Coming full circle
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
It's like coming full circle! Been there. Done that! We're fixing up the Ramona House again, and it feels just like it did almost 20 years ago.
When we moved from California to Kansas, we came to live in a house that was geared for vacation living. There were no closets, for starters. We didn't dress up in Ramona — we worked! There were minimal resources for heat and the house was not insulated well. We figured it all worked because we were usually here in the summer, praying for air conditioning and a cool breeze to waft through the crooked windows. Who needed more heat? And then, here we were, actually living in Ramona for longer than two weeks, two months, a year. Who needed heat? We did!
From the first, I hungered to redo the kitchen. That first winter, I made a video to send to friends. "Maybe by next year we'll have a new countertop in the kitchen," I quipped, "so we won't be washing dishes down around our knees."
Would you believe that it took six years before that new countertop waltzed into the kitchen with Tooltime Tim? As I told you in another column — I did tell you this, didn't I? — the kitchen renovation started while we were in Florida (2007). It continued until a week or so ago when the doors on the utility closet went back up and TTT declared, "It is finished!"
By this time, we liked the kitchen floor so well that we decided to continue it on into the living/dining room area. "You've got to move everything out of here," declared TTT, "and I mean everything." We set to work to do just that because at this point we did not want to impede progress.
Once the room was cleared, my sister and I looked at each other. "That wallpaper has to come down," said my sister, "before it falls down." She was right! Through the last 15 years, we'd gone to great heroics to keep that wallpaper on the wall. Now it had to be redone.
In the beginning, we'd make the trek from California to Kansas, open the front door, look around the quiet rooms and assess where the wallpaper was coming loose — it was always hanging down somewhere. We tried to figure out why. Was it because the house was closed up and unheated during the winter? Was there too much moisture? Not enough? Was it because the old plaster walls underneath were disintegrating? Did the glue just evaporate? Had we done it right in the first place? Never did we find an acceptable answer and meanwhile we tried everything known to man to keep that wonderful wallpaper in place.
As we ripped the paper down — an easy job, by the way — we laughed at what great lengths we'd gone to in order to keep that wallpaper on the wall! We'd glued and re-glued. We'd tried double-stick tape, Elmer's glue, glue guns, and finally resorted to staples. And now it was coming down on purpose.
Jess worked in the living room. I worked in the dining room, silently ripping, pulling, rolling, throwing it all away. And then we stood in the middle of the dismantled room. It was strange. We were back at the beginning, again. "Remember this feeling?" I said to my sister. "As I pulled off that paper in the corner, Aunt Naomi was there beside me, squirting water on the old plaster, pulling down eons of papering projects, just like she'd done with us in 1992."
"I had that same feeling," said my sister. "Aunt Gertie was washing windows and declaring, 'There's going to be a nice breeze through these windows,' and now none of them are here. We don't have them to come by and savor what we've accomplished, our audience is gone." For a minute or two we stood inert, silenced by the steady tread of time for 15 years.
"I could use a Pepsi right about now," I said to my sister, "Remember how hot it was in August and Jakie bringing cold Pepsi? Can't you just hear him?" We laughed! And then we laughed some more, reciting to each other the stories of the people, no longer here, who have touched our lives in this place.
It's another day in the country and we are once again reminded of our reasons for returning to Ramona.
