Silly Furniture and the Homemaker's Pipe Dreams

Joy Dare Day 23:  3 gifts found around the table
Today as D and I sat around the table at breakfast, we planned our week alone.  Knox and Ben are at Camp Mawmaw-Daddyghee's, where they will have at least one fun activity daily.  So gift #1 is D's excitement over our relatively mundane plans:  playing the guitar, giving him a daily piano lesson, painting furniture, cleaning out the attic, swimming, and shopping.  Not very exciting and certainly not expensive especially since shopping is just the regular grocery trip, but he was happy to hear what we would do together.  To be fair, I had really not considered the painting to be a "together" activity.  I had thought I would paint, and he would watch.  Well, that's not exactly how it happened.  When I was on the phone with Mawmaw to say, "No, Knox and Ben are right.  They are not allowed to have Coca-Cola yet."  D took to painting on his own.

I added a little to what he had started and gift #2 is our painting venture of our ten-year-old black chairs from IKEA.  Its third reincarnation is below:

 
 
 
 
 
 Funny how layers of paint give a chair a more interesting patina and unique coloring.  The final result is an orange-red, a medium vermilion. 
 This layering of paint or changing directions with a painting is called pentimento:  "an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his or her mind as to the composition during the process of painting. The word is Italian for repentance, from the verb pentirsi, meaning to repent" (thank you, Wikipedia "Pentimento").
 
  This technique can be an interesting metaphor for life.  I read the following quotation on Facebook today (thank you, Troy Causey):  "What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it's supposed to be."  And I think that's it. I  had this picture in my mind of how my life, my children, my marriage, my husband's church, my home, my career were supposed to be.  The original painting.  Oh and it's a doozy.
 
Something like the painting above from aliexpress website.  Picture perfect garden, cobblestone bridge, mountains in the background, a gentle rapid running into a lake calm enough for large white geese (who don't poop on the grass or become crazy-greedy for bread crumbs so that they attack visitors), a swing under a vine-covered arbor, and a wheelbarrow too beautiful to use.  That's what my mind painted.  And the reality.  Well anything odd by Picasso comes to mind.  Disjointed colors, features out of place, shadowing all wrong.  A subject not peaceful and staid as the one above, but vibrant and challenging to contain and appreciate.
 
 And then there's that Italian root for penitmento= the verb pentirsi, to repent.  And that's what I must do with my boring, beautiful pastel-y landscape.  Repent of my plans being supreme, of my ideas being best, of my picture being the way it should be.  What I want my picture to represent is how in control I am, of how this is what it is supposed to look like, the ideal, the idyllic.  So when people look at my life and my family and our church and my accomplishments, they say, "Wow.  She did something right.  She is favored by God.  She is blessed."

But I need to repent of this crazy desire to be glorified in what I have, am and do.  God is the one who is to be glorified in and by my life.  People should look instead and say, "Wow.  She may have messed up royally, but look at how God has redeemed her choices.  Look how He has brought beauty out of discord, harmony out of the miscast, and peace in the midst of turmoil.  Isn't God good?  Aren't we blessed to know Jesus as our Savior,  too?"  That's the picture I want my life to portray.  Beauty in brokenness.  That brings me to gift #3:  the chaos that is mealtime in the Layton household.

 
And for the usual poetry, my first--and only-- published poem (which contained the word "pentimento") exactly 20 years ago and the fun poetry of Edward Lear:
 
Isabel Archer
 
A canvas outstretched, muslin
and pristine, arrives in England,
Gardencourt to be exact.
 
Visiting Touchetts, avuncular family,
she is drawn by happy
walks in the cultivated yard.
 
Her laughter and liberty prized
by Lord Warburton; she refuses
Lockleigh castle,
 
casting a grey monochrone in poppy
oil, yet not too thick.
Hair, like honey,
 
is smoothed by Casper Goodwood
(Bostonian) offering his hand
and cotton farm, denied
 
 by curls teased into a bun. 
A neck most elegant,
assessed by Osmond to strangle
 
perhaps, but nimble
fingers obviously to ring:
a simple union with a poor man.
 
The impasto grows rich as Madame
Merle fashions eyes
of amaretto, fading,
 
the nose trimmed 
by Henrietta Stackpole, always,
American journalist supreme.
 
Gay red feathers pursed
into a smile by Ralph,
the invalid's pentimento
 
creating touchable lips that float
from the canvas.  Each 
breath, no longer society's 
 
best silk, flakes
off paint as a pansy 
plucked one petal at a time.
 
 
 
The Table and the Chair by Edward Lear
I

Said the Table to the Chair,
'You can hardly be aware,
'How I suffer from the heat,
'And from chilblains on my feet!
'If we took a little walk,
'We might have a little talk!
'Pray let us take the air!'
Said the Table to the Chair.


II

Said the Chair unto the Table,
'Now you know we are not able!
'How foolishly you talk,
'When you know we cannot walk!'
Said the Table, with a sigh,
'It can do no harm to try,
'I've as many legs as you,
'Why can't we walk on two?'


III

So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See! the Table and the Chair
'Have come out to take the air!'


IV

But in going down an alley,
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-quack,
And a Beetle, and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.


V

Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother!
'What a lovely walk we've taken!
'Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!'
So the Ducky, and the leetle
Browny-Mousy and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads
Till they toddled to their beds.

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