Catherynne M. Valente
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The Time-Traveling Decorator: Musings on the End of Summer--And Many Other Endings
🕑 Added 2025-09-30 23:41:13 +0000 UTCWarning: I'm about to get REAL contemplative about home DIY and design. This started out as the post for the RAM tier, but got longer and longer and more and more thoughtful and about other things, so it's become the essay for the month, though a little more personal and meandering than usual.
It's been a little over two years since I left my husband. It's become more than clear to me over those many months that working on the house and garden is such a deep coping mechanism for me that I can no longer even think creatively until I've lifted a few things that are way too heavy for me, or planted something, or painted something, or carted away some hulking relic that should've been put to sea years ago. Or at least made plans for one or all of those.
Hell, I stopped in the middle of writing this to ADHD-ly go paint some silly wooden stuff silly fake gold (Bastian has been insisting everything be some sort of golden lately).
Believe me, I also find myself annoying.
It just...helps.
I realized early on, when on my February third hour of compulsively moving rocks and digging in the unforgiving overstuffed chocolate-chip cookie soil of this place, in which the cookie part is the earth and the chips are so many rocks of so many sizes, that something very deep down just couldn't stand to keep looking at the things I looked at while I was in so much pain for so long. While I was so stuck for so long. At first, I was determined to move. The house was falling apart, it was too dark, I needed to run away, to escape somehow, even if it was just somewhere else on the island--though I wasn't at all sure I meant to stay on the island. Let the mice and spiders have it.
But interest rates said: ok lol have fun. And then, almost right away, you may recall, the pipes burst and the whole ceiling fell through, and my insurance company gave me so much money for the repairs I could actually start to carve something out of the broken mess this place had become.
So you start to try to make here a place you don't need to escape from. As best you can. With limited funds and knowledge. Bit by bit.
Now, while it's not close to done, my house is almost unrecognizable from the state is was in two years ago. The garden might as well have been teleported in from another universe it's so changed. Between my own semi-skills (improving slowly) and various friends' help, this house and its forest have begun to look beautiful in a way I never let myself even consider, because there was always someone else's taste and needs and doubts and judgment to take into account.
Now there's only a seven-year-old, who is easy to veto, but rarely requires it, as their tastes are even more flamboyant than mine. They're happy as long as we live in a place that looks like it sprang full-formed from the aching skull of Liberace.
Bit by bit, inch by inch, I keep trying to pull something pretty out of this 113-year old beast. Something that doesn't remind me of loss and hurt.
I probably should've been working on that before.
I rented this house for years before I was able to buy it. Then I was on tour all the time, then, well, the whole first Trump administration, then I had a baby, then COVID right as I was weaning, then the weight of raising a child, then a divorce...I just never did what I should've done with it. Never made it my own. I think part of me always assumed I wouldn't get to keep it, as my ex never loved the island like I do and I took it for granted we'd eventually leave.
But in a month, I'll have lived on the island for 17 years. Next May, I'll have lived in this house for 15. Never in my life from birth have I lived anywhere as long as I've lived here. I haven't even lived in one city as long as I've lived in this house. Even a general region.
So I guess it's long past time to commit. Treat her with a little respect.
And having finally finished Nobody But Us, a novel that's hung over me for years and stood in the path of the next phases of my life, I'm faced with being 46 and trying to figure out what those phases look like. The house is part of that.
I've shown you lovely folks bits and pieces along the way, and this is another one of those, yes, but it's more than that, or at least became so in the writing. Maybe it's the oncoming October, but I've had the oddest feeling of late, as I change these things, that I'm changing them to, more or less, their final form, and I will probably live my life and die in this house.
That's assuredly somewhat melancholy a notion, but not necessarily bad. I don't know that another partner is really in the cards for me, or if I even want one to be, and I love the island so deeply. Island has become another word for home. I hope I have a lot of time left. I hope I have a lot of books left, a lot of travel and experiences. But I don't mind the idea of this just...being where I am for the duration. If, the world being as it is, we are any of us allowed a duration. I'm sure that's part of it, too. Hyperfixating on things I can control, that have few consequences should I fuck it up, nesting as a kind of way of building armor against whatever the next news cycle heaves up.
But beyond that, while I do these things, two thoughts just won't leave me be.
One is that, as I pour my anger and pain and fear of the future into my garden and home renovation, I realize that, almost certainly, this is what all the old lame people who spent their weekends inexplicably deadheading roses and painting hallways like that could possibly be satisfying or fun were doing. Especially the ladies, who really just are so INTO those roses. Well, now that I'm an old lady...yeah. Roses are jerks, but at least they're predictable. At least I stand a chance of healing what's wrong with them. They respond; they reward. The entire world just now...not so much.
