My kitchen looks like Santa's elves had a drunken hootenanny here during the night. Drawers pulled out, counters covered with dishes and Xmas wrapping, one of the rugs scrumpled up in a corner and a cat sleeping on top of it. There are little paint-sample jars in gray and terra cotta, matching the squares of paint slapped here and there on the wall.

I woke up around six and revived the fire, kind of muddle-headedly. When I walked into the kitchen I just started laughing. I'm the sort of person who likes a lot of uncluttered surfaces — my eye and brain can rest and get on with other tasks when the spaces around me are clear. You'd never know this today! But it's all good.

I was at the tail end of a drawer-and-cabinet purging when I realized I couldn't live with the kitchen's yellow walls one more minute. Now that there's a big window into the living room, whose nectary, peachy-yellow color I adore, the slight lemon cast of the kitchen's hue is a shocking clash. Some people don't notice. My friend who built the window matched the living room color and then touched-up both rooms with it, thinking they were the same. But for me, it's fingernails-on-a-blackboard painful from every angle.

I admit I've been a maniac about fixing up the kitchen. It started with trying to save money, of course, and you know how that goes. My wood stove leaked so badly last year, I couldn't use it for one more winter. So I sold an old engagement ring and bought a new, efficient, smaller stove, which could be fit into a corner, leaving a blank wall that I then opened up the way I've wanted to since I bought this house. That change will help heat distribution and over time, I'll save a bundle on firewood, pressed logs, and propane, but in the meantime I lost three cabinets and had to reorganize everything, and the grating of incompatible yellows was revealed. Three months later, I'm almost done with the big purge and about to start on the paint. This is what I'm giving myself for Christmas. It's not the best present I got, though.

I've been trying to get my mortgage modified for the last three years, to no avail. I can't begin to describe the crazy-making nature of this process, but you can read about it in any newspaper. Maybe you think it's also a little crazy to start home improvements on a house in jeopardy. And you might be right. But it also could be the case that my acting as though the house was really mine tipped some balance in the universe.

Because on my doorstep yesterday morning was the paperwork for a loan modification, with numbers I can live with. It wasn't wrapped in green tissue paper and tied with a red bow — I just imagined that part. Perhaps December light refracted through tears has that effect.