33 Zen Lane

33 ZEN LANE

Thursday

         This is the time I’ve been waiting for all summer.  This is the weekend my house will become everything I wanted it to be when I first bought it.  Memorial Day and July 4th are past, Labor Day is a month away.  This is the Non-Holiday Weekend.
         Today I will take the car into town instead of puttering across the lake in the motorboat.  I stop at the butcher’s for ribs, brisket, chicken; the grocer’s for potatoes, macaroni, eggs, and other salad makings.  The back of the jeep is stuffed with bags and boxes when I finally turn the wheel back toward the Northwestern shore. 
         They were old cabins once upon a time.  Two rooms at best, basically camping cabins.  One by one they were bought up by people who wanted to get away from the big cities.  People who liked the rustic lakeside setting, but intended from the get go to renovate, build on, and make their vacation house just like their condo in the city.  There are satellite dishes on a lot of the houses on the lake.  Mine is no exception, but how else would I get an internet connection out here.  Email is one of my few connections to the outside world, as well as how I connect to work.  Satellite TV is just a pleasant side effect I try to ignore as much as possible.
         My cabin has been added onto piecemeal by various owners, and it looks like it.  Fresh paint makes everything match, but some sections look like they’re just butted up against the side of the house.  There are baskets of flowers hanging under the shade of the low eaves, and a wooden fence covered in honeysuckle forms a hedge of sorts at the edge of my property.  Two huge lavender shrubs flank the entrance to my driveway.  The gate is open and a battered blue pickup truck is sitting in front of the garden walk. 
         When I get out of the jeep the dog runs to greet me, tail wagging madly.  She looks at me expectantly, then glances behind her into the garden.  I know it has to do with my boyfriend, the owner of the blue pickup.  I grab three bags of groceries and follow my white German Shepherd into the garden.  The garden has grown up around us in spurts over the last couple of years.  There are tubs now overflowing with tomatoes and peppers.  There are too many onions and carrots but I know some of them will feed whatever is tunnelling under them.  More tubs make a home for my herb garden.  I don’t have to buy much in town anymore, and what I do need I tend to order from the internet.  Spaced along the foundation are oddly sprouting pennyroyals.  I put them there to keep bugs out, but the placement doesn’t seem to sit well with the plants themselves. 
         The man in my life is on the deck, scrubbing down his gas grill.  Beside it is the smoker; both of which he brought over today.  The radio is on, but he’s whistling another tune as he works so he doesn’t hear me coming.  I stop by the back door as Misty runs to him, winds herself around his legs a few times before I call her back.  He looks up, blue eyes warm and amused. 
         I drop the bags on the kitchen island and I’m about to go out for more when he stops me with a kiss.  Unexpected, but never unwanted.  He wraps his arms around me an lifts me off my feet.  Then he’s put me back down and swatted me on the seat of my jeans to send me back out for more groceries as he paws the bags.  He’s looking for his barbecuing supplies, so I have to haul him back out to the truck to help me bring the rest in. 
         Once it’s all in he grabs a soda from the case I had hoped to hide in the laundry room with the rest.  If I don’t hide it he’ll drink it all.  Then he’s unpacking the bags, getting what he wants and leaving the rest for me to put away.  Once he’s got everything he is looking for he starts preparing slabs of meat for the smoker.
         We had been lying on the giant teak lounge on the deck looking up at the stars when I broached the subject of this weekend.  I liked the way he automatically volunteered his barbecuing skills as well as other services for the duration of the weekend.  Last week he came over to fix the wobbly railings leading to the dock and cleaned out the hot tub.  He’ll help me do shuttle service from the train station tonight and tomorrow.  I’m surprised how enthusiastic he is considering it’s mostly my family and friends from out of state who are coming, although there are a few of our friends and his coworkers coming from town.

