Everything That was Old is New Again

I’m sitting here waiting for FedEx, UPS and USPS to show up with early birthday gifts to myself. Shopping online is way too easy. Coming today are my iron bed in a gun-metal gray (a new twist on a very old style), a box spring wrap (a new twist on bed skirts) a blanket and another set of sheets. The blanket I bought at Bed Bath and Beyond might go back, if I like the one coming from Amazon better. That store was a disappointment when I shopped it last week. They’ve enlarged a makeup section and cut down on the selection of towels and sheets. I guess makeup qualifies as “beyond” but most people think “bed” and “bath” supplies when they go there.

On my library shelf I have an 1895 Montgomery Ward and a 1905 Sears-Roebuck catalogs left over from an era when I day-dreamed that I was going to write historical romance novels. As much time as I spent studying those catalogs you would have thought I was living back in those times when ordering something took weeks to get delivered. Now you order, and two days later it arrives at your door. How cool is that! Over the years those catalogs have come in handy for identifying stuff we’d find in our travels. If no one could tell us what something was, there was a good chance it would end up in my husband’s collection. Sometimes it would take a few years, but eventually we’d figure it out, although I still have two things in the house that are mysteries. Even today I get a kick out of looking through those catalogs. You never know when it will come in handy to know that in 1895 you could buy a yard of 1¼ inch Irish Point Cambric Embroidery stitched on a three inch cloth for seven cents. Okay, so I’ve never actually been able to work that fact into a conversation, but I’m hopeful that day will come.

Back on topic. Here’s the deal. The bed comes today (Thursday as I'm writing this) and Saturday the guys from the service that Wayfair hooked me up with will come put the bed together. The mattress place only delivers to my area on Tuesdays and Friday so I’ll be in a holding pattern where I’m sleeping on a twin bed in the same room where my new bed will be set up. Tuesday the son-I-wish-I-had will be back to pick up that second twin---he’s already picked one set up to make room for the new bed. He has two sets of twin grandkids and they will put my old bed frames and mattresses to good use. Confused? You’re not the only one.

With the painters then all the other stuff going on poor Levi has been confused and out of sorts. I used those twin beds shoved up sit-by-side and he's been sleeping on Don’s side since a few days after he died. The first night with only one twin in the house Levi tried to claim it as his. I made him a nest on the floor next to the bed but he wouldn’t use it and there is no way I was going to sleep on a crate liner with a cushy blanket on top. It took him a half hour of pouting and pacing before he finally acknowledged me as the alpha member of our pack and went to the living room to sleep on the couch. The second night we agreed to share the foot end of the twin, but I was so afraid I’d fall out of bed that before I fell asleep I woke him up and made him move. He rearranged the nest on the floor, laid in it for two minutes then left to sleep on the couch. By the time he gets used to this temporary arrangement, the new mattress will be delivered and he’ll be confused all over again. 

Fun fact: The iron-look-alike bed I just paid $350.00 for on sale cost $7.50 in 1895 plus 35 cents for extra slats...and that one was solid iron. I had an antique iron bed that I had to sell when my husband had his massive stroke and it went for $800 on eBay. Everything that was old is new again.... ©

Here's all the photos of the finished bathroom redo:

view from the doorway, left side of the room---that linen closet is 22" deep

view from th doorway, right side of the room--the chest was not in the room when Don was alive and we needed the space for his wheelchair after transfers

This chest is one of the first pieces of furniture I refinished when I was in my teens. The 3-D photo on the wall was of one of my husband's gas pump faces. It was taken by a professional photographer who now sells them for big bucks. It speaks to me in ways I can't describe.

of course, we need one of these in a bathroom

This watercolor print was done by a local artist. It's of a channel coming from Lake Michigan and it's one of my favorite places on earth.

Going back out of the bathroom you see the necessary stuff on the counter top, although the linen closet has plenty of room for it if I want to hide it out of the way.

I wanted a pop of color on the floor without a pattern that fought with the shower curtain and I didn't want a solid color the would dominate the space. This 5'x7' rug filled the bill and is meant to look like a worn-out oriental rug. I had 23 rugs on my 'wish list' at Wayfair before I narrowed it down and I'm happy with my final choice.

Last but not least, pulling back the shower curtain to show the safety features in my shower. They are one of the reasons why when I was looking for condos a few years ago I couldn't find one that didn't feel like a downgrade for aging in place. If the portable chair is removed there's enough room for a rolling shower-chair for a disabled person. It might look like over-kill with all the grab bars but trust me, as the caregiver helping with showers I used them all...and still do to practice being safe in the leading place where seniors fall. Anyone remodeling a bathroom needs to plan for their needs down the road, think safety and accessibility BEFORE you actually need it. (Are you listening, N.K.B.?) After Don's stroke our houses sat empty and we were parked in a small apartment while our new house was being built because neither one of our old houses had bathrooms that could be remodeled to suit his needs. Even the apartment bath had to be approved before the hospital would release him to my care. In the stroke community I ran into a lot of people who spent unnecessary time in nursing homes waiting for their home bathrooms to be upgraded for safety and/or accessibility. 

