I did something wild and crazy Friday night and went dancing. Not to a nightclub or anything like that, but to a contra dance in the church hall. This is kind of like square dancing, but in two long lines instead of squares. Think the Virginia Reel from PE class. This was, oddly, something I’d dreamed of doing for a while. A number of years ago, I read a book set in Scotland in which there was a community dance in a church hall with a local band, and they did reels and pattern dances. I thought that sounded like so much fun, but when I looked to see if there was anything like that in my area, the closest I could find was in another city in the metro area that would be about a 45-minute drive on the freeway.

I’d forgotten about that until someone in the choir announced that there would be a dance in the church hall on Friday night. A band that used to play in the area would be doing a one-night-only reunion for this. I also saw a notice in the town Facebook page, with someone trying to get together a group to go. So I said I’d go and forced myself out of the house on a Friday night. I figured at the very least I’d get to hear some good music. It was an Irish-style band, and I love Irish music. And it was in the hall of my church, which is perfect for this sort of thing (it looks kind of like the hall in a medieval castle), plus is a 5-minute drive.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. A big variety of people of all ages were there, and there were even men who came on their own. The dances are designed so that you dance with everyone along the way, but people even mixed up in choosing initial partners instead of sticking with people they came with. I’d done the English country style of dancing, like in Regency books, which is more sedate. The Appalachian style is a bit more energetic, and I realized how out of shape I was.

I do love to dance. Dancing seems to show up in a lot of my books. I took a tiny tots dance class as a very small child and did dance routines to my records in my room. I tried taking a real ballet class in elementary school but found it boring since it was just exercises, no dancing (my adult ballet teacher said that was a bad class because although the exercise part of it is important, each class should include some center work with choreography). I was in the ballroom dancing club in college and loved that but wasn’t able to find a good place to dance as an adult. The one time I had a date to go dancing, I found that everyone only danced with the person they came with, which meant there was no point in going to public dances without a partner. Some of the big science fiction conventions, especially those near the West Coast, have ballroom or contra dancing as part of them, and I’ve taken advantage of that.

I took adult ballet for about 10 years, until I had a knee issue and had to drop out and do physical therapy, and then the pandemic hit, and then they fired the teacher who taught the adult classes. They have a ballet studio that offers adult classes here, but I don’t know if I want to get back into that.

Now I know that some people in choir are part of the local social dance scene, so I can get clued in to the other events they do, and I may get to do it more often. It’s great exercise, plus a way to meet people and be part of a community.

So you can probably look forward to more dance scenes in my books.

As the weather continues to get warmer (though with a few cold snaps — we’ve got frost and freeze alerts for this weekend) and the ground wakes up, I keep finding more surprises in my yard.

One was bluebells. I’ve read about them in books about spring in England. I’ve seen pictures and thought they were so magical. It turns out there’s a native Virginia bluebell, and there’s a state park that has a bluebell festival, plus at the right time of year you can just go there to walk on trails to see them. That was Easter weekend this year, when I was too busy to deal with it. Then a couple of weeks ago I was in my backyard, spotted something blue, went farther up the hill, and saw that I had a little patch of bluebells. I need to see what I have to do to nurture them because I want to encourage them.

I also found some forget-me-nots in the front yard. I planted those. Last year, I put out some seeds on a bare patch in the front lawn, but nothing happened. This year, though, some came up. Some of the other things I planted last year also seem to be thriving. I moved in for real last year the day after Easter (that was when the furniture got moved in and I started sleeping in the house), and after the Easter service they encouraged people to take the flowers. I snagged a hydrangea and planted it. It seemed to stay alive last year but never bloomed, and now it’s got new growth this spring. The following week, they’d set the remaining Easter lilies out in front of the church with a “free” sign, so I took one and planted it. I thought it was dead, so I dug it up and threw it aside. It’s growing now and looks good. No bloom yet, but we’ll see what happens. I found a “balloon plant” on clearance at Lowes and kept it in the pot as a patio plant, but then I saw a lot of bushes of it around town, so I planted it in a flowerbed. I thought I’d waited too late for it to take root before winter, but it’s got new growth this spring. I really liked that plant, so I’m glad. My Realtor gave me some plants at closing, and the one she took a cutting of from her yard is doing well and spreading. It’s a ground cover called Creeping Jenny. She also gave me some creeping thyme, but I can’t find it so it must not have survived. I thought the mint she gave me died because I couldn’t find a trace of it, but I spotted a sprig yesterday.

As I pull weeds, I’m finding that there are a lot of stepping stone paths through the yard that have been covered by grass and other vegetation. I’m trying to uncover all those to add some visual divisions, but some of the paths are in just the wrong place, the way my front walk is. I think some bushes have grown since those paths have gone in, particularly the lilac, which is going nuts right now. It’s almost intoxicating being near it, the scent is so strong. Now that I have a screen door up over my back door, I’ve been opening the door to get the lilac scent into the house.

