jiggedy jig
Usually when I go somewhere, I’m not that anxious to come back. A day at the coast or a summer in Greece or six months in the Netherlands – it never feels like enough. I may get cravings for certain familiar comforts. I may miss friends. But I rarely ever think for more than a moment, I wish this trip was over now. I wish I was back home for good.
And part of that, maybe, is that I’ve never lived anywhere that felt much like home, any more than anywhere else. Certainly not the suburbs where I grew up. We lived on a street with no sidewalk, in a neighborhood with nothing to walk to. When I was in third grade my parents remodeled the house and I asked for a tiny room just like the one I’d had up until then. They laughed and said I’d like my new big room. I didn’t. At seventeen I fled for a nine by seven dorm and never looked back.
New York didn’t feel particularly like home, either. New York felt like Fun and Late Nights. New York felt like a toxic indulgence that was heady and rich and easy, as long as I didn’t get stuck there. As long as I didn’t become one of those addicted New Yorkers, twenty years in, saying I can leave whenever I want to.
Eugene felt like a fine place for four years.
And I’m realizing, in making this list, that it might sound like my rootlessness is some long-running problem. But it suits me pretty well. I like feeling equally at home wherever I happen to be. It’s one of those things that only starts to feel inappropriate when I’m surrounded by people doing something else.
So it surprised me this weekend, away on an island in Washington, how much I wanted to come back home. My friends were getting married and it was a beautiful wedding – a five tier cake and a swing band and a bride dressed like a princess. Fresh cherries and mountains and the sound of waves in the morning. But I didn’t feel like meeting new people, and I missed Operaman (who was singing all weekend), and I missed my garden. It’s the middle of June, after all. We’ve had a cold wet spring and there’s a lot to do out there.
So Sunday afternoon I pulled up in front of my house and fifteen minutes later my hands were in the dirt. I dug up the hen-and-chicks from my vegetable bed and put them on my front stone wall; I reluctantly cleared the nasturtiums. The tomatoes and the peppers went in at last, though I fear it’s still not as warm as they’d like. I unwound the new hose and with great delight found that the outdoor faucet with no handle still works with a wrench. And I stood in the early evening sun showering my ten feet by thirty: the sweet millions and yellow pears in their cages, the floppy little pole bean seedlings, the lacy little carrot tops just starting to show.
Portland, so far, just feels like an experiment. Parts of it have gone terribly wrong but parts of it are just magnificent. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay, to be honest. I already miss the feeling of Being Away – I hear it tapping its foot at the end of every five day forty hour workweek in my cube. But as experiments go, this one seems worth a while of run time. And while it runs I’ll pinch the flowers off my dill, and sow my squash.
chickens little
Some people just plaster their ceilings and call it good. But some people, like the people who used to live in my house, feel driven to go the extra mile.
After plastering the ceiling, they wallpapered it. Then they painted it yellow – and it took quite a coat of yellow to hide the paper. Then they glued up half-inch brown fibrous acoustic soundboard. They used thick brown industrial-strength glue, saying to themselves, perhaps, We’ll certainly never want to take down this attractive brown fibrous acoustic soundboard! Because you can’t peel off this kind of adhesive without completely destroying the plaster. But to be absolutely secure they also nailed the board to the lathe, and nailed it well. And by “well” I mean thoroughly. Lots of different sized nails – finishing nails and box nails and galvanized nails and tacks – in random spacing and clustering. Then with the leftover glue they secured a layer of white pock-marked interlocking ceiling tiles. Then they stapled them. Just to be sure.
And I know all of this, now, because at six o’clock last night I looked across the dinner table at PD and said, naively, I’d like to do a little project. Let’s do a little project, she replied with enthusiasm.
I don’t know what made us decide that pulling the ceiling down was a Little Project. I guess at first it seemed like it might just involve ripping off a few foamy tiles. Except even a casual observer would have noted that the ceiling tiles were, as per custom, up on the ceiling, which in my house is quite high. So right from the start we were standing on the counters and pushing the rolling, broken dishwasher into strategic corners of the floor, stretching our arms over our heads with prybars. Dust and staples started falling into our eyes and onto our dishes, neither of which we’d bothered to cover.
By two hours later, when PD said Let’s just take off the soundboard too, we had acquired face masks. We had moved most of the food off of the kitchen surfaces. Sunlight was still coming in the kitchen windows and PD was wearing sunglasses because I only have one pair of goggles. That’s when the plaster started falling.
The acoustic board had been hung in a variety of rectangles of various size, puzzled together to cover the space. Some of the pieces were eight inches square. But others were three feet by seven feet. They were filthy and heavy and would rip free with little warning, propelling chunks of stuck-on plaster through the air to shatter on the floor or the stove. After each bang and burst, a quiet cloud of plaster dust would rain slowly down.
