yard that was about 3” in diameter, stripped the bark, cut it into two and made curtain rods over which I draped cotton fabric with a tight tone-on-tone pattern in a wheaty-beige. I also had wooden blinds made that matched the wood in our furniture. For over our bed, I had blown up to a large poster an old photo my husband had taken of an icy Latvian lake with stark, frozen trees and a few chilly birds flying by. New tawny, wooly flokati rugs balanced the cold in the picture and felt sumptuous underfoot. That room became a very comfortable success.

I mixed more leftover paint for the dining room and came up with a beautiful goldenrod color. It was the perfect backdrop for Winnie’s dining room set. When I reupholstered her chairs with a luscious material of deep raspberry dotted with golden dragonflies, I found several layers of past seat patterns underneath the faded fabric. With an obligatory yet joyful nod to posterity, I cut swatches from each remnant, replaced disintegrating foam and pad, and laid the swatches carefully on top before stretching the dragonflies over and reattaching the seats to the chairs. Winnie was with me that day!

It was fun busying myself with these little tasks in the house. For a while, every time my husband would come home from work or the kids home from school, I had another project going. Project Girl became my name, and sometimes not so affectionately, but it was fun to play, enrich, refurbish, and mark my territory. I wanted to create this environment that would unmistakably feel like our dwelling place, safe place, refuge, founding place, and source. If our environment evoked all of this, surely it would be a true reflection.

Some Permanence

2010-01-16T18:12:00.000-05:00

After all our previous practice, it took no time to move in and commit to our new home. There were many things I wanted to do to make the house more our own, but nothing needed to be done urgently, so we were content to take some time getting to know this house and live together as a family again. With maps, paintings and other objects hung on walls, furniture arranged, drawers, closets and cupboards filled, we declared some permanence finally.

Ok Mar

2010-01-13T20:16:00.003-05:00

At this point I could have written a book about the Art of Efficient Moving. Though, with every move we made (this would make nine in eight years) we seemed to collect more stuff. When we moved to Evanston, my father gave me liberal access to the storage unit he kept full of my grandparents' (Carol & Evans) leftovers. From there I picked out a bit of furniture, paintings, knick knack-y stuff that was either handy or sentimental. (Usually both.) We would collect even more on our way to Royal Oak.

Logistically this move took a little thinking. My husband was in Michigan already with one car, the kids and I were in Evanston with another, and we needed a big truck. Josh to the rescue! My brother is a master at manual labor and is particularly skilled in two areas: packing and hauling. He works in dog-like fashion, always eagerly, thoroughly, carefully, and happily. He puts his head down, sets his jaw, demands silence, and digs in. It’s almost scary to watch him in action, but when he’s done, throw him a big meal and he’s all yours again, sweet as a rose. I wouldn’t recommend patting him on the head, though. So when my husband and I concocted a plan to move, it included Josh, who lives about halfway between Evanston and Royal Oak in the fine city of Grand Rapids.

The scheme was that I would arrange for the biggest U-Haul in Grand Rapids one could rent without a trucker’s license, Josh would drive it to Dempster Street after work, load the truck the next morning before we would caravan to his house in Grand Rapids where my husband would get a ride to meet us, then my husband would drive the U-Haul the rest of the way to Royal Oak with me still caravanning behind. We needed some burly helpers, too, because after all, we had all this great old furniture. So I float this plan to Josh along with the request to bring a couple of high school kids he knew, and I get, “Ok Mar.” One doesn’t get much from Josh verbally, so the “Ok Mar” translation was, “Of course! I’d be happy to help you move, and get you there safely, and be very careful with your children and antiques, and rejoice in your new home and lifestyle change!” Good ol’ Josh.

So Josh and two strapping lads arrived in this ginormous U-Haul way after dark on the planned day, and I just expected to keep them fed and warm until morning. I was wrong. In his military fashion, Josh had the whole truck packed that night, or rather by the wee hours of the next morning. They would have made great burglars because of how quickly and quietly they emptied the flat. They even emptied the kids’ bedrooms while they were sleeping! You can imagine the panic when Jims and Sis woke up the next morning to find the whole flat except for their beds totally empty! Of course, before the kids could even gulp their oatmeal down, Josh had their beds disassembled and loaded on the truck, too. So off we went without time to muse over it.

By lunchtime we arrived at Josh’s house and met my husband and his father who had driven him to GR. There we picked up more furniture which had somehow found its way to my brother’s after Winnie died and Bill downsized. (Come to think of it, I think another U-Haul was involved…) Among other keepsakes, I was the lucky recipient of Winnie’s dining room set. It is crafted of gorgeous, rich mahogany and my guess is that it was made in the 1930s. The heavy buffet, sourced separately by Winnie, has seen as many Christmas smorgasbords on its top, and heavy silver, fine china and candles within than any in Gamelstan as has the large expanding table with five graceful chairs and my grandpa’s matching captain’s chair. Every time I look at it, I see my grandmother rubbing a smudge off the surface or my grandpa in his chair enjoying his pipe after a big meal. (Sometimes, like now, when I’m sitting at the table I can even smell the Captain Black.) Winnie was very proud of her things and took good care of them. She loved this dining room set. It was a wonderful gift to me from my grandfather, and I was tickled to be able to use it in my new house.

Carefully all this was loaded onto Josh’s artistically packed truck. With a hug and an “Ok Mar,” which I knew meant more, we left Josh and drove to yet another new home, this time on Girard Avenue in Royal Oak.

Girard

2010-01-12T09:30:00.001-05:00

While we were getting somewhere in the house hunting department as far as localizing an area, there was a tiny bit of disagreement as to the type of house. We ruled out the Detroit ranches with the tiny bedrooms and high, little windows (I couldn’t see out of them), and any Detroit bungalows had to impress us with a finished second floors and a slightly bigger yard. These styles of houses had been built mid-century when the auto industry was sprawling out all over. I favored the wood-framed houses with porches, separate dining rooms and lots of moldings, but there were issues in those homes we were shown that my husband couldn’t get over. His criteria were a basement and a garage. My criteria included at least three bedrooms and windows I could reach.

One big old white-framed farm house with green shutters I especially loved was on Crooks Road. This has the traffic equivalent of Dempster Street and Valdemara iela. Our kids riding bikes on this street made us nervous, but it was a great old house with a big front living room with a little den off to the side, a separate dining room, lots of exposed, old oak woodwork with actual 10” boards and not nominal 10” boards, three cozy bedrooms, a bathroom that needed love, and an unusually shaped lot. There were two big negatives for my husband the busy street sealed it: The unfinished basement was shallow and the garage was racked. Oh, but that house had such good JuJu! Even now, whenever I walk my Lucy-dog and pass that house I get such a happy feeling! Someone replaced the garage…

Anyway, we were shown a house built in the mid-1940s on Girard Avenue. It had a gravel road and no curbs. I hated that part immediately, but my husband was a little excited because he knew the street. His parents lived on the corner when they first moved to the area in 1974, and they had become friends with a family on the street—who still live on the street. My husband had great memories of playing in their huge back yard. He was hoping this house would have the same type of yard. It did. The lot was huge. Extra wide and triple deep--extremely rare in a community like this. Set back from a nice-sized front lawn with a perfectly shaped, mature sugar maple plunked in the middle, was a ranch. This was not a typical Detroit cookie-cutter ranch, though. It wasn’t like any other house we’d been in (not that was good or bad—just different). The three bedrooms and a bath were tucked on one side of the house with a long living room in front, a dining room sandwiched in the middle, and the kitchen on the opposite side. The back end boasted a huge family room with a cathedral ceiling and equally huge picture windows and door wall that looked out onto a cedar deck the football field-sized back yard. Arborvitaes and tall privet offered privacy from next door neighbors, and at the very end of this expanse stood the biggest, most majestic willow tree we had ever seen. And the forsythia had just blossomed. I remember the yellow that lined the yard.

The yard was pretty even in the soggy early spring, but all I saw was work. My husband saw LAND! The yard scared me to death, and house I wasn’t in love with, either. Its drawbacks: the dirt road, the old kitchen, the pink and black bathroom, one of the bedrooms was without windows because of the way the family room addition was constructed, and (get this) it had no basement. My husband was eager to sacrifice the basement because of blinding visions of building a workshop in the yard, He told me the dirt road just meant people would drive slower, and then said we should consider building a second floor addition later on as the kids grew. He wanted this house and he was convincing me I wanted it, too. What I wanted was to live as a family again (we were apart for about four months), I wanted to move a truck to Michigan the day after school let out for summer, and I wanted to move said truck into a permanent residence. Time was not on my side any longer! We bought the house.

I’ll tell the story of moving next, but I’ll end this by telling you that we closed and obtained possession of this Girard house about a week before we moved. The kids and I were there in Michigan just for the weekend. On that closing day, though, after playing around and learning about our new dwelling, the four of us camped out in the living room on the thick curly carpet. All in sleeping bags and blankets in the empty house, we snuggled together on the floor and spent the night. For me it harkened the first days in the Big Empty Flat in Aluksne before we had a bed and before kids expanded us. It was a really happy day, and by then I was totally convinced I wanted it, too.

Getting Somewhere

2010-01-10T09:47:00.004-05:00

We started looking for houses. Obviously, being a city girl at heart, my first instinct was to consider actually living in Detroit. That notion was quickly dispelled, and we started looking in the Farmington Hills area because of a much more logical reason: church was there. We knew that we wanted to become involved in the same church my husband had grown up in, where his parents are active members and where we had many friends. Roots were what we needed.

Mind you, in this time, we hadn’t actually moved to Michigan yet. My husband started his new job early in the spring when snow was still on the ground, but we still had commitments in Evanston—namely, my son was in 1st grade and moving him mid-year wasn’t an option in my book. It was offered that my husband shack up with his parents for a few months until school let out. This bought us some time to find a house and then move once and for all into a permanent place. My husband would come to Evanston on the weekends, but often we would travel there to look, get the lay of the land and figure out where to live.

After being shown many houses in the Farmington/Novi/Wixom/etc., they all ran together. Every home we looked at was composed of late 1980s-early 1990s construction on streets that lead to nowhere and a held lot of beige and brass. Beige and brass, as we know, can easily be overcome, as can stained oak cabinets and hollow core doors, but nothing really felt right. I never knew what direction I was facing and whenever I asked where the nearest grocery store or post office would be, I always seemed to get an answer like, “out of the sub, turn left and you‘ll see a stop sign. Don’t go through it, but turn down the side street right before the sign and cut through the other sub, make a Detroit left, and the strip mall is on the right.” Huh? For all the subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, there were plenty of trees and little lakes, but these areas somehow seemed to play around with being in the country without actually being in the country. Ironically, this culture was way too foreign to us.

In a way, I felt like I had no right to be picky, but in another way, we were about to make an investment, so it at least had to feel a little right. Sensing my unease, and I think having a bit of his own, my husband wanted to see a few houses in the area where he grew up, further east in Royal Oak. Royal Oak and its surrounding suburbs are closer to the city of Detroit and by definition are more established communities. He wanted to know what the same money would buy in these areas with real brick houses (not brick façade), in neighborhoods (not “subs”), and in a city with its own public services (not townships with a volunteer fire department). So our agent started showing us homes in Royal Oak.

