I hope you
enjoyed the first chapter of A Piece of Work.
As I’ve been re-reading it I realized something. When I originally wrote the first 14 chapters I was living in a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. Like many people at the time we were trapped there because the house values had gone down so much we couldn’t get enough money out of our house to make a move.
Fast forward 6 years. My son was out of high school, and my husband got a job offer in Oregon. By that time the house’s value was up enough that we could afford to make the move. Now we live on 20 acres in the woods. My husband spends half his time hauling wood and working in the garden. We even have a barn and he has a tractor!
Best of all, I finally have my own quilting studio. It’s not quite as fancy as Edna’s, but it does have a fantastic worktable that my husband built for me.
Isn’t it interesting how things turned out? Now, my husband and I are Edna and Joe, and my son is Joey, off at college. Life imitates art!
Anyway, I
hope you enjoy Chapter 2.
Susan
Chapter 2: Edna's Studio
Edna heard Joe fire up his rider mower just as she was finishing putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. She wiped the table and counters clean and checked to make sure she didn’t need any groceries in town, (if Joe was going in, he could at least pick up a few things). After making her list, she did a quick check to make sure all was in order and then went into the bedroom to make the bed. Her mother was one of those that kept to a house cleaning schedule and Edna liked the routine. Today, was the one day she’d always kept for herself, but now with Joey off at college she had more of those days then she was used to.
He’d been gone for two months now, down in Nevada at UNR. He’d wanted to go to Las Vegas but his folks thought Reno was dangerous enough. Besides, he’d be closer to the winter sports he loved, and her sister, who lived in Carson City.
Jolene was also a quilter, and having had no children of her own to take care of, a “mothering” aunt to her only nephew. Edna tried not to be jealous when her sister told her about her son’s visits. She missed him so much, but was also pleased with Jolene’s reports. He’d made the football team, and they already had plans to go down for a game in a couple of weeks. It would be great to see him again, and she’d convinced Joe to go a day earlier so she and Jolene could hit the quilt shops.
Edna couldn’t wait to get into her studio. When they inherited the house it needed a lot of work. Joe’s mother had passed on a few years before and his father wasn’t good at keeping it up. Edna used to go over once a week to clean, but her father-in-law didn’t like it when Joe tried to fix things up around the place. He was always very sweet to Edna, a real gentleman. But he and his son had a love/hate relationship. When they got along it was great, but if the old man sensed his son might be infringing on even the tiniest bit of his liberty, there’d be fireworks.
So, by the time he died, (a heart attack while mowing the front forty), the house was in bad shape. Joe had been left the house, the acreage, and a substantial amount of cash he had no idea his dad had. Turns out the old man had invested the profit from a land sale years ago in a tech company. He’d done it because the land was an apple orchard, so he thought investing in “Apple” was appropriate. Joe and Edna were certainly glad he did.
Joe had been a successful handy man-about-town for years. He could do anything and since the town was too small to support too many tradesmen, he fixed everything from computers to combine harvesters. He looked like any redneck farmer, but Joe was smarter than most and the folks in town knew it. Anytime anything went wrong, it was always, “you’d better call Joe.”
Now that he and Edna were “rich” he could afford to do what he really wanted and his first job was fixing up his daddy’s house. They rented out their tiny 2 bedroom place and he started making all the changes he’d wanted to do over the years.
The house was a typical farmhouse, built in the early twenties. The rooms downstairs were large, especially the kitchen, where the hands used to be fed when it was an operating ranch. Edna figured 12 large men regularly took their meals there. Attached to the kitchen was a huge pantry and beyond that a door that took you outside to the basement and root cellar.
Joe refinished the cabinets, lovingly restoring the huge hutch that took up most of one wall. Edna loved the piece as it held all of her baking supplies, and had a handy marble top for rolling pie pastry. Joe matched the marble for the rest of the countertops, and ordered new appliances from Sears. Edna was afraid it would be too fancy, all that marble and stainless steel, but with the original white farm sink, and vintage white cabinets it had a lot of charm. She especially loved the little potbelly stove that Joe restored and kept stocked with wood. There was no place cozier than her farmhouse kitchen on a cold day.
The rest of the downstairs was put in order by refinishing the wood floors, painting, and replacing hinges on wobbly doors. You entered the house from a wide porch, and went into a small hall and then through another set of doors into the house. The first space operated as a mud room, with a coat rack and umbrella stand, it also kept the worst of the cold air from getting in. The second set of doors were glass and opened into a hall. A staircase was against the left wall. On the right was the dining room, which led into the kitchen, on the left was the living room which led onto the office/library where Joey used to do his homework. At the other end of the hall were two doors, one led into the kitchen, the other into what had once been the “conservatory” but was now Edna’s studio.
It was the room that Edna had always dreamed of. She chastised herself for fantasizing about it when her father-in-law was alive, but now that he was gone she decided to stop feeling guilty and enjoy it.
The room was actually the least habitable in the house. It had been shut up for many years. In the summer it was too hot and in the winter too cold. Originally, Joe’s grandmother had thought she could grow vegetables year round in it but it never worked out. Joe’s original impulse was to keep it shut up because he didn’t want to deal with it. He could build Edna a studio when he built his workshop. However, she would not be denied. Why couldn’t they just tear out the windows and rebuild the exterior? She’d prefer to have laminate instead of hardwood in the room anyway, so the condition of the floors didn’t matter. She sat down and drew what she’d imagined and Joe agreed that it was a grand idea. He and Joey framed the exterior, put in some beautiful double paned windows, and another little pot belly stove to keep it warm. Edna chose simple white cabinets from IKEA that arrived in a big truck in boxes that Joe couldn’t believe held all the pieces.
Her favorite thing in the room was the old farm table. Joe discovered it in the barn, covered with old blankets. It was massive, big enough for at least 14 people, and since the condition wasn’t perfect Joe had no problems doing to it whatever Edna suggested. Now it had large holes drilled in it to hold electrical cords, (Joe’d already wired the center of the room for an island), small sliding drawers underneath, and an ironing surface and cutting board. Joe mounted the cutting board onto a piece of plywood and screwed it into the table, and did the same to an ironing surface Edna made. This way, they could be removed and replaced, as it was Edna’s intention to wear them both out.
Once the studio was finished it was where she could be found most days. An open arch had been built between the library and the studio so Joey and Edna could hang out together, (and she could keep an eye on his homework), and the proximity to the kitchen meant she could work away and still hear the oven buzzer. It was ideal.
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