Point of Pride: NaNoWriMo Excerpt

It's a small thing.  I'm putting it here for you to see.  It's an excerpt of my NaNoWriMo project.  You have been warned: this is an unedited first draft.  Don't expect anything amazing.

However, this project is filling up my life right now, so I thought you all deserved to see a little bit of what I've been up to.

The main character, Em, is refinishing some of the built-ins in the home she inherited after her mother's death the previous spring.  She is doing the work as a penance of sorts.  At this point of the book, she has had a lesson in paint removal from her friend Robert, and is working on things late one summer night.

Some tasks are just better suited to late night hours.  Scrapping paint off of old cabinets seems to be one such thing, at least in Em’s mind.  The last several days had been beautiful and spending time inside had felt like a punishment.  Camilla would have never wanted to punish Em by forcing her to work indoors on a summer day, so Em was not about to punish herself.  The last few days had been productive in their own way.  Em had hacked back the rhodes and tended to the path around the tree where the winter had moved some of the sea glass leaving bare spots where the dirt sprouted leaves.  Now that things were closer to shipshape outside, and the porch was under construction, Em was back to working on the beastly cabinet.

Tempering her desire to just get things done, with her need to do things just right, Em had created weekly goals for herself.  This week’s goal was to get down to the wood on at least two of the four drawers.  To prepare for her night of work, Em had prepared easy to eat snacks: smoked cheddar, summer sausage, and apple slices with whole grain crackers.  She also had one of her favorite bottle of wine and NPR playing in the background.  It wasn’t exactly a romantic scene, but it was one that inspired working to a goal.

Besides the physical sustenance, Em also prepared some mental inspiration in the form of posting a few of her favorite pictures of her mom where they were easy to see.  Her favorite was one of her mother before she had had Em.  Camilla has long hair, in that soft flowing late 60s way that all of the girls seemed to have at that time.  She wore a belted trench, and you could tell that it had been raining not too long before, but the sky had cleared and sun was hitting her upturned face.  The person who had taken the shot had caught her with her eyes closed and a self-satisfied half-smile on her face.  Em had never asked who had taken the picture, but her father had been working for the military and had been away at the time.  Em had always assumed one of her mothers co-workers at the diner had taken it on some sort of girls outing, but that had hardly mattered to her.

Putting her mask on and donning her eye protection like a good student would, Em set to work on the topmost drawer.  This one would be the most difficult to work on because it was to high to reach comfortably while sitting on a chair and too short to work on comfortably while standing.  Wanting to finish the parts of the project that would be the biggest bear, Em had decided this would be the starting point for the night. 

So far she had discovered five distinct layers of paint on the drawers.  The upmost layer was white followed, with a middling blue, sunflower yellow, white again, and a cocoa brown.  The paint was beginning to give way to the chemicals and the scrapping that Em was doing while she listened to Renee Montaign’s voice on the radio.  The world’s politics seemed to become more important when someone respectable read the news and NPR had a way of getting voices that demanded you respect them.  As she applied more solvent with a brush and tried to loosen the seal around the edges of the drawer, Em tried to remember how many colors this drawer had been in her lifetime.  She could remember the first three layers, but there may have been a time when she was little that the cabinet drawers could be used.  She couldn’t be sure as she looked back on her childhood through the haze of time. 

Her burning muscles let her know it was time for a break.  Stripping off the glasses, mask, and gloves, Em took the plate of snacks and her glass of wine out onto the front porch.  This was a smaller porch than the one in back, but it had a good view of the street and the mountain that loomed in the distance.  Placing the plate on the railing, Em looked out over the street where the lights made orangy-gold pools of light in the blackness.  A few kids continued to play between two of these pools down the road, riding there bikes between the lights like they were navigating between to far away islands.  Voice carried, but not the words, and Em could only tell that they were happy.

Somewhere near by a mother’s voice could be heard calling for her children, and the kids took off toward the sound.  How was it that the summer got so short?  When she was a child, the summer stretched on and on.  Now it seemed that the time passed more quickly every year.  Part of it was that she made less time to play.  Adults filled their days with work, and kids filled there days with play.  Em wondered what would happen to time if she spent more time playing, would it slowdown again to the way it passed when she was a kid riding her bike between pools of light on the blacktopped street?

