Beach House in the Burbs

This weekend, I learned that miracles do still happen. One swooped down and landed on our garage on Saturday. While I didn't witness the actual miracle occurring, the aftermath is still visible--and will remain so for a long time, I hope! We moved into our house, with its detached two-car garage, 15 years ago. In that time we have NEVER parked two cars in it. Most of the time we haven't been able to park one car in it. Chris is a Grand Poobah in the Distinguished Order of the Packrat. But this weekend he shed his packrat robes, threw off the grand poobah fez and cleaned out the garage. For the first time EVER we have both cars parked in it. Poobah or no, I think he's pretty grand!

Fifteen years ago we spent all of our money (and all the bank would lend us) on two acres, a pool and a house that was dark as a cave and nearly as dirty—especially the ancient gold-brown carpet. We knew as we moved in that we’d have to live in the dark for a long while as we saved our money to begin renovations. But when after about six months the washing machine overflowed (during the disgusting-water wash cycle) into the carpeted hall, living room and two bedrooms, I thought I could move our new-floor covering schedule up a bit. Chris came home to find me sitting on the living room floor with a box cutter and a screwdriver, cutting the carpet apart, pulling it and the padding up, and popping staples out of the sub-flooring. “Insurance is going to cover the new floor covering for us. Isn’t that great?” It was partially great. We got new carpet and padding put down in the two bedrooms quick like a bunny, thanks to the insurance money. But we wanted to knock some walls down in the livi...

The secret sign in front of our house inviting stray cats in for care and feeding has now apparently been translated into dog. We took to calling him Monster because of his bizarre shape. He seemed so huge lying down, then when he stood up he was revealed as a rottweiler body and head laid over a bassett hound chassis. He appeared to have been put together by a mad scientist, a sort of veterinary Frankenstein, or a committee that had to work with only the parts of dogs no one else wanted. But his sunny disposition soon allowed us to overlook his physical oddities--like the front foot that pointed off to the left as if he was constantly signaling for a turn. Friday morning, after he spent the night in our now barren vegetable patch, I put him in the backyard. Did I mention I was still in my pajamas? He promptly trotted down the few steps to the the pool deck and before I could catch him walked his large, weighty self out onto the center of the pool cover, which is just a heavy-duty tarp...

Tacky or charmingly retro? I've got to go with charmingly retro--though, in fact, it isn't retro at all, but the real old McCoy. My grandmother and the aunts sat around a card table decorating Christmas balls for years, it seems. One year, when my sister Susan and I were maybe eight and nine, we got to help. Grandma had tons of costume jewelry on the table. Lots of garish gold ribbon. Those weird satin-wrapped Christmas balls in every color imaginable (and some, like this odd salmony color, that really aren't imaginable). By the time she and the aunts finished the project, Grandma had an entire tree's worth of Christmas balls dripping in pearls, jewels and ribbon. She hung no other ornaments on her tree after that. Grandma latched onto a tradition and kept with it forever. Grandma died in the summer of 2001. We didn't have Christmas on our minds at the time. But off and on since then I've wondered what happened to her Christmas tree ornaments. This year I though...

This is an entirely inappropriate blog post for someone who not only voted for Barack Obama, but also is thrilled to pieces at what she has seen from him in the days since his inauguration. But I can't help it. For as genuinely happy as I am to have a Democrat back in the White House, I am almost that happy to have temporary possession of a Confederate States of America cuckoo clock. Its tacky kitschy quality speaks to the tackiest part of my Southern soul. Here's how we came to have it. Last week when my sister and I went to Huntsville, Ala., to surprise our mom for her birthday, we found a surprise ourselves. We walked into the living room, a room that has changed little since we grew up in it. A room that hosted my mother's liberal friends during all the dark years when they had to practically meet in secret due to the conservatism that permeates Huntsville. Despite its history, the room housed a CSA cuckoo clock, complete with Stonewall Jackson on a horse, Robert E. Lee...

