My Life In the Season of Big Zucchini

It's been a big zucchini summer here at this household. Not big as in numerous zucchini, big as in BIG zucchini. The big fat green zeppelins that happen when you don't pick your vegetable patch on the regular, so that all the squash get seedy, tough, and outrageously over-sized. 

I like summer squash. I like the advantage of growing it in your own garden, so you can pick them when they are small, young, and tender. Sauteed in butter and herbs, they are a fast, easy, tasty side dish to all the grilling going on during the season. I like them on the grill too, and as a substitute for noodles in lasagna. 

But these giant squash? Yech. Don't tell me to shred and put them in cake or sweet bread, because zucchini is a savory food only for this girl. Desserts with green vegetables in them? No, thank you. Yes, I have tried them, and I think y'all have gone straight crazy. 

Up until this summer, I've considered it a sign of failure, a sign of even (Lutherans all gasp in judgement) laziness, that I keep missing, and then picking, these big green brutes instead of the tender little lovelies that we prefer to eat. I dutifully go out into the yard with my wire basket, peek under the giant umbrella leaves, and -- "Dang it. Again?!"

At the beginning of the summer I took all of this zucchini-picking failure quite seriously. If I'm going to go to the trouble and expense of gardening, I want to do it well. There is a small window (just shy of three months) where I can supply most of my family's fresh produce needs; I want to optimize that. Coming from a family that has experienced poverty, I hate wasting food. Large zucchini seemed to represent a lot of things to me: poor resource management, inattention, waste, and even ingratitude to the processes of Nature which provide for us. 

But zucchini is a distinct season of the summer. We watch it come along in expectation in early May, when the earth finally warms up enough in Iowa to germinate squash seeds, and in June, while the plants spread out their giant leaves and start to bloom. Come July and August, there are pyramids of squash crowding kitchen counters. The reason for all the jokes about summer squash stuffed in mailboxes, left on neighbors' doorsteps, piled on break-room tables at work is because we know that they are prolific. Sometimes too prolific. We balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. So, so much. And while we are grateful, we are also tasked with it. Peeling it, slicing it, sauteeing it, roasting it, pickling it, tossing it into omelettes, soups, quiches, pasta-- even if we love summer squash, we know it takes up space in our lives, requires work, and sometimes, is just too, too much. 

This summer, big zucchini do not represent laziness, or ingratitude, or even inept gardening. They do, however, still represent overabundance-- a distinct season in our lives. In the last several months our household has seen multiple major appliance failures, major house repair, a car vs. deer accident (property damage only, thank God), and storm damage. We've done several home improvement projects, and have several more that are needed or that we are considering. We have a grandchild we are over the moon for, and love to help care for him and nurture him. We have aging parents who sometimes need support. We are gone multiple weekends in a row, honoring milestones like a son's entrance into pharmacy school, or another son's move into his first home. We have welcomed home a son-in-law who was deployed in the National Guard. We have visited a sister in Georgia, paddled the Boundary Waters with a blended family of menfolk, gone fishing. We survived a school year complicated by the pandemic and are about to embark on a senior year of high school that is looking much the same. We are navigating menopause. We lost an extended family member unexpectedly. We're looking ahead at college enrollments, helping autism spectrum children find their way in the adult world, and empty nesting.

All of these things are piled up on our metaphorical kitchen counter, and we need to process all of it. Slice and dice, cut out the bad parts where we can, create our own recipe out of these ingredients we've been handed, simmer, chew, swallow, and digest. All that growing, celebrating, repairing, nurturing, grieving, planning, sharing of time with people we love, closing one chapter, opening others. A great deal of it is joyous work, and for that we are grateful. A great deal of it is work-work. Labor and grief and frustration and exhaustion and loss and expense and time. So, we balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. It is also so, so much. 

We are in a season of life where things are coming at us fast and thick, both the gifts and the trials. Big zucchini aren't our ideal, but can be expected when we'd rather take care of a grandbaby, or help an adult kid move boxes. They can be expected while we sort through trenching a new water main to our house. They can be expected when we neglect garden work in favor of ceremonies, milestones, funerals, jobs, and much needed rest. 

