painting and progress in fits and starts.
and unsolicited advice on choosing paint colors.
We’ve been painting the main rooms of our apartment white for weeks now. Brushes are perpetually wrapped in plastic bread bags and stuck into the door of the refrigerator. There’s an entire paint roller wedged next to the carton of eggs on the bottom shelf. When there’s an hour to spare, we reopen a globbed-up can of paint, pull out the paint tray, and paint what we can before life inevitably intervenes.
The impact of a fresh coat of paint in an apartment can’t really be overstated and neither can the time it takes to get it there. When we moved in, the entire apartment was painted in the matte yellowish white preferred by landlords hoping to disguise damaged walls. The plastic eyes of drywall anchors glared at us from perplexing vantage points on every wall. I immediately took pliers to the anchors and patched the holes they left behind and then for three whole months after that the slightly shiny sheen of my Fast n’ Final repairs caught my eye each time I turned my head. Soon, my children’s greasy fingerprints joined them, glinting menacingly in the afternoon sun. When one of my kids palmed the center of the living room wall after scarfing a fistful of oily popcorn, leaving a perfect handprint precisely in the spot where we project movies, I started looking into washable finishes and scrutinizing nearly imperceptible differences in shades of white.
Our goal was to finish painting the main rooms of our apartment before the heat went on, but we’ve already passed that mark, so we’re trying to steal small mid-day painting opportunities when the radiators aren’t blasting and we can still fling the windows open. One living room wall has been exactly one-quarter painted for two weeks now.
I painted our last apartment in the fall of 2020 while listening to NPR report on whether or not we’d officially ousted an authoritarian president. On that impossibly sunny November day when the news finally broke that we had, I left my fridge full of paint brushes and danced in the streets. I didn’t imagine that five Novembers later, I’d be slowly painting a different apartment, with that same despot back in office, but also with a different and more potent kind of hope burbling all around me. This week, in New York and across the country, joy wasn’t born from deposing a despot, but from ushering in a political future that challenges the tired and inequitable structures that allowed an authoritarian to return to office in the first place. It’s political progress and potential built by the people, grounded in who and what we’re fighting for, not in who we’re fighting against. It feels so good that I might just find the energy to pick up a paintbrush again.