Cocooning

In the face of global turmoil, including (but not limited to) wars, famine, civil unrest and abnormal weather patterns, I have joined the revolution.

Like millions of other middle-class Americans, I am cocooning. It seems like the only thing to do, after casting one’s ballot and praying for peace. Is this the genesis of the modern drive to fix up our homes? I can’t think about it, I have a backsplash to tile.

I have a soft spot in my heart for found treasures. Where others see a bland Formica backsplash, I see a blank canvas for a colorful mosaic. One man’s cast-off Barcelona chair recently became my re-upholstered mid-century classic.

And last week, after an early morning off-leash adventure in Central Park with my Schnauzer, Aengus, I almost passed by a trio of construction debris barrels before spotting some lovely wrought-iron filigree. On closer inspection, the bling that caught my eye was a five-foot tall free-standing iron candelabra. Just the thing for my dimly-lit dining area.

As I was sizing it up, a well-dressed lady strolled by. “Very nice,” she said approvingly. “I wonder if it will still be here when I bring my car around?” I said. “I doubt it,” she offered, confidently. Knowing I had met the competition, I scooped up the candlestick and traipsed across Lincoln Center, trailing Aengus.

When cocooning on a budget, it is best to plan on such serendipitous finds and to be flexible enough to work around imperfection. The Mies Van der Rohe chair that I found on a street corner after a night of poetry and music needed the kindness of near-strangers to be carried through SoHo to our loft, and a good scrubbing with a Dobie pad to restore its lustrous chrome.

You don’t need to look further than your television set to find design gurus eager to help you spin your cocoon. They are spawned daily on HGTV. Supermarket magazine racks are overstuffed with kitchen and bath ideas.

Do-it-yourself stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are now as ubiquitous as supermarkets. We seem to need one in every town to satisfy our need to hole up in our castles while the world goes to Hades. Given the damage done to some communities by recent floods and tornados, the need for these home improvement centers increases with each new disaster. (Don’t forget your local lumberyard when the Depot comes to your township.)

My personal pre-occupation with home improvement projects pre-dates Hurricane Ivan, though. I remember my mother, on her hands and knees for days after we moved into our “Classic Six” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was scraping the grimy parquet with a single-edged razor blade, exposing the elegantly patterned floors in our new dining room. Another time, she covered the walls of our 30-foot long hallway with black and white hounds-tooth check wallpaper before laying down a bright red carpet as a complement.

Later, she would renovate a truly raw space, a loft in SoHo that pre-dated Home Depot’s arrival in the city by some 30 years. When I needed a bed for my room, I called a company that installed steel shelving and had them build me a “really big” shelf. But when the proprietor realized I was using his shelving as a bed, he made me promise not to put it near the window, afraid of the liability issues should I roll out of bed in the middle of the night. Years later, he included loft beds as a use for his shelving in promotional literature.

The process of cocooning seems never-ending. There is always something to do, something to fix, something to make better. As Thanksgiving approaches, I won’t forget the people who wish they had homes to fix up. Cocooning doesn’t have to separate us from the world. It can make us more aware of how preciously we treasure our homes, whether on a hillside in Pakistan, a bayou in Louisiana or a riverside in Narrowsburg, NY.