And I start wondering just how much rage some of those women were beaming into their pretty pink roses right before they chopped some heads off.
The other, stranger thought I can't escape as I finally, finally actually choose how my environment looks and finally, finally, learn what I myself prefer in the absence of a partner, is that I decorate like a time-traveler.
I rearrange possibilities in my head, over and over; colors, furniture, paintings, mirrors, curtains, organization, lamps. I change my mind and make lists. I buy nothing for months, just to make sure it's "right."
And I know its right when some small part of my hindbrain regards an unpainted wall or empty room with nothing yet so much as ordered for it, and whispers: yes. That's what it looked like. That's how I remember it.
Maybe, when science fiction and fantasy are your life's structural supports, this is a normal thought to think all the time. I'm not sure. It's such a strange feeling I don't yet have a word for.
The more I think about it, the more I've become convinced all domestic work, all design and landscaping and space-creating, is a kind of time travel. The speed at which a choice I make today becomes what my child remembers in twenty years is far, far shorter than the actual days that tick by between now and then. Becomes the stories they'll tell about their childhood. Not just paint and plants, but everything I chose: chores now or later, how I answer their endless questions, games we play or do not, outings we take or skip, projects we do or don't finish, whether I have modeled today what good adults should do or how chaotically most of us actually stumble through. Did I remember to make them practice their piano. Did I yell or hug. Did I work when they needed me or hold them when I needed to work. Was it five or six songs tonight. Did I do anything at all for myself.
But they'll also remember that I always had a parrot chandelier, that we always had so many rosebushes, that the Ready Room was always white and clean, the library desk was always a piano, the front porch was always a speakeasy.
Because for them, still so small, really, they were. They will be. We're making the choices that make us and telling someone stories about it in a cafe halfway across the world with grey in our hair at the same time.
And almost certainly, my baby will remember that this is where I always worked.
They won't remember the Umbrella Cover Museum I rented as an office for 12 years; they were only 3 when I swapped to the top floor of Sarah and Dan's barn for a few years. Maybe they'll dimly recall the barn, but I suspect, in their minds, I never rented someone else's space as a writing office, even though until July this year, I have been, the whole time.
And despite paying thousands upon thousands in rent over the years, I never made those places anything like my own, either. Because, of course, they weren't.
Now, Bag End, the tiny house I mentioned finding on the cheap from an islander moving away back in early July, has been quite a saga, and still is. Turns out, sometimes, you get things for cheap because they're super fucked up. I do not yet have the skills to fix the inside, which is oh-so full of choices, and it's gonna be a long time before I want to let anyone see that. I think I need to learn to use a circular saw. And like...cabinetry.
I am not overly good at building things. I can imagine anything, and even sometimes know how it should be done, but I rarely have the skills, precision, patience, or math to actually make it happen. I'm not being modest, I just...can only care about angles and millimeters for so long before I want to throw myself into the sea. I'm trying. But there's not a lot I can do about the inside until I learn...just a ton of shit about woodworking.
But I did feel like I could do something with the outside.
(Don't worry about the overturned boat. It's covering a MUCH bigger problem I have no way to fix at the moment. When my neighbor trailed the tiny house through the side yard, the weight of his vehicle broke through the earth and wood and rocks that were, unbeknownst to me or anyone, covering the old dried-up cess pool this house once used when it was a one-room no-plumbing cottage in 1902 and now there is A Pit. A friend left that dinghy here to store years ago and never came back for it, so I figured it might be useful in making people Not Die by walking eight feet out the back door. Like I said. MUCH bigger problem.)
I'm so proud of that swoopy curve
Look closely--that's not water!
Lookit the fishies!I don't have a before photo because frankly, what was back there before was awful. I would never have taken a photo of it because I wouldn't want anyone to see it. Now, of course, I wish I had. I MUST PAINT A PICTURE WITH WORDS.
So that whole long strip alongside the house was basically a total shitshow. When I moved in, there was a chicken coop there, and I had chickens for years, and also there are hungry minks and raccoons on the island, so it'd grown a tangled eyesore of logs connected by wire fencing and the ghosts of dead chickies. All that was moldering and rotting to pieces as I haven't had chickens in some time. Next to that were raised vegetable beds that had also rotted and then been smashed by a tree that fell during a winter storm. Everything else was a mass of tangled briars, thorns, old logs, massive rocks, and other detritus. I honestly didn't even consider it part of the yard, it was just something to try to ignore because too many other things to deal with.