Not all my discoveries are garden-related. I keep digging up odd things like silverware and even a potato masher. I just about have a full place setting, but I don’t intend to bring them into my kitchen. I may keep them as garden tools.

As I approach the one-year anniversary of living in this house (I closed on April 9, but the first night I spent here was on the 21st), I’m gradually coming to terms with some of its quirks and with some of the issues of having a house like this.

For one thing, I have a basement. This is the first time I’ve lived in a house with a basement since I was a kid living in Germany. There it was damp but cool. Here, it can get pretty humid, even when it’s hot. I learned last year that a dehumidifier is a good idea, especially during the times of year when it’s too warm for the heater but too cool for the air conditioner. Mine seems to pull about 3/4 of a gallon of water out of the air every other day or so, even when it’s not humid at all. This is essentially distilled water, so I’m using it to water plants. I can’t imagine what it will do when it actually gets humid, but by then I’ll be running the air conditioner. I learned during the past couple of summers that I have to adjust my idea of a good thermostat setting and can’t set it where I would have in Texas. Sometimes, I need to just put on a sweater and run the AC to get the humidity out so things don’t mildew.

The basement itself is kind of weird because it’s actually upstairs from my first floor. My house is built into the side of a hill. The front half of the downstairs is the ground floor, where the front door is. Then you go up a step into the basement, which is the back half of the downstairs and the part that’s mostly underground. It’s not a finished basement. The floor is concrete, and it looks like the walls were encapsulated and sprayed with foam insulation by the people who restored the house. I don’t know what it was like before. The utilities in there are new. They were still installing the connections for the laundry when I first looked at the house. Then the upstairs is the second story in front and the ground floor in back. The back door to the house is upstairs. This is the only house on the street like this. For the rest of them, they built them up on the hill, with retaining walls to hold in the hillside and stairs from the street level to the house. My neighbors’ ground floors are just about level with my upstairs.

I think there may once have been a back kitchen door, as well. When the house was restored/remodeled, they took out the wall that cut the downstairs room in half. There used to be a separate kitchen and living/dining room. The chimney for the coal or wood stove that was apparently used for cooking and heating is still there, though there’s nothing attached to it now, and they took out the wall that was there to open the space up, putting in a bar instead. There’s a bit of concrete slab on the side of the house by the kitchen that looks like a small porch, though there’s no door there. It’s behind the refrigerator, but there’s an electrical outlet that’s at the height for a refrigerator on the wall beside it, and the window for the kitchen is a different size from all the other windows in the house, without the wood framing that’s on all the other windows. My guess is that there used to be a back door behind where the fridge is now for bringing in coal or wood for the stove, the refrigerator went on the wall beside it, and there was a different window in a different place. The siding is relatively new (though not part of the remodel), so there’s no trace of the old door from the exterior, other than what looks like a side porch that has no door. The neighbors who saw the kitchen before the recent remodel said it was very different and it’s good that it’s totally new. That part of the house was gutted, so the kitchen is what you’d get with new construction. I’ve added an island because there was a lot of floor space that wasn’t very useful, and now I have more counter and storage space that I can reposition as needed because it’s on wheels. I’ve also bought a small chest freezer since, as a single person, I generally have to buy packages that are larger than I need at the moment, so I need to freeze a lot of stuff.

The living room isn’t of much use as a living room. It was definitely built before the age of television. I guess it would have worked as a kind of sitting room/parlor, and they might have put a kitchen table where I have the kitchen island, so they didn’t need to use the front room as a dining room. I have the chaise lounge that wouldn’t fit through the door of any other room in there, and that’s where I put the dining room. I use one of the upstairs rooms as a living room. It’s designated as a bedroom in the floor plan that went with the listing, but I don’t think it’s been used as a bedroom for a long time. The door to the room has been removed, there’s no clothes rail in the closet, and there’s a sliding glass door to the deck. I don’t know if the deck is original to the house or if it was added later, and I don’t know if there was always an exterior door in that room. It’s a little odd having the living room on a different floor from the kitchen, but I’m getting used to it. I put my old microwave (there’s one built into the kitchen) in the spare room so I can reheat tea or even make microwave popcorn without going downstairs. I love that living room and looking out at the yard from my seat on the sofa. It’s snug, but it works for me.

I’d thought the lack of closet space would be a problem, but it seems to be working out okay. Most of my tops are knits, so I can fold them instead of hang them, and I’ve turned a bookcase into a wardrobe with fabric bins that fit on the shelves. Since I am who I am, that bookcase does have some books on it, as well.

