Issue 10, containing: On Household Arrangement, Local Wanderings, Classifieds, Letters, Commonplaces, &c.

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SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

Because time is a lie on even the best of occasions, last week unfortunately did not have an issue. As such, naturally today’s issue is late.

This is an extremely professional publication.

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ON HOUSEHOLD ARRANGEMENT

A couple of weeks back I realized — as I periodically do, often enough that I should perhaps schedule it — that my environment affects my thinking. Without going too far into the reasons why (as they would almost certainly be depressing): I don’t do well if I develop a living space that has nooks and crannies and specific paths to get from A to Zed.

Over the past several months this was, in fact, what developed in my home, and so I decided to spend a day tackling the most obvious culprit: the kitchen.

My kitchen is small; contains no dining space; has a single counter approximately four feet long; two upper cabinets; one lower cabinet; three drawers; one outlet; one refrigerator that partially blocks the path to the bathroom; a hutch; a desk-sized table; a very small rolling butcher cart; and a very large and ancient stove that serves as both cookery instrument and the heat source for the entire apartment. You’ll notice that a sink wasn’t part of the list, and that’s because the sink is in fact in a side room off the kitchen that I have decided to call the butler’s pantry because I am very much Myself.

Sometime last fall I decided to move the table, which I’ve had for a few years now, from the children’s room to kitchen, placing it center in the room to serve as a sort of dining table and additional cooking surface. This worked fairly well for a while, and even into the spring, when I started using it as a work-from-home desk.

And then: the summer.

For reasons that I couldn’t begin to guess, my living room is a guaranteed to be the hottest room in the apartment in the summer, and the coldest one in the winter. I can’t move the stove into the living room during the winter, but I can most definitely have the air conditioner in there, and as such, it was the only livable work space in my home for the past few months. I kept a tidy little bucket of work materials on the couch, got myself a little laptop desk, and generally spent my days cool and carefree.

The same could not be said for the kitchen.

A path seemed to fester between the living room and the bathroom that conveniently passed the refrigerator but tragically avoided both the trash can and the sink in the butler’s pantry. Plants on my hutch begged for water. My coffee, on a shelf above the plants, slowly transitioned away from that carefully chosen spot to the much more path-convenient top of the refrigerator.

Something that might have been easy to ignore if I spent the majority of my time outside the house was no longer tolerable. And so, the Great Rearrangement began.

The hutch hadn’t moved in over five years. That, I decided, was the linchpin.

Over the next several hours, while listening and singing along loudly to several sea shanties (because they are by their nature working songs), I shifted the hutch over to where the butcher block had been, pushed the table to fit against the wall and window perpendicular to where the hutch had been, rearranged all my plants to fit on the end of the table, got out an unused mirror and pretended I knew how to create the illusion of space, moved the butcher block to fit beside where the hutch used to be, cursed my inability to move anything else of significance, and then spent an hour on Amazon ordering hooks and a cheap floral tapestry because the table, in its new configuration, would very definitely show my bedroom after I transitioned back to the kitchen “office” in the winter and I prefer to keep my bed away from the sight of coworkers, as that is an awkward thought none of us need have.

Some minor adjustments were also made to the top of the refrigerator, but that had more to do with my spending too much time on Pinterest, and need not be discussed.

The effect of the rearrangement was both immediate and amazing. It feels wonderful to walk through the kitchen now, and easy to get to all the things I want to reach. It has inspired me to do some radical rearrangement in other rooms. My bedroom (the aforementioned unmentionable) will receive a boost in terms of storage, and the children’s room is likely to have some of the craft and art supplies moved into it to suit their interests, but the living room… the living room is project for this weekend.

In my tenure in this apartment, I’ve moved the couch (two different ones) from one long wall to the other, installed and then removed a recumbent bike, moved a bookcase from one short wall to another to another, broke a bookcase, was given a new one, bought a second one, rearranged my books on multiple occasions, used a bench for a TV stand and a TV stand for a side table, and bought a small water fountain. 

What I haven’t done before is actually bisected the room entirely by putting the couch in the middle, facing away from the kitchen and creating a TV space in one half and… something else? In the second. One of the bookcases would need to move. Certainly the bench. How will the TV be placed? Art would need to be moved, and new focus points created.

I have no idea if it will work.

I am intensely excited about it.

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LOCAL WANDERINGS

Recently two of my siblings, twins, had their birthday. We all live close to one another, and have considered one another part of our social “pod” through this time, so for their birthday I brought them to Mystic Seaport, in Mystic, Connecticut. 

