Houses

I am madly in love with my house.   When we met six years ago, my house and I had an immediate rapport, but over time it has blossomed into true romance.  

Apparently, I'm not alone in experiencing extraordinary passion for a domicile.   One indication of Americans' obsessions with their homes is the proliferation of "shelter magazines," i.e., magazines about homes, in recent years.   Whether our "cocooning trends" are a reaction to 9/11 or to the astronomical price of real estate, they are evidence that as our world grows more uncertain, people are more likely to want to festoon their windows with valances.

In House Thinking , Winifred Gallagher examines an interesting theory of what makes a house a home: "the most important evolutionary elements of an appealing home are the paired features of prospect, or a big, bright space that has a broad, interesting view, and refuge, or a snug protected haven."   My house has both: it's on a hill, elevated above the flood plain, with dark, musty little rooms that one can curl up in.   It's both cozy and above the fray: during the fierce storms of this past summer, some passing motorists got stuck in a puddle right outside our gate, and we watched from the safety of our front porch as the police rescued them.

But as in any love affair, the object of my affection is not without flaws.   For one thing, it's afflicted by sad vestiges of the decorating style of previous owners.   The flowered wallpaper in the living room is hideous, but there's no point in replacing it until the ceiling has caved in, which, judging from the crack in it, will happen soon.   The tile on the kitchen floor is a repulsive faux brick pattern covered with glue stains.   The previous owner worked at one of those large home-improvement stores, and let's just say you can tell.   Our wiring and plumbing are dodgy, and the front porch seems likely to collapse at some point unless we do something--but what?  

Indeed, everything in the house seems to be in a state of entropy.   The fridge has a tendency to leak sporadically for reasons known only to itself.   The dishwasher is not always in the mood to function.   Lights constantly flicker, grout flakes away, countertops detach from the wall and move earthward.   Walls beg to be painted, floors to be refinished; the kitchen pleads for an island.  

It's not that we're just sitting back watching everything go to hell; we've made countless improvements, some quite costly.   We first installed a new furnace and then, unexpectedly, a new water heater that required a fortune in electrical work.   We put up a picket fence.   For an exorbitant sum, we had our rusting tin roof painted by Kyle, a guy we knew from around.   As a handy-person, Kyle is normally in too much demand to bother with something as mundane as painting, but that fall, he was trying to rake in some fast cash for a trip to Disney World.   He was almost done when he ran out of time, promising to finish the job when he got back.   We didn't hear from him until the following fall, when he was planning a second trip to Disney World--apparently, the first one had been a roaring success--and offered to come back and finish the roof and floor our attic.   Like the desperate idiots we are, we hired him again.   He never did get back to the roof, and as for the attic, well, be careful where you walk.   I can only hope he had fun spending all our money on mouse-ear hats.

My husband and I have an unspoken deal where he is has primary responsibility for the outside of the house and I am in charge of the inside--shades of some primal gendered hunting/gathering arrangement--and we do our best, but we are busy people.   The dust bunnies on the floor are the size of jackrabbits, and the other day I noticed that there was a large spider web on the piano; I was on the run at the time and as far as I know, it's still there.   Because it's an election season, my husband has been too busy with politics to dig chicken-wire around the garden fence, so a groundhog has eaten all the tomatoes and is working on the strawberry plants, and we'll be lucky to harvest so much as a jalapeño.

We may not have the time or money to nurture our house sufficiently, but I think about it a lot.   I fantasize about what I would do to the kitchen if we could afford to eat all our meals somewhere else for several months.   I dream of knocking out the bedroom wall and ceiling and creating a large, bright room with skylights.   I know exactly what color I will paint the living room once the ceiling has finally fallen down, and I have already picked out the light fixture I want to replace the ghastly ceiling fan with when that happens.   I have the name and number of a guy we will hire to cement the dirt floor of the cellar as soon as we can afford it.

But for now, this is just a fantasy--and when people call those shelter magazines "pornographic," I know exactly what they're talking about.            

In Britain, there is a saying that things are "safe as houses."   The fact is, though, houses are not very safe.   In 1999, "over 17,000 Americans died as a result of a slip, trip or falling injury," most, presumably, inside the home.   The cheesy blue vinyl that my house is, alas, covered with has been linked to cancer.   In the wake of all the natural disasters that seem to be accelerating as a result of global warming/the oncoming apocalypse, whichever, it seems clear that houses are actually incredibly fragile structures.   They can be flooded, blown down, blown up, burned down, confiscated, or lost due to lack of funding.   The feeling of refuge that we get curling up in our nests is an illusion, though a compelling one.  

When we contemplate the effects of war, we generally think of the process George Orwell in his brilliant essay "Politics and the English Language" reminds us is called "transfer of populations."   Each member of these populations had a home, and while it may not have been grand, indeed, may have been falling down and full of spiders, it was the place they felt connected to.   As I sit curled up on my couch, looking out the window and simultaneously experiencing Prospect and Refuge, I think about all the people around the globe who have been tragically "transferred" in recent years.   My house makes that settling sound old houses make, like a sigh, as if it is thinking about them, too.

See Carol Lloyd, "Shelter-Shocked: Is the proliferation of home mags about post 9/11 nesting or the need to fetishize our big mortgages?" SFGate.com http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/03/23/carollloyd.DTL , March 23, 2004.

Winifred Gallagher, House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 6.

Go buy my novel!   The Book of Fred (Washington Square Press, 2001).

National Ag Safety Database, "Preventing Injuries from Slips, Trips, and Falls." http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d000001-d000100/d000006/d000006.html

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