Dolly Parton's My Favorite: A Working Version of Song Lyrics

Hell yeah, Dolly's my favorite

Why you laughing at that?

Prodigy. Self-made lady. Song savant.

You can feel it wherever you go.

From New York to Tennessee to right here at this unwelcome table.

Just want to go Back. 

Back to my hometown kitchen

Kid guitar in my hand. 

Belting "Coat of May Colors"

Before I knew there were people like you.

Take me back Dolly now.

Take me back now Dolly 

To where I'll never "sort-of" belong

 

Go back to where I'll lay to rest one day

We'll sing about the silly times 

Where you are now with your crystal and wine

But the real shine and the fine

Are so much more than this...

It's coming home. 

But for now this dinner with plastic faces --

Crystal decanters--

Fifteen forks--

Maids at the wings--

Conversation turns to music

Dolly comes up 

they say it with disdain and a half-hidden smirk

"She's really your favorite?"

I don't wait to say back: "Always Dolly."

And I'm there. 

Into my hometown kitchen

Kid guitar in my hand

Belting "Jolene" with Dolly 

Before I even was kissed

They said I could sing

But not well enough. And then no connections.

Some saw a pretty face.

I turned away.

Smart enough not to build on a face

On the hard stuff that took my heart. 

So I'm back now. Dolly on my lips.

No guitar. I never learned, but I'll belt it

on karaoke night. 

"9 to 5" still dealing with them.

But it doesn't matter now. I'm home at this table. Never leaving again. Because "I'll Always Love You."

Fog moves in

 I've started two novels in my life. One I started shortly after graduating from college and another last year. This is the start of the second: 

"We knew we had to get the ponytail just right. The length of her hair at just that time of year, the honeyed ends glazed by summer's long lost days, her brown roots growing in just now as the fall leaves fell. The blond-tipped ponytail would be a beacon, a flash in the cold morning fog that would catch the light and his eye. The hope for my team was that he'd have a fantastical moment of deja Vu. That ponytail swish would look so familiar that he'd follow, not really knowing why, except that an old reflex had kicked in and he needed to see it just one more time - even if he already knew that hair lay in damp, dirty locks in the farthest corner of his basement."

There's more, but that's the start. Comments welcome. 

Between Houston and San Antonio

Trying to share a little more of my writing so I can jump back into it full-time over the next months. There's a drawer in my desk with all kinds of things I've been writing over the last 10 years or so and I'd like to type some of them up for this audience to help spring me back into this. Here's a small thing I wrote while on a trip to see my Uncle Steve in San Antonio before he passed from cancer some years ago. 

"The ride between Houston and San Antonio or to Austin reminds me of what I imagined real Texas to be. Cows spotted roadside about 30 miles outside Houston proper: chewing their cud, unconcerned about the massive move of people and metal a few feet from their grassy posts. Stretches and stretches of green laced with yellows and blues and pinks. The sky as big as I'd imagined and then stretched along the edges in pale grays and whites. We're on the concrete way that's dotted with billboards of streaking color. Between two big cities, but longing all the way for a small town spot, good barbecue and some talking on one of those broken-down porches. I can imagine myself there forever between cities, them just out of reach to be convenient. A porch swing. A different page in my book. Maybe one day between San Antonio and Houston." 

I loved the car ride between Houston and San Antonio and Houston and Austin. Inside what some consider the "nothingness" of this drive, I was often captivated by the scenery and the things I was drawn to photograph if we stopped. But we didn't stop. We didn't make time and that was the problem. We were rushing between cities and just generally rushing through life. My uncle's stay in San Antonio gave me so much to think about on the way back to Houston. Why were we going so fast? Why were we always rushing? Why did things have to constantly be on warp speed? That notion stuck and stuck and stuck with me. Especially after our kids were born. Time is precious and the best things are accomplished in simple things. Maybe it was finally time for a change of mindset and a look inward. I've tried pinpointing when the seeds of all the big changes of the past few years set in. This scrap of paper might just be an origin story.

