A Walker in the Suburbs

The summer house is haphazard. Chairs moved from living room to deck depending upon weather and visitors. Beach towels draped over stools. Kitchen table cluttered because we’re eating outside.

I’m reminded of a time (a time that is still happening in many parts of the world) when a room had many uses: eating, sleeping, working. And only the time of day or position of a table would declare that room’s current purpose.

In this case, there was/is no parlor or den, no kitchen or dining room, no bedroom or sleeping porch. There was/is just one room. The living room — though it was not called that. People were too busy living in it to name it.

In summer, we’re always moving our chairs (and tables, too).  It’s delightfully disorienting. So the message, then, is this: Look carefully before you sit; make sure there’s something there before you do.

The house is usually silent when I wake, walk downstairs, fire up the computer and write my post. So it’s important to be quiet.

Those squeaky stairs, for instance, how to avoid them? The girls had this down pat. Because it was to their advantage to ascend and descend without sound or detection, they memorized which steps were noisy and which were not. Even the two daughters who no longer live here, I bet they could tell you exactly which steps to avoid. And the one who’s still here, well, it goes without saying.

So why is it then that every morning I put my foot —not in — but on it?  It’s not from lack of knowledge or sensitivity or caring. Perhaps a stubborn fondness for transparency?

Once again, then, I vow to count the stairs, to remember which ones squeak and which ones don’t, to move silently through the house.

(Not our stairs — I wish they were.)

“Our house, is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard,
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy ’cause of you….”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

They said it would be finished by June 1, and, except for some trim in the back, largely invisible to the untrained eye, it is.

Even though I was here for most of it — shuddered as the old siding was ripped off,

got a headache when the new windows were pounded in, took our poor beside-himself dog Copper for walk after walk to get him out of the place as the work continued — it still seems miraculous that from this

 … there came this.

Perhaps there was some magic fairy dust involved…

They are stripping our house, skinning it, peeling off panel after panel of dented aluminum siding. How inconsequential it all seems now, this pile of discarded metal.

But this shell is what has protected us from wind and rain and snow. It has been our barrier, our boundary with the outside world. It has held in the giggles and the screams and the slamming of doors. It has kept out the snow and the wind and the withering heat.

Seeing it now in piles upon the ground it hardly seems possible it has done all of these things. But I’ve been here. I know it has.

To be continued.

(Photo by neighbor John DeVoe of an earlier phase of reconstruction: the new roof we got Tuesday. Due to current camera glitches, I’m one day behind in photo retrieval.)