the Nixionary

I got frustrated yesterday. I know part of buying a new house is being patient, but what about when you don’t feel like being patient? By mid-day yesterday, I had finished painting the kitchen, the pantry, and the upstairs bathroom, and there was nothing else for me to do. There was tons for me to do, but I couldn’t do any of it. Before I can work on anything downstairs, the wall has to be torn apart. Before I can work on anything else upstairs, we have to finish the downstairs. Anything else I do feels like I’m playing a game of musical boxes. I have moved the same boxes into the kitchen and out of it four times. I have moved the bathroom shelf into and out of the bathroom four times.

In the bathroom, the walls are now Shimmer Green and instead of vacuuming the debris out of all the registers (which Luke kindly suggested when he noticed my listlessness), I filled a glass of wine and I filled the tub and I slunk under the water where everything feels safe and close and thoughtful.

This was one of my foremost requirements of a home: it needed a bathtub. This, though, like everything in an older home, is also a problem. It’s a clawfoot tub with antique fixtures, which means there’s nowhere to buy a curtain rod or showerhead holder without ordering one online or paying a thousand dollars at a specialty store for a few arms of metal.

I went to Bed, Bath, & Beyond yesterday because when I searched for clawfoot fixtures online, it looked like they might have what I need. When I got there, the woman at Customer Service told me to go to the bathroom department and wait. She then called for assistance over the intercom. In the bathroom department, I couldn’t decide where to stand; stand in the aisle where they could confuse me with any other customer, or stand inside the maze of bathroom gadgets where I might not be found. When the employee finally came, she wanted to be helpful, but I had trouble articulating what exactly our tub is missing. It turns out that when I have to ask for help, I don’t have the right words for all the things we need.

Luckily, we do have a “telephone showerhead,” which is what I told the lady at BB&B (where is the “Beyond” in Bed, Bath, &Beyond?), although she gave me a funny look. This is what my brothers and I used to call the showerhead in Kentucky when we went to a convent during the summers to fish and pray and eat food on cafeteria plates. The guesthouse there had a clawfoot tub and a showerhead you could detach from its cradle and hold up to your ear or sprinkle over your shoulders for a self-given massage. This is where my love of baths and old houses began, I think—the personality of the odd fixture, the creaky conversation of floorboards in a home that knows more than its inhabitants.

For the time being, we shower by crouching down below where the curtains end. It’s awkward, but it beats traipsing all the way downstairs to the upright shower past the small piles of dirt from the nice guy, Nate, in a beard and bandana, who carried an entire truckload of concrete and wood up from the crawl space and damaged floor in the basement. The green in the upstairs bathroom was a nice choice. It looks like the green sherbet that floats around in a party bowl, and that’s what it feels like to be in the tub up there. A calm little island of melting.

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We slept in our new house for the first time last night. Woke to gray light coming through gray curtains. I had dreams about Paris and La Familia, the pool in Baker where I used to swim. It has only been a week, and that neighborhood feels like snow-covered streets in a different city. (The above photo was taken from the side of the house where the lack of bars on the windows makes it look less ghetto than it does from the front).

My friend Libby said that after she and her husband first bought their house, they really felt at home when they could get up and make coffee in their own kitchen. That’s what I did today. In my new Cuisinart EXTREME Coffee Maker I got for Christmas. This is a new frontier for us since we’ve always made our coffee in the French press. (Not extreme.) I had to drive Sunflower Market on 38th to get milk (our neighborhood sounds like a Sesame Street episode: Megan who lives in Sunnyside drives to Sunflower Market for her milk and eggs). I got the milk and eggs, then I had to get gas, all the while thinking about how my coffee turned out on the black corian counters I have mixed feelings about. On the Save-a-Lot sign half-way home, the deal this week is pig’s feet and beef tripe for 99 cents a pound. I wonder how many people in Sunnyside eat swine feet and cow stomach.

I’d only been in the Sunnyside Save-a-Lot once a few weeks ago when Luke desperately needed a 5-hour energy, but all I could find there was bulk puffed cereal and juices in colorful jugs with Mexican names on them. In New Orleans, the Save-a-Lot on Carrolton was where we shopped after the storm hit, and the cans of beans were 29 cents each, bags of rice a dollar, and this all went on FEMA food stamps and we ate, if not in content, in the amounts of kings.

