refreshing

The best thing about actually living with your partner is that you don’t have to spend all weekend in the airport thinking about all of the things you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to settle for slimy stir-fry from Panda Express because you can make pesto from the basil on the patio. You don’t have to debate the merits of wheelie bags or fight with TSA about shoving those wheelie bags into the overhead bin. You get to buy shampoo in bottles larger than 3 oz., and you get to stay on the ground.

You also get to wake up on a Saturday morning and decide that the dining room chairs that the former owner kindly left are just too gross to keep using. You can then jump in the car and spend $8.96 a pop for new high density foam. You can also gloat about the fact that you were inspired to buy exactly two yards of heavy weight japanese linen on your summer vacation, even though you never buy more than a yard and a half, and even though you had no idea where you’d use it.

You can then look at your watch and realize that you have all evening to reupholster the chairs, unconcerned about catching a flight or having to go to bed at 8 pm for the cheap 6 am one. You can perfect your process as you go, layering foam and thin batting and fabric, developing a heretofore unseen intimacy with the staple gun. You can even go to sleep with 3 chairs done and wake up on Sunday morning, drink a pot of decaf with the Sunday Times and then leisurely move to finish the last 3. You can finish it all by noon and then clear your desk and get down to schoolwork. Ah, weekends. Ah, short-distance relationships.

The good, the bad, the electrical

I had some vague idea that this summer would be relaxing, that I could leisurely undertake some modest home improvements, that I could spend a couple hours each day working on a creative writing project, that I could imagine my courses for the fall as I planted hostas and watched my jalapeños grow. I thought that just maybe J and I would drink cocktails on the patio in the evening, marveling at our good fortune and savoring the fresh summer dinner that I’d just whipped up with delights from the farmer’s market. I’d even open the dreaded dissertation manuscript and start the revisions. Oh, and we’d surely travel to Michigan and then out East, for a meandering road trip in our new car.

All of this seemed possible as I packed my bags in Philadelphia. After all, the blogs I read each day make it seem so easy, so beautiful, so perfectly uncomplicated. So unreal. How did I forget that home improvement doesn’t actually happen in the space of a blog post? How did I forget that my relationship to writing is so vexed that I’d rather make the bed, mow the lawn, and pick up dog shit than sit down and put pen to paper? Why didn’t I remember that having a puppy is like losing an arm and having to work one handed, the other one constantly throwing the ball, removing the bottle cap (or the rock, the sock, the sleeping pill bottle (!), the drano bottle (!!), the shoe, the sandal, the rug) from that damned puppy jaw? And wait, what about this whole marriage thing? Why didn’t occur to me that it would actually take time and energy, patience and fortitude to negotiate all of this with another?

And so now, as we scramble to get out of town for one last breath of coastal air before the grind begins, I feel frantic, made ever more so by the first major house problem. A little bubble on the kitchen ceiling, one that I diagnosed even before I’d mounted the step stool turned into this:



Well, actually, this is the brand new fix. I was too horrified by the problem, I guess, to get a good picture of the old lead pipe (yes, it was actually lead) that was so contorted that it had practically split in two and was spilling toilet “water” into the ceiling. I’m trying to forget the fact that we had just had this ceiling redone a few weeks before. I’m also trying to forget the fact that this drama was playing out on top of our refrigerator. Gross.

The plumber was here all day yesterday, dashing out every hour or so because he was missing yet another part or tool to fix this decided singular set-up. He spent most of the time sawing cast iron and lead pipes, spewing metal filament all over the kitchen. In the fruit bowl, on every plate, glass, and mug. He draped the kitchen in a black snow. And so I spent last night drinking a stiff gin and tonic and mopping up the mess. This all would have been well and good had I not insisted on standing on the counter to wipe the top edge of the window trim. It was then that I noticed that all of his banging had actually dislodged a new light fixture above the sink. I was annoyed and wanted to see if I could sort of jimmy it back into place. I grabbed the metal bar and zap, I felt the shock shimmer up my arm. The light went out and I thought, huh, that was sort of weird, but I didn’t register the problem. So I turned off the switch and grabbed it again. Another zap and then another. I thought maybe I was losing my mind and so I made – forced, really – J to try it also. And of course, electricity knows no favorites and he got zapped also.

This struck me as truly bizarre. How could a fixture be zapping us if the circuit was turned off at the wall? I still don’t know. But a quick google search suggested that we were liable to burn our whole house down. And faced with an unlabeled breaker box (now on “the list”), we decided to be safe and flipped the entire house breaker. Good thing it’s summer and we found the flashlights beforehand. I took down the fixture today, resigned myself to calling an electrician, and I’m forcing myself to just walk away from it for the moment. Argh.