For that reason, I will make of big zucchini what I can. Some days, that will mean preparing, seasoning, and cooking those parts we like, and enjoying the results. Some times it will mean sharing our overabundance with others that can make better use of big squash than we can in the moment. Some days, it means I will send that big ol' squash sailing over the compost fence and into the pile, so that it can feed some vegetable garden of the future, in another season, where life will assuredly be different than it is now. 

Things I have been doing: 

Enjoying this, this, and this recipe as a way to use up those big zucchini. When I don't, you know, compost them out of sheer lack of time to do anything with them. 

Not reading. But looking at The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain sitting on my end table, and deciding it's a better book for cooler and cozier fall nights. 

Painting buckets of primer and paint on the walls of a basement craft room that we are working on. I'm looking forward to having a permanent home for my sewing machine. 

When Old House Character Doesn't Work for You.

Our home's name is Ruth. She has a personality. She's modest from the street-side, her heart is larger than you'd guess if you only saw her from the outside, she has quirky angles like many old ladies do, and yet she also has a comfortable lap, like a good grandma, and loads of charm.

Ruth's front room, circa 1963

I'm a lover of history, and have researched my house's architecture; it's a Colonial Revival Cape Cod, built in 1939. I am the fourth owner.

A house this old and older will have quite a few layers on it. I'm thoughtful about those. There's also a range of opinions out there about what to do about it, from the extreme of gutting them completely and putting modern builder's-grade interiors in them (which personally horrifies me), to being supremely dedicated to maintaining period authentic details in every way one can. That extreme I can appreciate a little better, for the sake of its desire to preserve original details from the era in which the house was built. But it's tough for me to be that rigid in my own life. I've got some pretty eclectic tastes, and being stuck in a narrow window of the late 1930's wouldn't work for me.

Besides, people don't live that way. As much as scrupulously period-authentic homes teach us about the way people lived in whatever era, they can be museum-like, and sort of artificial in the sense that it is the rare person who built a household from scratch in exactly the year, say, 1955, and kept it that way for 63 years. More often, people launch in adult life with hand-me-downs and heirlooms from previous eras, get tired of certain things and fall into the fads of the decade (shag carpet, anyone?) in the interim, feathering the nest over the years with what's needed, what works, what delights, and what feels like home.

In addition, one must embrace (me: strong simple graphic design) or survive (me: beige everything, granite countertops) the current home design trends and fashions of one's own time. "Dated" is the word home improvement shows squawk over and over again to describe older homes. Of course it is. Whether or not it's a pejorative is largely up to the house, and its owner.

My house has postage-stamp sized foyer, only a few feet by a few feet, and another, larger room we ingeniously refer to as the "front room" because it is, uh, at the front of the house. In the 1960s, someone paneled this room, and it was where the gentleman of the house lounged, smoked, and watched television.

That purple fabric across the top of the wall hid stereo speakers. It was just as attractive as you might imagine. 

While I like me a good rustic paneling, as seen on our recently renovated screen porch ceiling photo below--

...this was really not the same. It was made of a rather expensive veneer plywood (it's either mahogany or cherry) dark-stained, but not skillfully installed at all. It had gotten orangey over the years, and it made the room gloomy. Then a later owner had sawed a big, unfinished hole to get his big screen TV into the wall, and left that hole behind when we moved in. It was like the hall closet had a picture window into the front room. I hung an old sheet across the hole and put an old sofa in front of it. Which the kids used as a place to pile coats and backpacks.

Not proud, but it was real life here. I also tried to love the paneling. It's historic, I said to myself. Paneling was a thing in Midcentury houses. Part of the charm. 

And practical too. The scuffle of four boys was well hidden by those dark walls. I tried to foof it up with some of my own things:

And still really, really hated it. I just couldn't make myself love that dark room, and even if I'd been able to repair the hole in the one wall, it wasn't worth it to me to be this miserable for the sake of period authenticity. To hell with wood paneling, at least in this case. I needed light. I needed color.