In honor of Elvis’ 74th birthday, I thought I’d give you a tour of our guest bathroom, known for nearly 15 years as the Elvis bathroom. I wasn’t a huge, drooling, fawning, panty-throwing fan of Elvis. By the time I came around to liking his music, he was probably dead. Though living in the South my whole life I admit I’ve seen some folks who could have been him, but likely they were just huge, drooling, fawning fans. But then I found this shower curtain. I don’t know what drew me to it. Maybe Elvis possessed it? We had just moved into our trash heap of a house and decided that the hall bathroom had to be remodeled first. The shower curtain was the inspiration I needed. We have a lot of company. I couldn’t ask them to use the scary bathroom. Instead we asked them to bathe with Elvis. We painted the walls in jailhouse stripes, to honor that horrible movie, Jailhouse Rock . (I’m not a blind fan, though I admit to liking Viva, Las Vegas .) A friend gave us a picture of Elvis in the shower....

It seems wrong to be thinking about Christmas before Thanksgiving, but since this contest wants to know what we do in our homes for the holidays, and we visit my mother-in-law (in warm, sunny delightful south Florida) for Thanksgiving, I have to think about Christmas. Besides, I can no longer claim to be a Christmas traditionalist. I’d been a purist about Christmas trees for as long as we’ve been married (21 years—YIKES!). I wanted a real tree, with that real tree smell and those real tree pine needles and it had to be nearly as tall as the ceiling. I don’t know where this need came from, probably my childhood deprivation. We decorated a bamboo in a pot at our house for all of my growing-up years. Anyway, last year the southeast was experiencing a drought (we still are) of some significance, and I read that real live Christmas trees were dry and not likely to stay pretty through the holiday season. So, I broke down and bought a fake tree. It’s not a traditional green or even a flocke...

No, I never claimed to be a good cook. But, honestly, any idiot ought to be able to bake a potato in the microwave. Get a load of the mess that appears when a potato explodes all over the oven! I swear I poked holes in it. What the picture doesn't show is that the potato skin was completely empty. Every bit of the inside blew out, leaving a hard, crusty, empty shell. It’s a good thing Chris can cook, or we’d be living on cold cereal and restaurant fare for the rest of our lives.

I'd never heard of Amphicars , cars that go on land and in the water, until I read my most recent Coastal Living magazine last night while waiting in the MommyVan (No, we don't have children, and I don't even drive the van. Chris, the male spouse in this marriage, drives the fairly beat up 1998 Windstar and dubbed it the MommyVan.) for Chris to pick up his 1976 pickup truck (we don't do new cars) that had to have transmission work. It wouldn't go in reverse; a real drawback in a longbed pickup! Anyway, I've got to have an Amphicar. It's the perfect beach house in the burbs car--part convertible/part boat. My birthday's coming up in September. For those of you planning to get your shopping done early, this is what I want! I prefer the Fjord Green, but am willing to go with the blue or white in a pinch. Get one for me and I promise to take you for a ride!

My sister just got back from the Greek island of Crete, where she spent a month “working.” She’s a physical anthropologist and was cataloging human skeletons—not very old ones by Greek standards, only 600-700 years! Anyway, she brought us back this little painting on wood. It says “good morning” in Greek. Pronounced ka-lee-MEH-ra. The traditional place to hang these, according to Susan, is over the bathroom mirror, where you will see it every morning. If we’d done that, it would have been butt up against the ceiling and tall as I am (5’10”) I never would have seen it. So we hung it between our bathroom mirrors. It makes me smile every time I see it. (The bathroom walls are pink, not purple, which is the color they look on my computer. Chris calls it Barbie's dream bathroom.) Now, I mention all this Greek goodness to explain the new screen doors. See, we got a cat. New cat, Dusty, scared old cat, Miss Kitty—whose name ought to be scaredy cat, since she’s afraid of everything—so that...