But in late spring, a couple of friends offered to come tear the coop down. I tore out the old beds and got those nice high ones that don't break your back. Suddenly there was so much space. And when we scouted out where to put the Bag End, that little hill back there seemed a great spot. Also the only one accessible in terms of having that thing out in the forest and not glued to the side of the house, which would defeat the purpose of having a separated workspace. So another neighbor came by with earth moving equipment and stripped the hill bare...which still left a shit ton of deadfall and sticker bushes and holes gouged out of the earth where the vehicle tossed up boulders like boba tea bubbles.
And I did take a picture right after they parked the trailer.
This is why I'm genuinely so proud of what I've done this year--I didn't even know I could do it until it was done. And, because my overworked hindbrain will never forget the poverty of my youth, I'm even more proud that I did it all for less than $300.
LEMME WALK YOU THROUGH IT.
So alllll that brush on the left, which is covering three fallen trees and a deadfall twice as tall as me, is where the firepit is now. I broke it all down into firewood and cut it all back myself, even though those fucking firepit rocks were huge and heavy and all my muscles hurt forever. I dug, pried, scraped, and pulled every one of those rocks, and the ones that make up the rock wall surrounding the hill, out of the ground all around--that's what I mean by chocolate chip cookie soil.
Then I built up the ground and filled the holes the trailer-truck gouged out and planted all that grass in a few phases. The grass seed cost me about $100, all told.
Then I had to deal with the approach. Because Chris accidently broke through that cess pool, I knew I couldn't just leave it. There was rotted wood and century-old metal bits all over, and besides, Bastian was 100% going to blithely plummet into That Pit as soon as possible.
I got the bricks from one neighbor who was tearing up her patio, another who had some left from building her patio, and a handful from the demolition site of a crumbling old brick building down the road, which had a free brick pile out all spring. And carried them allllll in my arms to lay them out, which I did not measure and just eyeballed because I can't, I just can't do the millimeter thing.
But then I had two issues--one was that every way you can fill a path that long is way out of budget for me these days. Another was that the obvious solution (grind up all that brush and forest toenails out there into free wood chips) would turn out to be unworkable, as I do not have a wood chipper, and unlike seemingly every other tool in existence, no one on the island wanted to lend one out. I spent most of the summer trying to sort that issue before giving up and just mulching it, which, honestly, is fine for now. And $20 of mulch beats the monstrous prices of wood chippers, good lord.
The last issue was that, due to an exceptionally big boulder, there was Another Pit between the path and the beginning of the hill. Another Pit Bastian was 1000% going to break an ankle not noticing one day very soon. It seemed too dramatic a Pit to fill in a way that would look nice, so...
I found a little garden bridge for $55. And it seemed perfect, because crossing a bridge feels like leaving one place and entering another, crossing a boundary, breaching an invisible wall. A physical separation from Regular Life to Writing Life.
But a bridge covers water...and while I cannot make a real pond (YET), I figured I could do something a bit cute. (And reminiscent of Prester John's river of stones) The metal koi cost $35, I scooped gravel out of the driveway and spray painted it the same blue as the Ready Room (see Denizen for this month) peg-boards. I had the glow-in-the-dark turquoise stones from a previous project, and the border is just more forest rocks liberated from the ground and called up to the big game. Then spray painted white.
I moved earth and made water. I've spent most of my life thinking of myself as pretty incapable of anything but writing--I've made jokes to that effect since I was a teen. But now I wonder if I just was told that a lot. And not taught. I look out there now and see place that was never anything but forbidding and broken before, so sweet and lovely and Shire-like now, even if it's not perfect. There's more I want to do, but autumn and winter are coming, so it'll keep till spring.
And I look out there and think: yes. that's how it always looked. That's how I remember it. That's how Bastian will remember it looking, will never remember it any other way.
A lot of things have been forbidding and broken in my life for the last many years. It's so much harder to make those right. At least, harder than carrying bricks or planting grass or liberating rocks. Vastly harder than writing books, where the people mostly learn and grow. But I do think one leads into the other. I'm working on a serious wood witch reputation out here, and if I can fix a forest, maybe, slowly, I can fix myself, fix my stories, fix my way of living. Make it smoother and kinder. Make it my own. Fill in the Divers Pits. Cut back the thorns. Let the sun in. Work with the land as it lies, accepting its difficult parts, folding them into the aesthetic. Get rid of the invasive vines that had taken over, full of painful pricks and barriers that prevented anything from getting a foothold. Make something softer grow.
Maybe I can even do it in time for my little one to never remember us any other way.
Comments
Ailbhe Leamy
Oh I *feel* for you with the stability of address. It's quite a thing.
Lee Hulme
I reckon your wood witch era is gonna be epic.
Laura Bethard
Canning jams, pickles and salsa is my old lady thing and it kind of scratches the same itch of "this is the thing I can control." I look at my pantry full of canned goods and think "I don't know how I'm going to make it through today but my depression era grandma would be proud I won't get scurvy this winter."