When a home gives you lemons...

Our home has a lemon stained glass window in our downstairs bathroom. It's time to decide what to do with it. And when life gives you lemons, make a lemon-infused space. 

Time and again in my interiors reading, I hear that designers often face a design element that cannot be changed, and thus, the homeowner decides to avoid overlooking the element and instead lean into it. 

This, I think, is that moment for our house. The lemon stained glass is still pretty and fits the window that I really don't want to remove right now (it's almost WINTER!). If you've done renovation, you'll learn costs can quickly mount if you go willy nilly into removing everything without care. 

This is the paper I decided on. Lemons it is.

Friends on Facebook have weighed in on the design. Some agree that my idea of adding wainscoting and trim will help the space that, until now, has been a broad brush effort in this renovation effort. Previously, I painted it Del Mar Blue (a beautiful color in our upstairs) and then the deep and lovely Newburg Green of the upstairs bath. The colors just aren't sitting right in there, and, despite my promises to avoid wallpaper of any stripe after removing at least nine different kinds in that space, I'm going to wallpaper it. (However, I'm planning to REMOVE the wallpaper going forward instead of just tacking on another layer if I happen to change my mind down the line and redecorate. Future Me will thank Me.)

The next part is waiting for the wallpaper to arrive. I have the other wallpaper that I plan to use to mimic wainscoting. Starting out, though, I plan to un-color drench the bathroom with a primer to the ceiling and baseboards. Then, I plan to see how far up the wall the wainscoting will go -- if at all. The wallpaper might just be so beautiful that I'll do all the walls with it. My fear with that, though, is that the walls will look too busy with too many lemons. Have you ever gone into someone's bathroom and been overwhelmed by a pattern? I don't want visitors losing their way to the toilet or the sink in a lemony haze.

We'll see. And I hope to keep progress reports up on this project. So far, I've been doing a lot of things by charging forward and ahead to keep momentum going. This one, though, could benefit from some input. I like getting input on a smaller space that could be easily changed. I also am enjoying the fact that many of our main rooms are pretty much complete and I can focus on writing and photographing things a bit more without complete overwhelm. Remodeling a six-bedroom house is not for the faint of heart. Just to recap, here are some of the COMPLETED PROJECTS in this nine-month renovation: 

1. Plaster ceilings

2. Refinished floors

3. Paint interiors - six bedrooms, hallway, kitchen, parlor, living room and dining room. Only our movie room remains for painting.

4. Renovated bathrooms (2) - adding a third in good and due time.

5. Carpet in upstairs bedrooms and offices

6. Kitchen and laundry refinishing - reclaiming spaces for a breakfast nook and laundry room and eventually a remodeled kitchen

7. Remove an above-ground pool, hot tub, deck and decrepit grape arbor. Reclaim a vegetable gardening space.

8. Paint exterior historical windows and weatherized wooden detailing and porch

9. Remove and replace homemade stained glass craft project with professional stained glass front door window.

10. So much wallpaper removal. Three floors of hallways and the downstairs bath had, in total, 12 layers of wallpaper. The kitchen had so many roosters.

Looking back now, I think the most rewarding part of this is a realization that so many renovators/rehabbers/refinishers/preservationists have made: Doing this requires being decisive. And, in being decisive, you face your fears and live with the actual consequences of your actions. That's hard. 

When I became a semi-minimalist, I had to face that then, too. You live with the fact that you may have to re-buy something you decided to declutter, but the benefits of living with LESS far outweigh the cost of having so much inventory in your home.

Those decisions weigh now a little differently. I'm often sifting through thoughts about the next project, and, in the moment, I find myself pausing about this or that. Nine times out of 10 that pause or hesitation is about facing some kind of fear about my skill set or what the decision will do. I learned how to remove and reconnect lighting this year. I was so afraid of shocking myself. It was a rational fear, but with some learning -- and turning off electrical breakers(!) -- I faced the fear and saved a ton. Now I'm pausing about this project because I'm afraid it will look odd and I'll have to face that in front of friends and family who are watching. (I suppose this is how it is when home renovation shows do their thing too. We just don't have a television-sized budget.) But we'll just keep going. 

