Where we are now

I’m sitting on my porch again, and it’s beautiful. It should be. I had the floor stripped and repainted, the screens redone, and spruced the joint up mightily. It’s time to list the house again. This time I’m serious. The slanting floors are being replaced and structurally re-configured at great expense, and things I’ve been meaning to paint for years are finally getting painted. I have been madly pruning in the yard. I have thrown away bag after bag of detritus, donated carloads of clothes/books/furniture/appliances, watched as passers-by removed item after item from the curb. (I should hold a garage sale, but there is something deeply gratifying about putting things out front with a “FREE” sign taped to them, and seeing who stops to pick them up. And god knows I have scavenged plenty off of the street–everything from armchairs to easels to oriental rugs–in the past.)

With help from my boyfriend and consoling-windows friend and my kids, I’ve filled a dumpster with–let’s be blunt, shall we?–crap from a decade’s worth and more of family life. A giant house, a garage, and a basement make it all too easy just to put the broken television set, the outgrown bicycle, the slightly-flat basketball, the ancient Macintosh computer, the crib and its mattress, et cetera et cetera somewhere other than the municipal dump, or Goodwill. We have cleaned and re-caulked, disassembled and reassembled various items of furniture (the bunkbeds are no more; the old smelly sofa is gone forever) culled the shelves of books (a phrase I never thought I’d type), rearranged, stored, stowed, dusted, wiped, vacuumed, and mopped. I’ve pruned and planted, weeded, raked, clipped, repotted. And nothing is quite finished, of course, but the end is finally in sight.

Will it all have been in vain–more work by far than I did the first two times I listed the house, more extensive repairs, more cosmetic touchups, more money by a factor of about twenty (my ex-husband, though he does not help, is bound by the terms of our divorce agreement to help pay) spent to try to sell the house? This time, as I said, I am serious, this time I have had enough. I wanted to sell as long as three years ago, of course, but back then the habit of living here was still very strong. When I think that I could have moved out in the first place and left my ex-husband here, and that I did not, I could weep. 

But there is no point second-guessing decisions made by whoever I was back in the throes of separation and divorce–I did the best I could. I honestly thought that the kids needed to stay here, and that I needed to stay with them, though I now think I was wrong–I think I could have taken even a tiny apartment somewhere close by, and they would have been fine. But no matter. All I can do now is finish what needs to be done, and try not to think about how little control I have over any of this.

The contractor claims he’ll be finished with the floor/ceiling repairs in a week. I’m dubious, but this is certainly good news. There are plenty of annoyances ahead–showing the house, coping with inspections and financing and so on and so forth, finding a new place to live, then moving–even in a best-case scenario. I am trying not to think about what happens in a worst-case scenario, trying (with varying degrees of success) not to fret and worry pointlessly.  Sometimes it all seems rosy and wonderful, and other times I think that I have stupidly thrown a great deal of bad money after good, and we will be stuck here–poorer, but with level floors–forever.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t matter one way or the other what you think,” my boyfriend wisely said last weekend, as we painted the fiberglass garage doors in ninety-degree heat. And he’s right. Whether I feel optimistic or hopeless has no relevance and affects nothing. Whether I find this particular powerlessness Zen or wildly frustrating also has no bearing on what will or won’t happen. I woke at three this morning having dreamed that the car I was driving had careened off a cliff–I watched my sons’ bodies float down to certain death, and knew I was falling too, until I woke up–and lay there trying to sleep for what felt like hours, pointlessly treading the same old ground in my head. Which is, as we all know, a patent waste of time and energy.

Right now the yard is sunny, the birds are singing, the windowboxes are blooming (though I accidentally killed a bunch of petunias by overfertilizing them) and it’s lovely on the porch. The kids and I saw the first lightning bugs of the year last night as we sat out here playing hearts. The cat, amusingly, went nuts trying to catch them in midair in the yard. The swim club is open, and we can ride our bikes down there. The house, once everything is finished, will never have looked more beautiful. Any intelligent person would try to enjoy her uncertain tenure here for as long as she possibly could.

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