…around here, where we start talking about things we’d like to do to the house, because the house? she needs work.  The roof has got to be replaced and I still haven’t gotten to finishing painting the trim in the hall or our bedroom, and when we start talking, because we’re in construction, we end up with some pretty neat plans.  Only, zero time to do them. Just a big fat zero. And there’s no way either of us will hire someone else to do them because we know we can for less than half the price someone else would charge and we’re not big on throwing money away, so we shelve the ideas for that magical one day when we’re going to have more time.  I’m sure we’ll be in walkers by then and will need to rethink most of the design elements. (Or we’ll be too senile to care.)

But the one thing I miss is painting; I used to oil paint — did so for many years, and it’s an amazingly relaxing thing for me to do.  I don’t feel like painting is “the” thing I do — I’ll never be great at it, I’ll never have that unique vision that makes me a wonderful artist, and that’s not only okay, it’s a very good thing, because I don’t feel this urge to compete. (With writing, I am always trying to improve over the last thing I wrote. It’s a necessary sickness.)  With painting, I don’t really care if it ever hangs anywhere or if anyone thinks anything is any good; it’s just the process of transferring something to an image that makes me just zone out and come back refreshed.  So every time we have these conversations about the house and what we’d like to do to it, Carl always mentally includes a spot for me to have a corner in which to paint; an easel and everything ready for whenever I want to sit down and have at it.

And then… we realize that we’re the ones who’d have to build all of this stuff and we don’t even know when we’d do that, and then, seriously, when on earth would I have the time to paint?  I have this dream that one day soon, it will just magically happen.  (I want to be in one of those makeover shows where someone just comes in and does it all and then they go away and I can have everything I wanted for a little public humiliation on TV.  I could live with that.)

Maybe one day.