I would like to believe this neighborhood has similarities to New Orleans. There’s a new speakeasy on 32^nd we saw last night when we went out for burgers with some friends who bought their house up the street a year before we bought ours. I can’t decide if a speakeasy here is a cool thing or just another nostalgic trend to satisfy people who wish they had been alive when less was available and indulgences were more prohibited. Before eating my blue cheese covered burger, I did take interest in the speakeasy (though at that point I didn’t know what it was—the exterior walls of the place are black and there are books on shelves in the windows, leading me to think that it was a “late night bookstore” which I said to Luke, then realized of course it wasn’t.) A late night bookstore is one of many places I would like to open. There would be wine. There would be silence. A girl could go there alone on Friday night and not be a weirdo.

Also, I would like to invent a wall x-ray machine. I’m trying to find out which walls in this house are load-bearing and which have brick inside them, and there’s really no good way to do this besides beating the living hell out of the sheet rock and lathen plaster with a hammer. I know this must not be the right way to go about investigating, but there’s really no other way to do it. I have learned that if you go in the basement, the floor joists will run perpendicular to the supporting walls of the house. But this doesn’t help. In our crawl space, a brick wall runs north-south under the whole structure, while upstairs, after taking off an electrical plate on said wall, it appears that inside the upstairs portion of that wall, there’s only splintered wood and the fuzz of areas not meant to be seen. This does not help me as what I’m going for is either exposed brick (warm, reminds me of baking bread and cozying up by the fire, centipedes and poor insulation, be damned. (I have read that in some exterior brick walls, centipedes comes through the mortar when it’s warm out). GROSS!!!)

Anne, my friend since the age of 3, came over yesterday and had the same thought as me. Break down all the walls on the first floor! Luke told her to leave. She was right. After our last place, I think I might miss open space. Although, it is nice here to have a room for cooking and a room for sitting and a room for fireplacing, and to not wake up when your brother is staying with you and to have to make coffee in the same room where he is sleeping. Anne and I share the same Catholic school-girl heart. We will live beautiful lives! We will abide by stories of more importance than boring old reality! We will go to Paris! (Hence the dream).

Here is the difficulty: I have measured most lessons and mistakes according to the rooms of my past, and now here I am with the many rooms of my present (more so rooms of my own than any before), and I am not sure how to orient myself to this space or it to me. I know that moving in takes a long time, but the people who owned this place before made choices that are plaguing me. Mostly decorative, I admit, but still—textured walls throughout the house, a cat piss-smelling perfectly wasted pantry space (above), 80’s knobs on the kitchen cabinets, sheet rock that covers half the trim on the windows. I woke up this morning and looked at the ceiling fan (why do men love ceiling fans?), and I thought, what the hell? I look forward to the day that I do not wake up thinking this.

Quincy was crying at the foot of the bed because he refuses to walk on the laminate floors. He gets trapped upstairs and in the kitchen until I drag him out, all four legs going sideways and spinning in futility like a hamster in a wheel. This does not bode well for him as we intend to be here for the rest of his life. Here is a picture of his hourly dilemma: to cross or to not cross the slippery threshold. I am partially torturing him by putting his food on the slick floors so he learns his rewards for risk-taking.

I am generally not a vain person, but something about house design does make me feel like I am. I have become obsessed with magazines and blogs and DIY projects; color palettes dance through my head in the car, in bed, in church. We bought eight paint colors last night, and only two of them worked. I went a little overzealous on the green choice (Lemon Pepper looks like what ends up in the toilet when you’ve eaten only salad for a week) and Luke’s orange for the stairs resembles the curtains in my parents’ house in Aurora circa 1978. Luke mudded over two square feet of the textured wall, though, and it is so gloriously smooth and it will take so long to do all the rest, but I want that scratchy texture gone, so what do I do? This is the question: how do we spend our days, with all that needs to be done?