I think I’m eventually going to get different blinds for my bedroom windows. The window frames are a slightly odd size, so one size of blind was about half an inch too big. I thought I could make the smaller size work, since it covers the glass part of the window, but since it has to hang over the lower part of the window that you can raise and lower, it leaves a gap on the sides on the upper part of the window, and in the summer when it starts getting light around 5 in the morning, that’s annoying. I may go with something that fits over the window rather than inside the window, and I have some ideas. For now, I have some lined curtains that I can throw over the curtain rods that hold the lace curtains, and that deals with the worst of the light.

I had to get used to not having a landline phone. There isn’t even a phone jack. There’s a connection box from Bell Atlantic on the outside of the house, but it doesn’t lead to anything in the house (I think the phone jack must have been in the part of the kitchen that was gutted and remodeled, probably one of those old phones that hung on the wall). So I joined the 21st century and just use my cell phone. My old cordless phone system with two handsets connects to the cell phone via Bluetooth, and my house is small enough that my cell phone is always in range, so now I have handsets up and downstairs that ring when I get a call and I don’t have to find the cell phone or run up or down the stairs to answer. I have fiber optic Internet, so I have my phone set to run over the wi-fi so I don’t have to deal with cellular reception at home.

It took me a while to get my office the way I wanted it. I found a small desk that’s on wheels and that can raise and lower, but I found that I couldn’t get it to lower enough to be comfortable, and the keyboard drawer that was at the right level didn’t pull out enough to put my laptop on it. I also needed more desk space than it offered, so I found another desk that’s pretty much like a hospital tray table. I can lower it enough to type comfortably, and it raises if I ever want to do the standing desk thing. The other desk works as a “desk” for other work, and the keyboard shelf is good for keeping my planner and reference notebooks handy. I found a gaming chair that has good lumbar support that I can adjust, so now I can sit comfortably at my desk to type.

A lot of the windows don’t have screens, but I found some that you can slot in from the inside, and they work pretty well. I’ve got one of those magic mesh things for the door that leads to the deck, so I can go in and out with my hands full.

There’s still some fine-tuning to do to get the house exactly the way I want it, and I have a lot of work to do in the yard, but I’m getting closer to ideal in my cozy little cottage full of quirks. One thing I find amusing is that my house pretty much looks like what you get when a child draws a picture of a house. It’s got the pointy roof, two windows upstairs, two windows and a door downstairs, and a chimney sticking out of the middle of the roof. It’s like I was drawing pictures of my future home when I was a child drawing pictures of houses.

As of yesterday, I’ve owned my house for a year. The first year was focused on getting the house set up and in order, and now I’m turning my attention to the yard.

According to the neighbors, the man who used to own the house before abandoning it had landscaped the lawn extensively. Then it was left to run wild for years. The people I bought it from, who’d restored the house, mostly just mowed down the lawn before putting it on the market. It went wild with weeds in the summer, but now that I’ve cleared out a lot of the weeds and am seeing what it’s really like in the spring, I’m getting a lot of surprises.

For one thing, there are a lot of bulbs that didn’t get a chance to bloom last year because they were mowed down just as they were coming up. This year, the yard is full of tulips and daffodils. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of blooms. Part of that may be because the greenery was cut down last year. I’ve learned that bulbs essentially “recharge” after blooming by using the greenery as fuel, so you’re not supposed to cut back the leaves after the blooms fade. The bulbs got their cycles messed up last year by having the greenery mowed down as soon as it came up. The bulbs also need to be divided because they’ve been allowed to just grow and spread, so they’re in huge, tight clumps. After the greenery dies off, I’ll have to dig up some and move them around.

Then there was the field of something from bulbs. The greenery came up, and it looked kind of like grass, but thicker and more tubular, and when I pulled up some of it along with a weed I was digging up, I could see that it was bulbs, not roots, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. Last Sunday, it bloomed, and I had a field of these white flowers, which my phone identified as Star of Bethlehem. There are other clumps of these all around the yard. I also have fields of wild violets. I had some daylilies last year, but it looks like I’ll have even more this year.

I’ve figured out what the leaves of the worst weeds, the ones with sticker burrs, look like, so I’m trying to dig them all up before they go to seed and produce the stickers. That alone makes the lawn look a lot better. Aside from that, my main project this spring is to move my front walk, which is in the wrong place for my traffic pattern — as I discovered when I was shoveling a walk in the snow and realized it was nowhere near the actual walk. Moving the walkway will create a flower bed. I hope to gradually turn the whole yard into a cottage garden, but that may happen a patch at a time.

Fortunately, I’m in a thinking phase of work, and I’ve found that pulling weeds is almost as good as taking a shower for encouraging creativity.