         He’s got the radio on in the kitchen and he’s singing along while he works, so I take a stack of freshly washed sheets and start making beds.  There were four bedrooms when I bought the house;  one has since been turned into an office  and studio.  The smallest guest room has two old twin beds from the local college in it.  New mattresses, bright turquoise sheets, and white fleece blankets make me think of weekends down at the Jersey shore.  The walls are painted pale blue three quarters up, then white to the ceiling, pictures of beaches decorate the seam between white and blue wall.  One nightstand with a rice paper lamp is all the rest of the furniture.  Peg racks on either side of the room have hangers on them ready for guests.  The next room has my old double bed which gets blue and white pinstriped sheets and an old blue and green summer quilt.  The white cafe curtains have blue ribbons on their borders.  The bronze candlestick lamp with it’s white shade that I’d trimmed in blue beaded fringe sits on the nightstand that matches the one in the small room.  I found a dresser in a junk shop, stripped and sanded it and painted it twice and sanded again so the blue undercoat shows through the cream gloss.  Two Susan Seddon Boulet posters hang on the walls.
         My room is the biggest of course, with the best view.  I have two windows that look out onto the scrubby  side of the property.  There’s a fir tree there which had to be trimmed so I could have a view over the rocks and down across the lake.  When I moved in I decided I had to have a queen sized bed.  I was completely alone so it seemed an odd decision.  Now I’m grateful for it.  Pristine white sateen sheets and pale aqua coverlet in here.  I added the lace trim on the sheets myself, and used the rest to edge the shadow striped shades on the windows.  Aqua paint in here too, with pale custard-colored glossy woodwork.  Everything looks like summer all year round. 
         The living room and dining room are a jumble of hand me downs and thrift store finds.  There’s the blue and white jaquard love seat I inherited from my sister years ago, flanked by two overstuffed easy chairs covered in white canvas slip covers.  The easy chairs don’t match anything; they’re green and red respectively and they need reupholstering, but the slipcovers do the trick.  The coffee table used to hold my childhood dollhouse and wasn’t much to look at.  Last winter I ordered several pounds of mosaic glass tiles and spent two days of a winter storm tiling and grouting the table.  It’s rather pretty now.  Book cases line most of the wall space.  Some are filled with romance and mystery novels, a couple have spiritual and magic books, another showcases odd literature and nonfiction and art books.  I have so many books.  Side tables came from a friend and they’re covered with vintage linen tea towels protected by a slab of glass.  My favorite bronze uplights are in here, as well as a couple of wallchieres I picked up at the home improvement store.
         In the dining room is the long dining table I got from my best friend.  All six chairs have been recovered in red and the table has my best blue and green tablecloth on it.  There are two more book cases in the kitchen stocked with cookbooks.  A couple of them are spiral bound sketch books I use for collecting recipes; some recipes are printed from the internet and pasted in from the newspaper, others I’ve invented and toyed with and written in by hand.  One book contains old recipes handed down from family members.  I xeroxed recipes out of my mother’s card files and hand copied them all the first winter after I moved in, notating where they originally came from, and making sure any of my mother’s notes were included.
         I deal with the boxes from shopping that need to be recycled.  I’ve been cleaning all week so everything is in place.  There’s not much more to be done until people start arriving.  I squeeze past him in the kitchen to get a glass of iced herb tea and I take that and my notebook outside. 

         There are three decks here.  The largest has an assortment of odd folding chairs and tin tray tables that I’ve been collecting at yard sales and junk shops.  They’re all stacked against the side of the house for now.  The teak lounge and a small cafe set are all that occupy the upper deck.  There’s a blue and white striped sailcloth canopy lying on the table waiting to be hung as soon as he is done in the kitchen.  The gas grill and the smoker are waiting to one side, away from where the canopy will hang. 
         The second deck is off around the side of the house, accessible by a short path, has a fence and gate around the hot tub.  The tub was old and in need of service when I bought the house, which is how I found my gentleman friend.  I had been looking for the chemicals I’d need for the tub when I bumped into him - literally - in the aisle at the home store.  He’s a contractor and he helped me find someone to check out the tub.  He gave me his card and I hired him to help me fix up the house.  When some of the expenses of the repairs went beyond my means he let me know that he’d accept dinner as payment for some of the more minor work.  We stopped keeping track a while ago. 
         The third deck is small with a railing around it, two short steps down from the main deck.  It sits right on the edge of the rock face and is really more of a landing.  Leading from this deck are the steps that go down the rock face to the water.  There’s a long wooden dock at the bottom where my boat is tied.  There’s a ladder that goes down into the water for swimming.  Today I sit in the center of the long flight of steps and stare out at the lake and the boats on it as I check off items from the long lists I keep making.  I sent off two articles this morning, and the day before yesterday I recorded the last chapter of the latest audio book from my online agent.  Work is done for the weekend.  My fella’s deep voice barks from above and I realize the light is fading.  Time to put up the canopy while we still can.  I have outdoor lighting - once again provided by my fella - but hanging the canopy is easier in daylight. 
         The canopy is up and we go inside to prepare dinner.  I light the candles on the cafe table and we eat outside with the sailcloth flapping in the breeze.  After dinner is cleared away he lures me out to the hot tub where we lounge naked in the water, our last few moments of privacy before the family invasion tomorrow.