When my husband and I met and started dating in 1990, I swore I would never live in Royal Oak. Don’t ask me why, I’m not really sure. I was a snotty little kitten who slept on a cushy down pillow on the North Shore and had not yet scrubbed Levi’s in the bathtub or haggled for the only bottle of Heinz ketchup in the shop, but when we started going through houses in Royal Oak 12 years later, boy did my tune change! It was refreshing to be in such establishment, such as it is. (In Latvia we’d lived in communities established in the Dark Ages. Royal Oak was established in 1891.) Not only did the brick and mortar of each dwelling place feel more sustainable to us, but the whole community did. It even felt a little like Evanston without my precious lake. We could build a life within these city limits that by Metro Detroit standards were pretty ancient. Now we were getting somewhere.

Change, of Course

2010-01-08T13:09:00.001-05:00

Unemployment always throws you off, but this timing was so unfortunate. I was just starting to feel like stability in America was taking hold so our family could be still long enough for some fulfillment and satisfaction to settle in. Truly, we had been in this odd limbo since day one, always changing course, planning, moving, resting for five minutes, and then doing it all over again. It was kind of like Groundhog’s Day. Granted it was exciting at times, we had the benefit of experience many people only dream about, we had to trust each other and work together to make things happen, and our kids are still excellent at adjusting to all new things, but it was beginning to feel like one stressful situation after another and a whole lot of overcompensating--but for what, I wasn’t completely certain.

When the job search in Chicago was coming up empty, we decided to change course again. Detroit: The place where my husband grew up, where his parents still live, and where we had many really good friends. This felt right. God knows why because I honestly don’t remember. (Impatience?) But, in the end of course, God did indeed know why and he (my husband, not God) landed a great job that still keeps him happy. Or at least relatively happy as I understand it. I had very well learned by then that a husband who is happy with his work means a much happier environment at home, so I was eager to get over my impatience, embrace this latest change of course, plan and move.

Impatience

2010-01-06T11:58:00.006-05:00

My dear friend Lindsey, about whom I’ve previously written, yesterday shared on her blog a passage from Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and author of many books on spiritual life. Just before reading it, I was thinking about how to express the next phase of this story which is all about grappling with patience. Of course, there are no true coincidences, and I had to insert his words here:

"Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else."

Even though this message might just be the most singular theme in my process of living from the inside out, I wouldn’t have believed these words nine years ago on Dempster Street however true they were. My middle name was Impatience.

Flux

2010-01-05T12:11:00.005-05:00

At the end of the day, there isn’t a lot to say about our time in Evanston now. My little boy started kindergarten that fall and my girl was in a 2 year old preschool program. I just wanted to live quietly and get used to it all. I could handle what was in front of me and the adjustment was easing.

The plan was to stay on Dempster Street for a year and then find something to buy, but the company that moved us back to the States ended up going out of business and letting my husband go not quite a year later.

After months of being out of a job, my husband finally was offered something exciting with a newer company in a western suburb. He really enjoyed the opportunity, but it meant a very long driving commute and that we would need a second car. Naturally, we decided to start looking for homes in suburbs closer to his work.

These were exactly the types of places I could never see myself living in, but again, I was trying to dispel my preconceived notions about “home” and be supportive, so I tried to reason my way through this and get excited about it, too. I would have very much missed the lake and established neighborhoods with sidewalks and trees and the city at my fingertips, so thank God it didn’t work.

This new company folded less than six months into his employment and we decided to stay on Dempster Street for another year. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice! Telecom was a bitch back then and there again was more flux.

Exactly the Same

2010-01-03T10:10:00.002-05:00

We left Alisa & Keith in April that year for the first floor of a two-flat on Dempster Street. Now here is a great example of how it’s hard to go home and fall into an expectation of a lifestyle: I grew up on the far north end of Evanston. As I remembered it, this flat we rented was in an undesireable neighborhood in south Evanston, but things do change! I had to loosen my prejudice and follow my instinct a bit to realize that this part of town had morphed into a very eclectic, gutsy and somewhat creative area. The surroundings seemed to fit what we had grown accustomed to in Riga with interesting people all going about their days in varying, interesting and off-beat ways. There was a rich marrow that filled the crevices there which told me there was space to move in, grow, and ripen. The way Riga was.

Furthermore, any Evanstoninan (or other suburbanite) would tell you that it’s completely undesirable to live on busy Dempster Street, but for us it was a lot like being back on Valdemara iela minus the cabled busses. The traffic and street noise was a bit comforting. Another plus was that we were three blocks from the train and six blocks from the beach. Laundry and some storage were included, Washington School was a quick stroll through the neighborhood, and three bedrooms, a big living room, separate dining room and decent sized kitchen made it all easy to settle in.

After having our belongings in storage for so long (remember I had no sooner unpacked everything in Jaunmarupe only to pack it up again to move overseas), the semi carrying the huge container was unloaded on the street and I had everything arranged and hung in about two days. I was anxious for us to feel like participants in life again instead of a vagabonding family. Arranging a home was the only way I knew how to create some stability and balance.

Fortunately, too, the Dempster Street flat had been freshly painted with warm neutrals which, coupled with the old oak floors and thick woodwork, allowed our strange collection of things to slip in naturally. I was afraid that my version of “home” for our family would never feel like what I had conjured up in Latvia. I was afraid that America would erase it all, but in the end Dempster Street felt exactly the same.

Settled On

2009-12-30T08:38:00.001-05:00

Alisa and Keith had a very cozy tri-level townhouse in Wheeling with two spare bedrooms and extra bathroom for us. They worked so hard to make us comfortable, and as a married, working couple without kids, the imposition of dilapidated us falling down on them had to have been an imposition, but they never once showed it.

We fell into a routine: My husband and Keith would drive together to the Metra station and take the train together downtown and back every day. Alisa drove around a lot for work at that time, and would often get home before the men in the evening giving us a chance to share our day as we put dinner together. I quickly enrolled Jims in a preschool program run by a long-time friend in my old North Park neighborhood, and otherwise kept my little kids entertained, tried to keep Alisa & Keith’s home intact and clean, shopped for food and put dinner together for all of us each night, and of course worked on finding us permanent residence.

Life obviously doesn’t stand still when you’ve been away for years, so even though the Chicagoland area was familiar to me, things changed. I forgot where things were and had no idea how places had evolved. Where to take sick kids to the doctor? How to begin looking into kindergarten? What did housing cost? Where to buy a car? Where to insure a car? Alisa & Keith helped us navigate all of these things and with their generosity, really took the pressure off making quick decisions in favor of making good decisions.

Finally, we settled on Evanston. It is where I grew up, very convenient to the city, right on the lake which would provide lots of entertainment in the summer, and a true city with neighborhoods and a culture—not a suburb with subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. And we decided to rent at first. Evanston was expensive and also we decided that we weren't in a great place to make a commitment as huge as real-estate purchase. Buying our little Ford Focus and committing to 2-year mobile phone plans seemed like big enough steps. In Latvia, you never had to commit to much of anything.

With a city and community settled on, I began making calls and arranging to look at flats. Like Chicago, Evanston has many flats. High and mid-rise apartment buildings of course exist, but brick buildings with very spacious 2-8 unit apartments are even more prevalent, and that’s where I steered our home search. Chicago flats are very comfortable. I’ve lived in several of them: North Sawyer was a 3-flat, flats were my homes with friends in college and after, and of course, my Great Grandma Lucy’s 2-flat meant love and old-Chicago all rolled together. They are solidly built with brick, oak, and wet plaster. They have enormous windows, vestibules, ancient buzzer systems, always a living room and dining room, gorgeous doors, and back porches. They were efficient but elegant, encouraged community and family, and were simply built to last. I learned to appreciate them, and it was settled.

While Jims was in preschool, I would drive up with my little girl, park and stroll her down the streets I grew up on looking for For Rent signs and assessing the buildings and neighborhoods from the outside. It was very cathartic walking these same sidewalks as the mother instead of the toddler in the stroller, or the little girl trying to avoid the cracks, or the preteen with a dollar in her pocket heading to the bakery for a happy face cookie. There was most certainly a full-circle feeling running through me, and as I found myself in front of Mustard’s Last Stand, next to Dyke Stadium and across the street from the colonial office building my father used to work in (top floor, last window on the left), and with the oak trees in bud and daffodils in bloom, something inside of me--louder than a nudge and quieter than a whack on the head--said there's a story in all of this. It was about the size of a whisper, but very clear, that one day, when the time is right and the whole circle closed and everything settled on, I would have a story that I would need to write and that this day would be part of it.

Merry Sunshine

2009-12-29T08:20:00.001-05:00

As I wrote before, at age 13, my family moved to North Sawyer Avenue in Chicago. I hated every minute of it. I hated our new home, I hated our tiny back yard, and I hated my new school. As an 8th grader from a proper middle school in Evanston, I did not appreciate this K-8 business at the new school. I did not want to have recess with first graders. Heck, I did not want to have RECESS at all! To add insult to injury, students did not eat lunch at this institution. You walked home for lunch, thus eliminating a big social component. Not that it mattered much because I felt like there wasn’t a single person I could relate to and that they had prejudged me as a stuck up girl from the suburbs anyway. Probably this was a bit true, and honestly, I did my fair share of prejudging as well.

So everything about my little life at that age felt completely out of my control and like one giant step backward. This frustration was of course punctuated by all the daily trekking back and forth four blocks to the stupid school. After about two weeks of my walking pity party, out of nowhere a girl, a fellow 8th grader I hadn’t noticed before, started walking home with me. She talked. I talked back. This continued until we got to my house and I asked this chick where she lived—right next door, a fact she already knew. Alisa and I have been walking together ever since.

Unlikely friends had become best friends very quickly. My bedroom window and her sister’s bedroom window were only separated by the gangway (about six feet) and we would hang out the windows and talk and talk until her sister demanded her room back so that she could blast Madonna’s Holiday. Then we would swipe my brother’s walkie-talkies when our parents (and Alisa’s sister) were irritated at the amount of phone time we spent. We would have secret celebrations in the gangway with Perrier water and full size bagel dogs her Bubby would buy. We were inseparable that year to the point that for a while her dad thought I was passing her drugs through the carefully folded up notes we’d exchange on pretty paper. We weren’t doing anything even remotely questionable, though, just being 13 year old girls talking and analyzing our way through life.

In what seemed like a cruel twist of fate, as quickly as I had been plucked from the suburbs and plopped in Chicago, Alisa was plucked from the city to the suburbs. Just days after our 8th grade graduation, their family moved a million miles away (or about 20) to Buffalo Grove.

It was heartbreaking to think that we would be separated. However, through high school, college, her graduate school, deaths, marriages, births, oceans and way beyond, distance has been the only negative thing ever between us since 1984.

I could never adequately articulate what this relationship or what this woman means to me except to say that one gray day Alisa chose to walk beside me and the glorious, merry sunshine came out. Thank G_D she didn’t run.

Home Again

2009-12-28T10:50:00.002-05:00

Chicago and its North Shore is my home. I grew up in Evanston through 7th grade and then we moved to the North Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. But returning to my home was both helpful and disconcerting. Helpful in that I had friends, family and a knowledge base, but disconcerting in that there’s always a self-imposed expectation as to lifestyle. There are no truly fresh starts when you go back home.

My husband was to report to his first day of work almost as soon as we landed, which left the heavy lifting of getting settled pretty much up to me. This move happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to find a place to live, but my most beautiful friend Alisa and her husband St. Keith generously offered to take us in for a few weeks until we could figure it all out.

When we got to their lovely townhouse, Alisa took one look at me (my friends can really read me like a book) and knew there was crisis. A few weeks lasted about four months, and Alisa and Keith gave us so much more than a place to stay. As Alisa has always managed to do with me, she took the scary hurt away making it ok to be home again.