It stuck around awhile though, because I didn't have the carpentry skills and budget to change things up. It's hard to bring yourself to spend money on a room that holds the coats and boots, mostly, when you've got so many other things to do with your house.

When Tom arrived on the scene, we decided that while we still did not want to spend a lot of money on this room at this point, we needed to make it one that better reflected that we both lived here now, that I work from home here and wanted it to be creative, and that we both wanted to invite the sunshine in as much as possible.

I only have two not-so-great cell phone photos from the renovation period, but they sum up the two big things that happened.

One was fixing the sawed-up wall, and adding another bookcase to the room.

You can see into our L-shaped hallway.

The second major part of the reno was paint. Buckets and buckets of primer, paint, and more paint.

If you look at the top of the above photo, you can see how dirty the ceiling tile was from the smokers who previously lived here. While it looked okay in contrast to the dark paneling, once we started painting it was obvious just how disgusting it really was.

The rest of the decor was a matter of assembling things we already had on hand.

Before we updated the room, I had put a folk-art style rug in there in colors that I loved to try to cheer the place up a little bit. I decided that would go back in, and be the inspiration for everything else.

Then Tom's hall tree went into the front of the room, so visitors have a place to leave their coats.

Tom made it from salvaged paneling and wood. I love that it is there to greet his kids when they come home.

The window has a simple white cotton curtain on the lower half for privacy. The room originally had wood cafe shutters, and I would like to do that again when the budget permits. The basket in the corner is to corral shoes (lots of boys, lots of tennies).

The green dresser is a crappy little old thing I rescued off a curb and spray painted. I've had it forever-- it just keeps changing color. It is tucked just on the other side of the front foyer, and holds incoming mail, change, keys, etc. The drawers hold the things you always needs right before running out the door-- mittens and hats, umbrellas, sun screen, insect repellent, etc.

My work space is usually much messier than this, but this is the "blog-pretty" version:

I have a preference for things with a history or a connection, so I'm always more likely to go with old/used furniture than with new. The oak desk belonged to a friend of my mother's. The printer stand is actually a record player/music stand from my Great Aunt Elizabeth's house. The lamp is hers too. 

The floor in this room is 1960s era vinyl composition tile. If it were new or in good shape I wouldn't mind it at all. I like the pattern. But it had carpet over it when I moved in, is full of staple holes, and has cracks and crumbles in places. The next time this room gets an overhaul, it will need to go, I hope in favor of tile or wood flooring.

I'm most pleased with the bookshelf area.

Lots of old friends live there.

Some of the shelves are extra deep, which is a plus for me. I'm famous for squirreling books away. The desk is a curbside find, and Tom uses it for his work-from-home days. The big baskets hold camera equipment and random electronic odds and ends.

I wanted to have fun in this room, so I gathered second-hand store picture frames, spray-painted them in black, ivory, orange, and green (to echo the colors in the rug), and framed family art.

I did not feel constrained by rules here. That part felt good. I like how grade school ceramic projects and family photos and favorite books mix on the shelf

And as much as the paint helped freshen this room up, having art made by people I care about, things that show their personality and humor and love, is the best part of this room by far.

When this room gets another round of attention in the future, it will most likely get some of the things that honor the 1930s Cape Cod heritage of the house, walls with painted wainscot paneling to match what is elsewhere in the house, wood flooring, and trim. In the long run, we'll have both fully respected the heritage of the house, but kept it fresh and for us. For now this redo fixed the biggest problems, and fits our personal style so much better. I only wish I hadn't waited so long.

The 'Laundry Basket of Home Improvement Updates' Post

It's not that I've been holding back on my blog readers, exactly, but there's a point at which you're so busy you can't put down the paint brush/nailer/shovel to write about what you're doing. I suppose "too much to write about" is a good problem to have, but it does tend to pile up like baskets of clean laundry. Sooner or later you feel guilty that you haven't gotten around to folding it and putting it away. So this post is a folding and putting away of home improvement news, a big update with lots of things to offer, including sunflowers at the beginning and at the end. Ready?

