Making My World Beautiful:
Chandeliers and Paint Colors
Eleven o’clock, I heard it, FedEx. A text that morning alerted me, but as the truck drove away there was no package on the porch. My mind churned with scenarios as the distinctive gurgling of the truck moved along the streets. Over the next hour, I refreshed my phone numerous times, no change to the message: “Out for Delivery.” When the sound of the truck had long faded I called Customer Service. “He stopped but no package.” The voice on the other end tried to explain his hands were tied. I said, “It’s very expensive, I’m afraid it could be lost.”
He said he’d contact dispatch and call back. I waited on the porch, feeling 5 years old, my watchful eye on the corner for my mother’s return from work. Rain teemed, I waited. My phone rang, the now familiar voice on the other end of the line assured me it would be delivered by day’s end. When the truck idled in front of the house, I met the driver with a big smile. He said, “I couldn’t find the box at first,” as he sloughed the oversized package off his shoulder and on to the porch. It dawned on me, that I hadn’t asked how it would arrive, but I would soon find out.
The existing light had come from Home Depot, I think, with matching floor lamps and living room light. Five years of switching on and off led to this moment when the original beauty of the beveled glass butler’s pantry, the stained glass window, and a vision of future dinner parties under sparkling crystals would take place.
Christmas and this steamy summer day had much in common as I sliced through tape, plunged fingers into peanuts, and removed cardboard. Instructions, brass pieces, cotton gloves, and foam-wrapped crystals that I laid out in organized fashion, packaged A through G, as my husband breathed over my shoulder.
A white resin medallion came down and went to the basement so I could paint it to look like brass. John took down the old light, secured the utility box, and piece-by-piece, puzzled the brass fixture together as much as he could on the table before hanging. Medallion went back. We worked to mount the bare bones fixture—John wiring, me tensing every muscle as I held up the heavy piece so he could trace the wire through the chain and into the electric source.
Only then could I don cotton gloves, unwarp crystals and begin the tedious work of placing them around the brass form. Crystals alone became a 2-day project. By Thursday evening, like Michealangelo surveying his work on the Sistine Chapel, I couldn’t help but move about the room to inspect it from every angle. Satisfied, I started to clean up.
Was it worth it? From finding the light in a shop in Alexandria, Virginia during my birthday weekend in May, to convincing my husband it was right for our house, to organizing transport, to its tenuous arrival, to now, yes. It was worth the wait, five years in the making. As I admired the chandelier with the entry way in the background, I realized that now attention had to go toward the foyer. I called for my husband, “John???”
Over the weekend I prepped and painted. Took down a yellowed medallion and brassed it up, too. My dear friend, @Curtis Hueser, and his book, Your Home: A Living Canvas, taught me the finer points of layering paints to bring out the sheen of a bronzed or brass treatment on nearly any surface. Poetry Plum wall paint, Steamed Milk ceiling paint, colors picked first by hue then by name added to this writer’s creative bent. As I edged and rolled the paint to make my home a bit more beautiful, a feeling akin to seeing my mother come around the tall bushes at the end of the street came over me. To see her tired gait, a shopping bag by thumping her purse, reminded me that, no matter what, everything was right with the world again.