Practicing

2009-12-27T16:35:00.001-05:00

We left Latvia with much less ceremony and much more baggage than what we’d arrived with years earlier. A huge container had been loaded up and brought to the Port of Riga ready to cross the Atlantic. It would arrive in New York in about a month's time and then trucked to Chicago a few weeks after that. We moved to Chicago early in January, 2000 with two kids, four suitcases, Sissy’s big German stroller, and a Pack & Play. So much for 100 pounds of home.

I remember sitting in a restaurant at Gatwick airport the day we “moved.” London was our layover and we had many hours to kill. I don’t think I’d slept in days, the kids were antsy and feeding off of my unsure nerves, and all this tension was coming to a head. Gatwick felt like purgatory.

Jims' Godmother, Aunt Lisa (now London Lisa), who had just months before moved from Riga to Chicago herself, met us at O'Hare after we had travelled about 24 hours and scooped us up. Lisa will tell you that she isn't the nurturing type, but she mothered me and the kids perfectly right then (my husband never needed mothering--just ask his mother). She was sympathetic as our comforting link of familiarity from our suddenly-vanished life in Latvia; she had long, tight arms especially for Jims who needed to be around someone happier than I was; and for me she had a sister's searing look of strength mixed with slight irritation that said, "Come on, Maren pull it together...!"

Everything had turned into a frenetic scramble inside me and I was all at once amazed and aggravated that the effects of what we were doing, what we uprooted, didn’t seem to bother my husband one way or another. It didn’t feel right to me, but then nothing did, so as any good designer should do, I began rearranging my black to balance out his pastels and florals. I was practicing, trying to turn my tension into something more interesting and hopefully practical.

Tension as a Tool

2009-12-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

This particular part of the story feels very long and drawn out to me. Stupidly, I’m just remembering that this period of time was long and drawn out! This process of moving to the US was tedious, gut wrenching in many ways, and just downright laborious. It was wrought with tension.

My husband was a Peace Corps Volunteer. At a close of service conference he attended after two years in Latvia, the volunteers were told to be prepared for culture shock when moving back home. They spewed off a statistic that said something like, for every six months you’ve spent in the field, expect it to take one month to readjust to life in America. For us at that point, this readjustment time amounted to about a year. At first I didn’t buy it—I’m not someone who lets a lot of grass grow under my feet (another gift from Winnie), but I had this terrible anxiety at my growing task list and growing “unknowns” list, and I was beginning to get the point. An inner tension prevailed and was getting stronger by the day.

The thing about tension is this: I think a little is a very good thing. Nothing worthwhile I’ve ever done seems to come without a dose of it, and I come to expect it—often even welcome it—when I work at something that’s important to me. It’s the thing that shows contrast. It’s the thing that makes the mundane or the tedium all of a sudden a bit more interesting. A little is a very good thing.

I liken it to putting a room together—there needs to be some tension as a stabilizer or a grounding. It actually makes a space feel more comfortable. Think of when you would visit your old Aunt Florence (I had two of them, I know…). You would likely enter her living room and be stared at by generations of photographs in glimmering silver frames sitting atop a round piece of glass which tacked down a piece of floral chintz. Then a petite settee in another fancy pattern of matching tones would beckon you to come keep the needlepoint pillow company. These are the same flavor as the curtains, as the lampshade, as the rug, as the Florentine foot on the sofa table, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this, the coordination evokes softness, peacefulness, bygone eras, and Aunt Florence’s folly, yet it’s UNCOMFORTABLE!

Enter blessed TENSION! Throw some BLACK mats under those silver picture frames! Replace the mauve throw draped over the chair with a vibrant PURPLE one! Toss the chintz doily and let the glass top rest DIRECTLY on the rich mahogany round side table. Break it up! Add some TENSION and suddenly, flowers and pastels are actually appealing. Everything is more interesting when given room to breathe.

I often find the same irritation when entering the ladies room in nice hotels and restaurants. The overworked décor is simply agitating. It’s all very pretty and serene, but I can’t hike up my tights fast enough to get out of there! It needs an infusion of the unexpected. Tension equals relief.

…Until there’s too much. Then there’s chaos.

The Life Chronological

2009-12-15T11:03:00.002-05:00

I will note my absence from posting by letting you know that all these events happened exactly ten years ago this December. It’s a lot for me to take in, and realize, and write about! In the last entry I wrote about not knowing what had hit me, and this is true, but I was reacting to a sense of duty and didn’t have time to be dogmatic or even thoughtful about it.

Wallace Stegner, in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Angle of Repose, tells the story of a grandmother’s remarkable life as explained by her grown and physically impaired grandson. When I first read it while living in Latvia, everything resonated with me, and if you know the book, the reasons why are obvious. Stegner writes,

“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making the new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”

This is exactly how I sold this lifestyle change to myself—that it was my generational and marital duty to pull up my skirts and get on with the business of moving forward.

The care that I took creating a home out of nothing in these Latvian flats was all to be left behind. The heart and work I put into building the Jaunmarupe house—designing my first kitchen, engineering the layout of gorgeous Villeroy & Boch tiles, standing over the guy with mortar and glass block making sure he built a shower wall exactly to my specifications, painting every single room myself, measuring and creating a design with the hundreds of balusters in the loft so little people wouldn’t slip through (although little Sissy did manage to get her head stuck during Thanksgiving dinner…), arranging our precious few belongings including our gorgeous antiques I’ve described within the walls built specifically to fit them—all to leave behind. Who can afford to believe in the “life existential” anyway.

Leaving

2009-12-02T17:02:00.000-05:00

Now that we’ve segued through Thanksgiving, on with the story: I don’t think it ever really HIT me that we were leaving Latvia. We just built this house, our lives were comfortable, we knew how to manage living there, and life there seemed to just get better and better. It all happened so fast, though, and there was so much to do, I never really had time to process it.

We had a month before my husband started his new job in Chicago, and we were still on vacation in Florida! He had to resign from his current job, we had to figure out how to get a shipping container to move from Latvia to Chicago, figure out where we were going to live in Chicago, figure out what to do with our house and car and other things we couldn’t/didn’t want to take with us, get medical records and vital documents in order, I had to tie up loose ends of projects I was involved in, say our goodbyes, the list went on and on and there simply wasn’t time to ponder anything. We just had to do it.

That month was one of the scariest, busiest and most surreal times in my life. Nothing about it felt right, but there was little I could do to argue the plan. The String of Tension had apparently thickened its hold again, and cooperation and infallible union seemed to me to be the only remedy for easing it.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T07:26:00.002-05:00

Interrupting the story again to touch on Thanksgiving. How can I not? I think Thanksgiving is a very creative holiday, definitely a part of my process, and certainly should count here.

Growing up, my holidays were probably much like yours: Lots of family gathered around one big dining table, a few satellite tables nearby, and the obligatory kiddo table. There were always at least two gigantic birds, enough other food to feed small African nations, happy spirits of the soulful and liquid variety, lovely tables set, scenic outdoor images from the windows of the candle and fireplace glow inside, and usually a slack handful of otherwise dinnerless friends/boyfriends/fiancés of my relatives. This is what Rockwell had in mind.

Christmas seems to hold more tradition in both the American sense and of course the religious sense, and although Thanksgiving is strictly American and traps tradition, it’s somehow looser. This was made evident to me during our time in Lativa. Those were the very best Thanksgivings.

Truth told, although our American clan I’ve written about before looked for any excuse to get together, Thanksgiving was special. It meant sharing in an intentional way our heritage, our nostalgia, and of course, our thankfulness.

Finding a turkey was always part of the anticipation. That generally started in September. Turkeys weren’t raised in the Baltics, Polish turkeys were skinny, and no one wanted to even think about a Russian bird. If we got into a pinch, we might settle for a Scandinavian hen, but the angling always started at the American Embassy—they always ordered a pile of Butterballs and had them delivered hard as rocks through the Diplomatic Pouch. None of us were embassy employees and our State Department status at the Peace Corps (1) wore out, and (2) didn’t have any clout to begin with. So we had to buddy up to someone in order to save the rest of us from a pasta Thanksgiving (which Lisa would have pulled off, but still…). The problem was that this embassy tribe of employees was usually pretty transient. As soon as one of us got to know any of them, their term was up and they were going home, but once in a while (usually with an invitation to our infamous gathering), some Secretary of Something would tack on a 25 lb. bird for us. Otherwise there was smuggling. If one of us had an autumn trip to the States lined up, or visiting family, we would bring back a turkey or two. The American’s didn’t care if we took it out of the country, but the Latvian’s always scratched their heads at us bringing it in. That frozen ball shrinked-wrapped in plastic with English all over it appeared mighty threatening notwithstanding the pop-up indicator.

So once the stress of the turkey was over, we could look forward to the rest. Scrounging ingredients to make American side dishes, fudging recipes to make things taste like Grandma’s, and the crazy routes and distances we would take to make it “home” for Thanksgiving was always part of the fun. See? Creative!

More often than not, Lisa would host Thanksgiving. For one she loves to cook and entertain, and for another, she has a house and the space for often 30 of us. One year, actually I think it was the year Lisa was in the States after having given birth to her second daughter on Halloween, we rented a villa (for lack of a better word). It was a big old house, with lots of land, rolling hills, a barn and a sauna. We had the complete run of the place. I think about 20 of us spent the weekend there, cooking and decorating, sledding, keeping the heat going in the house, reading by the fire, general monkeying around.

Thanksgivings were always very cold, beautiful, delicious and made us all the more thankful to be together in sometimes God-forsaken Latvia. And they had become infectious. By this time our Thanksgiving gatherings had created something of a buzz in the international community and everyone wanted to experience what we had that day. Often we had foreign guests, and they were always very cautious not to steal the show or trample on our heritage. They knew they were guests; observers to our Americana.

I think back on those days, remember how hard we worked to create something special for each other through all the senses. Those holidays inspire me to work every day at creatively creating comfort, safety, warmth and love. Thanksgiving is absolutely part of this story.

And I wish you all a happy, memory-making, creative, inspiring and bountiful Thanksgiving!

Curveballs

2009-11-19T11:41:00.000-05:00

Clearly, emotions and tensions were running high that Christmas in Florida. My mother, aunt, grandfather and I, who were all there living in the thick of it, were reeling from our sudden loss and trying to deal with our own shock and grief while trying to soothe each other—and it wasn’t working very well. Winnie was a rudder. She was an irreplaceable touchstone for all of us, and coming to terms with what her absence would really mean was devastating.

Needless to say, it was a somber Christmastime, and I was grateful for my husband’s natural detachment from such emotional curveballs--he had the energy to carry on with the children and keep me somewhat attached to their reality. I’ll say this about him: he is an expert at dealing with the here and now. He always finds a way to stay grounded in crisis, and he’s a fixer. Sometimes to a fault, but at that point in time, I loved him for it.

With that said, what happened next seemed to come entirely out of left field, but in retrospect, this is exactly how my husband operates. In the short time between my grandmother’s death and Christmas, he told me he was offered a job. A good one. In Chicago. And they would pay to move us. And he took it.

Behind

2009-11-10T14:44:00.002-05:00

Oh boy, am I behind! It's hard to write about the past when there's so much present going on! Anyway, on with the story...

We were in the new house for a little more than a month before we went to the US for a three-week Christmas trip in 1999. We were set to go to my mother's, who at the time lived in Florida, for the holidays and a 60th wedding anniversary party for my grandparents, which was the prelude and really the biggest reason for making the trip.