There have been a lot of exterior home improvements checked off the list in the last few months and even more going back almost a year. I mean A LOT. As in punch-drunk with exhaustion and still juggling paint brushes, power tools, sunscreen, and wasp spray a lot.

Well, at least I am. The exhausted part, anyway. Boyfriend Tom is one of those cheerfully energetic people who can work their way through a long DIY to-do list with amazing speed. That's mostly awesome. But on the days where I think I might need a nap, or a beer, or some time for my anxiety-predisposed brain to hyper-analyze the situation, he keeps the table-saw running, and pretty soon I've got another paint project to follow up with.

Except for one thing: the roof. That we hired done. It was well overdue; it was past 20 years old and while I had not had any problems with it yet, I didn't want to wait until I did. Here's a before, from June of last year:

Not only was it looking pretty tired and worn out, it was a pale gray that didn't really "go" with the warm red/browns of the brick foundation and chimney So we picked out shingles that we hoped would pull the entire exterior together. Here's tear-off day. The house is old enough the roof was decked with boards rather than sheeting. Still sound, after all these years!

Here is the finished roof: 

Not shown is a new gutter and downspout system which went in a few days later, routed in a different direction to address some damp basement issues we'd been having. While it has been too dry of a summer to really say for certain that it solved the problem completely, our foundation stayed dry through the last two flash-flood level rains that we have had, which makes us hopeful.

It is embarrassing to admit how long exterior painting has gone on around here. Seasons. Years, even. Too long. That's totally on me, but I'm going to plead single parenthood. But guess what? It's done! (hugs herself, giggles maniacally)

Here's a "getting close" photo of the south (driveway) side of the house.

We had to borrow a longer ladder to get to the peaky-peak of the gable.

And here's the back of the house, a screen-porch, kitchen, attic bedroom shot:

But we are not done with exterior home improvement yet. Wait, there's more!

Tom, with help from me, and various of our boys at various times, built a fence across our back property line.

We "stole" the design from a fence in a neighborhood where we like to walk. Here's some during shots. We also had the yard all torn up, since we were not only digging post holes, but planning a garden bed.

Here it is finished. We plan to let it weather. I like the silvery gray of weathered wood with garden greenery and flowers. 

Here is what my backyard neighbor sees. I think she was as tired of the peeling pink paint as I was, and now we have our backside (ahem) all spanking new. 

But wait, there's more!

A vegetable bed!

This was my son Grant's gift of labor to me while he lived at home between college and the start of his new job. It was an enormous undertaking, and Tom is still hauling dirt for it, since it has settled some since we first filled it.

Here's what it looked like yesterday evening.

The bed was done in the last weeks of May. We got a late start on the actual gardening part, but we put in tomatoes, peppers,  and summer squash, and we've had a decent amount of produce considering the season was shortened on the front end. The tomatoes caught up pretty admirably.

And here's the fence row again, now in late August:

I got a packet of sunflower seeds that said it was mixed varieties 4-6 ft in height, to fill in some space quickly in a flower bed that was just getting started with new perennials.  Um, yeah. Right now we seem to be in the 5-8 ft. range with these babies, and no end in sight. There's a rose bush hidden in there somewhere, believe it or not. The rose will survive the shade in the short term and I don't plan to plant any annuals that are quite so large next year. But they're impressive, aren't they?

While Tom has taken the lead on the outside projects shared here, I've been working on the inside of the house this summer. I'll share some of those with readers soon. It's been a busy year!

Doorstep Gets a Front Door Facelift

Readers may remember that some summers ago my Dad swooped in like a hero and helped me get the front of the house painted. 

At that time, one of the things that went undone was the front door. I'd intended to follow up almost immediately painting it, but between the fact the weather never seemed right any weekend I wanted to work on it, and well, just life in general, it remained the weird brownish-mauve color, with peeling layers down to white. It was not a pretty thing. 

Later on, once upon a Thanksgiving, I painted the inside of the door, pictured here, and fell in love with the color. That's Valspar Cinnamon Cake: 

It's a warm, spicy, pumpkin-y color. This year, finally, as Tom has helped get the rest of the exterior house painting done, I tackled the front door on nice weather weekends in little half-hour increments. 

