Some Spring lessons you always have to relearn

It's Spring and I'm in danger of missing the whole point, again.

I’m Emily Grosvenor, a design magazine editor and the author of Find Yourself At Home. This newsletter is about designing homes for personality and values, neurospicy design, design in the media, and what I would do differently.

Now that some sunlight has returned here in the Pacific Northwest, and I am becoming this weird human body-based potential of energy and vision, I am getting impatient with the slow pace of change in the tiny world I am building at home.

I want to plant a garden / repaint our den / get a chair reupholstered / build an outdoor living space / replace all the broken things / dip my soil-covered hands into the statement planters at the front of the house / redo the spice cabinet / clear out the old toys, and maybe also redesign our open living area.

It’s getting Spring-y up in here.

On top of that, I learned this gut punch of a fun fact the other day while laundry-watching a really dumb movie with Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon movie:

“Once your kid leaves the home you have spent 90% of the time you are going to spend with them.” — Will Ferrell, I think, to Reese Witherspoon, in the dumbest movie I’ve seen in ages.

So this is it.

The Bradford pear is blooming I am an animal all nesty and chirpy and frantic and excited. I am spending entire weekends throwing things out and dreaming of better furniture, renovating our home in my mind, planning for rugs, chasing a feeling of completion, all while yelling up the stairs asking my sons if they are ready.

They are never ready.

Actually, when I pause a for moment, I notice that they are in a constant state of readiness for whatever is coming at them.

I am the one who is not ready.

I have 1188 days left with our first son. I have 1918 left with our second.

My one child has a jawline and sideburns he hasn’t noticed. The other is asking himself every day who he is, out loud.

I am in complete awe of it all.

But here I am and it is Spring again, and the longer days are turning me into this makeover monster who wants to be swept up in the magic of creating to the point that I can’t fully attend to what’s happening around me. The world is calling to be touched, beauty is asking to be made, everywhere. I want to be a part of it.

I can’t help having these moments where I feel like I am missing something?

Or: I missing everything?

Why am I still playing house and obsessing over shaping our experience of this place? Why am I so ready for our home be exactly what I had wanted for our family life, now, pretty please, and make it yesterday?

Why do the stakes feel so unbearably high right now? Could it be that I am channeling myself into whatever I can improve in the twenty yard radius around me because the world feels so broken and a single person can only do so much, that old change-what-you-can conundrum?

If I spend all of my free time doing house projects, I’ll be missing exactly the thing I have been working so hard to create — this experience of being a family in a home.

It’s not lost on me that I am lucky to even have a home, let alone to think about shaping it, when so many have lost homes to fires or don’t have one in the first place.

I’m not sure I even know how to create space and then exist in it.

And so, it seems March is the time to relearn a lesson I struggle with every year, but which is gaining nuance with the pressure of time’s passing.

Childhood will end, but a life — and a home — is always becoming. I will feel like this every Spring, just as Summer will slow me and dry me up, Fall will make me into a depressed German poet yearning for a heath to wander, and Winter will find me close to content and deliciously fallow.

I’m a little furious about that sometimes—these seasons, someone else’s imposed structures. Seasons awaken a feeling of incompleteness in me — me, who only wants to rest when whatever is calling today is done.

I’m sitting with that idea today — staring at a wall, wanting to paint it.

P.S. Middle age, amirite?

Questions no one asked me

📖How long did it take for you to read Alyssa Graybeal’s Floppy?

Well, first, it hung out on the top of my piano for six months. I would occasionally look over at it and think — are we going to do this? You? and me? Floppy is a book about a woman who gets medically gaslit her whole life and has to Miss Marples her way to diagnosis and help for her Ehlos Danlos Syndrome, a congenetive illness where your connective tissue is crap and it affects everything. I’m on the hypermobile spectrum myself over here and felt quite seen, and not at all triggered, by this book. So, six months and a day.

🎥 Have you ever tried watching foreign films in the languages you understand to recapture parts of your temporal cortex?

My friend Mike told me he was binging The Law According to Lydia Poet on Netflix, about a woman Italian lawyer at the turn of the 20th century who fights to get accepted by the bar while solving murders. I have four semesters of Italian and some time spent there, but I’m also in it for the sumptuous gem-toned jackets. These people are making jackets inspired by it! I love humans.

🎧 Is there a musical that you haven’t burst into tears at lately?

No. Griffin and I saw Hamilton last weekend in Portland at the Keller and I burst into tears during “Dear, Theodosia,” which was way more affecting in person and with these particular actors. I also cried at the end, which I have never done listening to the soundtrack or watching the Disney version.

🎨I know you’ve been avoiding old family photos. Were you able to help Griffin with his identity book?

Oh, this thing. Griffin has (possibly) the best teacher in the district right now, who has 7th graders do these massive identity books, with essays, poems, self-reflections, personal histories, the whole shebang. We went through our family photos and got some printed this weekend, and I was able to do it without my usual inappropriate level of despair at time’s passing. Late last night, he told me he was afraid of turning it in — of not getting an A. Isn’t this every memoirist’s experience, ever? Fear that the entirety of you will be rejected when you lay it out bare? We named the feeling and then we both felt better, I think.

🏡 Have you decided on what house project to focus on this season?

No. See above.

😦What are you doing differently?

I am refusing to accept that not being able to have milk products will keep me from Nutella. So I’ve been taste testing non-dairy hazelnut chocolate spreads. Here are the results.

Cacao e Nocciole
Imported from Italy, where they know about these things. Just three ingredients. A major splurge, and a little sweet. They roast their own cacao beans! $21. Gone in a few days when the kids noticed. Easily spreadable. Gift this to someone.

Nutlicious Dark Cocoa Hazelnut Spread
Local (in Oregon), and near-perfect. Also, $2.99 at the local Grocery Outlet. Lasted a week and I didn’t share. In other words, dangerous.

Choc Zero Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Spread
If you can stand monkfruit, this is a keto version that is good for a spoonful when you’re trying to get through the afternoon. $9.99. It stuck around a while, and I don’t crave it, likely because of the lack of sugar. A smart choice if you’re avoiding that.

What I’m working on

The Color Issue for Oregon Home is just about done. Hooray! It’s my favorite issue of the year — all stories of humans engaging with color in their homes. Do you get the magazine I edit? The online version is free! Just sign up for the newsletter here. Here’s last year’s Spring cover, featuring work by Kollective Design.

I really love running a regional design magazine because it’s not just about ideas but connecting readers to the professionals who can make big dreams happen. Inspo is great. Getting it done is pure joy. Long live print!