Yesterday was Annie's fourth birthday. I'm sure I'll eventually get around to posting pictures and writing about the whole experience (which included two hours of opening presents). One of the things I gave her was a set of the first three Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. I loved Betsy and Tacy as a little girl, and I'm hoping that Annie will love the stories too.
So, thinking of Betsy-Tacy inevitably led to thinking about the Little House on the Prairie books. Since I spent my whole first-grade year insisting that people call me Laura, told the lady at the jewelry counter at Saks Fifth Avenue that I wanted to grow up to be a farmer's wife and had visions of driving my team of horses in the breakdown lane of I-95, it's probably an understatement to say that my childhood was shaped by reading those books.
Although I didn't see it when I was reading the books as a child, last night I was thinking about Charles Ingalls and his relentless drive to move west. I believe (and it has been nearly 20 years since I've read the books) that the family started out in Wisconsin, moved to Minnesota, moved further west in Minnesota, and then settled in South Dakota. Like a lot of frontier men of his times, Pa Ingalls felt the itch to move whenever life got too easy or he got too many neighbors (too many defined as "more than three in 20 square miles").
I definitely like having neighbors. Even 150 years after the Ingalls family lived there, my sojourn on the Minnesota plains was a little bit too barren and underpopulated for my tastes. I love living in a big city. But I can relate to Pa's need to tame the wilderness. In my case, though, it's not clearing brush to reveal dark, fertile soil underneath, but in tackling the boring white walls of my house.
When we moved in June, I immediately tackled the most important painting tasks-- eradicating the ugly paint from the former owners (mauve in our bedroom and seafoam green in Annie's room). The next week we painted both boys' rooms. I enjoyed those rooms for a month or two, then the painting itch came back. So one afternoon I went to Home Depot and got some orange paint, and Eddie came home from work the next morning to find an accent wall in the family room. The next few call nights I painted the living room and study. And even though I like to mark my territory in every room, the kitchen and all three bathrooms had been painted so well by the previous owners that even I can't justify repainting them.
Now it has been a few months, and the driving need to conquer some virgin wallspace has returned. But the only spot left to paint in the whole house is the two-story entry, the stairway, and the playroom at the top of the stairs (basically a huge hall filled with balls and my little ponies). I'm dying to paint (is it the smell of latex that I'm addicted to?) but Eddie, of course, thinks I should wait for a few months until he's had the chance to plump up the bank account and then pay someone else to do it. He doesn't like the idea of me perched up on a ladder 25 feet in the air and he's definitely not going to be doing it himself. I've done some preliminary pricing, and I think it would cost in the $500-700 range to have someone else paint the rooms. It would cost me about $175 (including renting a huge ladder) to paint it myself. Is it worth the extra cost? I'm inclined to think not-- especially when I want it done yesterday.
But for now, I'm sitting on my hands. Actually, I'm trying to immerse myself in other projects. I hung 18 decorative plates in my family room yesterday. I think I might just take out the scrapbooking stuff and work on it a little bit more tonight. And then there's Annie's birthday party tomorrow. But doing those projects is sort of like eating ice cream when what you really, really want is chocolate cake.
Every time Charles Ingalls moved further west, he met bigger and bigger challenges. Painting the two-story entry would be my biggest painting challenge to date, but I'm not sure that I'm going to tackle it. One of the great things about living in civilization is being able to pay someone else to handle your dirty work. But I might just have to give in to the craving. If you see me late at night, roaming the aisles of Home Depot, you'll know that I wasn't able to wait any longer.
--originally published 2/10/06
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