Charming. Also, pay no attention to the ripped linoleum floor. Usually that's covered up by an area rug, and is a home-improvement tragedy for another blog post.

The risk for irritation painting doors while they are still hung is high. Especially a door that's heavily used. And of course my children, who leave doors hanging open as a matter of maddening habit, are now slamming it shut religiously, simply because you've got wet/tacky paint on it. Of course.

Here it is, almost finished with the prime coat. I scraped the big chunks, leveled with wood filler, caulked gaps, and sanded before priming. I'm pretty sure this is the original door, and while I like it, it's been used pretty hard and is about at the end of its life, including the hardware. The budget being what it is, though, we decided we'd throw a fresh coat of paint on it to see if we couldn't get another year or two out of it before taking the plunge on a replacement door and screen door.

Here's the finished product. I spray-painted the door-knocker black to coordinate with the light fixture, mailbox, and address plaque.

I love, love, LOVE how this color coordinates with the sage-y, olive-y green of the siding paint. I still need to paint the threshold trim the dark green color that you see on the awning trim, but the improvement has been so vast I'm kicking myself for not having done this sooner. It's made all the difference in the world.

One Last Post about the Porch

To say we've been basking in screen porch glory is a little bit of an understatement. All the work we accomplished in the waning days of summer last year felt good to get scratched off our list (HERE), but it wasn't until this year that we finally got the furniture rearranged, the pillows fluffed, the rugs down, the planters planted, and we could really use the space. It's been nice to end the work day here with a drink and a conversation with your sweetie, or begin the weekend with a cup of coffee and birdsong. 

I had a few more views of the screen porch to share, and then I'll move on to other parts of the house, because Tom and I have gotten a lot done since I was last blogging regularly (and all that work was part of the reason I wasn't blogging regularly). Remember this oldie but ugly? 

That chair used to be in my living room, and was a rocker from the home I grew up in. I've decided its wood form is not so bad as patio furniture, but I have plans to recover it with a slightly less loud fabric. It's a really comfortable chair, so I hate to give it up entirely. It's sitting in one corner of the screen porch to the left of the sliding glass door into the kitchen. 

On the other side of the sliding glass door into the kitchen is an old bar cart I found in the basement and repainted. I'll admit for the most part it's just filling space, though the bottom shelf does keep my flower vases handy for when I'm cutting flowers from the garden. 

I am in love with this golden ceiling, made of stained grooved 1X8 car siding. It's a cheap material, but it diffuses light in a warm way that makes the porch seem shaded and cozy without being dark. I'm less in love with the light/fan, but the price was right (free, from a fixture replacement project at my mother's house), and we can upgrade later when we find something we really like. 

On the exterior, we went from this: 

To this:

A proper gutter on the front wall of the porch means no more rotting foundations. My summer plants are just getting started on the patio, but we are already enjoying the strings of porch lights in the evening. 

Next up: A much smaller project, at the front of the house. 

Updating that Chapter About the Screen Porch

There's a better picture at the end of this chapter!

It's June! Screen porch weather here in the Midwest. Which brings me right back to the last time I was blogging semi-regularly, in October, about what evolved into a multi-month repair job on....the screen porch. 

I've imagined the story of my porch's construction before, and I will share it again because I believe it to be true: two guys got drunk on a couple of cases of Natty Light and decided to build a screen porch out of whatever shit they could find laying around. 

That was maybe 20 years or so ago. Add the insult of many years of bad patchy roofing repairs, a leaky or non-existent gutter, and the natural processes of sun and rain, it was something of a miracle (or just plain habit) it was still standing. 

Going back a bit, I've written about how we (we being me and Tom, but let's be honest: it was mostly Tom) spent most of August and September of last year, HERE, and HERE, tearing into the rot and getting the place sound again. Going even further back, we have my superficial attempts at coping with the ugly HERE.

