I tinker a bit in the spring. I tighten the screws on the handles of the kitchen cabinets that have loosened, again, with winter use. I shake my head at the garage that started the winter orderly and has disintegrated into a mess of abandoned projects needing a place. I pack up the old turtlenecks and dig out old T-shirts. It is a seasonal routine, decades in the making.
As a woman who lives alone, some things, I have learned, are beyond either my skill set or my desire to perform. I do not climb onto the roof to fix the shingles. I don’t mow the lawn or turn over the dirt for my little garden. I have someone help me drag out and reassemble the yard furniture. Sometimes I trim the branches of overgrown bushes and low-hanging tree limbs as a kind of therapy, but mostly I job that out too.
In the house, I can pound a nail and take down the drapes and move furniture to clean under and around. Attack linen closets with vigor. Adjust bookshelves. But sometimes I just remain perplexed at the nature of how things work. And rather than ask for help, I muddle through and around and avoid a level understanding that I would easily seek in the workplace.
The radio in my bedroom is a great example. It is a nice piece of equipment with a great sound system. It has a fabulous tiny remote-control unit. With the radio on the other side of the bedroom, when I wake up in the middle of the night, the remote allows me to click on the BBC and let those great clipped voices inform me of happenings all over the world, which, strangely lulls me back to sleep. In the morning I never have to get out of bed to start my day listening to the local news. On a lazy Sunday afternoon I can, from my wicker chair on the tiny upstairs porch, change the channel or the volume without ever leaving my novel or my beverage. The radio, long after the invention of a myriad of fancier devices, is still a constant companion.
When the clicker stopped working about a month ago, I was terribly sad. I would get out of bed in the middle of the night and turn on the radio on and the very act would wake me up more and make returning to sleep more difficult. When I was close to it, I never seemed to find the right volume that I needed when I was across the room.
Then my winter-frozen brain had a spring-warmed thought. What if there was a battery involved in the tiny remote device? I grabbed a screwdriver and dug away at the plastic casing. When a dime-size corroded flat battery popped out and onto the floor, I was ecstatic. I drove to the market, found a replacement, and my days and nights have returned to a routine of measured tones. I felt equally smug and silly to have solved the “broken radio” dilemma.
The broken lamp should have been easier.
Years ago I received a gift of a beautiful bedside lamp that came from the art gallery across from the Post Office. It has a glass shade of many colors and a base that turns on just by touch. This means you can roll over and touch the lamp and you have light. Touch it again and you have a brighter light. A third time, brighter still. The grandchildren love this lamp and so do I. In the middle of the night, with a touch I have light enough to meander to the bathroom. Or downstairs to put on the tea kettle. I can touch it three times and the light is ready for me to catch up on some reading.
When it stopped working, I replaced the light bulb with a more-efficient curlicue bulb. But the on-and-off functions were gone. It had to be unplugged to turn it off, and plugged in to turn it on. And there was no range of light. I decided the base must be broken.
I took the base to the gallery store on Main Street and they still had one lamp just like mine. They were happy to exchange it and we made certain that the new base worked fine. I came home, put the smart bulb in, and this lamp wouldn’t work either. And, yes, it really took me weeks of going back and forth in my head to consider that, perhaps, the problem was not the lamp but the bulb. I went to the market and found a less efficient, three-way globe. The lamp works brilliantly again!
In the winter I just push through all the things that need pushing through and ignore the details of my life. Each spring I am surprised and slightly appalled at all I have ignored: paperwork and organizing and sorting and loose ends. It is enough to fill a month of Sundays in the Park …
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.