a moment in the day: happy

Sunday morning in our dismantled kitchen, and our friend Brad is due any minute. He and Stephen are going to be patching this skeleton of wood with drywall. Quick I go upstairs and look through my pens. Grab a pink one. I take it downstairs and, alone in the kitchen, I go over to the crisscross of bare wood that frames the space where the walls used to be. I lean in over the space where the sink used to be and draw a tiny happy face on the wood. Two dot eyes and a curve of mouth, size of a ladybug. 

I go to another spot and get close in, put a happy face on the rough side of a two by four. Cross the room, another happy face. Dot, dot, mouth.

On one length of wood, I write, horizontal,

Hi

Hi

Hi

I wonder if Stephen or Brad will see it. Or if they'll (more likely) cover it up unnoticed. I make sure to hit all four sides of the room.

Dot, dot, mouth. Dot, dot, mouth. Little bits of positivity planted in our walls.

H

A

P

P

Y

K

I

T

C

H

E

N

a moment in the day: worm

We're cleaning up after the electricians have finished working in the kitchen. I've just put a big piece of, I don't know, drywall?, in the outside garbage, and as I head back from the bin through the soft rain, Stephen is heading over with a full trash bag to chuck. 

On the wet concrete not far from my shoes is a worm. At first it just looks like a thin streak of shadow, but it's moving. Making a mosey toward the house. I don't want it to get stepped on. I stoop, make the fingers of both my hands as delicate as I can to pick it up. 

It shrinks at my touch. As I gather it in my hand, Nicholas's spirit runs from the worm and into my skin.  

I don't believe in magical things, in spiritual things, as a rule. Still. At night in bed when my defenses are down, when my daily projects are quiet and I'm missing people and worrying about people, I close my eyes, squish my head into my pillow, and try to send a ghost thread of me out into the air, into the atoms, through the wood of my house, the drywall and dust, into the night, into the all of the everything, try to send it out far enough to make a connection with someone on the other side. 

And fall asleep.

I guess I can't complain that I'm such a good sleeper.

The worm squiggles in my hand. I go over to the grass, crouch down, and let it go.

a moment in the day: ceiling

Down in the basement, standing on a wooden box, I hold my hands just over my head, flat against the ceiling, as Stephen uses a drill to work out the screws holding the ceiling panel in place. 

One after another, the screws unscrew and fall to the floor. Tink. The buzz of the drill runs along the panel and tickles my palms. My arms are getting tired. Tink. 

A sudden weight as the last screw comes loose and the panel disengages. Both of us work together to heft the piece of ceiling down to the floor, but as we're leaning it up against some sort of pile of basement boxes, Stephen says, "What is that?"

Extra kick to the word that. 

He sounds weirdly alarmed. I turn. But the that, the thing he's just discovered on the floor, looks like a stray, half-crumpled strip of electrical tape. 

He says, "It's underwear!"

Giving his shoulders and both his hands a kind of shake like imagining he touched it. 

I look over my head at the wide hole in our ceiling. 

Underwear just fell from our ceiling.

I say the only appropriate thing to say under these circumstances: "Take a picture."

I turn back and Stephen's already got his phone out, stooping to focus. What looked like a crumple of electrical tape is a scant, looped strip of lacey fabric in two tones, green and blue. Who knows how long it's been hiding in our basement ceiling or how the hell it got up there.

Stephen straightens, checking out the shot. I go over and crouch down to get a better look. 

"Don’t you touch it" Stephen says. "Or I’ll never be able to touch you again."

some random facts about our house

There is a home-made straw bale building of some sort in our neighbors' yard, just over the fence from our side yard. It was one of the first things I noticed when we first checked out the place while house hunting. I was fascinated with the building and liked the idea of living next to it. On inspection day, after the home inspector had told us all the myriad things that were wrong with the house, I went in the yard and took a picture of that straw bale building because I figured I'd never see it again.

When we got the house, the dryer vent was on upside down, the hot and cold water was backwards in the bathroom faucet, none of the doors closed all the way, the plumbing was DIY in the worst possible way, and there was a plaque reading "World's Best Fisherman" mounted by the front door.

The fix-it guy who took out the old pre-fab fireplace in our bedroom and sheetrocked the walls back up and fixed our windows and put in our new lights was a whistler. Whistled pretty much the whole time he worked. On his last full day of work, I asked him what the tune was that he was whistling just then. He stopped, ticked his eyes upward to think, whistled a little more of it and then said, "Oh, that's a Confederate marching song."

After he took out the pipe that went from the fireplace, through the roof to the chimney, he stuck a plastic bag over the hole in the ceiling for a few days. The plastic bag hanging from the ceiling would gently rise and fall as air currents from the chimney filled and left the bag. It looked like it was breathing.

