Hey y'all!
While there are many things we love about this house, when we bought it, we primarily bought a neighborhood and community and a 30 foot magnolia tree, and they threw the house in. So there are things we wanted and did not get.
Like a screened in porch.
To be fair, I have never lived in a house with a screened in porch, but I have always wanted to. Down here, July through September is often miserable, but every other month of the year has many days in a row when being outside in shade but safe from mosquitos would be wonderful.
But no house we could afford had such a thing. So a few weeks ago, someone paid me for a thing I had not expected to get paid for and I decided I would put that money toward a screened porch. Having been underemployed all summer, I probably should have saved that money, but the advantage of having no kids means you can splurge occasionally without feeling guilt about college funds.
Technically, it's more a screen room than a screen porch. It's small, but will be large enough for a table for two and a couple of big cushy chairs. When finished, it will sit atop our large deck, but against the house.
I've been working on it in bits and pieces in the evenings and weekends, but there is no rush. Or there wasn't, until I saw a viral video of a man being shot and all my PTSD stuff came up from the last time I saw a man get killed in real life and then the internet lost its mind and I’ve decided I don’t need to do any of that, and so I turned off the computer. No podcast, no audio books. Just the sounds of birds and my neighborhood puttering in their yards and the bang, bang, bang of the hammer.
I have gotten all the roof on (I hate roof work) and the framing done and the electrical run, and while I cannot fix what is wrong with the internet, I can watch walls go up and structure take form and see what had been only a pile of materials become something that will shelter my family and friends from the sun and the rain and the mosquitos for the next few decades.
I hope you are all doing well, and that you have a place to go to get away, even if only for a bit, from all of this -*waves hands*-. But if you don't, I highly recommend a screen room.
Five Beautiful Things
Check out this open sourced Anxiety Toolkit, filled with tips and techniques for when it all is too much.
In a time of hate
Love is an act of resistance
In a time of fear
Faith is an act of resistance In a time of misinformation
Education is an act of resistance In a time of poor leadership
Community is an act of resistance
In a time like this
Joy is an act of resistance
Resist. Resist. Resist.
From Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It feels pertinent, and why building a screenhouse seems like the right thing to do.
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
And related to that, check out this collection of a thousand years of human drawings and paintings of meteors and comets, shooting stars and other sky phenomenon, all made long before we could capture them on film (or disk!). 
