The Magic Nutshell

Oh, wishes for real dishes to wash and lovin' on my oven! Our DIY kitchen renovation is not nearly finished, but we have finally installed flooring and hooked up our appliances--except the vent hood, which has not been delivered yet. Ooh, steamy! We can cook our own food! We can wash our own real dishes! I have never been this excited about chores. It's a chaotic mess in here without our upper shelving or real countertops, but we have lighting, plumbing, a dishwasher, an oven and range, and a pantry that is in the kitchen instead of the living room!  And I can already start to imagine my rustic cherry shelves festooned with ghost pumpkins . There are more than a half dozen of them growing on the vine that is joyfully overtaking my front yard cornfield, and I'm hoping that no little jerk of a jackalope or chupacalabaza or rude bunny, squirrel, or deer will come along and decide to take one bite of each. I haven't had the best of luck with that. The local fauna often tak

Boo!  It turns out that the volunteer squash vine in my garden this year is not producing gooseneck gourds, as I suspected. It's a ghost pumpkin! Now I remember tossing one of those in the compost after last Halloween.  There are also deer tracks in the garden, which I did not fence this time, but this spooky little bubble of joy is growing right in the center of the thick, spiny foliage, so I hope it will be left to hang in there until my daughter can carve it up this Halloween.  Happy Hot Gourd Summer!

Pantry! We slapped in some fun and easy, removable wallpaper and dug around in the garage until we found this functional beauty, a commercial-grade speed rack abandoned by a former roommate long ago.  The wallpaper is also pretty old, leftover from a project in my parents' former house. Weirdly, I just saw it featured in a bookcase in an episode of Love It or List It . As seen on TV! While we renovate, we've been going through lots of old stuff in the garage, attic, and shed to donate, throw away, or, occasionally, use in the new kitchen. I've unearthed some VERY interesting and exciting treasures from deep inside the garden shed, which I hope to show off soon.  Things are getting very bog witchy around here indeed! 

The corn has grown past "knee high by the Fourth of July," and so have the sunflowers. The delicious bean plants keep trying to climb up their tall sisters' stalks, though the cute, fuzzy creatures of the neighborhood keep trimming them down. And in one very green corner of the garden, the zombie trash gourds have returned! Last year, they volunteered to take over my compost and apple wood stick piles, and this year, they popped out of the front yard garden (after I spread compost there) to say: it's time for another hot gourd summer! The Fourth of July fireworks are all used up and done; it is now legal to look forward to Halloween. Pumpkin spice girls and bog witches, rejoice with me! And pray to every curly shoot and warty bump that by the time these decorative gooseneck gourds ripen, my witchy kitchen will be finished and ready to display them on rustic cherry open shelves against shady green walls. Until then, it's a joy to let the gourd plants' broad gre

All the lights are on! This weekend, my dad finished installing our kitchen cabinets as well as three pendant lights that hang above them. Hallelujah, let there be light! Now we can finally see what we're doing, giving us a boost of productivity by providing both visual access and a more pleasant work environment--which will soon become a warm, welcoming place to cook and eat and converse! This bright, warm light is a great metaphor for something else I've realized over the course my month-long home renovation staycation--which, though hard and busy, has been a clean break from my nonprofit work, my novel-writing creative work, and most of my social life too. I had an "aha" moment about illuminating the kitchen that my family has designed and built ourselves with a set of clear, warm lights that my husband and I chose together, as well as the fact that we are no longer living in other people's stuff. We're approaching 40 now, and we've finally been able t