Harold’s Room
Chapter Two
Harold settled in nicely. He found a spot behind some potted plants sitting on the floor between the table legs where he was shielded from view, and he seemed to be comfortable there. I placed his food and water dishes back behind him so they were near at hand, and though not as private as his spot, semi-secluded at least, and near the floor level windows so he could see out.
Wait a minute here. You have no idea what I’m talking about. I need to give you the layout of Harold’s room. Of course you know it’s a sunroom. It is twelve feet long by ten feet wide. As you are about to exit the house to enter Harold’s domain you are facing east standing in a three foot wide sliding glass patio door centered on the ten foot wall, with three foot wide stationary glass panels on each side of you. To your left are two sets of six foot wide by five foot tall sliding glass windows with glass panels above and below them. In the corner to your left is a six foot artificial ficus tree with six monofilament strings of small mirrors hanging from the upper branches. They catch the breeze from the ceiling fan and reflect light around the room. Lisa loves them, and in fact made several of them. (Do not get anywhere near her if she has a hot glue gun in her hand. She is dangerous.) There are also five or six very colorful, very large butterflies, maybe six inches wide by five inches tall on average. Tucked back in the branches by the trunk near the top is a Christmas ornament, a five inch tall raccoon with a green and red scarf around his neck. Sitting next to the ficus facing into the room are the ladder back hickory chairs and the circular, metal slat top, folding leg patio table. The slats are white and have swirly flower patterns Lisa painted on them. Centered on the wall above it and the windows is a black framed print of a drawing of multiple species of owls that I bought Lisa for Christmas several years ago. Now we are entering Harold’s enclave. This is the corner where the glass side and end walls meet, and where the three walnut colored tables holding the plants sit, under which lies Harold’s sacrosanct territory. In front of the pots on the largest table is a sixteen inch tall white gowned angel who looks as if she is carved from wood and painted, and smaller versions six inches tall to her left and right. You can never have too many angels. I let some of the vines from the pots hang down between the table legs and trail on the floor to give Harold more cover. In front of the tables on the floor are the ones Harold hides behind that got us started on this tour, and we call them “The Potted Jungle.” One of the pots is on a metal, spindly legged brown cat plant stand with a bowl shaped body and curly whiskers on its wide, oval, spring mounted face. It sort of reminds me of the Chesire Cat, but doesn’t look quite so evil. Its tail is spring mounted, too. Hanging from a wall hook mounted in the corner above the glass is a pot with a variegated philodendron. I keep the vines trimmed on that one so they don’t touch the tops of the plants on the table. Okay then. We’ve made it down the left side glass wall and around the corner to the right to the glass end wall. Time for a break. A Killian’s Irish Red should help me get going again. I’ll let you know how that works out. If I remember to. It sucks to get old. But then again, I’ve always felt old, so I guess I’m really just catching up. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have two Killian’s. I can blame it all on my age.
Well alrighty then! (That sounds perkier, yes?) One down, and a cold one by my right hand to go. It’s going to get trickier now. It’s getting dark out here and I don’t like to turn the lights on. I like to be able to see out. I guess I didn’t mention I use red floodlights out back so the nocturnal animals are lit but not bothered. I’m also concerned that if I turn on the lights in the room it might disturb Harold’s repose. He went to bed right after his bath this evening. Didn’t even want any meal worms or cantaloupe for supper. I hope my clicking on this keyboard won’t bother him. I have been told I “strike heavy.” That comes from learning to type on an old Smith Corona manual typewriter. I suppose I could take my laptop into our office and type at my desk, but it’s just not the same as writing in Harold’s room. It’s worth the extra effort. Much better ambience, especially when the night creatures start to show up. But once again I digress. Damned squirrels. Or were those raccoons? Where were we? Oh yes. The glass end wall. The patio door on this wall is larger and mounted off-center to the right. Sitting against the frame on the left side of the upper glass panel, way up there off the floor, is a five inch tall stuffed raccoon holding an acorn, a gift from Lisa’s sister Kelly, and against the frame on the right side above the door a nine inch tall cone incense burner in the shape of a pot-bellied Bavarian hunter carrying a fur game bag and a shotgun. He’s wearing lederhosen with suspenders, a green Bavarian hat with a feather, has a big gray beard and mustache and a bent-stem pipe in his mouth. I have been told that someday I’ll look just like him. Yes I wear suspenders (but NOT lederhosen), and hats (no feathers), and I have a beard and mustache, and I smoke pipes. Maybe they were right, because now my beard is turning white. It used to be red, and it’s cut much shorter than his now. He was a gift from my mother, Ginny, and has been with me for literally decades. Against the left side of the frame next to the Bavarian hunter is a stuffed frog. No. Not a real one. It’s a small, plush, light green stuffed frog, not a failed biology experiment. He is a bit tall and gangly for a frog, actually, but I like him very much. He was also a gift from Lisa’s sister Kelly. I get a lot of gifts like that. Dragons, too, but that is an entirely different story and involves a different room, and in some ways a different life. Let us proceed. Hanging from another plant hook near the ceiling in this corner is a large spider plant in a wicker basket with braided rattan hanger cords, and above the spider plant, also hanging from the hook, a small stuffed owl. NO! It’s not real. Neither is the raccoon. They’re both plush. On the floor in this corner are the containers where we keep the mini marshmallows, the cat (raccoon/oppossum) food, and a couple of partial loaves of week old bread. That all gets put in feeding pans, or tossed or sailed out the back door over the course of the week, usually around dusk, though there are several of the masked “night creatures” who prefer for me to hand it to them. There