The houses we grow up in

reflecting on places I have lived

With rain forecast all week the work crew took the downtime to finish some indoor projects for clients they have let languish as our never-ending project, Casa dos Galos, has eaten up their time as casually as my feral flock of roosters eats up the feed I lay down twice each day. 

It’s not all persimmons and lemontree flowers over here, you know. There is accidentally stepping in Jake’s calling card, which he no longer leaves in a tidy and easily identifiable pile but trails in segments of all lengths along his way, increasing the number of opportunities to step in it from one to about six.  Which is why between us we have three pairs of shoes with dog poop on them.

There’s the knowledge the fox is out there, ready to kill the final two hens in the flock, leaving me with possibly one of the world’s largest family reunion of gentleman bachelor roosters (N=30) in the world.

There is life stuff always moving forward no matter what projects are or aren’t moving forward at Casa dos Galos. Mom’s house sold, and the check has been deposited, and now the place where my father drew his last breath, the last place I saw him and spoke to him and held his hand, is no longer my place to enter. The living room with the couch where dad sat so often in those final weeks, right elbow on the armrest and his head resting in his hand, exhausted and miserable with his need to sleep is still there and has that same couch, possibly in the same position mom had it in, but I will never again walk past it and remember dad sitting there, I will never again wake up in the middle of the night in that house and wander into that living room to sit in that spot on the couch, the moonlight streaming through the picture window, always alert for and looking for a sense of dad, but never feeling it.

mom and dad’s living room

I took a picture of that couch in that living room the last time I was home, just a few months ago. Outside the summer blazed with furious, record-breaking heat but inside mom’s house it was the same perpetual fall day. I didn’t know it was the last picture I’d ever take of that living room; it has the feeling of an elegy.

The h is finalizing a white paper preparatory to Web Summit, a huge conference that takes place in Lisboa every November, and quite possibly the source of the case of COVID the h developed right at the end of the conference last year, and then gave to me. Last year when the h went to this selfsame conference I was left behind in the dark palaceta with no electricity, a couple of hours’ worth of battery on my phone and laptop combined, and exactly five candles burning - one near the single chair we had in the entryway, two on the staircase, one in the bathroom, one illuminating the long dark hallway to the back door. Somehow I slept there, by myself, for a whole night, all the candles gradually burning down and swallowed by darkness. I might have left my headlamp to burn on low all night in the tent - I no longer remember, but it sounds like something I’d do. What I definitely didn’t do was hear or see or feel or sense any ghosts.

Back then I wore a headlamp indoors - also a hat and coat, it was a damp cold fall outside and in. I tried very hard and mostly succeeded in not looking up at the darkness that seemed to be pressing down the stairs and through the ceiling holes from the second floor. I most definitely refused to think about the cellar with its dank low-ceilinged rooms and the wind filtering through the ground-level grates where the glass had long since fallen out, allowing whatever came crawling or scurrying or slinking along to enter the house if it had a mind to. Which more than a few rats and bats and one cat did

This year while the h is conferencing I will have a warm, dry, clean house, a well-lit bathroom, a refrigerator I can open and stare at the contents until it bings at me to shut the door, a TV I can turn to local Portuguese news to practice my language skills or, in defiance of the still-impenetrably-dark cellar in the palaceta across the way, watch a horror movie on Netflix or Shudder or Amazon Prime on our new big screen tv.

There is my own work, performed online, which has been extremely high pressure lately, so that I have to actively work to stay stress free. Among other things I manage an active social media community with some very shall we say deliberately disruptive members. I hope they give Sandra a month of vacation after this, someone posted in the community. Of course I demurred saying things aren’t so bad people are not without a point etc. but things were bad enough that when I saw how many people ‘liked’ that post suggesting my deserving a vacation I got emotional. 

With the successful installation of the 10G wifi, the large screen television and the Italian oven, we have been the recipients of the steady arrival of related packages from Amazon - loaf and muffin pans and a wood-handled, stainless steel pizza paddle for the oven, coils of Cat 8 cable for the wifi, a screen cleaner for the tv. The h mutters as he goes about unwrapping, cleaning, testing and finding homes for these items. 

