Painterly

Things started appearing in the hallway, eventually creating a topsy-turvy tower. Taking a closer look, I could see the construction: a coat rack, some shoes, and boxes and bags and other containers that never made their way into the recycling.

Toys also lined the walls and dotted the floor, making a trip to the washroom reminiscent of a game of Angry Birds come to life, only with the new goal of avoiding the newly displaced's collapse.

Each thing sat with a look of shock, the glassy-eyed stare of sudden homelessness.

A stuffed bear with a maple leaf t-shirt and a doll with a horrified expression sat together next to a pile of picture books, none of which had had hands placed on them in years.

Framed slogans of flowery intent leaned against bags of old and not-so-old clothes she had either mentally or physically outgrown.

Their shelves now empty and dusted clean.

The teen had started clearing out her room in preparation for the third decorative makeover of her residency.

I felt surprisingly calm as I tiptoed around the stuff that once orbited her childhood, and was now staged for its final jettison into the great unknown.

Maybe it was because I didn't have to lift a finger. That was the deal.

The pink of her primary years was long gone, but the toil it took to slap two coats of tropical turquoise onto her walls was still fresh in my mind. The preteen years go by so fast.

So far, she has done all the heavy lifting, if not the financing.

She had chosen the color and had invited a friend to help paint the walls a particular shade of soft gray. "Alaskan Husky," to be specific.

I wonder if she will think of her room as the frozen Tundra.

In her younger days, the name rather than the hue would have been the reason for the selection. I might have to take that back, seeing as how I picked "Raccoon" for the dark gray of our house's exterior … so that I could think about living inside a trash panda.

But I digress.

It's some sort of magic I think as we wait for the paint clerk to mix the paint colors and smudge a sample on top of the can.

"It dries darker," she said.

The concept is as familiar to my daughter as the prep work she's already completed.

She has moved the furniture to the center of the room and draped it in old sheets. She's taped off the edges of the ceiling and the molding.

She even knows the preferred roller technique: the Y formation.

Getting two coats of paint up in one afternoon will seem like child's play. 

Only less messy.

There's barely a drop of excess paint on anything, let alone the cloth made for catching them.  There are no dabs of paint on the ceiling for me to cover over in flat white.

A clothes rack, some baskets and a new rug ... that really ties the room together.

The result seems sophisticated beyond my years, let alone hers.