The Full Surburban: Leaning in to locate the source of a crashing sound
A few weeks ago, I was alone in the house except for Maggie, our cute but lazy dog who was napping by the fireplace. I had been tinkering around in my kitchen, putting away random objects that had collected on the small countertop where I charge my phone and also stash important things like school papers, dead batteries, grocery lists, bubble wands, sticky notes and toys that have been confiscated from naughty little boys.
So, when I heard the sound of something crashing to the ground, I was alarmed. Either our house was under attack, or something had just fallen off a wall. Things falling off the wall is not a rare occurrence in this house. I am a “leaner” when it comes to artwork, meaning that I’m usually too lazy and indecisive to hang pictures, so instead I’ll set them on a mantel, piano, or dresser and simply lean them against the wall.
This method can appear boho-artsy or thrift-store-casual depending on how you look at it, but it usually works just fine – except for the time when I’d opened all the windows to let in a breeze and a rogue gust of wind chased through the house, blowing over the giant picture that had been leaning against the wall behind our piano.
Glass shards went everywhere, the frame was splintered beyond repair, and the picture inside was ruined. I spent the better part of an hour cleaning up that mess, but I still haven’t learned my lesson; I just stopped opening my windows on particularly breezy days.
Another successful method for getting pictures to fall off your walls is to improperly use Command Strips. Command Strips are basically velcro for anything you want to hang on your walls, with highly adhesive backs that stick to surfaces like magic and then peel off without leaving a mark whenever you’re ready for a change.
Command Strips work great if you follow the instructions, which include the directive to stick them into place and then wait one full hour before hanging anything from them. But because I have the patience of a toddler, waiting an hour to get a picture hung is simply not an option; I give it about 45 seconds before I walk away.
Sometimes, this method works great; I’ve had picture frames that have held steady for almost six years now. But when it fails, it fails spectacularly. Last year, I lost two pictures off my bedroom wall within days of each other, one shattering the glass covering one of my bridal portraits, and the other damaging an antique frame from France that Logan had given me for our anniversary. But, hey, not a nail hole in sight!
Before you get too busy judging me and my toddler-like ways, keep reading because I’m about to give you lots more ammo. Let’s go back to the beginning of my story, where I heard the loud crash in my otherwise quiet house. “Picture down,” I said to myself as I raced toward the sound to see what kind of mess I would be dealing with. To my astonishment, I couldn’t find a frame on the floor anywhere – no glass shards, no destroyed artwork.
“Maybe a toy fell over or something,” I wondered next, wandering through my living room and entryway in search of anything amiss. But that search proved even more unfruitful. There were so many random toys, books and shoes strewn every few feet that I couldn’t tell if they had recently fallen from a higher perch or had been there for days.
It wasn’t until I wandered into my pantry hours later that I discovered the culprit: our electric skillet, which had lived most of its life precariously perched on an upper shelf, had finally slipped and fallen to the floor. Relieved to have located the source of the crash, I picked up the skillet, gathered its shattered plastic edges and learned a very important lesson: This house needs to be tidied – stat!
Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.