Crisply Spoken » Housekeeping

A Coatless Closet

Elisabeth Crisp — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 03:16:01 +0000

I turned this:

Into this:

In a city where the average number of sunny days is 244. Who needs a coat closet? Except for the chandelier, I built this miracle of engineering with leftover wallpaper, paint, and wood. It needs tweaking–brown on the floor, generic boxes covered with wallpaper, a new trash can–but, it works. And best of all, the sewing machine isn’t sitting on the breakfast table.

Extreme Home Makeover: Cherry’s Room Edition

Elisabeth Crisp — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:38:36 +0000

In the midst of pestilence and disease, I made over Cherry’s bedroom. New paint, curtains, light fixture. I pulled up the Berber and painted the concrete slab a glossy chocolate. The thing about painted concrete, besides the fact that it’s cheap and trendy, is it has to cure. Six days. You paint yourself out of the room and close the door. Or not. I couldn’t resist a peek. Or two.

Day four, I’m checking the sweaty surface. Will it ever dry? The seventy percent humidity isn’t helping. The phone rings. I turn my back for a millisecond. Talk. Hang up.

“Jasmine? Jazzy?” Where’s the puppy? ”Shit.Shit.Shit.Shit.Shit . . .”

She’s yaps from the middle of the shiny floor. “You can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Schnauzer.” Dance. Dance. Dance. Puppy paws on concrete.

Smack. Smack. Smack. “Shit.” The sound of black flip-flops on wet paint. “Jazzy, come. Jasmine, come.”

“Let’s dance, mom.”

“Damn it. Jazzy come.” She bounces. I stick. Her little feet float above the surface. Weighing less than three pounds is an advantage when walking on wet paint. She doesn’t dent the surface. My BMI leaves size seven footprints. ”Gotcha.” I grab the little rat and deposit my shoes in the trash.

On day four, the floor the gets another coat. Hence I live with the expression, watching paint dry.

Cashing Out

Elisabeth Crisp — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 03:30:09 +0000

I was looking for the shortest checkout line at the supermarket when she approached, a young woman in a t-shirt and jeans, alone. “Can you do me a favor?” She was quiet, but not shy. She made eye contact.

“What is it?” I’m on a schedule. I have kids to pick up at school and a pile of food to pay for, transport, and put away.

“I have my food stamp card, but I need cash to pay bills. Will you help me?’

Did she pick me because I wasn’t scary? I looked like her, thirty years from now. I have the same long hair, except it has silver streaks. I’m wearing faded jeans, sneakers, and a Marvel Comics t-shirt that reads, Betrayed across the chest. I didn’t have to think about it. She asked me to commit fraud.

The sad thing is that it’s harder than heck to qualify for food stamps in Texas. The paperwork is a nightmare. I’ve known people who were really needy. They gave up. Yet . . . this person was willing to risk cashing out.

“No.” I pushed my cart to Check-Out 9.

Cleaning Up

Elisabeth Crisp — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:20:16 +0000

Last night, Coco cleaned up. Without being asked she scraped, rinsed, loaded, added soap, and ran the dishwasher. This morning, I discovered the plastic containers, the things I religiously cram into the upper rack, on the bottom. They didn’t melt. Who knew?

The Thief Within

Elisabeth Crisp — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 02:28:02 +0000

When I was a child, my family took a road trip to Canada. Along the way, my dad had the car serviced.

The mechanic pointed to an apparatus under the hood. “What’s that?”

My dad said, “The air conditioner.”

“Hey Ralph! Come get a load of this. This guy’s got an air conditioner. Bet you feel like a fool for spending money on that?”

The air conditioner in my minivan went out this week. In San Antonio or Sauna Antonio, if you aren’t indigent and living under a highway overpass, your car has an air conditioner. Panicked that destitution would surely follow, Bacon led a convoy to a garage owned by a friend of a friend. Too late for business hours, we left my Mommy-mobile in front of the overhead door under a security camera.

Panic never pays. While we were gone, Lilly, the bird killing schnauzer, helped herself to an unsecured cheese pizza. Let me rephrase that. The dog ate her weight in cheese pizza. We came home to an empty box neatly propped against the leg of the kitchen table and a dog wider than she is tall.

Sheet Cake

Elisabeth Crisp — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:36:33 +0000

Two nights ago, I couldn’t get the kids to sleep. Since I’m the mom, I don’t crash until they do. Bacon can nod off anywhere, anytime, through any form of natural disaster. Fortunately, he’s married to me. I wake at the sound of butterfly wings, spiderweb spinning, and a ten-year old’s insomnia.

That precise thing led to the eradication of box springs from our bedroom. What? You don’t rearrange the furniture when a family member can’t sleep? In a fit, I woke Bacon and demanded he remove the middle layer from our cake of a bed. I’ve written about my consternation over the Cake Bed before. I’m not sure why I didn’t see the solution earlier. It was always a pain to don climbing tackle just to get aboard each night. As an added bonus, the layerectomy completely feng shuied our bedroom. Now, the bed looks like it did twenty years ago in the furniture showroom. No matter how many different dressings I’ve applied, it never seemed right. Maybe, it was meant to be a platform and not a drum.

The next day, I searched the house looking for the girls. Their rooms were empty. The computer was off. The television was dark. I walked into my bedroom. Cherry reclined atop the fleece blanket reading a book. Beside her, Coco caught an afternoon nap.

Why are you in here?

It’s the most comfortable spot in the house.

Why now?

It’s the right size.