But wait, wasn’t this post going to be about everything evening out? About finding balance in the midst of struggle? Wasn’t I planning to linger on the good, the beautiful, the moment of grace that washed all of this away? Well, I was. Really, I was. But come to think of it, this moment has no beauty and has no grace. It’s just a hot day in Kentucky with a hole in our kitchen and a few singed hairs on our arms.

That last bit, well, that’s just a bit of narrative exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Arm hair remains healthy and growing.

slowly

There are still stacks of boxes (lots of them) and unpainted trim upstairs and old ceiling tile that needs replacing. The walls -- newly coated -- are bare. I haven’t hung a thing, save for a single painting by my Aunt Mimi. Rugs are a distant hope. As are curtains. Reupholstering the couches is on the list, but it keeps falling below the more urgent need of the day, like fixing the hissing toilet or replacing the lousy shower head or making a vodka run to the next county over. My painter, the one whom I hired just to paint the ceilings but who has now become a third member of the family, can only work in the afternoons because he is -- and I’m not joking -- a bounty hunter the rest of the time. He’s not working today because he’s on a hunt with his pepper gun in some strip mines in Eastern Kentucky. He’s twice offered me a job, once to be his partner, “50/50 all the way!” and once to photograph children riding his miniature donkeys -- still not joking -- at county fairs. Extraordinary.

Before

But this isn’t about my painter turned bounty hunter turned breeder of donkeys. It’s about the slow changes happening around here. When we moved in, the living room was a creamy beige and all of the walls were shot through with old nails and anchors and holes. I spent the first week here filling and then sanding all of those holes. Hundreds of them. My mom came down -- bless her -- and we painted the next week, in the 95 degree heat. Though she and J had some initial misgivings about the color -- it’s “moonshine” by Benjamin Moore (I ask: how can you not paint your walls moonshine if you live in Kentucky?) -- everyone fell into a kind of dreamy rapture once it dried. It’s downright gray on the paint chip, but it’s blue on the walls. We were all so smitten by it that we went ahead and gave the dining room and kitchen the same treatment.

After

The couches are old and I’ve loved them since I was a child. They spent their first years in a mid-century house in Midland, Michigan with my grandparents on my Dad’s side. They’re Danish, teak and wicker on the sides. They even fold down into little beds. I’m not sure, but I think they’re from the late 60s. After awhile, they traveled north and resided in my hometown. Eventually, they ended up with my Aunt Barbara, who moved into my grandparents’ house at some point in the early 90s. Or was it the late 80s? I don’t remember. After that, they ended up in the East Village with my cousin Margaret and her boyfriend, in a fourth floor walk-up with narrow halls and steep stairs. As soon as we bought this house, I knew that I needed them. So I begged my Aunt -- who kindly obliged, even if she was mystified by my ardor -- and J and I went and fetched them in a rented zipcar before I left Philadelphia. They’re perfect for this space, even if they desperately need to be recovered and are virtually begging for some funky pillows.


After again.

The space is certainly inchoate, but it’s coming. Slowly. For now, I like to fall onto a couch, catch up on my stack of unread New Yorkers, and pretend that I’m thinking about my syllabi for the fall. Homer sleeps on my chest and J fusses in the kitchen. It’s happening. We’re settling.

a fine prospect

I’ve begun to write four posts in as many days. Each time, as I’m ready to finish one up, I get distracted or my plane lands or I decide sleep is better than blogger. I’m hoping to find the time and space to work on these hibernating posts more this week and, in turn, get this little blog hopping again. That may be wishful thinking. I have a feeling that chaos will ensue until I land permanently in Kentucky at the end of the month.

For now, though, I’m determined to post. J and I finally -- and hopefully conclusively -- decided on a house this past weekend. I made an unexpected trip back to Kentucky on Saturday to check out one lingering possibility, a lovely and rambling old place that in the end needed more work (and thus more money) than we thought we could muster over the next couple of years. So we decided on the little brick abode that we first turned up a few weeks ago.

It’s not without its problems, but this morning I woke up more convinced that we were making the right choice given the options that we have. I also woke up thinking about how polarizing this experience has been. Since I’ve known J, he’s extolled the virtues of renting. In fact, my first doubts about our relationship arose during one of his particularly vituperative monologues about the idiocy of home improvement. I was crestfallen. How could this otherwise brilliant, generous, caring, and creative man have such a blind spot?