It all felt very rushed having just moved and then packing up again for a long trip, although, Florida in December was certainly something to look forward to since we’d already had two months of winter. It was all sorted out, though, and we’d arranged for friends to live in our house while we were away. It was still so new and there weren’t any other houses around it at the time, therefore it would have been very unwise to leave it empty.

So after almost 24 hours of travelling with a 4 ½ and 1 ½ year old, we’d arrived at my mother’s in sunny Orlando running around without big heavy coats and boots. My grandparents, Winnie and Bill, rushed over—they hadn’t yet met Caroline and were anxious to get their hands on both kids and me, too. My grandmother and daughter quickly found kindred spirits in each other. They traded coy smiles and then Caroline with wide eyes fondled everything sparkly about Winnie (there was always A LOT!). Winnie affectionately dubbed her, “Tilly” and little did she know that in a few short months “Tilly” would inherit the moniker of “Mini Winnie” for her verbal and willful yet beautifully poised traits so clearly personified by her great grandmother, a true original. We had a great visit, laughing until crying, and lots of tight squeezes that told me I was safe in the arms of those who love me and believe in me most.

I suppose like most people, I had very special relationships with my grandparents, particularly my grandmothers. From Winnie, I learned how to charm with a confident, quick wit; how to dig into the bigger picture of things; how to squeal loudly when very happy, and how to sob deeply when very sad; how to wear jewelry; how to sew; and how to be relentless with personal convictions. From my Grandma Carol, I learned how to entertain; how to make others feel accepted and special; how to shop; how to carry on a conversation even if I’m bored to tears; how to identify many trees, flowers and birds and marvel in their beauty; and how to honor tradition. Both of them, two very different women, taught me how to be very creative and resourceful, love with my whole heart, put all my faith in God, and arrange furniture. I know I am Winnie’s treasure and Carol’s jewel, I know they hope and dream for me, I know they see pieces of themselves in me, and I know that they are full of pride and protection for me. I adore them just as much.

Anyway, just two days after our little homecoming, Winnie fell asleep in the beauty parlor chair she sat in every Saturday morning. We had a funeral instead of an anniversary celebration. The trip was turning out to be something different…and that’s not the half of it.

Jaunmarupe

2009-10-26T10:22:00.000-04:00

It all happened so quickly really. In a way I don’t even remember it because it happened so fast. One minute we were shivering in an attic drafting shop of the architect we employed going over plans and the next we were having Thanksgiving dinner with 20 people in our new house.

My husband knew what he wanted the house to look like on the outside, and I knew how I wanted it laid out on the inside. Working together on this house certainly relieved the aforementioned tension. We found a rhythm in this common goal and it was fun to build this together. Unlike the Big Empty Flat in Aluksne, building this house had a strong sense of permanence to it. We were making a commitment the development of our new little “suburb” outside of Riga called Jaunmaurpe, a commitment to our children with regard to school, and also a long-term commitment to the country which, up until that point for us long term was considered six months.

So in the time from about March to November we built the house. Per my preferences, it was very symmetrical and efficient. It was built like a barn with a hipped roof. A large, open living area was at the center which looked up to a balcony/loft which held three bedrooms and a bathroom. On the first floor on one side of the living room was a family room and spare bedroom, and on the other end the kitchen and another bathroom. In the very center of the living room was a big wood burning stove which was ducted throughout the house. The plan was to use this as the main source of heat. I insisted on huge windows and the changing light bouncing off of all the clear birch woodwork was fascinating. It was incredibly spacious and cozy all at once. At about four times the size of V-77, there was room for the kids to run, and plenty of room for the huge Thanksgiving dinner we ended up hosting.

When it was finally finished (somehow it felt like an eternity to us), we scavenged for moving boxes, lined up the nanny to pretty much live with us for a few days, and we moved. I think I had the whole place set up in two days. It was November, cold, and messy I remember. And I remember lying in bed one of those first nights thankful for how lucky we were to have such a beautiful place not really believing that it was real.

Build a House

2009-10-20T12:55:00.002-04:00

So time is marching on in Latvia, and I’ve omitted a lot. I’m offering a glimpse of what it was like to start a family in a very foreign country, and some of the little sprouts that lined the path to my present, but we all know that there’s a yin to every yang, a sour for every sweet, a pull to every push, a positive for every negative.

I believe we’re moved forward through our lives by this string of tension. And truth told, at this point in my life, I was beginning to flounder in it. I’ll allow these mixed metaphors to sit here and just continue with the story by saying, one day my husband was feeling my tension, and by way of compensation came to me one day, looked at me hard and said, “I want to build our house.”

For a few years we’d talked about building a house. We’d done some exploring as to how to go about doing this in Latvia where land ownership was still such a mess among other things, but he was serious, and he found a way. So as quickly as we could (I'm sure in order to relieve the tension), we bought some land, and we started building a house.

Family

2009-10-14T20:42:00.004-04:00

Fixing up the Big Empty Flat was a project borne from boredom as much as necessity, but that pressure was off in Riga. V-77 was cozy, becoming full of collections and a short history of life with these two little kids and all their stuff. It was a real home. Not a bachelor pad, not a flop house, not a college apartment, but a real city flat where a real family lived. We had many “family dinners” there in chilly candlelight and warm wine with our little American community of the Lisa, Lisa & Juris with Kiki and soon Kaija, Denise & Jerry, Christopher, Scott, Dave and eventually Sveta. This was our core and our family--people I was growing up with (or in front of), and people I love and respect still. Anyway, we were this cast of varied and harried characters all traveling on that post-Soviet train to God-knows-where together.

One night Lisa honored me with the comment in her sometimes affected Rhode Island accent, “Maren I don’t know how you do it, but wherever you live you always make it feel like a home!” High praise from the woman who can out-cook us all with only a match, a chicken, and a smuggled package of brownie mix. I laughed her off, though, chalking it up to upbringing, but I was secretly flattered and not too sure my mother or grandmothers could have worked this out in a place like Latvia. But never mind, it goes back to the sculpting comment. I’m not a sculptor, nor a decorator. Nothing remarkable. Just plugging along trying to make the best of it and care for the people closest to me.

The Trunk

2009-10-13T15:03:00.002-04:00

We did have that oak hutch refinished and whatever half-heartedness my husband felt for that piece immediately dissipated. It is one of my favorite pieces and it makes me happy whenever I look at it or open one of its doors. It was refinished by a man named Dainis whose specialty is furniture restoration, and he brought new life to the tired bones of this hutch.

Dainis and his brother were building a tidy little business scouring the countryside for antiques and either refinishing them or disassembling them and making new furniture out of the antique wood. My friend Lisa was a huge supporter of theirs and because of her their business boomed in the ex-pat community and they were able to export to the US and Western Europe.

It was here that we found our bookcase, a coffee table, and an “antique” TV cabinet. They also restored little pieces, too. I had a butter churn and a big abra—wooden bread dough bowl. It was almost a given that whenever one went to their factory, a purchase would be made, and with limited Sunday afternoon entertainment, we’d go there about once a month. It was fascinating, too, to watch these big men painstakingly sand off old paint or take tiny tools to some ancient carving that had been buried under decades of dirt and varnish.

One day, we were browsing and talking to them when at the top of a staircase landing was something we’d never seen before. It was a dowry chest: A BIG trunk with iron strapping, big handles and a big old lock. It was Swedish and under years of grit, they found beautiful rosemaling of flowers, vines, two birds and two hearts. Dainis restored the wood and a lady in their shop filled in the painted design. I absolutely melted. My husband hated it! “It’s nothing but a big useless box! It’s huge and we don’t have room for it! Who cares if it’s pretty?” Now I don’t mean to paint him as an ogre, but he is a very practical man. “Oh, but it’s so unusual! We’ll probably never, ever even see anything like this again! It’s another piece of someone’s history! This belonged to some other young bride who had to ship her own 100 pounds of home to an unknown future in this very trunk!” I don’t know if it was my personal identification with this trunk that won the squibble or not, but the trunk came home with us. Once it got to our flat and he saw how it fit into the grand scheme, and how it was actually a very handy place to store Christmas decorations and off-season clothing, he accepted the trunk.

Markers

2009-10-12T10:20:00.003-04:00

When I described my husband’s half-hearted approval of my bed purchase for Sis, I alluded to our already full flat—we’d collected a lot of furniture by that time. We knew that we wouldn’t be living overseas forever, I was determined to make our lives comfortable at home, and we found some beautiful things for very little money that we would never have found in America. We saw these things as markers of our journey. Reminders of where we were when we started our life together and built our family. Everything had a story, too. I’ve shared some of them here between the custom Ikea knock-offs and Sissy’s bed, but there was more.

There was the Estonian furniture factory we found out about. We took some American business men there when they were scoping out exporting opportunities, and the boss ended up purchasing whole container load of their furniture to send to the US to test the market. He had my husband place the order and as they were deciding on inventory, the American casusally told him, “pick out whatever you and Maren want—thanks for taking me there.” So we ended up with several pieces of beautiful solid birch with exposed dovetail joints, including a dining table and six chairs, sideboard with a hutch, a short little dresser, a secretary desk, and a sewing box I fell in love with.

Then there was the day my husband came home and told me about a big wardrobe he’d seen at an antique shop. Closets didn’t exist and we desperately needed a place to hang clothes. He said it was huge, but the nice part was that it was engineered to disassemble neatly (so that it could be moved) and that it had a mirror. We went back together to check it out and I hated it! It was dark, ugly and old lady looking, but then I spotted a gorgeous old crusty oak hutch (another hutch!) with nickel pulls, original etched glass, and jugendstil details and carvings. I told him I wasn’t buying the wardrobe unless we could buy this, too!
“Mar, we don’t need another hutch!” But look at it. We’ll have it refinished. This is a special piece. “Yeahhhhh, maybe you’re right…” Of course I’m right. Meanwhile the Russian shop keeper was cooing at my kids as he dressed them up with heavy, battleship-gray wool Soviet military hats…We checked out the hutch, dusted it off with our fingers and the Russian man saw our mild interest. In a strange mix of Russian-Latvian-German-English, he told us a price for both the wardrobe and the hutch. No good. We dickered with him a bit longer and in the end, we purchased both pieces and all walked out with Soviet hats atop our heads.

The wardrobe certainly filled a need, but its been sitting in pieces in my garage for years. The oak hutch is one of my favorite things and stands gracefully over me as I type this.

Thanks

2009-10-09T15:45:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy week, so I haven't been able to keep up here as I would have liked, but I do want to thank you for the fantastic feedback! I am extremely touched that so many of you have expressed enjoyment out of reading this. It's humbling and encouraging all at the same time. It is my honor to offer a mid-afternoon bender!

Until my thoughts are re-collected and we go back to Riga, 1998, I remain yours truly,

Sissy's Bed

2009-10-05T19:32:00.001-04:00

So as my Sissy was lamenting about her deprived life and space, I was trying to explain to her all the good juju that surrounds her in her very own physical place in the world. It was getting through to her that her room was not only lovingly designed by me and decorated by us together, but also that the things that take up her space are meaningful—full of history and reminiscences and love. All things I want to fill her life with.

Then I got to the story of her big oak bed.

