SOLSC 2022 #11 - House and home

It is March 2022 and time for the

 15th Annual Slice of Life Story Challenge  

Every single day, for all thirty-one days of March,

writers will share stories.

Thank you, Two Writing Teachers, for creating this supportive community 

of teacher-writers!

Thirty-four (34). Tomorrow. That's how many years we've been married, how long we've lived together in this dear home.

Thirty-one (31). That's how many years ago we added onto our house, creating a new family room/kitchen.

Seven (7). That's how many months it's been since our contractor first drew our attention to the sagging ceiling in our kitchen/family room.

Five (5). That's how many drywall holes that have been cut, as we try to decipher the enormity of work that must be done in order to correct the structural issues in our house. 

Two (2). That's how many times the blueprints have been revised, as the structural engineer and contractor discover more issues. 

Yesterday. That's when the contractor explained in detail the work that must be done. 

One (1). That's how many new steel beams we will be putting in our home. 

That last line is so succinct - wildly oppositional to the grueling mental slog this work has been to date and the work that must yet be done.  Let's be serious: no 'real' work has even started. I hold no false illusions about the future weeks/months of construction being any easier than this discovery phase. 

It's going to get ugly. 

The months that lie ahead will offer lots of great mindfulness practice; I will be an expert by project's completion.

Time to lose myself in a good book!!

284 out of 376 - That's how many pages I have read so far of Sarah Broom's memoir The Yellow House.* What a great read, especially for me at this time. She writes about her family and their home in New Orleans East, and by no means can I compare my situation to this one - her childhood home is completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. But throughout the book, Ms. Broom offers such beautiful reflections on 'place' - how the walls that surround us, the ground we walk on, the people we grow alongside, these feed our souls. 

In the midst of my own home falling apart, these words of hers resonate: 

"The family grew into all the spaces of the house: all rooms were multipurpose; all were lived in, the family's traces everywhere. Everything was used; nothing existed solely for show."

"...Mom was convinced. She had grown to believe that the objects contained within a house spoke loudest about the person to whom the things belonged. More than that, she believed that the individual belonged to the things inside the house, to the house itself."

"It could be said, too, my engineer friend told me, speaking more metaphorically than she was comfortable with, that the house was not tethered to its foundation, that what held the house to its foundation of sill on piers, wood on bricks, was the weight of us all in the house, the weight of the house itself, the weight of our things in the house. This is the only explanation I want to accept."

"I said the moment you want to leave is probably when you should try hard to stay."

This poignant memoir is making me think -

I need to write more about my home. I need to write into the emotions that are coming up for me as we do this big fix. More to come! More to come!

*If you are interested in learning a little more about Sarah Broom's The Yellow House, here is a seven minute PBS interview with Sarah Broom. Here, she shares the 'why' behind her work - and offers some insight into her writing and research process.

Archeological dig

All this time at home has freed us to see what needs fixing, what needs changing, and what we can cull. Being retired is an added bonus - because we have the time to follow through. 

The past day or so, we've been tinkering with a small, narrow closet - adding and painting new shelving, adjusting some coat hooks. One set of coat hooks was set up for when our children were about three feet tall - and they have never been changed since that time, rendering them basically useless (unless you are partial to the look of floor debris clinging to the bottom of your adult coat). The shelves in the closet are (were!) - sadly - simply a series of stackable plastic bins, hastily set in place as a temporary solution right after we remodeled 30 years ago. These bins were immediately filled and overflowing with the stuff of daily living, and the original idea of adding 'real' shelves long forgotten - until now, that is. 

This closet is located right next to our side entrance, our main door to the house from the driveway; thus, these bins were the depository of all those things one takes off and gets rid off as soon as they enter the house. Coupled with a door that closes, hiding the ugly truth from regular eyes, this location became a treasure trove of forgotten artifacts. 

I set about emptying the bins themselves - what's in there? what can I toss? what belongs elsewhere? - while Tony began sawing boards for the shelving. There was so much forgotten junk in these shelves! Ugh! Suffice to say, I threw more things away than I saved; I had a small pile of donations. Lots of paper trash. (There is always so much stray paper in this house.) I was surprised by the "singles" - three separate gloves, each from a different pair, no match anywhere around; one single flip flop from a teenager (in other words, at least ten years old); one slipper...where are their matches? where did they go? why is it here and not the bedroom? I also found a pair of children's gloves. Itty bitty hands. No, they are not my grandchildren's. 

Here's a fun new chapter to this storytelling: I decided to wash this small find for future use by said grandchildren, when - I kid you not - only one small glove made it OUT of the dryer. What? Two gloves are washed and dried but only one comes out? Where did the match go? Do gloves have feelings? It's as if they cried out - 'what, you ignore me for 20 years and expect me to hang around now!?'

Sifting through the debris of this one little closet has sent me on a rampage through the house, culling, tossing, weeding, and organizing. I even spent some time in that truly forgotten space - our attic, opening up bins and clearing out clutter. It is amazing what time can do for these stored memories - yes, there are many things that I still love and want to keep, but there is a whole subset of extraneous, much less meaningful stuff with which I am easily able to part. I am excited for our trash pickup this week! 

Isn't it wild, though, how you can hold a piece of paper - say, a handwritten note, or an old ticket to a concert, or a child's drawing, and instantaneously be transported back in time - seeing where you were, hearing certain songs, remembering how you felt? 

We often joke that it's been thirty-plus years of deferred maintenance on our home...truth is, these years have flown by. Now, in this quiet 'stuck at home' interlude of the pandemic, we can finally focus. It's almost like being on an archeological dig, right? (Yay! I am traveling!) 

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I wrote this post for Slice of Life.  All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day, on Tuesdays. Thank you, Two Writing Teachers!