We were pretty scared of the kitchen for a long time. Its filthy stove and cabinets and old refrigerator. During the period we were fixing up the house, pre-move, while we were spending lots of hours working on the woodwork and painting, we fortified ourselves with daily trips to the Bipartisan Cafe, where we bought mochas and sandwiches. We ate sandwiches from Bipartisan every day for two weeks straight, Stephen also went to the store and got us what he called "ironic snacks." These were string cheese for me and a bag of mini pepperoni pieces for him.

On our first complete day working at the house, as we sanded the woodwork and scraped off the drips and cakes of old paint, the neighbors may have heard us singing along with the film soundtrack to Oklahoma. The most-often-played artist was Patsy Cline.

The professional cleaning woman whom we hired to clean the scary stuff periodically used our CD player when we weren't around and listened to country-western-style Christian music. Our fix-it guy, the whistler, held onto a tune, whistling that and only that for hours as he worked. The guy who put in the baseboards talked to himself [I wrote about that here]. Our plumber listened to the news and podcasts in the basement.

Some of the names of the paints we used are: Belladonna's Leaf, Coffee Shop, Bright Idea, Lickety-Split Dip, Mom's Love, Footy Pajamas.

We finally had the cleaning woman clean out the scary fridge. Most of the shelves were missing and one was broken. The cleaning woman took the broken shelf home and duct taped it back together. The duct tape she used had pictures of bacon and mustaches on it.

Then two days after we officially moved in, the fridge died.

In the basement is a small room whose walls are a strange reflective silver material. When we first saw the house, the man who lived in it and was giving us the tour told us that he used to have someone living in that little room and the weird reflective walls were to help keep the room warm for him. Later, during the house inspection, the inspector took a look at the place, leaned in to us, and said, "That's a grow room."

When we first checked out the house, the guy who lived in it and was giving us the tour showed us the very mismatched backyard fence and instructed us that if pieces of wood ever fell off of it, we should get a staple gun and staple the piece back in place and we'd be good to go.

During our move, while we packed up the last of our boxes and bags of stuff and the movers came to the old apartment to cart everything away and we cleaned the apartment, Nicholas was in doggy boarding. The place had a closed-circuit camera so I could watch him. Sad about leaving the apartment, stressed about the move, I'd periodically lie on a pile of folded-up bedding on the floor and stare at my open laptop computer where I could see a tiny image of Nicholas all alone in a room drinking from his water dish.

Spraying peroxide actually can lift some of the staining that your floor guy claims to be the worst animal urine damage he's seen in all his 27 years of working on floors.

The beautiful wooden columns and windows in the living room and dining room at one time had paint on them, but far before we looked at the house that paint had been removed by the then owner of the house, luckily for us. That woman now lives across the street from us.

House-hunting tip: If your realtor shows you a house listing that highlights the ugly chain link fence and the ugly red couch in the living room and the place where the bathroom door was taken out and the wall only partly patched but doesn't highlight the lovely columns and woodwork, don't overlook this house. Everyone else will be overlooking this house, and you will get a good deal and can do a little work and make it beautiful.

Our realtor was a dream who not only helped us hunt down the right house and endured all our pickiness and obsessiveness along the way but made us feel comfortable and taken care of in the process, which, in this stressful market, was so helpful. She also hooked us up with all the professionals who took that neglected house and whipped it into something beautiful. If you're ever in the market and want a good realtor, check Molly Starr out. While we were fixing up the house we went one night to a wine bar to hear her sing with a jazz combo. She sang God Bless the Child.

During the whole process of finding and buying the house, I mourned the loss of our ten year apartment, and among the things I grieved losing were the sounds of the streetcar going by on the street below the apartment, the sounds of train whistles from the nearby train station, and the beautiful, little touches of our old neighborhood, including the old apartment buildings and the lovely horse rings all along the curbs. While going back and forth between homes, fixing up the house, I used to stare out the car window all along Burnside, looking for horse rings and seeing only naked curbs. It wasn't until we were moved in that I saw, here and there along our new street:

a moment in the day: building

Sitting at my computer unshowered on a Saturday, tinkering with the front cover for the book City of Weird. I'm so deep inside that place that I don't see the room around me, or the clutter of papers on my desk, the jacket I left on the floor, only this deep, dark fantastical world I'm building out of pixels. Reds, blues, yellows, shading and shadows. World-building makes you a kind of god. Right now, I'm building a city, I'm building a monster.

Click of my mouse, and over that, the hammering of a fellow world-builder. Bradley K. Rosen is in our backyard, putting French doors on the garage that's going to be Stephen's artist studio. I like that Brad is building the opening through which Stephen will be soon doing his own world-building.