It was summer, but it was still chilly in the evenings.  As she stood on the porch, Em caught a chill from the air.  A campfire.  Yes, a campfire was what she wanted to take the chill away.  The smell of a campfire was one of those smells that speak of good friends and a good time.  But adults don’t make campfires unless they are camping, so Em went back inside and grabbed her fleece jacket before returning to her snacking.  It’s funny that she be thinking of camping and childhood’s long summer days and also be eating her father’s favorite camping food.  On the few trips the family had taken when she was younger, nearly every meal was made up with beef-stick, cheese, apples, and crackers.  These little sandwiches were one of the few things her father could “cook” with ease.  There had also been roasted weenies and burgers, but Em remembered the beef-stick for its spicy quality and the apple for its sweetness.  These two things with the crumbling cracker and soft cheese had made for a treat. 

Camilla had always cooked a proper meal at home.  When the family went camping was the only time Em remembered her dad cooking or the family eating “snack” food at meal time.  When Em got a bit older and was fending for herself in the kitchen, she often made this type of meal.  Her mother would have been mortified to know that her daughter had never managed cooking with any skill.  Camilla had been known for her ability to design and host a party, but these were not skills that Em had managed to pick-up on along the way.  Sitting in the kitchen as a small girl, Em would watch her mother cook.  The cook books fascinated her and they seemed more akin to spell books than simple food books.  Her mother would have several pots simmering on the stove on a winter’s day, and some other dish baking in the oven at the same time.  Em could see that making a meal took practice.  As her mother wielded the measuring cups, whisks, and knives, Em would go back to her books and read about the warriors who made the world what it is.  If cooking had changed the world, had saved it from devastation somehow, Em may have been more interested in it.  But there were few mentions of cooks in the great epics, so what fun was there in being a cook?

The chill was starting to settle in past the fleece, so Em headed back to work.  Again clad in her protective gear, she made progress.  The drawer revealed two more layers of paint, a yellow and a horrible rust color, and then the bare wood was evident.  This discovery encouraged Em and soon one edge of the drawer was showing and the drawer began to wiggle in its setting.  It was painfully slow, this process of uncovering the past, but, as each of these layers were not put on in a day, Em figured she could take more than a day to be rid of them.  As the paint was removed, Em was tempted to get a screwdriver and wedge it into the drawer to pry it open.  Immediate visions of wood splintering and ruining the entire built-in kept her from trying that plan, but she did round up a razor blade from a box cutter.  Some of the paint had gotten between the drawer and the face of the cabinet.  After all of the paint was removed from the surfaces, Em needed to cut through this bit of paint that was holding the drawer closed. 

Carefully, carefully, she repeated to herself as she used the razor blade to open the seal.  This process  resulted in a building of anticipation for what she may find.  Treasures are rarely discovered in modern life, and to have a treasure chest right under her nose for so many years added to the excitement.  Robert had warned her that she may find a big mess of rotted wood behind the paint, perhaps a dead mouse or two.  Not that rot or dead mice would cause a problem for Em, it’s that they were lame prizes for all of the work that she was going to.  If the drawer was going to be this hard to open, she wanted to find something interesting in it.

Thinking logically, if anything interesting had been in the drawer when it was painted shut, someone would have gone to the trouble of opening it long before the task fell to her.  The most she cold hope for was some forgotten phone book with doodles or notes about businesses on the cover.  Perhaps, just perhaps, she would find some missing socks and discover where the sock monster had been stashing her missing pair-mates.  

The drawer came open.

There was a quantity of musty smell, what you would expect from a drawer that had been closed for so long, and an empty space.  The drawer was empty.  The let down was palpable as Em craned her neck to make sure she had missed nothing.  She opened the drawer to its limit, and then pushed it closed.  All of her work had rewarded her with a functional drawer: noting more and nothing less. 

Em had to sit down after all of that.  For some reason she was emotionally drained and did not know what the reason was for sure.  The work had been physically taxing, scrapping the paint off while not quite standing and not quite sitting had let her know that she needed to hit the gym soon.  Her legs had started to feel the burn, especially in her thighs, after the first hour.  She did not think the exhaustion was solely from the physicality of the project.  Her mind had created something that was not there and she now felt its loss. 

After sitting for several minutes, she picked herself up off of the sofa, cleaned up the majority of the mess, and slogged to the shower for a quick rinse off before hitting the hay.  Her sleep came quickly that evening, but the dreams continued to focus on some target she could not specify.