I mutter too - yesterday SOMEONE threw a bleach-soaked rag into the basket of clothes on the washer. The h washed the load, and everything was fine except for my long sleeve heathered purple thermal underwear shirt, that I LOVE, or I should say loved because now it has big pink splotches on it. When I squawked in dismay the h tried to act like it looks cool with the bleach stains, like an intentional design. I’ll replace it, he said.

HA, I said. That’s what you said when you tore a hole in my beautiful new orange cashmere sweater that I paid $200 for in Santa Fe, and that you kept in a drawer by the side of your bed for more than a decade, but never replaced, or even turned into a scarf, I said.

The h often boasts to others of my memory but it just as often works against him as you can see. 

I am mostly a c’est la vie kind of woman when it comes to accidents, but I really hate shopping and I don’t yet have much in the way of clothes here - the majority of my wardrobe is in containers awaiting shipment. As a result, I’ve been happy to accumulate a few nice things thanks to my mom who keeps buying new clothes and then deciding to give them to me instead, because that’s one way she likes to show her love and that’s at least one way I am happy to receive her love. Who doesn’t like free clothes.  So if I seem grumpy out of proportion to the absolute value of an Old Navy brand heathered purple thermal underwear shirt, that is why. Also it is a very flattering color for me and makes me feel pretty, a feeling that has been in short supply for me since I went through menopause. I didn’t realize how much I liked feeling pretty again until I felt how deep the angst was over the splotched sweater and the h’s cavalier “Oh sorry love.” 

HIS clothes never suffer catastrophic damage like this, oh no. I thought about pointing this out but decide against it, because at sixty I have to pretend wisdom even where none is in effect. This morning I put the blotched shirt on. See, the h said, and I whirled on him and I said If you think for one minute this so-called “design” is going to save your ass from finding the time to shop for replacements for my beloved orange CASHMERE sweater and my awesome HEATHERED PURPLE long sleeved WAFFLE WEAVE thermal shirt then you have another think coming buster and it all came out so smooth and fast like it was planned that the h just blinked and said Okay. 

And the yellow chair! I shouted as I left the house for no particular reason except the dramatic effect. But it was raining so I had to scurry right back, followed by eight drenched roosters.

Whenever the h receives Amazon deliveries he’ll come in and say I have a present for you and then it is something like a pizza paddle which is not FOR me, per se, though no doubt I will use it plus make lots of sexy jokes about it (you should see it hanging there). Anyway it is definitely not a PRESENT the way the replacement orange cashmere sweater and heathered purple waffle weave shirt will be, and those aren’t even really considered true presents the way something like the yellow chair would be a true present, as the clothing would be making up for as-yet-unrectified-mistakes.

my brother, my daddy

I am (mostly) joking about the yellow chair …but I have been wondering lately why the yellow chair has become linked to dad in my mind. I didn’t notice til yesterday when my sister-in-law shared a picture of dad, taken in the last year of his life, before the dementia had taken its toll on his face. He is talking to my brother and you can see by his expression he is explaining or describing something - he is not fumbling for words or staring into space. He is fully present, talking, a beer near his elbow and my brother’s.

It’s actually a three second video, my sister in law apologizes. I thought that was what I was sharing, not just a picture. Now I can’t find it, but you can hear his voice.

I hope she finds the video; it would be nice to hear dad’s voice again, though I can imagine it perfectly well, and even as I think this suddenly all the clues rush together and the picture is clear, it’s five fifteen and my dad is coming through the front door of the house in that other place called Beautiful¹, where both he and I were born. Hi Sanny, he’d say first thing, because the first room anyone saw when coming through the front door of the house I grew up in was the living room, where I liked to sit and read while tilted dangerously far back in the rocking chair next to the coffee table with the only lamp in the room.

The chair - a place I sat more than any other as a child, girl and young adult - was upholstered in a scratchy, nubby fabric that was a bright and cheerful yellow. I have no idea what happened to it - it didn’t make the move from Belleville to the house in the subdivision in the cornfields of tiny Smithton, which is where daddy died. Strange to think both those houses belong to others now; strange to think that is the fate of all our houses, mine included. What will become of this place absorbing so much of our effort and time, I wonder. Will either of us die at home? What will it be like in 50 years, when we will have likely left this world - will either or both of our daughters live here? Our granddaughter? An as-yet unknown grandson, or great grandchild? I hope it will not fall back soon into the hands of nature, but I won’t really have a say, which is fine.

1. Belleville, Illinois