The first time we walked into our house, my reaction was, “Ohmygod, it’s dark as a tomb!” My second reaction was, “We can fix that.” The house had 2 acres, nearly unheard of in the northern suburbs of Atlanta even 14 years ago, and a pool. With a remodeling contractor husband, Chris, I knew we could redo the eyesore of a house that came with the great piece of land. The biggest project we tackled, and we’ve redone the entire house inside and out, was the kitchen. It sat in the middle of the house, dark and uninviting, walled off from the tiny dining room, with almost no counter space. Shortly after we moved in, the oven and the dishwasher both died. We replaced the dishwasher immediately. I could live without an oven, but not without a dishwasher. In fact, we lived for five years with only an oven from the 1940s that one of my mother’s friends gave us. About the size of a large microwave, the oven lived in a separate room from the kitchen because it tripped the breaker if any lights or...

Every summer our yard turns into a jungle. With nearly two acres of trees, little grass, several hundred daylillies and a willingness to let it all be natural, by this time of year, the yard begins to look like no one could possibly live amongst all that greenery. And while I gaze at photos of beautifully manicured and landscaped plots and suffer pangs of garden envy, I get over it by picking blackberries throughout the month of July. For those of you who've never picked blackberries, let me tell you, it's a challenge. Blackberry bushes have big, sharp thorns that prick at your clothes or bare legs. And they grow in the shade. You can't just stand at the edge of a blackberry thicket and pluck berries without getting dirty. Nope, you have to get in amongst the thorns, where chiggers and snakes like to live. The first time I remember picking blackberries I was a teenager. My uncle had told me that snakes like to live where blackberries grow. My job, I decided, rather than act...

But try telling that to the Canada geese who took up residence on our pool this spring. We had some trouble with the pump that keeps water off the pool cover during the winter—the trouble was it quit working and we never replaced it. So disgusting brown, pond-like water filled the pool. When we took the cover off, I couldn’t blame the geese, it looked like a pond to me too. A pair of geese has rested on our neighbor’s pond (a real one, not a pool) for years. But this year with the drought in Georgia, I guess their pond didn’t look as inviting. The couple didn’t bypass it completely, but they seemed to look on our pool as their vacation pond. They’d mostly hang out next door, then when they needed a break from the old home place, they’d head to our pool. Or it could have been the vicious Pomeranian, Princess Prissy Pants, who lives at our house that kept the geese at bay. She enjoyed barking at them, but actually never got too close. Though they should have been used to attacks by small...

So the guy came out Saturday to look at the furnace, declared that the blower motor had burned out, and we'd have to wait until Monday to get a new one--it being Easter weekend and all. And that will be one finger and three toes for the good news. Fortunately, this being the South, it wasn't miserably cold on Easter. Though we woke up to 55 degree temps in the house Sunday morning. By keeping a fire going in the traditional wood burning fireplace in the great room all day and having 17 people huddled in front of it drinking hot chocolate, we managed to get it to about 70 degrees. Warmer than we keep the thermostat. We hid eggs, ate too much, including the cutest cake shaped like a lamb. It was red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, so looked just like lamb brains and innards when we cut into it. It inspired many gross comments, but tasted great! So, while all the chaos was going on at our house, our cat, Dusty Cat, disappeared. He tends to do that when we have kids over (w...

Well, I'm a day late, but the sentiment is sincere. We had a really nice Easter, which was a surprise given that we had no heat and 17 people at our house for Easter dinner! My parents arrived Friday to spend the weekend. Friday night after dinner, we were playing cards and started smelling something like electrical burning. It was in what we call the red room (formerly a garage, now an office/den). We wandered all around the room, sniffing and feeling outlets to see if they were hot. The electrical box is out there, it wasn't hot either. We couldn't find anything. We went back to playing cards and the smell got worse. We all got up and tried the sniff and search again. Still nothing. By the time it got to be bedtime, the smell was not as strong, so we didn't worry too much about it. Saturday morning I woke up cold. That doesn't often happen. We have a programmable thermostat set for the temp to go up in the mornings. I pulled on my big fuzzy robe and went to look a...