When she was a baby, I managed to get out of the house one Saturday morning and walked through Riga’s Old Town which is just a few blocks from Valdemāra 77. It was kind of raining and I didn’t really have any destination in mind, but I found myself walking through a funny little passage I didn’t usually take, and I found a little antique shop, so I went in to get out of the weather and kill some time. This was a tiny place, but it was packed, and also there was a Latvian man running the shop. This was unusual because for some reason Russians seemed to be the primary proprietors of antique shops. The only reason this matters is because I couldn’t speak very well and in turn negotiate with the Russians (I spoke Latvian). So a very sweet old Latvian man was very happy to see me that drizzly Saturday morning and was anxious to offer coffee and let me squeeze through this shop. Honestly, it was more like a crammed closet than a shop, but I enjoyed talking to him and looking around trying to take it all in. It was full of big old wardrobes and dressers, and nothing was arranged—just piled and stacked. But then I saw something that caught my eye. It was oak with a very tight grain and a gorgeous patina, and it looked like little doors. So I asked my man what the heck this was and he told me a girl’s bed. OH!

For a little European-sized twin (slightly smaller than a standard US twin), it’s massive. The headboard is almost 5’ tall and footboard slightly shorter. They are constructed as in an Arts & Crafts fashion, except that they have delicate floral hand carvings at the top. If I had to date it, I would say this was built around 1920 when the Arts & Crafts movement met Art Nouveau. You can understand why I thought they were little doors. Then I asked my man how they worked and he showed me the two big rails that looked more like beams leaning on another wall. OH!

It was perfect. No damage, no stains, perfect. This bed was clearly made and taken care of with a lot of tenderness and purpose for a very special and very loved little girl. All I could think about was this little girl falling asleep feeling like a princess with her dad’s handiwork and protection cradling her sleep. This felt like a secret treasure and I had to rescue it for my girl. So I asked my man coyly how much. 50 USD he told me. OH!

I felt too guilty to even dicker with him. I ran home to get my car. I don’t even think I called my husband to tell him what I was doing. I had my keys on me, so I just took my car and zoomed back down to Old Town to try to park close to the shop. It used to be that there was no driving through Riga’s Old Town—you had to have a special permit or have diplomatic plates, so I had to park somewhere on the outskirts. I ran back to the shop(as if someone was really going to steal my treasure in the rain from that mess of a shop in the 10 minutes it took me to return), I plunked down my $50 and lugged this bed three blocks to my car. Four pieces took me four trips. It was kind of a ridiculous site really. The rails are at least 60 lbs. each and are about 6’ long, and the headboard I'm sure weighs more than me, but I carried ALL of it in the rain to my big old car.

When I got home, my husband was a little irritated that I went and bought even more furniture for our already filled flat especially since Sissy was still an infant. I think he was cursing under his breath as I enlisted his help in hauling all of this up two flights of stairs, and then we got it in. And he LOOKED at it. Then he looked at me and said, “Yeah, you needed to get this.”

So, Caroline, I believe your special bed was crafted especially for a little Latvian girl who's riches surrounded her. And I believe this bed was waiting in that crowded corner of the little old Latvian man’s antique shop just for me to resurrect it for you. There is lots of love that surrounds you as you sleep tight in your very own room.

Sissy's Room

2009-10-02T15:30:00.002-04:00

So our Sissy is now 11. She is on that tender cusp between little girl and snotty teenager and I’m desperately trying to keep the snot out. Sis has always been a mamma’s girl. Without question, she adores her father, but she has an inherent need to be connected to me physically and spiritually, so we foster that. My mother would tell you she is exactly like me from her quick temper, to her endless collections, to her always-game-for-an-adventure attitude, to her eager drive to see things through. With that, I’m going to side track our tale for a bit and share a relevant slice of the present…

Last week, she was eager to “do something” with her room. Her brother just had a cool man-chair added to his room to help encourage high school studying, and she, naturally, was feeling short changed. I told her I’m not discussing anything about her room until it was CLEANED UP, and surprisingly, she didn’t fight me on it. She was really angling… It should be noted that in Sissy’s 12’x12’ish room, she has a desk, chair, narrow chest of drawers, 32” round pedestal table, end table, her bed, and Tuna-the-cat’s bed.

Finally she announced that her room was vacuum ready and with tape measure in hand, she ordered me up to discuss rearrangement options. She was bent on rearranging things herself, was desperate to move her massive bed around, sling her dresser and desk to opposite ends, add a man-chair of her own and bring in a dance floor. She did not like me telling her it’s not gonna work. We pulled the tape, we monkeyed with curtains, we discussed balance, and finally I had to pull out my Professional Interior Designer card and tell her (in the same gentle terms I tell all of my clients things they don’t want to hear), that there is no other way to arrange her room for more floor space and that what she has is the very best way to arrange her room. (It should also be noted, too, that through all of this I’m laughing to myself as I’m rolling my eyes at her—after all, this is my determined little thing—MY most recent sculpture—the same girl who for Christmas two years ago wanted crown molding in her room!) She was crushed, though. Life isn’t fair, Jims gets EVERYTHING, and she never gets anything, lalala…

Once she finished her tirade, we sat down on her bed, and with her silky brown head in my lap, I reminded her that her corner desk was mine growing up where I did all my homework, wrote in my diary, and read my Nancy Drews while I sat in the same old maple almost Windsor-backed chair that used to be Grandpa Evans’ kitchen chair when he was a boy. Then I told her how her side table came from the radio cabinet makers in Aluksne from our first home, and how I fell in love with the chest of drawers from Latvia crafted by a friend who made new furniture from recycled antiques scattered around the Baltics. I asked her if she remembered when she was six and we found her pretty, shiny, black round pedestal table at a funny furniture store in the town where her Grandnan lives. I reminded her about how I stumbled upon her fantastic Tord Boontje die-cut light fixture while in Paris with her Aunt Lisas, and how I had to have it for her because it was called “Misdummer Light” even though it meant I had to hand carry it all the way home. And then I told her the story of her gorgeous bed...a story that will have to be continued tomorrow…

A Sissy

2009-09-29T14:50:00.000-04:00

The arrival of my daughter was almost identical to that of my son in that I was sequestered away in Helsinki for at least a month and living back at the Mission House. The difference was that it was summer instead of early spring, my friend Lindsey and her family no longer lived in Helsinki, and I had my three year old guy with me. It was a neat adventure for him so much so that he barely missed his dad who was again working back at home. We spent a lot of time playing the park outside the Mission House, climbing up the big hill to the shops, taking the ferry to the Helsinki Zoo, and there was a lot of fun to be had with the old gate mechanical elevator.

My little boy took it upon his little three year old self to “take care of Mamma.” The truth is that I was nervous about being alone with him with no help so late in my pregnancy, and we rehearsed the what ifs if I went into labor before Daddy could come. He is a patient and compliant soul to begin with, but he was especially easy on me that month as we waited for his sister to be born. Jameson charmed the pants off of everyone as usual with his huge blue eyes and sweet closed-mouth grin, and it was exciting for me to see him not only adapt well to this unusual change of pace, but really rise to the occasion.

A few weeks into our stay in Helsinki, my good friend Lisa (aka Latvia Lisa or Kiki’s Aunt Lisa for those of you who know my friends) came to stay with us for a few days. She was also expecting her second baby in October--we had the same doctor and she had an appointment. This was a HUGE relief to me! Lisa got me out and moving, kept my spirits up, calmed my nerves, provided familiar comfort to my son, and was over all a great distraction. It’s extremely tedious to be pulled away from your home, city and normal routine to sit somewhere to do nothing but wait for your body to push out another body.

By the time Lisa had prolonged her stay as far as possible, we were pretty sure I was going into early labor. We happened to be at Ikea at the time (remember Lis?). She hated leaving us, but had to, and in the end arranged it so that Jims and I would only be alone for about a day before my husband arrived (another panicked phone call, but this time he drove to Tallinn and did not fly). Part of the urgency to time departures and arrivals just right was not only because of the baby, but also because of the mid-summer holiday and festivities going on throughout the Baltics and Finland. Life comes to a complete standstill for the longest day of the year.

Midsummer’s Eve, 1998 did turn out to be the longest day of the year for me especially. At midnight, Jims was fast asleep, my husband who had just arrived a few hours before was about to sleep, and I started rocking furiously in a rocking chair. It was time to go to the hospital. I woke my three year old child and told him that we had to go. He jumped up from his little bed and exclaimed, “Don’t worry Mamma! The nurses and I will take care of you!” And on went his little shoes. My husband had to call three cab companies before he could get one to pick up the phone, and when we did finally pile into a cab which reeked of vodka, the clearly inebriated driver drove like a bat out of hell to get us to the hospital. There wasn’t that big of a rush, but he was clearly nervous.

Seven hours later on Midsummer’s Day, Caroline was born. A nurse came to take Big Brother away to the cafeteria during the exact moments of her birth, and once he was brought back in, he kissed her little brown head and sweetly asked, “Is that my Sissy?” That’s your Sissy. He always knew she was a sister—never any doubt, and as we know, the nickname’s stuck.

Riga

2009-09-25T13:49:00.003-04:00

Riga is a very beautiful city. When I was living there, reconstruction and restoration were just taking off and it was almost like a veil of dust and damp was being lifted off of this magnificent place. The history is rich and the buildings are stunning. Even in pre-restoration states, there were still unbelievable pearls in the pits. If you search for Jugendstil and Riga, you will see images of what I mean. And I encourage you to do so!

I spent hours each day pushing my big stroller through the streets and parks to pick up the mail, go to the market, take Jameson to his play group, etc., and even though getting my stroller wheels stuck on broken cobblestones, narrow doorways or un-shoveled sidewalks was frustrating, I was always awed by being lucky enough to live in a city that was reclaiming it’s vibrancy. Admittedly, winter was long, dark, cold and sloppy, but the spring was glorious. There were always pensioners in front of our building (and on most street corners) selling hyacinths, daffodils, tulips and crocuses wrapped in newspaper, and I was always happy to hand over my 15 sentimes (30 cents) for a little bouquet. It helped that people were smiling when the sun came out, too, even if they didn’t have a tooth in their heads.

For me, walking through those streets, seeing very old and very poor people coming out of what was clearly once a home for some very wealthy German baron or something was absolutely fascinating. There had to be a story behind it, and to me, imagining the buildings restored was like restoring the memories of these old folks who had clearly lived hard and oppressed lives. The whole history excited me—not just the history of Riga, the people or the architecture, but the life cycle of these combined. It gave me an energy that I didn’t know what to do with aside from just soaking it in and wondering if it would ever really impact me in a way besides emotional. But anything more than physically taking care of my husband and child was out of reach for many superseding reasons—the biggest being that I was going to have another baby.

V-77 II

2009-09-23T23:40:00.002-04:00

Riga and I agreed with each other. It wasn’t nearly the project getting this flat in order. I appreciated the move- in condition of Valdemāra 77 and so did my busy 18 month old! This is a photo of our building taken by my friend Denise a few months ago. Our flat is the first three sets of windows on the left above the sign. The outside obviously isn’t anything remarkable, nor did the inside have any unusual architectural features (unless you can count 12’ ceilings), but like I wrote, it was remodeled for the upright-walking man which made it attractive enough! The top of the very tall walls were screaming DO SOMETHING with me in our living room, so I did borrow a ladder and stretch to cap the tops with a long, three-part stencil in jewel tones. It was very pretty way up there and made the room a bit less cavernous. I made some curtains, and kept rearranging our furniture, but other than that, nothing needed to be done.

With the inside shovel-ready for living, that meant I could get outside. Like I said, Riga and I agreed with each other.

