Edges and ledges

See it? That new cedar green strip
above the 2nd floor porch window?

All summer my body has been cranking out an early-morning song,  a call and response with the birds. My alarm is set for 5:55,  but I'm always ready to sprint before the tone sounds. Lately, however, my brain cells need to get out and start painting at 3:30 or 4am, making me think that Simi might be right...I am a little close to the edge.

It was breezy at 5:30 am today and I was hyped on coffee and paint fumes and way too eager to paint the porch floor, having spent much of yesterday with three brushes in my hand (yes--navy, cedar, cream) trimming fine details on the columns and repairing one bobble just in time to make another and have to switch colors.  But then Tommy arrived  (taken off the other job removing asbestos after his work partner--all space suited and helmeted up--keeled over yesterday--wonder why)  making this a surprise "lift day," and thereby scratching all other plans. 

100 degrees outside, 120 degrees inside.

Ok, we are flexible around here.  I changed the game plan  and  painted from the lift while Tommy repaired gutters.  Everyone agreed that the front of the house above the ultra-elaborate pedimento was a large yawn by comparison to the extravaganza of color we had created on the porch.  So...I added a cedar stripe below the nearly invisible navy and even more invisible green brackets that I'd almost killed myself back-bending into the first week.  Yes, I know.

Someone (I believe it was La Postina, Marie) tattled to Ken that I'd painted the back gable detail green-blue-green instead of the green-green-blue that we have on the other two) so Ken repaired my mistake only to paint the same detail in another green-blue-blue.  All this prompts me to wonder how many wrong ways there are to paint a gable.  Hot, hot, hot.  I tell you we are losing it.

Green blue.  Blue green?  Green blue green??

I took myself out of the mix after lunch and left Tommy and Ken in the lift painting the back sunroom windows.  One of the things I did this morning before dawn was to stretch as far as I could out of the corner window just to see if I could reach the exterior brackets with a scraper and paintbrush.  Well, yes...if you hook your right leg around the window ledge, hang on to the roof with your left fingertips, grip the brush in your teeth, and don't look down. It gives new meaning to the word "window-seat."

After today we'll be finished painting from the lift.  Just kidding!  The gangly dinosaur is beginning to look right at home in our yard, along with Old Forester, Subaru, and Truck of Antiquity.  And Tommy has moved into the sleeping porch and is beginning to leave laundry on the floor and say things like, "How is supper shaping up?"

Are we having fun yet?

Actually, yes.

This column was creeping outward.

Ira dons headdress, attacks lattice.

Tommy, me, and the lift.  We stayed high all day long.

North Side.  The last frontier.

Pedimento, continued

Shot from church steps.

Pedimento

Out, out, damned spot!  Cedar must go.

My friend Barb calls her blog Pentimento, an Italian term meaning the painter repented, painted over, and left traces of the original design.  Such is the history of the front pediment of the Emma House.

The center triangle was originally gray--we think--to go with a mustard exterior.  For years it was a solid white--obviously a relief from the previous colors.  With this incarnation I can't get it right, either...the interior triangle has now been painted light cream, cedar, and finally darker cream, the field color of the house.

I've sat on the church steps and pondered the colors, and how each balances with those surrounding it.  I've mused on the play of tones as I walked to the post office, the bank, and the library.  (All just around the corner in Clinton.)  I've backed into the street during mid-day traffic (not that dangerous) and decided if the pediment center was cedar then the surrounding windows would need to be painted to balance.  Not what I want, at least not at this point.

I think this final color--the khaiki-based cream of the body of the house--is the keeper, but tracks and traces of the process remain around the edges, in the farthest corners where my brush wouldn't reach, and in little scars and pock-marks that cover the surface and challenge my will.  This house will not surrender its history.  And the floor of the pediment--where we all signed our names last Friday-- looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.