Summit Update

It’s been a summer where we have treated the house on Summit like a summer cabin — there for the weekend, spending the rest of the week at the Ashland house. The goal was to get to know the Summit house a little better in our terms, to make it lived in and sense how we feel about it. Though we’ve not yet come to any conclusions, we have been getting more comfortable with it.

It’s also been a lot of work to keep up and do projects at the two houses though, plus rehab the new one. Today we had meant to go out and do some things — Paws on Grand, the Dollar House, art fairs — but ended up instead spending the day doing yard work with the fantastic help of Baillie, the teenage daughter of old friends. Baillie is a phenomenal worker, and remarkably can get things done while Beatrix prattles at her a mile a minute and shows her things, including the grasshopper she collected which is now sitting in a jar by her bed. At the end of the day we had cleaned out the two incredibly overgrown front rose beds, plus done a lot of smaller projects and cleaned up. We celebrated by heading out to the SEIU Member Day at the Zoo.

Though we have not come to any conclusions about the Summit place yet, I am very happy so far with all the good we’ve been able to do with it. Several of our friends have been able to live there at transient points of their lives. We’ve hosted fundraisers. We’ve redone the bathroom and been on a tv show. It’s been on the SARPA garden tour. We’ve been able to share it with hundreds via the Friday Night Pool Parties (have you been yet? you should come). I had wanted to feature some friends’ art there this summer at weekly or monthly art shows, but just haven’t been able to face the logistics.

We’ve spent every Saturday cleaning through things, and have been able to pass on many of those items as well. It’s hard to do, but nice to know some of the items that we just don’t have room for in our lives can move on.