Mystic Seaport is a living history museum demonstrating a 19th century seaport town. Aside from the usual recreated houses and, usually, costumed actors, there are also enormous, real ships, either restored and cared for, or built entirely new in the working shipyard.

A historical town would honestly be enough of a draw for me, but Mystic Seaport is a place that my family has gone to for literal generations. My aunt remembers going there as a child. I remember going there with all my siblings as children. And I’ve taken my own daughters there.

My childhood memories of Mystic involve simple things: 

• A metal coin bank in the special playroom they keep for very young ones. I put a penny into the metal dog’s mouth, and then pressed a lever — the dog would then “jump” and place the penny into the sailor’s barrel.
• White broken shells covering all the pathways, pink innards shyly sliding in and out of view beneath our feet.
• The hall of ship’s figureheads, real ones, collected and placed above even adult eyelines. I looked and saw half-bodies stepping forward as if there were ships waiting to sail through the walls. I remember a tartan-clad Scotsman, a man with a turban and scimitar, various animals, and a pair of blonde twin girls, unusual because they had full bodies, clasping hands and dancing out over the long-gone waves.
• Huge cups of lemonade, whole halves mixed into the sugar water, which has forever affected how I think lemonade should be served.
• Eating through an enormous bucket of mussels with my family, which at the time was grand until it became Too Much, and has unfortunately left me with a dislike of bivalves.
• And the ships themselves, particularly the Charles W. Morgan, an 1841 wooden whaler. I have decades’ worth of memories of walking on and into it. The smell of the hold is a strangely treasured scent, wood and something sharp and something peculiar that makes me wonder if I’m smelling the old, old oil that was kept there. During regular times, reenactors climb the rigging and demonstrate how the sails were raised and lowered, raise and lower the whaling boats and harpoon invisible behemoths, and then, in the evenings, sing shanties to hasten the work that needs to be done to settle the ship for the night.

So, of course, I took my siblings there.

My sister hasn’t been since she was very little, and it was interesting to watch her enjoy Mystic without necessarily remembering it — though, when we came upon the Morgan, and she looked down into the galley, she suddenly remembered the little ridges built into the tabletop to prevent plates and trays from sliding in rough waters, and the gasp of delight she made, remembering that small thing, was a bright and shining thing.

My brother had been in later years, and remembered more of it, though we all agreed that it was strange to experience the place in these times. Many of the houses weren’t open, and only some of the “businesses”. There were no reenactors, and the steps down into the belly of the Morgan were closed. 

It was also, though, very peaceful. We all found ourselves uninterrupted and alone inside a lighthouse, a replica of Nantucket’s Brant Point Light, watching short videos about lighthouses and making terrible jokes. Later, we sat quietly together, watching the water, talking idly of the grand houses we saw across the way, asking one another what we remembered, realizing that some of our cloud-castles were built out of our experiences of Mystic. There’s something about the water; there’s something about the ships, the stories, the songs, and the steps, down and down, into the belly of history.

It was a strange day, and it was a very lovely one, and I count myself beyond lucky to have had it with them.

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CLASSIFIEDS

Seeking: Siblings who are NOT afraid of getting a free paddleboat rental, the weenies.

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LETTERS

From Mystic Seaport, to the Magazine, “Pardon?”:

Did you… say something about bivalves? Again?

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From the Magazine, to Certain Siblings, “Lighthouse Jokes Are Very Funny”:

It’s not the Editors’ fault that one of the siblings has a great sense of humor, and the other one very sadly does not. It is a tragedy that we mourn daily.

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From the Living Room Couch, to the Magazine, “Registering Concern”:

I have not been moved from my place since I was installed, and frankly, I’m not sure you’ve thought this whole “middle of the room” plan through. Don’t even pretend you took accurate measurements with your measuring tape — I was there. I saw you, waving it around, letting it flop and deciding that was “close enough” and “probably fine”. Furthermore, do you have any idea what horrors I’m covering up? You have two children. Things have definitely gone behind me. And it’s been at least six months since you cleaned under my cushions. I know you’ve got “ideas” and “a vacuum”, but if you think I’m going to just get turned perpendicular without a peep, well… well. I’m not entirely sure what I could do about it, but be assured that it’ll be dreadful.

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COMMONPLACES 

From Swanjolras, on Tumblr:

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking  up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping  and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely  and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we  wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop  being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing  that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we  were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to  break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we  were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people  out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and  maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the  planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come  from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

I fully intend to regret many, many things in tomorrow’s great living room rearrangement. What better way to feel alive.

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If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line: 

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print. 

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-Until next week, be safe.