If the lemons turn out to be a lemon, I'll paint the bathroom all white and move on until the mood strikes to try again. I really hope my first foray into wallpaper isn't a dud.

(Just a little amazing find while researching for this post -- Home Depot has a pretty amazing selection of Anaglypta paintable wallpaper! Will definitely be digging into that soon!)

 

Mount Pleasant's Trump-Harris Halloween Parade debacle: A parent's reflections

Search "Mount Pleasant Halloween" and you'll find national articles pointing to my hometown. My current town. The town that my husband and I moved our family to this year -- for a break from the fast-paced crazy we once found in our former lives in Texas.

Are you laughing yet? I am -- in a sad, exhausted way.

We moved to a swing state during one of the most vitriolic election years in American history.

My younger son learned the word "rape" from a political advertisement that played during his kid-topic YouTube videos. My older son asked on the way to his gym class whether, indeed, as the advertisement said: "Did Bob Casey FAIL us?"

Then, in the middle of the Mount Pleasant Halloween Parade last Wednesday, my two little kids saw a woman depicting Kamala Harris chained/tethered/handcuffed/leashed to the back of a golf cart with two men (one dressed as Donald Trump) wielding a sniper rifle on a tripod from the top of the vehicle. The vehicle was "protected" by several others flanking the vehicle and dressed as federal agents.

I saw the gun first. 

My initial thought was for the safety of my kids, in front of me, gathering candy off the street. My little boys wear Asics. The little one sometimes wears Velcro sandals when he can't find his Asics. I didn't remember just then what they were wearing, but my mind instantly went to identifying them if needed. In a real-life morgue. 

I was at a Halloween parade. This suddenly got really sad, really fast. But isn't that how this all happens -- over and over in American public spaces? Fun at concerts. Fun at the mall. Being together. Little kids learning their ABCs. My mom and sister and cousins were just down the street. 

I turned to my husband and said, "Breathe. Just breathe."

It's a refrain I immediately turned inward, as I always did as a journalist when reality hit too hard in the moment:

"Just breathe": The Capitol is locking down. January 6.

"Just breathe." A shooting in Uvalde. Several fatalities. Likely juveniles.

"Just breathe." Matthew McConaughey tearfully holding up a pair of sneakers necessary to ID a little girl gunned down in her classroom.

"Just breathe." Police called to an active shooter situation at Sandy Hook Elementary.

As this editorial notes, parade watchers were pulled from the fun of the Halloween festivities into election politics. For a few minutes, all I saw was the gun. Was it loaded? (Open Carry is lawful in Pennsylvania, but it doesn't make it any less jarring to see.)

I eventually saw the Donald Trump mask. It was a political statement. I shook it off -- as most people can do. As we've had to do to keep on going. To be normal when all is definitely not.

A political tableau. OK. That really didn't make any of it better -- especially as I saw what was bringing up the rear: a woman dressed as Harris who agreed to be shackled to a golf cart and paraded through town. What was her involvement? What was her damage to be agreeing to such a thing? How long had this whole thing been planned? Did anyone think -- and even scarier -- what had they thought? Did anyone have misgivings and then say, "whatever," and continue down that road (Death Bed the Bed that Eats People-style)? Who let them onto the parade route?

The mayor and others have issued statements. I've read them. I've processed them. However, the only thing that is staying with me is that visual and my reaction: "Just breathe." Have I -- have we -- been reduced to just surviving through all of this crazy? It seems so. Upon reflection, I've found I helped normalize a scene that could have been pulled directly from "The Handmaid's Tale." This is NOT OK.

And that's just one aspect of this. I'm a white woman. What did Black and brown people think who saw this? It's just cruel and terrible and so embarrassing. My town. 