In K-Mart this week, my mom saw two women buying all the layaway toys for kids whose parents didn’t have money to buy them what they wanted for Christmas. I have to admit, redoing a house this time of year has two sides to it: we’ve been blessed to receive many gifts that are helping us immensely along the way, but I question how much of this is too much, and how much people need—the ones who are buying pig’s feet for 99 cents this morning, or the haggard woman who stumbled into the gas station on 38th for cigarettes. Still. On my way home aside my cage-free eggs, I thought about how appropriate Nocturnal Sea would be for the back entryway.

And, there are small victories in our new home even amidst all the debris; my Extreme Coffee tastes a little better than the electricity-free kind I’ve always made.

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We are under contract on a house. I’m not sure if I should say this here. The house is not the place I expected to like, but I do. Actually, I refused to let the realtor take us there the first few times she tried. When I finally said yes, I was set on another house and just wanted to see how they squeezed a bathroom upstairs in a similar amount of square footage. It is not ours, but it is mine in my head, and I have gone from under-thinking about it to over-thinking everything that has to do with it.

My friend Sara said that when she looked for houses, she imagined herself into every corner of the space and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Instead of writing, I look at paint colors. Instead of trying to be less materialistic since we’ll have less money soon (whether this is the house or not), I find myself wanting more and more things. I found a quote in someone else’s house online that says, “All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them,” and I can’t figure out if that’s an artistic or a selfish thing to say.

I hurt my back. I saw a chiropractor who took both of my hands in his. That rubbed me wrong. Then he cracked me wrong. He said the body is self-healing. But then he charged me $53. His assistant hooked up electrodes to my back and the current bounced through my muscles like tiny angry animals. I am not going back. Instead, I have a heating pad and have been only walking and slowly swimming.

Today at La Familia, there were only three of us in the pool: a man who always wears a Speedo and is pretty fit besides his paunch, a woman who never puts her head under the water while swimming freestyle, and the woman with the snorkel and a bubbly black butt that sticks up out of the surface of the water and who was at another Denver pool at the same time as me on Saturday. The lifeguard tonight was my favorite one–the one who breakdances on the pool deck and plays hip hop I can hear between sets.

When I got home, the neighbors were having cigarettes and PBRs on the hood of their car in the parking lot. They love living here. We do too. But we are leaving for somewhere with a garden and sloped floors (unless they fall down during the inspection) and a few more rooms that will hold a few more dreams.

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We’ve been doing this.

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I spent all of last week on Lake Powell, pulling warmed skin through water, hiking up chalky canyons, drinking in the morning, looking for wild horses, watching the sky not change while wind ripped at the ropes holding the boat to the rocky shore. The chords groaned and stretched, sagged, then snapped tight again, and I braced myself for a disaster that did not come.

Tonight, I did a load of laundry at my parents’ house and walked Quincy in the golden field where foxes howl late at night. We had barbecued chicken and corn, and then the neighbor came over and told me he has lost track of where I live.

When I got in bed, I heard my brother in the hallway, home after a three hour drive where he’s a priest in a small farming town, not unlike where I taught in Louisiana three years ago. He is plagued there by mistrust, by people who see the white in his collar and turn angry and irrational, the way blame makes someone turn when they don’t have anywhere to direct it. He stood in my doorway talking about the guys at the prison who do trust him and how that’s the place where there might be more reality than among the free. At least he gets homegrown tomatoes, though, from some old guy in town, and he knows to buy applewood-smoked bacon, and he puts this all on gluten-free bread with mayonnaise, and sometimes that’s enough to get you through the shit of the day that threatens to take away the goodness of a good sandwich but doesn’t.

A young boy is lost in the suburbs tonight. A 17 year-old with spinabiffida and a backpack full of medication. They sent out a reverse phone call and said everyone should check their cars for him. At the end of my walk today, I might have passed him. At the end of my walk today, I noticed they started emptying the water out of the pool. At the end of my walk today, the sky changed so fast it hurt my heart a little bit, knowing that there’s never enough summer. This is the time of year for change, for wondering what I haven’t changed yet.

In my brother’s hand tonight, I could see a silhouette: the scapular of Mary twisting tight then unwinding back to its natural laxity, a tiny square of hope separating then blending into his black pants, then disappearing when he said goodnight.

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