dual personalities

Well it has been quite a week. Last Sunday we worked frantically to empty the kitchen. It was touch and go but we got it done.

The contractor and his guys arrived on Monday and got to work. I imagined him moving like Chip Gaines but I’m sure they used actual tools.

In a couple of days later had my kitchen looking like this:

And by the end of the week, they had the room down to the bare bones: no cupboards; no sink; no dishwasher; no floor; no wallpaper, no stove vent, and no lights.

The plastic sheeting over all the doors makes my house look like a crime scene, but it does keep the dust transference to a minimum. We’re managing just fine, although it has been difficult to get a decent cup of tea and the lack of kitchen sink presents a challenge. I’m afraid it’ll be paper plates and bread products for the foreseeable future. No matter —  I booked Thanksgiving dinner at our favorite restaurant. Son #1 will be joining us and I know that we’ll have a delicious meal.

Stay tuned for updates. In the meantime, have a wonderful Thanksgiving and take the time to be grateful for everything, including whatever seems annoying, inconvenient, or terrible, for those things reveal our strengths and weaknesses and teach us to be better. I’m glad to be alive and to remember what Lew Wallace wrote in Ben Hur: “Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.”

*Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of end of World War I. I’ve blogged about our family’s participation on more than one occasion. Over the last four years, the war has received a lot of attention and inspired some wonderful memorials, exhibitions, and history projects.

American cemetery Meuse-Argonne

One of the best WWI archival projects I’ve come across is the web site Epitaphs of the Great War that collects the headstone inscriptions of the war dead. Not only have the compilers researched the deceased, but they have tracked down the literary and religious sources for the memorials. For example, the headstone on Private Edwin Frederick Jones’s grave reads, “May no wanton hand ever disturb his remains,” which turns out to be last line of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie and the epitaph inscribed on the hero Natty Bumppo’s grave.

Families were often creative with epitaphs, although many stuck to tried and true phrases like “Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away” or something from Shakespeare: “Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages.” One family even used “che sera sera”!  Do visit the site and spend some time reading about the young men who lost their lives all those years ago. Unfortunately, many graves have no names; those men are “known unto God”.

I can’t help feeling that the fanfare and research of the last four years are meant to end our remembering — as if to say we can stop thinking about WWI now because it happened a hundred years ago. Yet major wars have a way of holding on, even when we want to forget. Just think of how the Civil War continues to haunt us. As for WWI, laborers in Belgium and France will continue to discover bodies at a rate of more than forty a year whether or not we choose to remember. The dead will have their day.

Don’t forget to wear a poppy and take a moment to be silent tomorrow at 11 am, on the 11th day of the 11th month.

P.S. In other news son #2 god a job! He will be the new arts and entertainment editor of the newspaper, the Idaho Mountain Express! Meanwhile, across the country in northern NY his parents will spend the weekend frantically emptying their kitchen because the big kitchen redo starts on Monday. Stay tuned for updates!

*Byron, Don Juan, and also the epitaph on Private Alan Yardley’s grave.