I also like that the power is on. I need electricity today. Last night, luckily just after we'd finished watching a movie, the power went out due to high winds. The entire neighborhood dark. I walked Nicholas in the frozen front yard. The wind was a freight train through the trees and Nicholas kept moving in and out of the little glow from my cell phone flashlight, appearing and disappearing in the black, tail tucked, not happy, still taking his time to find just the right place to pee. I had the leash around my wrist and squeezed hard in my hand but I still felt like he would slip from my fingers and be gone.

We went to bed wearing extra layers, listening to the wind and to the world flying apart outside.

This morning, walking Nicholas again, in the light, I surveyed the damage, such as it was. The garbage container was overturned and the plastic wheelbarrow. There was a thin sheet of metal that used to be attached to the fence between our house and the neighbors', loose and flapping in the breeze. But the tiny pumpkin, healthy and left over from Halloween, is still sitting on the porch.

a moment in the day: laundry

It's a rainy Saturday morning and laundry day in the new house. I step into the bathroom that looks so unlike the bathroom we bought a month and a half ago. New blue paint where it once was mauve, new vanity, toilet, cabinet, rugs and towels, shower curtain. Even the grate in the floor, new. We've spent a painful amount of money but as I look around, there's something so surprisingly satisfying in knowing we've bought so much. How much we've made this place new and our own.

I stop at the laundry hamper, one old thing in this very new room. The basket is halfway across the house full of curtain supplies, so I figure I might as well just grab the hamper itself and take it downstairs. I heft the thing - it's tall and thin, probably a lot easier to take around the corners down the stairs, actually. Nice not to have to transfer the clothes from one container to another just to take it downstairs. Jeez! Why didn't I ever think of this before!

There's a sound that starts out crackle, quickly moves to crunch and ends a second later in a satisfying crack. And, you guessed it, the bottom of the hamper falls out, spilling my dreams of laundering efficiency all over the floor.

Ah. Well, I guess it's never too late to buy one more thing.

a moment in the day: the floors

We're at the house every moment that we're not... somewhere else. Today I worked nine to five and then we attended a literary event but now, nine o'clock at night, we're at the house again.

The smell of sawdust has replaced the stale cigarette smell, at least in the four rooms where the floor guys have been sanding things down. Working like mad to remove the paint that was splattered and slopped across the lovely, old fir floors when the people who lived here before didn't bother to cover anything while painting the rooms. Working like mad to reduce the outrageous amounts of staining that resulted from those people letting their cats and dogs pee all over the carpet and never bothering to clean it up. Untended animal urine that the floor guys and the carpet-removal guy before them have declared to be the worst case they've ever seen.

I'm mad at those people. For hurting this house. The paint splatters all over the lovely wood molding, the spray of old soy or teriyaki sauce (that's what the cleaning woman said it was) up one living room wall and across the ceiling. The garbage we found half buried in the dirt behind the garage. I know I don't have any right to be mad at them; it was their house and they could do whatever they wanted in it. But now this house is mine, and I feel like you do when you find out someone kicked your little sister.

All the half-assed do-it-yourself repair jobs they did on the plumbing. Paint smeared across window glass. The door they took out and walled up but never bothered to refinish. All the filth they were living in. All the neglect. How neglect can feel like disrespect.

Stephen crouches with a spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide, squirting the spots along the floor where the long-ignored animal urine stained the wood the worst. There's only one spray bottle and it's not my turn, so I'm walking around, taking some pictures and looking at the difference this treatment has made already.

I stoop and touch the floor. Touching is something I've been avoiding in this house, at least when I'm not working to scrape paint spatters off the wood columns or help unscrew ugly bathroom fixtures from the walls. It's like there's a layer of those people lingering like old smoke residue all along every surface. But now, we've yanked out the old green carpet and the floor guys have sanded the top layer off the wood underneath, exposing a surface those people never touched. I run my hand along the soft, powdery surface. Something new. Something clean.

a moment in the day: porch toast

Stephen and I sit side by side on the porch steps. Early-dusk blue sky, a cartwheel of crows overhead. We closed on our house today, this house behind us, and it feels real like only something this big feels real, which is to say not real. Whose house is this, it's not our house, it's not a house at all, it's the facade of a house sitting on the old MGM motion picture back lot, it's a painted stage flat on the opera stage at the Keller auditorium. We each have a glass of Veuve Clicquot.

We’ve been wandering around the empty rooms that are full of the stale smell of the fifteen thousand cigarettes smoked by the people who lived here before, pulling up old carpet to see the paint-splattered wood floors underneath. Taking “before” pictures of the cracked kitchen counters, the lovely but scarred and paint-splattered wood moldings and columns in the dining room, taking stock of the work before us.

Cats make lazy lopes through the street. A perturbed squirrel squawks at us from the walnut tree. We clink glasses.

Stephen says, "This is ours."

I take that in for a moment.

He sips his champagne and turns to gaze at our new house. “I don’t usually own things this junky.”