I'm still having some technical difficulties blogging in anything resembling an organized fashion, because in May I had no less than FOUR college students' worth of stuff show up from two colleges, and one of those students (my oldest, Grant) commenced from his university. So he was moving out of his apartment digs in a serious and permanent fashion. Where does one land? Mom's place. More specifically, her basement, her guest room, her garage. AND her screen porch. I've been waiting to get some photos decent enough to write around, and I'm still finding it necessary to do it in weird stages because of stacked boxes, trailers of kayaks (don't ask) and the flotsam and jetsam of daily life.

A sneak peak at the new ceiling: 

So what you're getting here is interior shots. But only part of it. Once the transitional nonsense of my spring is over, I'll blog the rest. It's not that I intended this to turn into "screen porch, strip-tease edition", emphasis on the tease, but it's just been that crazy around here. If I waited until my life was sane, you'd never read about it here again. 

Here's some honesty about "I-don't-give-a-crap-any-more-what-it-looks-like-I-just-want-it-done" renovation choices: the screen porch floor. The porch was built on slab, which was probably the only thing the original builders got right. But then they glued down lavender-mauve carpet that was not intended for exterior applications and all the fun you can imagine happened. It rained, the carpet got wet around the edges of the porch. It got hot, the humidity made the carpet rank and smelly. It had to go. And it went, more easily than I thought, considering how many home improvement horror stories that I've read about glued carpet that seemed more or less permanent up to and including the Apocalypse. 

It had baked in the sun to a brittle crisp, and the carpet peeled up fairly well enough. But. (There's always one more 'but' in these stories, isn't there?) while it made the carpet easy to get up, it also meant that the glue that had hardened to the floor was really ON there. That glue was stuck to the floor like, well, glue. 

So I sanded. And when I sanded, some of it came up, but some of it got hot with the friction and remelted into a sticky substance (like glue, maybe, mmmmm?) and gummed up the sand paper. Then I sanded with a wheel sander with a metal brush, and it heated up the old glue if I went over one patch too many times, and also threw sparks around, which made me super nervous. The idea of spreading chemicals around to dissolve it made me nervous too. 

Tired, nervous, impatient, and failing is not a good combination for doing a thorough job. I reasoned that if we left the glue alone, it was mostly in the corners, it was hard like an enamel or varnish coating. Let's just paint the damn thing, glue and all, and be done with it. Please. 

So that's what I did. Brown concrete patio paint, two thick coats. That brought the entire interior project to this: re-paneled walls and ceiling, repainted and rewired, windows reframed (but not replaced), new sills, and a finally finished (one way or the other) floor. 

The floor is not perfect. Then again, it's a concrete patio floor. I can't say I've cared two cents about its imperfection since we moved the furniture back in. And I so wanted to move in I started playing before I was even finished, like this: 

You can see the concrete-and-carpet-glue floor before sanding in the above shot. And the ceramic planters. Because that was really what all this work was really about-- getting those out of storage, finally. 

Everything you see is stuff I already had--8-year-old (with the original cushions, a little faded) Target all-weather wicker arm chairs, the weird little table I dragged all the way home from Kudzu Antiques in Decatur, Georgia. The hanging lamp, wire shelf (in the window) and ceramic planters I'd picked up over time and squirreled away for the right place. The little cactuses in terra cotta belong to my son Grant; I'm babysitting them while he's in between apartments. 

The area rug is a bit on the small side, but it was one I'd ordered from Overstock a couple of years ago for the front foyer. It was too thick to clear the swing of the front door and I was too cheap and lazy to ship it back. I stored it, figuring it would find a place when I needed a rug. And it did. 

I'm not a big fan of design folks talking about "use what you have" decorating like it's some gloriously free thing, because it isn't really. I mean, at one time or another you paid for it, whether you got it new or whether you got it second-hand. So while, yes, all these were pieces I already had, that does represent some years of acquiring and accumulating. It also represents the patience it took to wait until they had the right space to move into. Tom's carpentry skills (mostly) and my painting/staining/cleaning made all of the pieces fit together, and seem like home. 

In the coming weeks, I ought to be more organized (here's hoping), and will share more of the finished project, including exterior views and some new developments on the outdoor patio. Until next time!