The thing about the washing machine

2009-09-22T00:01:00.003-04:00

I should probably explain something about washing machines to my American readers. Europeans don’t do laundry like we Americans. Not even civilized Western Europeans do laundry like we Americans. First of all, Europeans don’t have the clothes we Americans do. Moreover, we learned that there was a lot of waste in laundering. Hot water was inconsistent, space to hang things to dry was limited, and doing laundry was generally a pain in the neck. And while underwear is indeed considered dirty every day, we wore wool socks that were good for at least two days, and jeans often could go weeks without really needing a wash. Sounds gross, but believe me, we really were the sweetest smelling people in town. It helped that we brushed out teeth and didn’t smoke or bathe in vodka.

Part of the reason it took so long for us to get a washing machine was because they were hard to come by. Dryers as Americans know them were non-existent. There was an agitating washing contraption that was easily available, but it made a gigantic mess and didn’t really clean anything. The other option was to send the laundry out for a per-kilo fee. This we did when we had big stuff like blankets and sleeping bags, and after a few rounds of washing sheets, jeans and towels by hand we would send those out for cleaning as well, but this took time (like a week), wasn’t convenient, and had other drawbacks that I’ve mentioned before. I thought it was easier to just fill the bathtub and scrub against a washboard in the orange water.

My college-aged brother in law came to visit for a very long month while I was pregnant and feeling nauseous all the time. (Lucky him.) He came with more stuff for a month than my husband and I had combined. About a week into his trip, I asked him if he had any laundry for me to do. I almost threw up all over him when he handed me four pair of jeans, about 18 socks, gobs of boxer shorts and more t-shirts than I knew one man could own. Really? I said. He just looked at me incredibly as if to say, how dare you think I can possibly wear this pair of jeans two days in a row! He clearly didn’t realize what this endeavor entailed or that washing jeans was one of the biggest pains in the ass on earth. But soldier on I did, and he finally got the message when it took five days for all of his clothes to dry and they weren’t warm and fluffy or smelling like Bounce. In the end, he DID end up having to wear the same pair of jeans two (maybe even three!) days in a row. Šausmigs!

It was a regular site to enter someone’s bathroom and see clothes lines hung above the tub. We had that, too, and once in a while socks or shirts would spill out over the radiators or kitchen chairs, but by the time a third person was living full time with us, even though he was tiny, laundry became the bane of my existence. Fortunately, Pampers could be found all the time, even at the local kiosk with cigarettes, bananas, and beer, but there are only so many spit-up rags one can deal with on a daily basis, and unlike jeans and wool socks, those COULD NOT be stretched another day! So after a little research and digging, we found an Indesit automatic washing machine with a built-in heated centrifuge (the closest thing to a tumble dryer). It was about the size of a dishwasher and held about ¼ of a regular American load of laundry. It took almost an hour and a half to cycle through each load, but it was great. Clothes wouldn’t come out completely dry, but hanging them out for an hour sure beat hanging them out for days.

In Alūksne, the washing machine was hooked up in the bathroom, but in Riga, there was a special spot all its own under the counter in the kitchen. Very civilized. Yes, even in the kitchen, very civilized. And in Riga, I no longer had damp clothes hanging from every door and pipe—I bought a drying rack! This may have been the best 8 Lats I ever spent in Riga. I could hang TWO loads of clothes from this thing, and it only took up as much space as an ironing board. Because of the limited capacity of the washing machine, the only way to keep up was to do laundry every day, so my drying rack was a permanent fixture at the end of our spare room in Riga.

That thing has travelled with me all this time and I still get people asking me where I found such a fantastic drying rack…ha ha. As I write, my fabulous Latvian drying rack is holding “delicates” and a bath mat. Old habits die hard.

Valdemara 77

2009-09-21T10:44:00.000-04:00

A new job took us from Alūksne to Riga—a move I couldn’t make fast enough! There was really no community for me in Alūksne and lonely didn’t even begin to describe it. Riga had everything, long-time friends, an ex-pat community, restaurants, shops and a buzz. I found us a new flat at Krišjānis Valdemāra iela 77. It was four rooms with a kitchen and bathroom and had been previously been rented and renovated by a foreigner—this meant the fabulous fiberglass wallcovering and real paint had already been applied along with a clean bathroom (meaning fresh tile and fixtures that hadn’t been rusted out by the orange water) and a western kitchen (our love affair with Ikea continues). It even had a designated place for my new washer/dryer unit in the kitchen! All we had to buy was a stove, and as luck would have it, the only electric stove that would fit was a top of the line Electrolux glass top. Darn. I wouldn’t get to light a pilot every time I wanted to boil drinking water and hope we don't all blow up.

Good Riddance

2009-09-16T23:03:00.002-04:00

We lived in that flat in Aluksne for almost two more years. I think our last home improvement there was procuring a washing machine which at the time was an enormous luxury. Prior to that, I would usually do laundry by hand in the bathtub, and once in a while we would send our laundry out for some old lady to do, but that wasn’t my preference because it took too long, the clothes would smell funny, and they would be rough and hard.

We left Aluksne for Riga, Latvia’s capital and when we shut the door on that flat for the last time I didn’t look back. Even though I’d thrown myself into making that flat a haven for my family, Aluksne was a very hard place to live, and it was easy to let go of all that effort. This was odd for me. Usually I get much more attached, but good riddance was all I could think of.

I’m sure that old Soviet block apartment is still standing, and not until today have I ever wondered who has lived in and hopefully enjoyed the work and love put into that flat.

Petie and the Pratie

2009-09-16T07:31:00.001-04:00

So settling back in to the BEF in Aluksne was underway. I don’t think I mentioned, though, that before I was Mamma to a baby, I was Mamma to a kitty cat. Peteris Pirmais (Latvian for Peter the Great), or more commonly known as "Petie," was an orange striped tabby who thought he was a dog. Somehow I end up with cats that act like dogs. First there was Tonto, also orange striped and as faithful a companion as any Native American, then Petie, and now Tuna who is all gray save a white heart on his throat. All of these felines knew how to work a crowd, work over a rodent, and hold their own with raccoons, possums, and I think Petie might have even had a run-in with a wild boar once…

At any rate, I finished the second bedroom of the flat with a potato. At that point I was tired of scouring the country for decent materials, and I didn’t have the time anyway, so I thought I’d go native. Not that Latvians decorated with potatoes, (however I do believe they have 101 uses for the ubiquitous tuberous crop) but native in that for once I was going to use a completely indigenous resource to help make the flat more of a home. Call it embracing my environment. So I cut stars out of the praties, dunked them in blue paint, and stamped Jameson’s new room full of blue stars.

As I was doing this, I was using newspapers on the floor to blot the paint, my little guy was snoozing in his bouncy seat nearby, and Petie was standing guard over his new ward. Petie thought he was the bodyguard. At one point, I noticed Petie jumping around trying to catch a very fat but very fast fly, and the cat was very agitated—the fly was getting too close to his baby—then the fly landed on our sleeping boy’s head. Oh the conflict on that cat’s face! He wanted to swat and pounce, but he didn’t dare bother the boy! As soon as the fly flew off, Petie bounded after it only to land in paint and add paw prints to the stars on my blotting papers. No harm done, but kind of a cute story and illustration of how this became a family affair.

Not a Sculptor

2009-09-14T20:02:00.001-04:00

It was true, with a little assistance and a whole lot of grace, a beautiful child was indeed sculpted. All mothers are obligated to say and feel this, but in those first hours of Jameson’s life, once we were finally left alone together, I marveled at his 19 ¾” of perfection. I remember this specifically because, to my amazement, when I fingered his tiny curled ear, it blossomed open under my touch. Jameson still has beautiful ears!

So when I was told with a wink and a smile that I was “a sculptor,” I was too embarrassed and grungy-feeling to really believe that I had done anything remotely amazing or artistic—Jameson’s beauty was clearly God’s handiwork and I just did the eating and the pushing. It didn’t take long, though, for this rejected compliment to reach deeper depths for me. Scarier depths.

A few entries ago, I wrote about leaving the flat in Aluksne only to return several weeks later to an essentially new life. Physically having baby and making that adjustment is about as life changing as one can get, but never one to take things half way, the birth of this child was redefining my approach in ways it would take me years to even understand.

So in those first days, as I put Baby Jameson to bed in the big vegetable basket he slept in, all I could thing about was this huge responsibility, and opportunity, to sculpt his life. That would take REAL artistry, and that scared the hell out of me.

A Sculptor

2009-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

Days after newborn Baby Jameson and I were discharged from the Naistenklinikka (where I may or may not have swiped one or two of their standard hospital-issue yet incredibly comfy nightgowns), we were trying to get to know each other back at the comfortable-but-not-home surroundings of the Mission House.

I was exhausted, felt awful, and had that brand new mother haze about me. So when a visiting friend turned to look at me holding my newborn, I naturally thought he was gawking at the black circles under my eyes, my dirty hair, and my newly soggy shirt. When I shot him an equally filthy look to get him to quit staring at me, he said with his signature twinkling eye, "Maren, you're a sculptor." Embarrassed, I rolled my own bloodshot eyes at him.

Helsinki III

2009-09-11T08:55:00.003-04:00

After a few weeks of going about my business and reading too many heavy books like Sophie’s Choice (for me at the time, a terrible choice), I actually did make a friend. Lindsey was introduced to me through the International Church folks, my hosts. Lindsey’s husband worked for the American Embassy and they had lived in Helsinki for a couple of years by then. In fact, their daughter, two year old Emily, had been born at the same hospital where I would be admitted, so Lindsey knew all the ropes I had to maneuver.

Lindsey was truly heaven sent, and she operated like a big rainstorm (or like my Grandmother Winifred), fearless, fast moving, and washing all the dust away. Even in other types of foul weather, she was determined to get me out and distracted from my big wait. Likewise, she was determined to get her little brood out in the double-wide Emmaljunga stroller. Emily had a four year old brother Christopher—together they were an adorable team and always compliant and happy. Lindsey and her kids were an excellent example of what I'd soon be handling myself! We went on some wonderful little excursions, us four, and Lindsey took excellent care of my spirit. She took this photo of me a week before my son was born.

When I finally thought I might possibly be in the early labor stages, Lindsey insisted that my husband get on the next plane. I was always hesitant to bother him with my own little insecurities and anxieties, and I wasn’t sure if this was labor or just going bananas, but Lindsey boldly responded to my flakiness and said, “It doesn’t matter, Maren! You need him and he needs to get here!” So together we picked him up from the airport in Helsinki and my husband didn’t exactly know what hit him--He’d just been shuffled onto a plane and then fetched by his slightly stir-crazy wife and some lady with lots of thick dark hair and two little matching kids strapped into the back seat of a Fiat!

In the end, my son was born 24 hours and a plate of deep fried jalapenos later on April 7th. Lindsey was right and knew exactly what I needed. Save my husband, she and little Emily were also my only visitors in the long (but customary) five day hospital stay. She had a fantastic chicken dinner waiting at my door on the day we were discharged back to the mission house, and soon after that, she and her husband Paul had us three over for another wonderful meal as a farewell to Helsinki.

Lindsey gave me so much more than distraction and good food, though. The love, kindness and instant friendship she showered me with has become something I have committed to passing forward. I knew I’d never be able to repay her, but it will always be my pleasure to return the favor in her honor to anyone crossing my path like I crossed hers.

Lindsey, Paul, Christopher and Emily came to visit us in Aluksne a few months later, and unfortunately, seas much wider than the Baltic have usually divided us since then, but we remain in contact. We both vividly and so fondly remember our very short time together. I was so grateful to her and the beautiful example of womanhood and motherhood she was--and still is!

