The country doctor and I love old houses. And we would have given our eyetooth (whatever that is) to buy one and re-hab it. There were a few stipulations. It had to be in the country but not more than three miles out of town. It had to come with a pond. It had to have a sort of intrinsic charm, but we could handle some re-hab. We wanted neighbors, but not too many and not too close. (This was actually a compromise as the country doctor wanted to live in a commune and I wanted to live in Siberia.) We were looking for a magic place that would beckon to us mystically, as if we belonged to the house and the house belonged to us.
As you can imagine – in five years of looking, we did not find this particular piece of real estate. So we decided to build. Or rather – I spent about a year crying, screaming, pouting, packing a bag and threatening to leave, begging, pleading, and then doing all these things again, only louder and with more tears, until finally the country doctor said – ALRIGHT ALREADY!! let’s build a house.
So we did. We went thru the process – drawing plans, finding a builder, siting the house, digging a hole, blah blah blah. The process kept me pretty entertained for the past nine months. And overall, it has been an enjoyable process. But I am not sure I wouldn’t scrap it all right this exact moment, for a decent trailer on a lot with some grass. It’s starting to get to me. I am staring to feel chunks of my resilience break off and dissolve in a puddle at my feet.
Today I just wanted to read the new Harry Potter book. I just wanted to sit on my couch and read The Deathly Hallows. I mean hey, it is summer and my kids are all entertaining themselves in various ways. Everyone is fed and bathed and wrapped and swaddled and contented. I have no kitchen to clean and no urgent laundry to do. I could sweep or dust, but why? The saw if going to churn up more dust in the next seventeen seconds to make that a completely inane task. Why can’t I just lay here and read my book?
Because my house if full of men who are WORKING – and that makes me feel like a worthless slug to lay on my couch and read. I guess I could slink off to my bedroom and read, but then I would feel like a sneaky worthless slug.
But I did it anyway. I sat on the couch and read. Then I started to doze off. SO I reclined on the couch and read. Every time I heard a worker’s boots draw near, I pretended to be awake and concentrating, but I was really napping. And no one hurled insults at me or said “Get a JOB!!” or demanded to know why I wasn’t painting the millions of things that needed to be painted or pointing out that the clothes in the dryer needed to be folded. And so Harry and I made some progress. In a house full of working men. And so far, we are both still hanging on.
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