Drained....

Midnight in the kitchen.

The 99 cent bubbles
swirled,
twirled,
cascaded one
right after another down the drain,
each one another hopeful contestent for the Miss America Pageant...
savoring her moment of fame,
bottom lip quivering,
then disappearing forever...

Tiny little Hungry Man Dinner carrots
bobbed,
drowning,
but pretending for a moment to be orange buoys in a silver sea.

I turned the water on harder.
Hot and Cold.
Everything at once.

I splayed my fingertips under the spigot, water splattering, spraying, splashing everywhere.

I cried.

And then I saw them.


The butterfly wings.....

99 Bottles of Beer on the wall.....

And what to do with all those caps?

Take one down,
throw 'em around.....

And glue them back
on the walls, of course!




It's Friday,
bring on
the
peace!

Feel the love!

Pass the beer, please!

The Critiques....and other chatter.....

“You have to paint more positive” “Draw happy things, you know, like
funny Valentines”
Oh my God, and should I sign my scribblings Hallmark?
“Well, you could just try. Try to not be so dark, so gloom and doom. So damned”
I like being damned. It gives me something to talk about.
“Uggggghhhhh….”


“I don’t like that they all have nipples.”
Is it okay that they have noses?


“I know you’re writing about me. I know what you’re doing. Drawing those pictures and all”
It’s not all about you.
“Really?”
Really
“Then what’s this one all about?”
Me.


“It’s kind of like airing your dirty laundrey, isn’t it?”
Yup


“They’re really pretty, but why are they all different colors?”
Aren’t we all?
“Yeah, but….”


“This house, all this, it’s nonsensical, really. Kind of like your brain on acid”
Hmmmmm.
“There’s no place to sit. You don’t have a couch. You don’t even have chairs at the kitchen table. You have these step stool things. And cats everywhere”
Hmmmmm
“Everything is painted a different color. There’s no theme. It’s not smooth.”
“Kind of like how you think. All zipping back and forth like a pendulum”
Hmmmmm
“I’m not comfortable here”
Good.



“I kind of think they all look like me”
They do.


“You rock”
You roll….



“I would have been surprised if it hadn’t looked just like this. Your house”
You would have?
“Yeah, I always knew it would look just like this”

If the walls could talk....

It was the dawning of 1992. We sat barefooted at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, twirling little locks of straight blonde hair in our fingertrips. Babies laughed just out of our reach, tumbled on the empty carpeted floor.

Love beads, our millioneth set, baked slowly in the oven. We believed. The ugly years behind us, it was time to rock and roll. To love. To pray for peace. Again.

We celebrated slowly....the coming of hope....the deliverance of 1992 into our welcome arms. "It will be a good one" we clanked, bottles bottom up in cheers. We smiled at the promise and even, laughed at the past. "Hell, it's what got us here, isn't it?"

In the wee hours before dawn, I peeked at my sleeping little ones, chubby fingers and toes, protected, for now, from the chaos of the outside world, by the quiet hum of Led Zepplin .

Paigey and I started then. Took the last of the beads from the slow-cooking oven and covered the beerstained kitchen table with cardboard. Out came the cigar boxes filled with trinkets, shoestrings, old crayons. The water colors, the markers, pencils, pens, and india inks.

We blobbed and dripped and dribbled, shot acrylic paint through straws, drug dirty shoelaces through puddles of color until it happened..... Peace on the kitchen table.

The words just happened. A quiet after thought. A signing-off actually. Tiny little words lacing the circle.

"May the wizards work their wonder...
May the children laugh and dance with each other in a world with no man-made storms.
May we wish on stars and believe enough in ourselves to reach out to them.
May we always believe in magic and be brave enough to enjoy it.
May the guardian angels spread their wings and keep us near
and may we never forget God is watching us.

To peace and love and laughter in 1992
and
as always,
to dreams and the promise of tomorrow"

justgivemepeace.com

Scrapbook House

Through my daughters eyes...


I guess you could say I was eavesdropping. I was in the next room chatting away on the computer. In the kitchen, my Mom and her friend sat opposite each other sipping hot coffee and chain smoking. Conversation bouncing back and forth between them like a volley ball game. They were good at this. They had been having kitchen-table-talks for years. They knew when to interrupt, when to change the subject, when to sit quietly and just nod. They were friends. Old friends. Honest friends. Most of the morning, their words just trickled by me, nothing more than background static, like the continuous hum of the ceiling fan. I wasn’t even aware that I was listening until the words that casually tumbled out onto the kitchen table began to break my heart. “You know, sweetie, if you ever sell this old house, someone will have to spend a fortune gutting it”. My Mother laughed aloud and their continuous bantering once again became background noise.

