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Edna's Office
Saturday, October 26 2002
setting: rural Hurley, New York
While I was still busy dealing with the half bathroom, Gretchen was driving up from Brooklyn for another advance in the goal of moving to Hurley: the bringing of the cats. In addition to more stuff than a Honda Civic should reasonably be asked to carry, she had Edna and Noah in their respective cat carriers. As always for cats, they were none too happy about the process of being uprooted and relocated. Cats may be animals with the capacity to move about on legs, but psychologically they act as if they have extensive networks of roots.
Noah is much more accepting of relocation than Edna. Once Gretchen and the cats arrived, Noah set out to explore his new digs. Edna, on the other hand, vanished into the boiler room, where she found an extensive void around the base of the boiler's chimney. The warmth and seclusion were perfectly suited to her anxiety. I jokingly began referring to her part of the boiler room as "Edna's Office."
Going through all the mail that had arrived, Gretchen discovered that one of her poems called "Seventh Grade" had been accepted for publication by an exclusive poetry magazine, her first major acceptance in something over a year. Lacking other obvious options, we celebrated with dinner at the Hurley Mountain Inn.
In the evening I was trying to figure out how to install a beautiful pedestal sink in the half bathroom with the parquet floors when it occurred to me that the plumbing coming out of the wall was too high for this particular sink. Gretchen suggested that I make something to stick beneath the pedestal in order to raise it up to the correct height. She kept suggesting different scrap materials from the garage for this purpose, but I ended up making a sort of thick homemade plywood out of three quarter inch pine planks glued together. Each layer was the shape of the cross section of the pedestal, making the wooden base seem like an extension of the pedestal. I left it wood grain instead of painting it white so that it wouldn't seem like I was trying to fake additional porcelain. When dealing with materials, it's usually best not to appear to be fibbing.
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