Four months ago today, our longtime tenant totaled his car. We were grateful he didn’t die, that he didn’t kill anyone else.

Yesterday I ran my mile and worked on our rental. We have reached the point in our work on this little apartment where “repairs” can be called done. Our son helped empty the trash into trucks and two dumpsters, a neighbor took aload in his pick-up for recycling, Gary stuff our Subaru with stuff for Good Will, we’ve scoured and scrubbed and repairs dents and holes, and a good contractor replaced the ruined woodwork. We’re now “renovating” and the apartment is no longer his. Gary cut back the hedge to restore some of the ocean view—our tenant never looked. Everything needed painting, the floors replaced, cabinets cleaned, stripped, and restored. Much of that is done too. The rusty kitchen cupboard latches needed more time to soak before I can scrub and reuse them, but yesterday I stained the drawer fronts, put a second coat on six cupboard doors and the south door, and worked on one side of the ancient 5-panel door that we hope to mount on a slider for a new bathroom door.

Does anyone remember when “Shabby Chic” was all the rage? Like it or not, out of fashion or not, I couldn’t scrape it all off. I am choosing to leave one side of the future bathroom door with all its four or five paint layers, flaking and alligatored. Back when it was popular, you could purchase a topcoat to deliberately alligator paint, because it was the style. I’m preserving the texture on one side of the door, making it smooth as butter with several coats of varnish. [I really I would use a favorite oil finish that I used on most of our floors. It’s seriously toxic and the last time I put on a coat, I geared up with full breathing mask and swore it was the very last time.] I will paint the other side of the door, which is in better shape because it was never exposed to the weather. That side will be “Chantilly Lace,” a barely tinted white I’m using for trim throughout.

Today is not a running day, but we will likely get a walk this cold morning. I have a Zoom later in the afternoon with a recent MFA grad I’ve been partnered with to mentor and offer support. Gary wants to run errands this morning and I should probably buy more paint, though I’ve done my best to use up what we already had. I have cabinet hinges and latches to clean and the kitchen drawers and one side of that shabby door to varnish. Four coats with a light sanding between coats 3 and four, I think. Maybe five coats. Six? It seems there will never be an end to the painting; much of the trim still needs a second coat. Some tidying is in order. We can’t afford to replace the kitchen counters

I will cook spinach with feta cheese this afternoon or maybe just toasted cheese sandwiches. I will rest and think about other projects I neglect. I’m rewatching The West Wing series, slowly. I’ll sit in my corner of the sofa after lunch. To say this old series “holds up” doesn’t do justice to this reminder about how government is supposed to work. At my left under the west window is a small plastic tub with an unfinished project, balls of yarn and the body of a sweater I began knitting for myself in 2024. That half-finished sweater waits for me to figure out the neckline. It’s striped in several fine handspun and hand-dyed 2-ply yarns held with a fine mohair/silk blend. It will be a pretty pullover, light and warm. Assuming I ever finish it.

The weather has finally turned cold with our first frost.

I am reading a wonderful novel, Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from the original French by Hildegarde Serle. The main character is Violette, a strong woman doing the best she can, and building a reliable and peaceful life on the edge of a cemetery where she is the keeper. Violette lies, and I suspected this lie. It’s the way we do lie and suspect lies about particular things, lying even to ourselves. I’m halfway through the novel and now I know.

In Zoom writing groups I hear poetry and memoirs detailing people’s terrible childhoods. I think sometimes we all had terrible childhoods. Violette was fostered, and that is almost always terrible. Our culture doesn’t seem to know how to love and properly respect children we didn’t birth. I say that, and yet I know of a former student who has done just that—spent her adult years caring for and raising a child she didn’t birth, a determined and generous woman giving a decent life to a boy-now-man. I would read her story about finding purpose in that, finding meaning while rescuing someone. I told Gary last night that I was tired of stories about love gone wrong, about abuse and excuses, about people hurting the one they love. Love should be what we have, I said.

I could write a memoir about the abuse I suffered as a child, mental illness in our family, guilt and grief, misunderstandings and trauma, and about worry—so much worry that leads to nothing. Disappointment. I write here about cleaning up the messy lives of other people while making messy mistakes in my own life. So much suffering. That unfinished sweater.

There is also the view from our west-facing windows. Every day we are here at the beach, I watch the swells build and break, and each day I look for a small something to accomplish. In the kitchen downstairs, there is a fresh loaf of sandwich bread baked last night and waiting to be sliced. I have been gratefully married to a man for fifty-two years this coming August, and he brings me coffee in bed each morning. I could ignore my aching hands, the morning headache, fluctuating blood pressure, the failures and errors and worry of all the rest. I could focus on joy. I can choose to let joy win.