Lots of Ups and Downs

The Episcopal Church in Riverton

After Christmas when everyone went back to work and school there were a million things I needed to do with the house.  Sis would call every morning to see what I had planned for the day and usually invited me to go here or there.  Most days I would find myself telling her I had things to do at home and beg off from what ever she invited me to do.  I guess I had sunk into some state of depression without really realizing it.  After putting on my "Happy Face" for the family and friends from Kansas City that would call there was simply no energy left to do anything.

Maybe it was just January after the holidays or the fact that it got dark at 4:30 in the afternoon on the east coast or that there was so much to do I did not know where to start.  The good thing is that I am one of those people who gets out of bed every morning thinking what a great day it will be. If the day didn't turn out so great there was always tomorrow. By the end of January the tomorrows turned into todays and I started going places with Sis and making decisions on the house.

There was a small paint and wallpaper store in Palmyra less than a mile away.  It was a good place to try to get some idea of what to do as far as the house was concerned.  In my usual fashion I had decided to do Wes and Wally's rooms first.  Every wall in the house had wallpaper even the inside of the closets.  Why?  That and a lot of other questions I did not even know enough to ask were answered by the young man  who owned the store.  There was a lot to learn about paint as well as wallpaper when it came to plaster walls I had never thought of.

Rick, the young man at the paint store, realized that my smarts about wallpaper were different from his as well as my love of latex paint. He actually made a trip to the house to look it over and make me feel stupid. I didn't know that you never put latex paint over oil paint. Naturally, all the paint in the house was oil based, probably lead filled as well, but as long as I didn't chew on the baseboards it would be fine. 
Wallpaper covered all the plaster walls to not only help hide imperfections but also to hide tiny hairline cracks that could appear from the house settling or an earthquake.

New on the market was a magic primer that would prevent the old wallpaper from bleeding through to the new layer.  No, it would be best not to remove the old paper but to go over it.  The rule was two layers are fine but three layers is a waste of time. By using the new magic oil based primer called Kilz I could not only hide the old wallpaper but give the new a base for the wallpaper to adhere to.  Wow, the magic Kilz was only $35.00 a gallon since there was no other product on the market to compete with it. Was Rick being honest with me or was he just seeing $$?  Hmm....I could have sunk into a deeper depression with the thought of $35.00 a gallon Kilz, $41.00 a gallon for oil based paint and whatever hundreds of rolls of wallpaper were going to cost. 

Starting to work on the redo of the house was good for me.  Secretly I had been in an "oh, whoa is me mode" for over three months. Here I was thirty-four years old and my only new friends, Sis and Gus and Mary Jane and Danny, were thirty years older than I. I could still burst into tears at the grocery store because I could not understand the "Jersey" accent when someone spoke to me.   (The people in Riverton really had more of a mid-western speech pattern) Naturally one would think that other Ford Motor Company wives would be good to make friends with.  I have always said I could write a book on corporate wives that move around every few years. For now I will just say the less conversation I had with any of them through the years the better.

Rick had fallen in love with Tug, the new puppy, when he was advising the decorator, me, as to what to do so after school one day the boys and I bundled up and took Tug for a walk to the paint store to look at wallpaper. Tug was so tired by the time we got there that he just sat in Wes' lap and looked at the books.  Wes, of course wanted the drag racing wallpaper again but it was no longer being made.  Wally liked the little bears and bunny rabbits so I needed to point them in a better direction.

They had adjoining bedrooms.  Not always a good thing but somehow I convinced them that maybe they should coordinate in some way.  We talked about how much Wes was enchanted by the river, ocean and boats so a nautical theme might work. Wally was still afraid that the ghosts in the house were going to get him at night so it was decided that Willie the Whale painted on one wall would protect him. I was pretty proud of myself for steering them in the right direction.  Wes' paper had a white background with blue architectural drawings of boats and Wally had a coordinating rib-ticking like paper.  Oh, Wonder how I came up with blue?  At least it was not going to be the pale Wedgwood blue that currently filled the house.  

The boys came home from school one day and were so excited that they had learned that the next evening they could go sign up for a little league wrestling team in Palmyra.  Do I need to say that I was perhaps a little less than excited?  Soccer, baseball or football may have been more to my liking but they told stories how all their new friends were going to sign up and I knew it was their way of wanting to fit in with the new surroundings. What was I to do but take them over to sign up.
It is difficult to describe that experience.  I purchased these rather silly looking suits, shoes and paid the team fee.

Thank heavens the wrestling season was very short or maybe they quit after a short time.  Wes tried but he was a bit of the skinny side for his age bracket which was filled with boys who looked liked they would grow up to star in Hulk movies.  Wally would look at the little boy he was supposed to wrestle, smile and was instantly pinned to the mat. I don't quite think he had much of a competitive spirit.  To top everything off the coach was a rather dislikeable character and yelled some very vile comments at both the boys and the parents in the bleachers. There was actually a fist fight in the bleachers one Saturday morning...maybe that was the about the same time the boys never returned to wrestling
again.  Hooray!

Things were beginning to look up.  The boys had friends and liked their school and teachers, I began hanging out with Sis more and was even invited to join the Porch Club and the Riverton Historical Society.  I was hoping that the Porch Club and the Historical Society was a better way for me to fit into our new town than joining wrestling was for Wes and Wally. French Fry became the terror of all the squirrels in our trees.  There seem to be a never ending stack of squirrel corpses in our basement window wells. Best of all was little Tug who had to be the cutest and smartest dog ever. The boys fought every night over who would get to sleep with him but Wally ended up with him most of the time as French Fry wouldn't let Tug on Wes' bed.

Even with constant grumbling from dear Dennis things were beginning to look up especially after a phone call from Barney.