Temporary Fixes and Partial Solutions

and things that won't look good on Zillow

On Tuesday I made multiple trips up and down the stairs, moving a table and my office chair, some books, a candle, and setting up a new space to work in for awhile. Between all that rearranging and the walk Scout and I took, I ended the day with more than 40 flights of stairs according to my watch. Win win.

When we began planning our move into this house, knowing it would likely be for sale in the near future and not wanting to over-clutter it, I made an office space in the landing with my white desk, white lockers, white bookshelf, and white filing cabinet. Tim hung one picture over the desk for me and I added some plants, but for the most part it is a very practical and un-artsy spot. I pay bills, file reports, make schedules, and scrutinize sales reports there. I keep it pretty tidy. It will look good on Zillow.

My other desk is in the basement, arranged in an L shape beside a sewing table my mother-in-law gave me when she decided she was done with large quilt projects. Both desks are beginning to be gloriously cluttered with paper scraps and paints, journals and vintage books, and almost all my supplies are rounded up into one corner of the daylight basement, behind the piles and projects for finishing the house. I have an old metal shop stool that looks really cool pulled up to the art desk, but I am normally just standing while I play at making—which has not happened as often as I would like these last seven months. But it’s all there and ready. It’s the kind of mess you expect in a basement.

This morning I waited to see the sun get up over the mountains out the window, watching it begin to filter through the trees that surround us. The sky bruised at the edges, but the clouds are stubborn today and everything above is only gray now. I am at the tippy top of this great big house we never planned to live in, sitting at a plastic, fold-up Costco table that will not look good on Zillow, enjoying the gray world out my window. Facing east. Facing the sun somewhere out there, a future I can’t see but still trust.

I actually love this temporary spot for my temporary desk. I have been fighting against that word for months because we have lived in temporary places before, and that feeling of unsettledness can be endless gray, endless white. I want to root down.

Tsh Oxenreider shared an essay this week about partial solutions, mostly in regard to finding our friends. We can idealize who our perfect kindred spirit would be—usually a clone of ourselves and our interests and life stage—and that ideal can keep us from seeing the people God has already placed in our lives. She says,

It looks like continually keeping your eyes peeled for someone who fits the bill, but it looks even more like keeping partial solutions at the forefront of your mind when you yearn for companionship. Maybe God’s already answering this prayer; you just need to recognize who it is He’s really bringing to you.

“Partial solutions” was the phrase I needed to hear, for friendships and living conditions and desk placement and art tables, because waiting for everything to be perfect has kept me from so much goodness over the years. It’s kept me from starting things, finishing them, putting myself out there, taking good risks. Waiting for a more perfect time and place and person is the real definition of procrastination, whereas a partial solution makes use of what is in my hand and just does stuff.

Last Christmas we gave my mother-in-law one of Emily Lex’s watercolor workbooks. Knowing her hand and wrist were bothering her enough for her to give up large quilt projects, I thought maybe watercolor would be an easy creative outlet.

This week she showed me the nearly completed workbook, which sparked her interest in sketching, a trip to the second hand store, and a haul of several books on watercolor and drawing. She brought out her sketchbook full of birds and told us about the watercolor class she’s signed up for at the local college, starting in May.

None of that will enable her to quilt again like she used to, but the partial solutions are now new hobbies that feed her joy.

My ideal space would have my functional white desk and filing cabinet for all the admin stuff I do, my stand-up desk and sewing table for painting and art journaling projects, and a comfy chair for writing, all in the same room. The walls would be filled. The surfaces would be wood, not plastic. It would be my space alone and I would close the door if the house needed to be “more presentable”. Our last home had this space and I loved it.

This home has a different set of needs and rules, and that’s fine. It has views and spaces that our last home didn’t—right now I’m on the third floor, watching birds dive from the treetops to the ground below, and I can see the dogwood turning red with coming Spring. Giant pinnacle rocks across the road are snatching patches of fog.

My art space is as far as it can possibly be from my current writing space and the “inconvenience” means I have to be more purposeful, which never hurt anyone.

Partial solutions aren’t necessarily less than ideal—sometimes they are simply a different ideal. Someone dreams of having one single desk to do their work at, not to mention the time and resources to do it with. I am by no means complaining about where we live because it is a dream home and I love it here. The struggle is in how we are living here—temporary, a bit unsettled, not sure about roots, and far away from our people and work.

Reading over what I’ve written, my past self has come up to haunt me and give me a good dose of my own words. The future I couldn’t see when I wrote the following is the present I am struggling with now, so I needed this again:

Whether leaving or staying, our work is to risk the investment right here, right now, and to nurture what is before us as if it is all we will ever know. We can be shade and shelter, and we can leave beauty around to fill the pockets of future generations, as long as we are courageous enough to risk rootedness right in the middle of our unknown stories.

—excerpt from “Risking Rootedness” at Cultivating Oaks Press, June 2024

My partial solution is to settle in as hard as I can, while I can.