Scarlet Stone

It is a late Saturday afternoon on Sept. 13 and the leaves on the trees are changing color fast and the golden light of warm autumn evenings is here. It’s a favorite time of year for me and there are fun things happening. My son, Keaton, wife, Ashley, and I will be flying down to Kansas City in November to visit family. I ordered a deep red and dark green plaid dress for a bagpipe event we will be attending. I sent the dress pic from the website to my sis and soon got the yellow thumbs up emoji reply but no words like cute, festive, or “I am not surprised” accompanied it. “That’s a weak response from sis I thought,” so hours later I replied back, “But, if I look like a holiday box of Kleenex in the dress…. BACK it goes! “She soon sent an image of another longer plaid flannel dress in earthy autumn colors. I chuckled, as she obviously was not saying... “yes to my dress.”  I still ordered the dress and might chuckle when I try it on and that’s a great place to be, to lighten up and laugh at my escapades. For me, seeing humor in life is like a daily pledge as we move through the days of these scary times we live in when it seems there is less and less to chuckle about. So, on with small talk and distractions I have been busy with.
As a cat person, I started calling Saturdays “Caturdays” long ago, and I like to pour on special attention to my four quite perfect roommates. It was a great Caturday today, as I did some housework, more leisure than work, played with the cats, and was only disappointed once when I popped into the Soudan Store for an ice cream cone and they didn’t have my favorite flavor, key lime pie. In disappointment, I settled on a peanut butter, vanilla swirly kinda-weird-name-flavor but I could not get it in a plain cone as the poor clerk working had a hand injury and had to flop some in a dish. I held it up like a cone and licked away while I drove to McKinkey Park to enjoy looking at the lake, leaves, and surroundings. I soon was “sweeted-out,” then set the dish aside unable to eat it all. A cone followed with a ride around the “horn” is one of the greatest things about a Soudan summer.
Soudan folk are getting projects done. Mary Batinich over at the Inn has had a wonderful summer with loads of guests and she is now adding a front patio to her red cottage. Her favorite dirt guy has been arranging rocks, smoothing ground, and has created a great parking space for more visitors. Everyone is busy harvesting gardens and apple pickers have been on the job already this fall. The boat and trailer traffic going past my house up to Stuntz Bay is getting very quiet, so Porch Lady got bored and left for a visit to see her brother Melvin in Crosby. I said, “don’t sit and wait for snowflakes to fly. Besides, I am having the house painted so you need to move off your perch!”
It’s not easy to decide what color to paint a house! I have hired a painter and borrowed his Sherwin William’s swatch book twice already and by now he most likely thinks I need medication, and I will be the worst customer ever. In all honesty, I am a happy customer and pretty positive about things.
I admit I’ve been creeping quietly up alleys and driveways with that swatch book over the past month, laying it against people’s siding to help my difficult obsession with choosing a color. After all, I will be looking at it for a very long time. I don’t think I have been seen or reported as trespassing while out “swatching” homes.
One evening at dusk I ended up at Art and Collette Dale’s as they have a lovely shade of Sherwin Williams sage on their house. I knocked and hollered through the screen door, and they invited me in to chat about paint. Collette is petite and went flying down the basement stairs and lugged up a five-gallon can for me to look at. The name escapes me now, but as it turned out, I decided her sage was a bit too blue for my green/black roof.
I really have agonized over the color choice because I know how misleading a color swatch can be. I had almost selected Sherwin Williams’ color, Green Onyx to use with white trim, then with the help of a therapist (just kidding- no therapist), acknowledged I am actually tired of green and between the grass and leaves and so forth, more green will be too much. I then discovered a visualizing App on my phone and virtually painted my house.
It confirmed to me that I’ve never been a beige kinda gal and something like barn red, dark green or charcoal gray all looked overwhelming on the app, plus my painter advised dark colors would fade faster. Yellow is no good, my neighbor’s house is yellow and together, we’d look like a weird Soudan commune. I pooh-pooh’d gray, having done that years ago on my Ely house, plus it is everywhere like in the clouds and the roots of my hair too. So, to conclude this color selection insanity...I have chosen white and nobody will talk me out of it. Amen.
Porch Lady and I will be living in our big White House on the corner, with us as the administration of course. My foliage will certainly show up nicely and I will be adding dark green or wine shutters and perhaps a few hand-stenciled window boxes eventually. Home makeovers are pretty exciting except that I had to take down my trellis, chop my honeysuckle back, unscrew plant hooks and so many things that give this ole’ house its curb appeal. By later this fall and into next summer plants will return, perennials will bloom in the new garden and it’ll be a fresh look but you will never see an over-sized ballroom being built on the east lawn of this White House.
On top of the plans for painting, I had an insulating company come and scope out my upstairs and was told there was only a couple of inches of “puff” in my attic and roof because old timers prominently burned wood and coal when this house was built. So, then a local roofer arrived to put in three new vents on exterior attic walls and he discovered that my house is well over 100-years-old because it was built with square nails that were manufactured in the 1830s to 1890s.
By its location in Soudan, it is close to homes on Jasper street that were the first built when mining began. After sawing through siding, he had samples of the layers of wind-break material in my walls. The first layer, I believe, was a sheet of gold felt, likely known as mineral wool patented in around 1880. The second layer was black tarpaper, followed by what looks like the original black speckled siding, and finally a layer of reflective aluminum showing the passage of time for the old house. In the winter, the owner of the insulating business said he will come with a thermal imaging camera to see where the cold spots are within my walls, and I can then pursue adding more insulation. For now, we are tackling the attics, and it will be nice to have a warmer house this winter with less chance of ice dams on my north sloped roof gutter.  
So now it is Tuesday evening, and the vents are in place, plus my painter power washed the house today and loosened lots of old white trim paint. I joked with him about needing to vacuum up all the chips of paint, and I think he told me to take more medication. I see my windows are loaded with particles and dirt but that comes with the territory, so I add window washing to my fall project list. I still have other tasks to complete too, like doing a bit of sod busting for another perennial garden, cleaning my garage, and most likely will be mowing one more time. Enjoy your projects and these fall days!