Very quietly, I gazed around the room. Gut it? Did she mean tear down the walls? Rip out the cabinets? Take down the doors? Gut it? Peel up the floors? Yank out the windows? Pull down the lights? Yes, I thought, that is what she meant. Craning backwards now, I peered down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Thousands and thousands of pieces of broken tile danced and swirled up the hallway walls, then snaked around the corners….a meandering mosaic that crawled up my bedroom walls, around the windows and back out my door again. Deep mysterious symbols are concealed in the intricate patterns. My Mother’s art. Grouted for eternity into the walls that divide our home.

My eyes are hurting. I have a headache, right there behind the part of your heart that you see with. I want to put on sunglasses. Rose colored sunglasses. Because I do not want to see our house the way other people must see it. I want to see it the way my Mother sees it. There are nineteen cabinets in our kitchen and seven drawers. There are green doors, lavender drawers, pink cabinets, yellow shelves, blue cupboards. Every inch of every surface intricately embellished with flowers and ribbons and cascading designs that either flow perfectly or abruptly end…as if she were stopped mid sentence. Pastel Pointe shoes , painted in honor of my first solo ballet, are tangled into the quirky design. The ratty satin ribbons blending into the background.
Our kitchen door is psychedelic. As is the laundry room door. The steps are painted. The doorframes are painted. The baseboards are painted. The cobblestone porch is painted. The garden gate is painted. Some of our windows are even painted. Carefully executed in reverse, with the good side to the world. Tiny voids of paint…the center of a flower, the eye of a storm…act as peep holes. At first sight, it looks as if someone has gone mad and collaged the entire house. There are archways of a zillion shells, all priceless treasures the tide was kind enough to share with my Mother. And amidst it all, there are words buried everywhere. I suddenly remember a remark a friend of mine once made: “Be careful what you say around here, her Mom will paint it somewhere”. It’s true. It’s called Graffiti. Our entire house is like the back page of a children’s Highlights magazine…find the hidden objects. I wonder now, if she envisioned this concrete scrapbook as one big blank canvas when she first discovered the “For Sale” sign in the tattered front yard. I take a slow breath and wonder if she’ll live to fill every page with color…if she’ll still be painting when I’m forty…if my children’s first heralded birthdays will be recorded here also.

I have grown up here. I turn around and my life is splashed onto every surface. The summer at Ballet Camp. My first boyfriend. Homecoming. My Mother’s tiled, glued, painted house are proof we have survived it all. I run my fingers down the baseboard.

Storyteller house.
Scrapbook house.
Home.

Peace, love, and the painted porch

Artwork (c) Singleton 2006
SOLD

Through my eyes....

First of all, it didn’t start out a porch. Or a patio. Or anything close to the great outdoors. It was a 1950’s carport. I first pulled in under it’s protective roof in 1995 and immediately banged my shiney red car doors on the columns . My first car ever was a green and green 1957 Chevy and I was sure it was much bigger than Adam’s Apple, my candy red Grand Am. Why in the heck were these columns so close together? I knew instinctively, “this will never work”. Adam’s Apple was left to scorch in the sun .

Aesthetically, it was pathetic. The concrete floor was puddled with oil stains and thick with psoriatic peeling paint. But it was instantly, the entrance to my house. My kitchen door lived here. My driveway ended here. This was my new old house. And this was the way I wanted in. I stared at it.

For a long time.

And then I spent days on my knees, scraping the veneer of old paint off the floor, and intricately painting oriental rug designs on the concrete. Wallah! It’s a patio! Tacky, and hot as hell, I was still determined to make it a welcomed place. I parked a few chairs out there, a hanging plant, and directed visitors to ENTER here.

And they did.

Because I asked them to.

Over the years, the floor was leveled, the bottom was bricked in, the windows to the world were screened. A door that squeaks like a Halloween sound track was hung, wind chimes were dangled and strung, and placed meticulously anywhere there was a breeze. The mosquitoes were banned, the lizards never took their eviction seriously and have squatter’s rights to their original domain. The columns and walls were painted. Not to match the house. Not to match the landscape. To match my world.

The furniture is painted. The doors are painted. The kitchen window is painted. Graffiti is everywhere. The words, the moments, the memories are cradled forever in a psychedelic surround-sound-style mural that engulfs the entire porch. From the street, the view is probably somewhat obnoxious. An architectural wreck piled up against the little pink and white “grandma’s house”. From under the fan, parked in my pajamas, watching the sun come up, it is home. My children grew up here…their accomplishments and passages embedded in the walls. My grandchildren scribble here. You are allowed to paint on the walls at Mimi’s house. My friends etch their presence here, autograph my life with their thoughts and takes on our world. Hurricanes are recorded here, soldiers are immortalized here. The painted porch is my welcome sign.

Anytime the light is on.