Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): dip (1967)

Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: DIP / IN STOP / Cherries when love on stilts picks its way along gravel paths and reaches the treetops I too in cherries would like to experience cherries as cherries. No longer with arms too short, no longer with arms too short, with ladders on which for ever one rung, just one rung is missing, to live on stewed fruit, on windfalls. Sweet and sweeter, darkening; A red such a blackbirds dream-who here is kissing whom, when love reaches treetops on stilts. Günter Grass

"We would be months getting accustomed to Tacky Park …"

July 1, 2009, would be warm and sticky, hanging in the high seventies into the low eighties. In the unaccustomed humidity, it certainly seemed much warmer to The Muse and I with The GrandOtter beside us, as we packed up our few belongings and the cats and left the temporary housing high-rise for the last time. We were unaccustomed to the drive to the other side of The District, for Rosslyn was just over the Southern border and Takoma Park, hard on the Northeastern edge, eleven miles and nearly an hour's drive. We were to meet up with the movers at the Sherman Street house. This was the day we would finally move in; TheMove was at hand. We'd left home three full months before and overstayed our temporary housing welcome by a month, but we were finally going to land somewhere.

As it does in summer back there, the world smelled musty and damp. I'd already sweated through my clothes by the time we arrived. I never learned how not to sweat through my clothes there, for I had never experienced high humidity until I was in my twenties. I was raised in a dry country, so I never gained any resistance to humidity. I believe my forebears traveled West for the sole and specific purpose of escaping humid conditions. Moving to Maryland felt every bit like a giant evolutionary step backward. It was with no tiny trepidation that I anticipated moving in.

Our benefactor neighbor Clair greeted us with the keys, and the movers set up their strategy. The house was situated halfway up a steep and narrow street, too steep and narrow to park a moving van, so they parked it uphill where the street was flatter and ferried loads down in a smaller van. Our job that day would be to direct boxes and furniture into roughly the proper rooms: kitchen, dining room, my office, living room, Amy's office/sewing room upstairs, master bedroom upstairs, basement guest bedroom, basement storeroom/laundry, or garage. The place was about a third the size of The Villa Vatta back in Walla Walla. We had yet to determine how much of our stuff would fit into the space.

Fortunately, The Muse's new job came with a moving service. Months before, as we were preparing to leave on the Exile, a crew had come in for two or three days and packed up everything left in the place. I had already cleared out some stuff I didn't think we needed to take. A few of those discards still wrankle The Muse, who was absent because she had already started her new job back East. I oversaw the move-out, so our stuff was sorted according to my understanding of proper organization. The Muse would find ample additional reasons to feel wrankled about my sorting and discarding before our Exile would end.

The ethic in Takoma Park was that anything left on the parking strip or front sidewalk was fair game for the taking. The Movers stockpiled loads on the that sidewalk between shuttles, so we had to chase off a few scavengers during the day. Clair cautioned us to ensure our cats stayed inside because his cat, Murphy, was the neighborhood's Alpha Male and could cause damage. An hour later, our Crash had escaped and was spotted serenely eating Murphy's breakfast, with Murphy cowering nearby. Murphy never regained his dominion.

By the middle of the day, it became clear that we would need some storage for about a quarter of the boxes. The Villa had a basement almost as large as the whole Sherman house, so Christmas decorations would need separate storage. We found a mini-storage nearby and loaded the shuttle van with the overage. We filled up every inch of the space we rented, adding an additional couple of hundred dollars on top of the already exorbitant rent we would be paying. Sorting through that chaos would become a pastime for me through the upcoming weeks and years.

That night, we'd managed to assemble beds and locate sufficient bedding, especially since we were still sweating. I'd left living room windows open, thinking that our woodland-like backyard would prove remote enough to offer adequate security. During that first night, somebody mangled a screen on one of those windows and managed to sneak upstairs in the dark and swipe a pile of cash The Muse had left on the dresser. This served as a startling reminder that we were no longer living in Walla Walla but on the edge of a great city where we couldn't necessarily take security for granted. That said, we'd landed safely, our lives secured, if mostly still in boxes. The following few weeks would witness the great unpacking. I would arrange a pleasing office space for myself, and The Muse would amaze herself by organizing a small bedroom into a functional home office and sewing room. We would be months getting accustomed to Tacky Park and, in some ways, only partially succeed, but our Exile took a positive turn the day we moved into what we would later insist was the Villa Vatta Schmaltz East.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz