Come on Vogue

In the middle of this whole strange time, I decided that I needed an office. needed a space where I could work from home, where my boys could do homeschooling work, or occasionally have a friend over and not be stuck in our two-bedroom apartment with me.

There was one free – in my own building. Adjacent to my apartment, one that had been used for my boyfriend’s family business for many decades now. With down-sizing and changing duties, the office wasn’t necessary any longer. I made a request to rent it, and we began a reno project that is ongoing.

(Q: Do reno projects ever Sometimes I feel like they don’t.)

This gave me something healthy to focus on – and when people asked what I was going to do there, I told them, ‘If I build it, it will become.’ Not the first time I’ve taken myself for a philosopher. I did believe it though.

We removed two half-walls that had once hemmed customers in by the doorway. We got a great deal on flooring and changed that. We changed the ceiling tiles. I thanked my lucky stars that for some strange reason, during an inventory liquidation sale at a local hardware store following the Christmas holidays I had decided to invest $90 in $900 worth of pocket lighting and the light bulbs to match. The strange investment at the time paid off.

We painted the walls. They went from beige and brown to seafoam. I took the small bathroom from white to peony fuchsia and even painted the floor – yellow. Pigment yellow. Yellowyellow. I decided it was my tribute to Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour that I had purchased tickets for as a Christmas present for my youngest. The show was postponed. (It is now rescheduled for February of 2021.) end?

I trolled my storage attic for three artisanal copper hanging lamps shaped like flowers that I had picked up for $30 at a thrift shop a few years ago. Into the freshly tiled bathroom ceiling they went.

I spray-painted a metal shop table that I had light blue, giving it a new look, and an old metal planter to match. I recycled art from other lifetimes, curating a collection that made sense.

While my boyfriend worked the many hours of someone in construction in late summer, I brought him in for one or two steps at a time, and occasionally, with an afternoon or evening a push occurred, with a bigger job getting done.

I remembered the dollhouse I got for Christmas when I was five. How much I enjoyed making furniture and accessories and setting things up. How it is still in the attic at Mum’s. How it still soothes me, on this bigger scale. How the dollhouse was a nest. How this was a nest too.

A nest for hope. A nest for prosperity. A nest for purpose. A nest for work. A nest for progress. A nest for the future. A nest for a future at a time when it was becoming a challenge to see very far ahead.

In some ways, our lenses have changed. We put the binoculars away. We only glance at calendars. And the occasionally we are a little bolder, and we make plans. We contemplate the next season.

And some stockpile, and some can, and some wish they could, and some push the boundaries and go Old World, imagining trips. Imagining other times. Imagining what is either/ or return or emergence to/from what these times are.

One evening, a week-and-a-half ago, after the lighting had all been installed in the main room’s ceiling, as he finished a long day, I made one of my ‘two things’ requests – to hang a print and put up a shelf. I was too short to reach the place they were meant to go myself, as the spot was above a few steps. Even with the stepladder we had, I couldn’t manage it alone. He put them up, using the laser level he thanks himself for buying a few years ago, after countless moments where it came in handy.

The print was picked up some time ago at a thrift shop. A Vogue magazine cover from 1919. A painting of a woman with blue eyes, wearing a white hat with a black band with a reddish flower on it, just over her right ear, a print coat with white piles of fur around her shoulders and face. The tips of yellow-gloved fingers emerging from the white fluff. Her cheeks are rosy. We can’t see her mouth. A Model-t sort of vehicle over her shoulder to the left.

The work of French artist Georges Lepape (1887-1971), there was something about this work that spoke to me. Now, as this Vogue character found herself featured in a special place in my office, the place that I was building so it could become, a new pocket light casting just the right wedge to highlight her, I paid attention to the details.

Vogue Magazine, January 1919 edition. Vogue’s first issue date was December 17th of 1892, 127 years ago. This 1919 issue found them early into their 27th year.

As this painting peered at me, all sky blue irises above the white puff, from a framed print, I realized that it was released right smack-dab in the middle of the Spanish Flu epidemic that occurred from February of 1918 until April of 1920. She was almost a year in.

I realized that she was us. The magazines printed on, the seasons changed again, and even as we speak, Vogue’s annual biggest and most excited September issue, released in August of course, wraps up its month for 2020.

One hundred-and-one years later, staring at her from this office and wonder what this space I’m building will be, I connect with her, she gives up none of her secrets, shrouded in painted furs, but reminds me that a century later, we’re still here.