It was all fun and games until the board with mouse shit came down, and PD was right underneath. PD is not someone I would call squeamish. There aren’t many things I can think of that would gross her out. But I’m pretty sure this did it. It was obnoxiously awful, and it fell right on her head. To our relief there was only one board like this – a single board in the corner of the kitchen, underneath the attic space where apparently mice used to live. It was revolting. It was not fun.
It got fun again, though, when we pulled the final side of the final board. We felt so close to being done. There was a mess, for sure, but a manageable mess, and there were holes in the plaster, but the neat little grid of lathe remained. There was no reason to think the last board would be any different. But it turns out that just for novelty, there was no lathe behind the final board. Instead, it had been anchored directly to the ceiling framing of the room, and the board itself – with nothing above it – had been serving as the floor of the mysterious inaccessible attic. So in the moment after we pulled it free – in the moment when it hung in the air, six feet of soundboard suspended by a row of nails along one edge - we saw the layer above: a mountain of mucky, puffy, ancient insulation, loose once-white fluff in a two-foot-thick pile. And then the nails gave.
It took about an hour to shovel and sweep and wipe, to fish the bits of dusty debris out of our stovetop burners and off of our casserole dishes. And then there was nothing left on my kitchen ceiling but plaster crisscrossed with amusing patterns of glue residue, and little cut-outs of lathe.And then we flew kites in the park by the moon.
baby steps
Don’t worry. This has nothing to do with babies. (In fact, last week when I was sitting at a dinner table between my friends with their six week old and their friend with her two year old and their other friend, dad of a three year old, and the mom of the two year old asked me – in a brief pause between picking up dropped sushi and a tablewide conversation about poop – Do you think about having a baby?, I answered Not Really so fast, she looked like I slapped her. But I digress.)
Instead, this has to do with the small – and I mean very, very small – progress I have been making with the house.
Since my weekends have been busy with hiking about and bike shopping and hanging out with Operaman’s kids (who, at 9 and 11, do not throw sushi, and deal with their own poop), I have come to embrace the Evening Project. The Evening Project begins the second I get home from work, and makes use of the sunlight-till-ten that is Portland in June, and is all about momentum and a dinner made of snacks. In such a manner I was able, last week alone, to pull down the ugly hulking cabinets suspended between my kitchen and dining room, and take the doors off my kitchen cabinets (I hate cabinets), and transfer all my tools from a pointy pile on the floor to a significantly more convenient and less hazardous wall-mounted pegboard in my sunroom.
In summary, my sink still leaks and my wiring is still highly suspicious and last week my oven baked its last bake, but at least now I can find my hammer.
In other “This Hardly Counts As Progress” news, I finally found the lucky excavator who’s going to drill me a new sewer connection. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s a complicated, expensive job, and I had to get four estimates before I found someone who seemed both competent and not condescending.
I’m gaining an understanding for how house fixing can drag on longer than expected. I’ve already caught myself looking at the faux-wood-paneled walls and thinking That’s a good project for winter. Luckily the same cannot be said of the insulating, or the heating system, or the gutter replacement. Which hopefully will be enough incentive to keep me up late on a ladder, even on schoolnights.
lining
(1) Bus riders on the number fourteen (and bus riders here are everyone) say thank you to the driver as they disembark, and not just a quiet thank you from the front door but a practically bellowed Thank You from the back door, one after another. Thank You! Thanks! Thank You!
(2) Two blocks later at my office the non-bus-riders have just gotten off of their bikes, not just the Americorps kids and the summer interns, but the heads of departments in skirts and blazers, tall guys in the elevators in clacking clip-in shoes and ankle to elbow spandex.
(3) Earlier this week the soupcart guy John – with whom I sometimes compare notes on the latest opera – introduced me to the woman behind me in the lunch line, because we both like the same sandwich and are both always in a hurry. But she eats early and I eat late so we’ve never crossed paths.
(4) I met six friends for happy hour last week; we drank cocktails with fresh muddled fruit and sucked on edamame. Then we went next door and drank PBRs in a bar with a mechanical bull. Then I walked home over the bridge.
(5) There is a national forest one hour east of here – One Real Hour, I am not rounding down – named after one of my heroes. This weekend Operaman and I drove there. I put my feet in the Columbia, roll on roll on. We stayed in a cabin that cost less per night than a mediocre meal in New York, we hiked half a day and saw no one. We ate cinnamon bread from the bakery in my neighborhood and ice cream from the dairy on the coast.
(6) My porch smells like roses.
These are the things I remember when I wake up and it’s raining again, when I wake up and it’s June and it’s been raining for eight months – not in a metaphorical way, but it’s starting to feel like it.