Likely you are thinking that my little trip backwards has taken a wrong turn from the original direction of How I Became a Designer to Indulgent TMI, but I assure you, even though there are no building materials or architectural details involved in these few entries, our story has not gone astray! Thank you for sticking with me!

Helsinki II

2009-09-07T22:31:00.002-04:00

I haven’t explained why I was shipped off to Helsinki. Most of you remember: I was there to have a baby. Medical care in Latvia at the time wasn’t um reliably safe. So long story short, I’d been receiving prenatal care from a doctor in Helsinki and was instructed to arrive at least one month before my due date so that any emergencies could be handled appropriately at the big Woman's Hospital. It wasn’t very feasible for my husband to sit there with me for a month or more since he had a job, so our friend Arden had arranged for me to stay at the mission house of the International Church. This was a beautiful old apartment building in the city center that had been converted to offices for the attached International Church and a few floors of dorms for missionaries who needed a place to stay while in Helsinki. I was able to stay in these dorms.

The whole set up was really ideal for me. The building was converted cleverly without losing some of the old details like the mechanical iron-grate elevator with the manual door. It was very safe and extremely convenient, too (not just the elevator, the whole building!). I was told I could have my pick of rooms on a certain floor since the dorms were otherwise empty and I was given keys, codes and even a mailbox. I chose a nice-sized room adjacent to a private bathroom and across the hall from the kitchen. Down the hall were two common living areas with satellite TV. Other than an African choir that was there for a few days (they were a lot of fun!) my floor was empty the whole time. My room overlooked a lovely little park that was always busy even in March and the harbor beyond it. It was really like a palace--sparkly bathrooms, fresh paint, clean furniture, a clothes washing machine(!), and a bottomless supply of hot water that could even be drunk right from the tap. Heavenly Helsinki!

After I got settled in and my husband left to go back to work, I was really on my own. Aside from scheduled doctor’s appointments, I generally filled my days by walking. There was a little American library set up by a government agency and it was at the opposite end of the city center from my place, so I usually made the library my destination and then would slowly work my way back from there. Along with an obnoxious amount of reading, I spent a lot of time window shopping, food shopping, a little bit of baby shopping (although the Latvians had made me pretty superstitious), and testing my sense of direction by exploring the winding streets and looking at the buildings. There is such a contrast between pre and post war construction. Helsinki was really opening my eyes to what the landscape of the Baltics could look like in 75 years.

The Baltics obviously weren’t the only concern or wonder I had about the future. This was really the first time I’d truly been alone—and aside from my unborn baby, I was REALLY alone. Believe it or not, it was still not only extremely expensive, but also technologically difficult to make phone calls to Latvia, so I think my husband and I spoke only a couple of times per week. Moreover, I only had access to a payphone in the dorm. Email wasn’t something that worked yet either, so even in 1995 it was kind of like the Dark Ages. All that quiet usually has a way of speaking certain truths if one’s ready to hear it. I think for me, some truths started peeping then, but the more immediate concerns were a bit bigger and scarier to deal with at the time--I had to deliver a baby by myself, potentially without even my husband with me, and in a foreign country. I was kind of in survival mode.

Helsinki I

2009-09-02T07:36:00.001-04:00

As many of you know, Helsinki is an interesting city. It’s this funny hybrid of Scandinavian folksiness and Soviet utilitarianism. It is also happens to be the cleanest capitol city I’ve ever visited. Sterile even. Like you could lick the tram tracks and they might taste minty. Anyway, you see this as you walk the streets, but living there and experiencing it as a whole culture was something that really resonated with me during my two extended stays. Everything has a purpose and that thing—a window latch, a toilet paper holder, an elevator—is crafted beautifully. There are no frills, no gimmicks, no ornaments, no fluff, but everything is quality, clean and honest. That’s the way I encountered people, too. They did their jobs quietly and diligently with no song and dance, but with positive energy that was attractive.

The contrasts to me were astounding. Here I was an American—Excess is our middle name. We are used to more, bigger, better, faster, sweeter, brighter, etc. But I had just spent the last year thrown into a post-Soviet hangover where everything was run down, falling apart, gray, and unkempt, and uncared for. The attitudes of course, are similar respectively. (By the way, I’m not knocking Lativa or its people! In 1995 the country was till traumatized.) Socialism is just a different animal, I guess, and from my tiny perspective, it was working in Finland.

I appreciated the pride the Finnish people took in themselves, their work, and their community, and I appreciated the functional beauty they created out of very simple things. For me it was all very comfortable. At the time, I didn’t realize how important this would become for me in my approach to design, but truly, for my approach to living.

Filling the Flat

2009-08-29T22:30:00.004-04:00

At the end of all this we had a bit of a housewarming party. Some of you were there. I found a photo…It was after New Year’s in 1995, and almost marked a year since I was brought to Latvia as a new wife. This was the first adult place I could call home, and while most of the necessities were there (we still didn’t have a washing machine), I was looking forward to filling it with life in every material, physical and spiritual sense of the word.

The party was certainly a start to that, but there was something bigger looming. A few weeks later, I had to leave for an extended stay in Helsinki. I remember crying that day as I got into the car and looked back at the windows of the flat through the curtains I had just made. I had just spent months creating this safe place to soothe our new and sort of feral life; Now I had to leave this home for at least 4 weeks which promised to be an unforgettable, unpredictable, and uncertain period of time. And I knew quite clearly that regardless of how this time played out, when I returned, none of it--my home, my marriage, my whole life--would ever be the same.

Locally Grown

2009-08-27T16:57:00.002-04:00

Clearly, things were taking shape in the big empty flat. There was nothing opulent—hell, it was barely furnished at this point, but I was always amazed when even at this stage people (Americans, Latvians, Europeans) would walk into our place and inevitably give out some signal of approval. There was always a sigh, a nod, a little smile, or even an exclamation as they entered and got their bearings. It was hard, though, to actually make guests comfortable in our place for very long because despite the warm and creamy walls and inoffensive divans, eating on our laps and resting beer bottles on the floor was not comfortable.

Our first trip to Ikea in Stockholm is a story in and of its own, but we came back with a catalogue that had become my biggest source of entertainment that cold, dark winter. The solution for getting furniture seemed easy enough—Ikea does ship after all, but getting materials in and out of Latvia in 1994 was still a big, expensive pain in the ass. My husband, then, had the idea to chat up our new friends at the VEF Radio shop—remember the kitchen cabinets? They seemed to like the idea of making some knock-off Ikea furniture!

Once I knew they were game, I had a lot of fun tweaking some Ikea designs to fit our needs and then coming up with a few of my own. From birch and pine we ended up with two little end tables, a coffee table, a dining table with two benches, a hanging bookcase, and a pair of night tables to match the new bed. In the end it turned out beautifully!

Commissioning furniture sounds like another luxury expense, but having these pieces custom made for us, with unmistakable quality, and the lumber grown and processed in our very own town, was actually less expensive than purchasing it from Ikea. Our backwater radio-cabinet craftsmen were very proud of their results, too. Except for the coffee table, every single piece is still used and enjoyed 15 years later and across the ocean!

Mebelu Nams

2009-08-26T15:48:00.003-04:00

Another thing we did while waiting for the carpet to arrive was look for furniture. Literally, we had a little gate-legged table, two stools and a mirror. Sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags was getting very old especially since I was pregnant. Things just were hard to come by at that point in Latvia especially in backwards Aluksne, and we were told to go to the only furniture store there was—Mebelu Nams (or “furniture house”). Like most necessities, Mebelu Nams was in Riga and by far the biggest store in Latvia at the time. I think it was even bigger than the Universal Veikals (the everything store—think Soviet Wal Mart).

Our buddy Ainars came through again and let us borrow his truck one day so we could take this excursion. Not really knowing what to expect from this Mebelu Nams, we were surprised. It was huge with many confusing floors full of furniture suites. The thing that really surprised us was that it wasn’t really possible to purchase a chest or a chair—you had to buy the previously blogged about kompleksa of furniture. We went in with intentions of finding a bed and sofa at a minimum, and again we didn’t know exactly what to expect, but the thing was that we couldn’t simply buy a couch—we had to buy two couches, two chairs, two end tables and a coffee table. Sounds convenient, right? Living room in a box, right? Ick. In theory this might have been a nice idea for several generations of folk who had been taught to never have an individual or creative thought because Mother Russia would see to all their needs, including, apparently, furnishing their homes. That was aggravating on many levels, but this was only half the problem. Not only was the notion of having to buy a packaged set of furniture unappealing to me, the FURNITURE was unappealing! There were two styles throughout this entire Ikea-sized store—horribly ugly and hideously ugly. The choices were cheaply-made, overly-ornamented, heavily lacquered crap imported from Italy, or Russian imports with a style which was a tasteless hybrid of the Italian design and the old lady designs which looked suspiciously like the wallpaper I’ve referred to before. It was all gigantic with price tags to match.

After wandering through this mouse maze of a store looking at one ugly kompleksa after another, we were discouraged and I could feel my taste level being compromised out of desperation and the prospect of spending the rest of the winter sleeping on the floor. My head hurt, I was nauseous, and even my unborn baby had had enough. My husband and I were starting to squabble because we were both frustrated and tired, and I finally said, “I’m not leaving without a bed.” And at that moment the Universe heard my cry.

As if by magic, we came upon a tiny corner of this vast store where there was yet another kompleksa of Polish furniture. It wasn’t bad despite what the sales lady was telling us. “Oh, you don’t want this,” she said, “It’s from Poland. It’s cheap looking and the quality must be bad because the price is less. And there isn’t a whole set to buy, a maximum of three pieces. And look, it’s made out of pine and the other is made out of shiny plastic.” Yes, these were really her arguments, and before she knew it we were asking if we could take it today.

Now, this Polish furniture wasn’t beautiful or terribly high quality, but it wasn’t bad at all. There was a bed frame (and ONLY a bed—no gaudy night tables or humongous wardrobes to match) which consisted of a pine headboard and footboard of good, five-piece construction in a natural finish and it came with two glorious looking European-sized twin mattresses. We also bought a sofa that came with the obligatory pair of matching armchairs. It was all upholstered in a soft, woven fabric with a large, jewel-toned floral print—the least offensive in the joint and even against my newly fiberbglassed and painted walls it was even a bit interesting. The furniture gods smiled down on me and whipped up a miracle that day, and we brought the whole kompleksa home in Ainars’ van.

Clever Scandinavians

2009-08-25T17:27:00.002-04:00

Ok—on with the big empty flat story…

While waiting for that carpet to arrive, there were other things to be done. Namely, something had to happen with the cold concrete walls. This was a bit of an issue because quality paint was hard to come by for one thing, and latex wouldn’t stick to this for another. Somehow, though, the ceilings were high (8’-10’) in these block apartments, and they had been treated with some chalky paint-like substance and were white and clean looking. I wouldn’t want to lick them, but they looked ok, so that was one less thing to worry about.

Now most Latvians covered these types of walls with bad wallpaper in antiquated, tight prints (often in varying shades of pink) which was predictably hidden by massive bookcases and wardrobes (the concept of closets were lost here). So without any furniture, much less the en vogue overpowering furniture usually found, or an affinity for the taste of a 120 year old woman, we needed to find another solution.