He was, after all, calling foul on one of my core commitments. (Oh god, I can’t believe I just self-referentially used the expression “core commitments.”) He was, unknowingly, throwing stones at my imaginary glass house. I couldn’t take it.

I have, I’ve had, I’ll always have domestic desire.

You see, I was reared by a mother who was always crafting and recrafting her interiors, who was thinking about ways to make kitchen traffic flow or finding the perfect shade of butter for the living room walls. We always had stacks of interior design magazines and architectural books about small houses as our bedside table companions. I particularly remember a book from the 1980s about tree houses -- one of those old Sunset publications, I think -- that singlehandedly constructed arboreal retreats in my young mind.

Sadly, our recent house hunting was massively compressed. We had, essentially, one weekend to find a place in a land of generally abysmal architecture, in a state that’s given over -- hook, line, and sinker -- to the excesses of new construction. I had dreamed of a big bungalow on a rolling hillside with cultivated gardens, but not surprisingly, that wasn’t exactly available during the 48 hours we had. And so we’ve compromised.

We’ve taken the pretty good instead of waiting for the perfect. I like that we’ve made this compromise, mostly because I think it will help me to not over identify with my house. The yard is small, but carefully tended. The kitchen hasn’t been touched since the year of my birth, but is pleading for a facelift. The light doesn’t flood in, but there are these lovely, delicate wooden shutters on the inside of the windows that are ready to drink up a coat of brightening white paint. There’s enough to do, but not so much as to scare me from even starting.

Still, I've only half convinced my other half that this is a good decision. I see the worry in his eyes when we talk about replacing the furnace. I hear the tightness in his voice when he bemoans the lack of a disposal. But in the end, I think he'll come around to home ownership.

And it seems, in fact, like this little brick number might just be the perfect place to start.

90

I went to Michigan to do more than meet Lucy, though that was certainly part of the plan. I also went as more than an excuse for some in-flight knitting. This was, in fact, the first of three planned trips to Michigan over the next eight weeks. I love Michigan in the summer and as I get older, I love to be in my hometown. It’s less vexed now than it has been in the past, though one’s ghosts seem never too far distant in one’s childhood haunts. As my mom and I were driving to the airport on Monday, we crested a small hill and I had a long view of 8th street, a charmless avenue that has changed little in the last thirty years. The storefronts, of course, change color, but they remain. Everything is short and squat, gray and beige; it’s a luckless street that traverses the town. As we drove, I felt what I feel so often in Michigan, the layers of the past all stacked atop one another and yet distinct, a palimpsest of the past.



The layers were ever more discernible at one of the events for which I came home. My grandfather turned 90. 90 years old. My family—cousins, and great aunts, friends, and parents—gathered in what felt like nothing but pleasure. Even my father, who often inclines more toward tears than laughter, couldn’t help but laugh as he toasted his father, a man who still plays tennis each week, and whose delight in living a full life seems undiminished after nearly a century. There were three things that I loved about this event:

1. For at least a decade my grandfather has talked about the “young guys” that are his tennis partners. I always—and stupidly—imagined these to be, well, young guys. So as I was chatting with a few octogenarians on Sunday about their tennis game, I asked them where I could find the “young guys.” I was eager to ask them what it was like to play with the decidedly old guys three times a week for more than twenty years. At first they looked confused, then a bit aghast, and then they just started laughing; “We’re the young guys!”

2. During my father’s toast to his father he talked about Grandpa’s working life, a subject about which I know shamefully little. One time about ten years ago I found a packet of letters from my grandparents that were written to my parents during the 1970s, at a time when they were living near Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia. I had remembered—at least I thought I remembered—my grandmother telling me about buying down feathers directly from the geese (this can’t be right) for her pillows in Yugoslavia. In any case, I knew that they had lived in Europe for long stretches of time during the 60s and 70s and I knew that Grandpa was an engineer for Dow Chemical, but I didn’t know much more (and who really knows what engineers do). So when my father started talking about Grandpa opening plastics plants in Europe, I just started giggling. It was like living in The Graduate for a minute. He just kept saying “plastics.” “He brought plastics to Europe.” This cracks me up. Plastics.

3. Cousins! I love, love, love my cousins. I love hanging out with them and whenever we get to see each other, I just end up wishing that I got to see them all of the time. They’re smart and interesting, incredibly funny and definitely a little crazy.



I’m hoping that we can celebrate again at 100.