In a statement, Daylon A. Davis, president of Pittsburgh’s NAACP branch, called the act “harmful” and racist. 

“This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and brown communities have long endured here in America.”

This kind of representation does real harm. And the target audience of a Halloween parade is children. This is how you chose to represent a Black person in a Mount Pleasant parade? Seriously? 

What will be the benchmarks for inclusion in the parade going forward?

I was happy to see people's outrage in the videos circulated and in news reports in the days after. That's the Mount Pleasant I know and am proud to be living in.

We'll likely see changes to next year's parade: Some process. Applications. Vetted parade entries. Maybe. We'll see who wins the election. 

As for me, I'm standing with Mount Pleasant's mayor, as she noted in this NBC report: "This needs to stop. In this country, this needs to stop." 

Inside the renovation: The house wants a pedicure

Amanda Cochran is renovating/restoring/refinishing an 1873 home in southwestern Pennsylvania. Follow her and her family's journey as the home is revamped into a family home with traditional style and Victorian extra-ness.


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The to-do list for our new house is longer a sheet of notebook paper can contain, but yesterday the house itself added one thing to the list and insisted upon it: a pedicure.
I know what this sounds like. Amanda has been inside her house too long. The Yellow Wallpaper is speaking to her. Yes, I could see where you got all that. Especially because her wallpaper was red and white and featured a woman and man in various states of relationship and she was tearing it unceremoniously down from the walls of the new home she’s sharing with her husband. I promise, it’s not symbolic of anything but a change in taste.


But I digress.


The house and it talking to me. It’s not a haunting – but it is of a sort.


In the “Cheap Old Houses” book (which I highly recommend - it's my Mother's Day wish), one of the homeowners is quoted as saying that the home will tell you what it needs.


As I looked down at the floorboards yesterday, I finally heard something that went beyond the creaks of the boards: “I desperately need a pedicure!”


No, not me (but really me, too). The house. Its hardwood floors are in a sorry shape. What appears to be primer and some mid-tone stain are everywhere and wearing through. I got curious. What was underneath all of that?








Reddish pine. Hardly any knots.


But finding a refinisher has not been easy. And the price tag is in the tens of thousands.

It seems the house wants me to give it a pedicure.

And it seems – with years of furniture refinishing under my belt – my home’s floors are to be my largest wood refinishing project ever.

Our home has six bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, living room and kitchen. I’m not refinishing all of those floors. Not even half of them.

I’m starting small: the front hallway. The dining room, parlor and living room are keeping their hardwood floors, but the bedrooms and offices will be carpeted in the coming weeks to ward off cold feet in the wintertime. If I get around to refinishing those spaces some time in the future, I’ll have truly lost my mind, but will likely enjoy the journey into true insanity. For now, though, I’ll contain my crazy to the front hall where so much work is already underway.

I’m refinishing the front door, the hallway shed its wallpaper with my help and beveled windows are under repair. Today I’m buying paint.

Or maybe perhaps, I’ll find myself on the floor, scraping back years of primer and stain. A grand pedicure. That’s what this will definitely be. Pruning to remove the thin layer of primer and stain. Sanding to bring back its softness. Wood conditioner to lay a lovely foundation. Stain to dress up the space. Polyurethane to polish the look. It’s a long way. It’s a long process. It’s going to be awesome.


If you find me talking to my floors, know that I’m promising them everything that I can – everything that I’ve tried to learn over these many years of do-it-yourself projects. If you come over and I’m laughing maniacally on my knees, covered in wood chips and wielding a dull scraper, call my husband and my mom. They’ll know what’s up: she left the polyurethane can open again.


Close the lid and get her a Diet Coke. All will be well. Eventually.

#theseandother2020thoughts

 How am I going to go back to sucking-in undergarments and clothes not made of at least 50 percent spandex? Will I face a day when I draw on my eyebrows again and leave the house, ready to face a number of people who aren't my husband? Will pants be widely worn ever again?#theseandother2020thoughts