During this time, we had been invited to our friend Arden’s flat in Riga. Arden was an American; a Lutheran pastor from Minnesota who had been sent to start an English-language ministry in Riga. He set up shop in the old Anglican Church in Riga’s Old Town, and would in a few short months baptize our son there. We lived far away, so we weren’t regular attendees, but we enjoyed Arden whether we saw him behind a pulpit or behind a beer, so there we were at his flat one day. He lived in a similar but smaller block apartment than we did, and it was fixed up very comfortably. It took us a little while to figure out why it felt so comfortable, and then it dawned on us: he had PAINT on the walls! No distracting, headache-inducing wallpaper! How did he do this?!? Then two beautiful words that we’d never heard in such a combination came from his mouth: Fiberglass Wallcovering. Huh?

Fantastically fabricated by clever Scandinavians, fiberglass threads were woven together to produce a very strong and pliable fabric sold on meter-wide rolls designed to cover imperfections on walls, absorb paint, and provide a reduction in reverberation. Better than all that, it came in a variety of textured patterns to boot! We had to get us some of this.

I don’t remember for sure, but I think we may have purchased this in Helsinki. That sounds extravagant, but it really wasn’t because I was travelling to Helsinki on a regular basis anyway for pre-natal appointments. It’s kind of like the trip from Detroit to Chicago with a quick ferry ride added on. The Dan Ryan is as big a pain in the ass as any border crossing, too.

The fiberglass went up with regular wall paper paste, was very forgiving, and even before painting it, the walls looked great. We had chosen a pattern of very tight basket weave which added an interesting texture and dimension. We ended up being able to find decent latex paint imported from Germany and threw up a couple of coats of a buttery color. The light from our west-facing living room windows was no longer cold and harsh but warm and cozy. Form followed function.

2009-08-24T23:10:00.003-04:00

I had to take a breather from this renovation story because I’d been out of town attending my 20 year high school reunion of all things. It was the only school reunion I’d ever been to, and probably the only one I’ll ever attend. I don’t keep up with many people from those days; however I have enjoyed reconnecting with a few over the last several months, and really this handful of people is the reason I made the trip. We had a decent turn out for a class of about 350, and I probably don’t need to explain to you how fascinating it is to see how people have grown up.

This combined with the preparations being made for my own son to start high school in a couple of weeks, naturally has me thinking a lot about how the high school environment and experience influences an individual as well as a collective group. I was scared when I started high school--the concept itself was daunting to me, plus this was a prestigious school in the middle of a city I hadn’t been a part of very long. On top of it, as a magnet school, my school was also intended to be racially balanced. There was a lot to adapt to!

In four years, though, I made very good yet unlikely friends, was exposed to fantastic opportunities, was given opportunities to shine, and was forced to stretch outside my comfort zones in order to enjoy all of that. A good taste of real life for sure, but in the end, my high school experience probably wasn’t all that different from yours. But for me it was unique, and it ended up giving me some guts I didn’t know I had.

After 20 years, one kind of forgets about all of that formative development. The reunion was a nice reminder of what the world looked like back then and how the scope has gotten so much bigger. It was good to take stock at what I had done with the tools I gathered in high school, and of course learning a bit about what my classmates did with theirs. Pretty impressive. I hope my son and his classmates will be as lucky!

The Carpet Story

2009-08-21T23:00:00.000-04:00

With the kitchen working, we moved onto other necessities. The rest of the floor in the flat was just a subfloor at that point and we needed to put something down. It was suggested that we just buy a set of ugly matching rugs from the market (you know, a “Kompleksa”) and throw those everywhere. No thanks. Wood was the obvious choice seeing as though my husband helped run a big saw mill outside of town, but I had a baby coming, and I wasn’t convinced that hardwood flooring would be manufactured or installed with any quality standard whatsoever. It seemed like a recipe for trouble, especially with a baby coming. Ideally I wanted carpet. All the Latvians (except for Ainars) thought we were crazy because carpet holds allergens and bugs and dirt so they said. Never mind what could be living in the rugs from the market that likely had fallen off of some truck from Tajikistan as they were suggesting. It was all mostly a fear of the unknown. Most of these folks had never actually SEEN carpet, so like anything it was skepticism of the unknown.

Once every few weeks we would travel 4-5 hours to the capitol, Riga, to see friends, try to get things we needed that weren’t available elsewhere, take care of business, etc. While killing time one day, I found carpeting. It was in a shop that sold pots, pans, and general house wares, and there they had sample boards of commercial-grade nylon carpeting. I asked the guy behind the counter if I could look more closely at the boards (at that point I wasn’t sure if this place actually sold the stuff or was just showing off the sample boards), and the man proudly said that this is carpet from Poland, it’s very expensive and no one has ordered any yet. Why he was so proud about this, I have no idea, but maybe it’s because I was the first person to inquire. I asked how much and how long it would take to order it, and he gave me a price which didn’t choke me, and a time frame which almost did. All he said was “a long time.”

Long story short, we ordered the commercial-grade nylon carpeting from Poland and “a long time” ended up being about 12 weeks. We kept checking in with the shop to see if the delivery had arrived yet, and finally after our 3rd or 4th visit and phone call, it had arrived. Good ol’ Ainars happened to have his truck in Riga that day and was happy to pick up the roll for us and deliver it. Another bucket of glue later, we had installed wall to wall carpeting in the living room and hall of our big empty flat. It was instantly warmer, and if there were any allergens and bugs, the VOC’s got ‘em.

Ainars

2009-08-20T22:30:00.001-04:00

So the flooring’s in, the refrigerator is also plugged in, and we’ve got 6 dishes, 4 mugs, a handful of silver wear, and a couple of pans all sitting either in the sink or on the stove or in the new fridge. We needed some cabinets. If I’m remembering those days in 1994 correctly, our friend Ainars helped us out with this.

Ainars was a character from another place and time. Aluksne was very much a backwater town in the northeast corner of Latvia about 30 km from each border (Estonian and Russian). If you’ve ever met anyone a little off and wondered what rock they’d been living under for so long, it was probably under the rock of Aluksne. At this time, I would say life here was very much like a teeny, remote town in Middle America during the depression. People were poor, not educated, isolated, very simple and usually drunk. Many folks had never even ventured the 300 km to the capitol city of Riga, but instead always stayed right there in Aluksne.

That place was quite a study, and although Ainars had lived there for his whole life as far as I knew, Ainars broke the mold of Aluksneians. He certainly didn’t live under the Rock of Aluksne because he was probably too busy chiseling it. A monument builder by trade (yes, mostly tombstones), Ainars knew a little bit about just about everything, and I think could craft almost anything with his thick, meaty hands. He was a sweet and generous man, and really liked practicing his English on us. He was an artist, maybe a bit of an intellectual, and his house and yard looked like Fred Flintstone’s quarry. Think Owen Meany but much bigger and with a normal man’s voice. I don’t really know how old Ainars was, he was neither very old nor very young, but we got to know him through a mutual friend and he ended up taking good care of us in Aluksne.

Anyway, Aluksne was actually known for a few good and interesting things, and one of them was the old Soviet VEF radio cabinet shop. Others can recite the history better than I, but no one was buying big, wooden VEF radios anymore, so the once famous (?) cabinet shop, full of carpenters and craftsmen was just trying to get by making whatever. Ainars, an unusually creative thinker given his personal history, knew one of these guys and talked him into putting a few cabinets put together for us. I think three pieces in all—it was all our tiny kitchen could hold. They weren’t fancy, but made from clear pine or aspen, and honestly I don’t even remember what the counter top was. Something highly lacquered, I’m sure. If I was cleverer back then, I would have gotten Ainers to fabricate granite counters for us. All I remember for sure, though, was that there wasn’t much choice in the matter. But again, I didn’t really care. It was all a matter of necessity and function, and I was grateful for Ainars.

Marketing

2009-08-19T23:39:00.002-04:00

I have to say, this blogging thing will be a lot easier to deal with once kids are back in school. I feel as though I’ve fallen behind and I’ve barely started! Back to the story, though…

I think it was October or November by the time we got the big empty flat. I remember the heat was on. In Latvia, there were no thermostats then. God forbid anyone has control over temperature, or hot water for that matter. There were only a couple of days of hot water in the summer until October 1 when the radiators kicked on and that also meant warm, orange water flowed from the faucets like honey. That’s too poetic…Flowed like Tang. Anyway, it was fall, it was cold, we had a big empty flat, and I was pregnant.

We started in the little kitchen. If the whole thing was 8x10 it was big. We’d gone to the market one Saturday, as we did every Saturday, to eat fresh pirogi and buy produce, meat and cheese and toothpaste and batteries and bootlegged cds, and found two specific things we needed: rolled vinyl flooring and a little refrigerator which ended up being the biggest fridge we could find.

I couldn’t believe the luck in finding this flooring, not that vinyl flooring is such a much, but remember this was freshly post-Soviet Latvia where if you found Heinz ketchup on the shelves it would be enough to throw a party, so this was exciting. Fortunately, the flooring vendor was smart enough to also carry some adhesive (must have been off the sauce that day), so we could get to work and lay it down. That we did! It was super easy and the one tight seam was barely visible and ended up being completely hidden by the little kitchen table we would later put in the room. The hardest part about laying this cobalt blue, brick patterned flooring was waiting 24 hour for the adhesive to dry before walking on it! I specifically remember, though, being so excited once I saw it down—things were beginning to take shape and this was going to become our home!

100 Pounds of Home

2009-08-17T04:02:00.000-04:00

While living overseas, I moved a lot. In fact, since I graduated from high school, I've never lived anywhere for more than three years. But anyway, while living in Latvia, we moved six times in so many years to a whole hodgepodge of places. Now that I think of it, though, I'm realizing that in the first year alone there were four moves. It's a good thing there was that 100 lb. rule because we didn't have a car, either.

First there was the scrudgy flat in beautiful Cesis; then we upgraded as house and dog sitters for the summer (who remembers Sir the girl dog?) to a funny little house outside of Riga which was full of African treasures and a very expensive sound system that I think only played opera; after that we slummed again in an overly-furnished, claustrophobia-inducing flat in Aluksne where the landlords would constantly enter without warning and eat all of our food in the refrigerator (even when we were home); to a bare-to-the-concrete-walls Soviet block flat that we got to make our own.

I remember ITCHING to get that place. It was nothing special by a long shot, but it seemed like luxurious space to us--first floor, two bedrooms, and stripped down of everything except the kitchen sink. It was a completely blank canvas.

Not Today

2009-08-16T19:34:00.000-04:00

So, blogging is outside my comfort zone. However, it’s been an idea brewing for several weeks, and with some recent pushes to promote my business in creative ways as well as the out-of-the-blue suggestion from a very savvy and patient friend, it almost seemed like I had little choice in the matter. (One of many ways my insides are coming out.) With that, the big questions are, of course: what in the world to write about on a semi-regular basis, and also how do I keep this interesting without exposing every gut I have?

I was able to reconnect with my old camp and college buddy Krista the other night, and as she was telling me about her own blog, she said, “I just write to these guys,” pointing to her friends down the row of our seats at the Tiger’s game. Great advice. I can do that. (That is, write to my friends, not to hers…) Then the very next day, London Lisa said, “Well, Maren, I think you should just start writing about the way you became a designer.” Ok. I can do that, too. But not today.

First Post

2009-08-12T12:10:00.000-04:00

Since the first posting is really a personal indugence with a sole subscriber, I find it fitting to start this journey the way I start my mornings--quietly and peacefully with the little quote found on the Yogi tea bag ticket. Today's message read:

The art of happiness is to serve all.

Ironically, I'm starting From the Inside Out for that reason.