Cleaning Teenage Wasteland

The weekend has somehow come and gone and every time I look out the window to admire the snow and subtly encourage it to keep on coming and snow the city in tomorrow it stops falling, so I have closed the blinds. I feel like I've achieved a lot this weekend, which is completely not true: all I've really gotten done is the cleaning of Teenage Wasteland in the basement which was, admittedly, a Herculean task and full of socks. There were socks everywhere. Every stroke of the broom brought out more socks. At any rate it's done now and young M, when he comes back from Baltimore (where he is apparently doing well, although it's hard to tell from his monosyllabic phone calls) will be shocked. There's a real living room and a real bedroom down there. With posters on the wall and organized furniture and made beds and a dresser full of his clothes and everything.

Not just posters, either, but also a strange and slightly disturbing fabric applique piece from Haiti that the QOB found at the thrift shop for 98 cents and gave me this morning. It says on the back in sharpie cursive on a piece of cotton that it is La Femme de Damballah par Hector Hippolyte, realize par someone whose name I have forgotten at the Centre d'Art et Couture in Haiti. It's a snake. With a face and wings and, after googling Damballah, I'm thinking perhaps I should put a small cup of rum and an egg down there for it so Damballah doesn't get mad at me. I'm also a little worried that all the teenagers hanging out down there will get pregnant - Damballah is a life force god and snakes are an old, old fertility symbol, of course, thanks Sigmund - which will be way entertaining because they are pretty much all boys. Perhaps I should leave a bowl of condoms on the coffee table - now that it's clean down there, they might actually be able to get some girls to visit. I also dug out all my old masks (the ones I've painted) and hung them on the wall in the other room, which should discourage girls - and houseguests and, well, pretty much everyone - rather effectively since en masse they're a bit scary.

Let's see, what else happened this weekend? J & S & I went to Broadways Friday evening; then S came over here; A was depressed but cheered up; my brother & C & I all met to discuss the QOB and talked about how thrilled we are by her recent progress and I went to a lovely dinner party at J & K's. Oh, and I got two fabulous new to me chairs and I am all patting myself on the back for having a great eye for mid century design and stuff because it turns out that they are these chairs. They have Knoll labels that say 1979 on them and I'm pretty sure that that's the original upholstery as well. Now my living rooms are both elegant in their own ways and I even dragged my mother's cast iron lounge chair out of the yard and into the solarium and then I lay on it and listened to Jethro Tull and watched the snow fall and cracked up at how very 70s everything is becoming around me in this house.