is a modicum of trust on both sides involved in that. By the way, some of those masked “night creatures” showed up a while ago and ate all of the goodies I threw out there earlier. I’ll need to go replenish that in a bit for the second wave. Now, the interior wall; it is covered with exterior siding. I’ll call it tan, but it has a slight greenish tint to it. That picture of Harold I took when I met him is hanging on this wall with pictures of some of our other friends, all grouped around a large, weathered copper three dimensional star about two feet tall, another gift from Lisa’s sister Kelly (Lisa’s nickname is Star). Phil the groundhog is there in one of the best pictures I have ever had the good fortune to take. He is standing up posing with a piece of cantaloupe in his paws, and standing next to him, likewise head up and posing, is one of Harold’s kin. They were eating cantaloupe side-by-side off of some paper plates, and when I walked to the door to get a picture of that they both stopped what they were doing, looked dead at the camera and posed. It was perfect. Funny thing, we’ve noticed that groundhogs and turtles show up at the same time a lot. We also have Jack and Jill the pileated woodpeckers eating side-by-side on two of the suet feeders, Jackie the red bellied woodpecker, also on one of the suet feeders, Corn and Bread the mallard ducks, with Bread, the female, sitting in a small, flexible, black plastic water dish just big enough to hold her, and Corn looking protectively over her shoulder. There is Pogo the ‘possum hunkered down under a log, and one of the taller does standing in the snow under a sunflower seed feeder (I wonder what she had been doing before I showed up?). There are others, cardinals, chickadees, titmice, finches and other bird species, but those are the best ones, although I should mention the one of the female house finch who was eating out of the pink, house shaped window feeder, also a gift from Gus to Lisa. She was peering in at us from between the fronds of the dragon trees when Lisa snapped her photo. We intend to go through some of the thousands of photos we’ve taken the past couple of years and enlarge the collection. The star they are grouped around is centered on the wall, and they take up about half of the available wall space, so we have room. Let’s persevere and finish it up. Now we are on the side of the room where you will usually find Lisa and me. Right beside the critter grub by the back door is a maple chair side table. On top of it is a terra cotta pot in the shape of a ladies head. She has a glazed purple bandana and hoop earrings, glazed bright red puckered lips and happy eyes. I inverted a six inch terra cotta pot, epoxied it into a terra cotta saucer, and then epoxied her on top of it so she is taller and has a neck. Behind her stands a lathe-turned zebra wood lamp my mother gave me for my birthday, also decades ago. I can’t tell you exactly how long ago or my mother will be displeased with me. It has a pastel green lampshade with a gold crackle pattern and black paint swirls on it, and was originally on a floor lamp in my bedroom when I was growing up. Our chairs are identical. They are swivel rockers, off-white, with a floral pattern similar to the one on the metal slat table. And extremely comfortable. The deal I made with Lisa when she wanted to replace our old chairs with something more colorful for the sunroom was, only if they are at least as comfortable as the old ones. They aren’t, quite, but they’re close, and they swivel and rock and the old ones didn’t, so they win. Now we are to my table. It is an antique made of red oak. On it right now are my Birds of North America book, a few of my Birds & Blooms magazines, my pipe, my lighter, a glass tobacco jar from Kent’s Tobacco Shoppe (closed long ago) that belonged to my maternal grandfather, a sort of bronze art deco butterfly lamp with an inverted tan shade, and my now empty Killian’s bottle, more’s the pity. But hey! Lisa went to bed. I’m still writing. Insert evil laugh. I’ll be right back.
Here I am! Ah! That’s tasty. Okay. We’re almost there. In the table drawer I keep a couple of packs of my favorite incense varieties (Lisa tolerates my smoking, she does not condone it, although there is no comparison to be made between my pipe and the stench of cigarettes or cigars), a few small hand tools and a couple of spare lighters. On the bottom shelf is my black dragon incense burner, cones or sticks, sitting on a black soapstone stick incense box. Behind that is a wicker basket with a bigger bird identification book and a few more copies of Birds & Blooms. Behind my chair is a black floor lamp with a sort of golden/tan shade. And in the corner behind the lamp is my friend Rick’s one iron. When we’d play in stormy weather Rick would say, “You need to carry a one iron like me. Not even God can hit a one iron.” When he passed away, at much too young an age, and Kate asked me if there was anything of his I’d like to have to remember him by, I asked her for the one iron. I don’t play any more since Rick died. I tried, but it just wasn’t the same. The one iron, however, sits right here by me. Always.
I see the finish line. You know there is a ceiling fan, I believe, from my comments about affecting the mirrors on the ficus tree. It is an antiqued copper sort of color a bit darker than the star on the wall. It has walnut blades, a cone shaped metal shade that reminds me of Tom Terrific’s thinking cap, with a large white glass globe up inside it. Hanging down from the metal guards below it are some sprigs of artificial mistletoe riding atop a large, flattened, pear shaped prismatic crystal. On the floor is a brown indoor/outdoor rug with floral patterns that are similar to the ones on the table and the chairs. The floor under it is a sort of multi-hued beige ceramic tile, nineteen by nineteen inch squares. The floor is heated. Harold likes that part. A lot. I keep it set on seventy degrees F during the winter. It gets cool enough out here for him to hibernate, but I don’t have to worry about him freezing in the middle of the night.
Ladies and gentleman, we have reached the end of our tour. Thank you for joining… Oops. Thought I was still driving the tour train at the zoo there for a minute. Boy, that was a long time ago. Hopefully I haven’t confused you, and you now have a basic understanding of the layout. This is Harold’s Room. It is all his now and will remain so, as long as I’m alive and breathing anyway. I expect him to outlast me. At any rate, now that we’ve gotten the necessary orientation taken care of, we can get back to Harold and what goes on in here.