If you think I'm being militant about this issue now, you should have known me a year or two out from Don's stroke, after we'd been through major housing issues. We had too much income to quality for the government subsidized apartment buildings that are set up for the disabled and the required 10% accessible apartments in large privately owned complexes were being rented to people who didn't need them. The apartment we did find had to have the bathroom and bedroom doors removed to accommodate his wheelchair while the apartment next to us had the government's basic ADA requirements---zero steps, wide doorways, grab bars in the bathroom---was rented by a young, healthy girl. Hopefully, the housing accessibility issue is better now than it was in 2000 but I wouldn't bet on it. Some states have since passed laws that large builders must build 10% of their houses accessible but back when I was following stuff like this, there was push back on making that a federal law. And ordinary people like to fool themselves into thinking they will never have a need for commonsense stuff like good grab bars. Drives me crazy! Rant off.

The Public Bathroom Controversy

Where do you stand (or sit) on the bathroom controversy that started when North Carolina passed a law making it a crime for transgenders to use men’s or women’s bathrooms that don’t match the sex named on their birth certificates? The state where I live could see a similar bill soon. One is being introduced in our state legislation next month, but I was shocked to learn that people can already be arrested in Michigan for “disturbing the peace” if you have 'outside plumbing' and go into a woman’s bathroom or vice versa. In the twelve years that my husband was wheelchair bound I had to take him into a lot of women’s bathrooms, especially before family bathrooms started popping up here and there. I’d usually check them out first to make sure the handicapped stall was open and I forbid Don to talk while we were in them. I didn’t want someone who’d come into the bathroom after us to get scared hearing a deep male voice in the next stall. I had no idea we were law breakers and here I thought I was a goody two-shoes all of my life.

North Carolina’s House Bill 2 got stuck in my mind a few days ago when I stopped at a gas station to use their restroom and I was surprised to see they’d renamed the men’s and women’s single stall bathrooms since last month. They are now both “unisex.” That solves a problem on single stall bathrooms and that common-sense solution has the side benefit of helping to keep lines from forming by the formerly women’s side. After leaving the gas station I spent the next ten minutes wondering why the owners took it upon themselves to make the change. Is someone in the owner’s family transgender? Did they have an incident that triggered a demand that the ‘disturbing the peace’ law be enforced? Are they just compassionate business owners who believe in being politically proactive? Why, why, why didn’t I have the guts to ask about the unisex signs?

Two years ago I never would have ever guessed this topic would come up in our presidential election cycle. When I was young it was ‘whites only’ bathrooms that they fought about all the way up to the Supreme Court. Ted Cruz is on a rampage about men in “girls” bathrooms---he never calls them “women’s” restrooms---and last night Trump said, “Just leave things the way they are” because it would cost businesses too much to make changes. Then this morning he flip-flopped to match the Republican Party Line and he said it should be left up to each state if they want to change the law, it shouldn’t be a federal issue. Ya, Donald, if they’d done that with ‘whites only’ bathrooms, drinking foundations and lunch counters guess what the South would still be doing today. And now the United Kingdom and a handful of other countries have issued travel advisers warning their LGBT communities against going to North Carolina and Mississippi. I’m not sure, but I think this is a first for the USA to have other countries declare parts of our country as unsafe for tourist travel.

There probably isn’t much middle ground between where each of us stands on House Bill 2 issues. We either think it’s needed or it’s over-kill but I’d like to know what they’re going to do down in North Carolina to implement the new law. Do they expect people to have their birth certificates with them at all times in case someone questions if the sex you look is in opposition to what they suspect you might be hiding? I ask myself how I would feel if Caityn/Bruce Jenner came into a restroom I was using. I've seen other caregivers like I was bring their husbands into the ladies room and it never bothers me nor did it ever appear to have bothered other women when I did it. Many even went out of their way to be nice. How would a transgender be any different than a handicapped guy in a woman’s restroom? I ask myself how I’d feel if I had a transgender son who got beat up a few times for being in a men’s bathroom while dressed like a woman. 

Life was simpler back in the days when people in the LGBT community were still in the closet---simpler for many of us but vastly more complicated for those who suffered in those closets. I truly believe that someday (within 10 years) science will figure out how to test for and correct what goes wrong in the gestation period that causes a baby to be born wired in their brains differently than their sex organs. And do it while a baby is still in the womb. But until the research brings us to that point is it fair to expect transgenders to live life suffering in silence or with daily ridicule just so the rest of us don’t have to face our prejudices and fears? Knowledge is power but that doesn’t mean newly acquired knowledge doesn’t challenge our core beliefs from time to time and require us to grow...or be left behind on the wrong side of history. ©