Home Work

We here in the Kitchen are home owners and home makers. To achieve our goals associated with those titles we become armchair botanists, technophiles, lay zoologists, hobbyist designers, craftsmen, and procrastinators. In short, we are distracted and lazy.

As such, our great home remodel project of 2005 has taken significantly longer than the three months that Head Chef once said it would take. Oh, and there are excuses. Some of our excuses are even reasons. But not all.

Despite our collective attention deficits and lethargy, Head Chef and I are motivated by nothing more effectively than the looming threat of visitors. We look forward to their arrival and the beach time we will take with them and the meals we will share. But we also stand on the steps to our little home in Pauoa and look around us with the eyes of a third person. And we shake our heads and think, “oh fuck.”

So this weekend, I eschewed my workplace responsibilities and we worked on the house. We floored the remainder of the hallway and the entire master bedroom. We cleaned. We investigated local options for kitchen cabinetry and planned the bathroom remodels. And then we worked in the yard.

If you know us even casually enough to have visited our home only once, you know our love for gardening. The front garden, now only 6 months old, is already reaching epic status. The gingers are getting taller, the brugmansia is blooming, and the Rangoon creeper already hides the stone wall. The ensete banana threatens to rule the world.

We dug in to our elbows, getting filthy and doing what is arguably one of my favorite things about gardening… discovery. From beneath four feet of shiny fern foliage, Head Chef produced a long-forgotten vanda sporting two spikes of shiny purple blossoms. Anthuriums that had tipped over were rooted, thriving, and blooming. And our new trees had fresh new growth popping out at the branch tips.

We planted a new torch ginger - one of my favorites - on the side of the house, and stood back to admire it. Now only 6 feet tall, it will one day reach as much as 15, with bright red flowers the size of large apples atop sturdy stalks jutting from the ground.

We do this – I do this, and I stand back and see what is done, and I feel full. I see the new floor in the bedroom from atop the living room stairs and the thriving garden and all the little improvements that are made over time, and I witness proof that things do get better, and that we have a hand in that. I see a sort of time lapse progression in my mind, from then till now, and I project outward just a bit – a skill that Head Chef teaches me each day – and I know that this is good. That this life is worth it, and that all the tediousness and doubt is made moot by these moments of doing this with him.