No, the addition to our family isn't of the two-legged variety, but he does cry an awful lot, is very needy, has the other "kids" jealous, and, I'm afraid, is going to require that we do some home remodeling that we never intended. Dusty is a tom cat who appeared in our yard back in the fall. He was scrawny and mean. So, as Chris says, we treated him like a wild bird, putting food out for him but not even trying to pet him. Gradually he became friendlier, it's amazing what a little food will do for your attitude, and when it began to get cold (even in Georgia it can get cold) we decided he had become our cat and we needed to figure out how to incorporate him in the family. We already have a very scaredy, indoor cat named Miss Kitty and a pomeranian who is small, but in charge. We (the royal "we," it was actually Chris) wrangled Dusty into a crate and took him to the vet to be checked out before bringing him in the house with the other animals. They prono...

When your beach house is in the ’burbs, rather than at the beach, sometimes you have to hit the coast for some inspiration. While the house I’m staying in on St. George Island, Florida, offers little in the way of home décor inspiration, the view more than makes up for the serviceable but unremarkable place. From the comfort of a screen porch (an essential for any beach house, whether in the ’burbs or not) overlooking the beach, I have watched storms roar through, enjoyed the perfect beach day (yesterday, it was breezy, sunny, low 80s, the Gulf was like glass) and nearly been blown to Timbuktu. St. George Island is off the coast of Florida, east of Panama City. I first came here as a Florida State student. It’s about an hour and a half from Tallahassee. The island is long and narrow, with a state park taking up about a third of the east end. The rest of the island is houses, a few shops and restaurants and a couple of inns and motels—all low-rise. It looks like the Myrtle Beach I remem...

One of the best things about getting most of the remodeling work done on your house is that you can finally invite people over. We went for 5 years without an oven, 7 years without floor covering in the living room, dining room and kitchen, and more years than I can count with exposed studs and crumbling drywall. Now, most of those things are taken care of (There's still one room with no floor covering, just the subflooring, but it's looking really nice with the magic-marker drawings on it.) So this past weekend we had a party. About 40 people, lots of good food--we do pot luck here, we may have an oven now, that doesn't mean I know how to use it--great music and interesting conversation. We even got lucky on the weather. It rained all morning, but quit about 1 p.m. and didn't rain again until just before dark. Long after people stopped getting in the pool. So, how's this related to remodeling, you might ask? Well, it's one of the things to keep in mind when you...

My mother-in-law called recently and asked Chris if he'd travel to west Alabama to pick up a family heirloom--for lack of a better word--that one of her cousins has had custody of for years. The cousin's moving and doesn't have room for it in the new house. And it needs to stay in the family, Chris's mother said. That's how we became the proud, but concerned, owners of something that may or may not be illegal to own. I don't know. When Chris was very young (back in the late 1960s) his family traveled from Alabama to the Petrified Forest in Arizona. And brought back a 600-pound souvenir in the form of a petrified log. Said log is probably a couple of feet long and a foot or so in diameter. As I was trying to find room for the dog--a Pomeranian, for heaven's sake, not a Great Dane or anything--in the back of the Exploder (I mean Explorer) I thought I'd just slide the log over a couple of inches to make room for Princess Prissy Pants. But I couldn't bud...

Pets add so much joy to your life! Especially when you have a dog door. It is the portal through which all manner of surprises can come enter one's life. We have a very large Pomeranian, as Pomeranians go, the 10-pound Princess Prissy Pants, who is quite as prissy as her name implies. But don't let that sleek, elegant, black (with coy touches of white on her chin and legs) fool you. She's a hunter. We don't always leave the dog door open. We also have a cat who brought in a live, tail-less chipmunk (The tail was on the floor by the refridgerator; obviously Kitty was saving it for a snack later.), a dead mole and a dead baby bird one day when Chris was out of town. But that's another story. But because of Kitty, we only leave the dog door open when we have visiting dogs because Kitty is a scaredy-cat and won't come out when Leroy, my parent's killer shitz tzu, is visiting. So, there I sat at my desk, writing a magazine article, when my precious little Prissy ...