Public Surrender
Posted on July 1, 2008
Filed Under marriage, bat-ass crazy, challenges, epiphanies |
The main drag through our town is lined with impressive antique homes, all of them tastefully restored and expanded upon and painted in an array of acceptable and historically accurate Benjamin Moore colors. So it follows that the one home that has NOT been meticulously scraped and painted Kennebunk Beige, the one whose front porch is broken and listing and appears to be trying to slink off unnoticed, that is the one that catches the eye when driving down Elm Street.
It is a scream in a quiet room, a berry stain on a white dress shirt. This house, that is the focal point of our historic district, stands as a sort of example, a warning to potential home buyers against buying beyond their means, against allowing idealism and romanticism to influence a real estate transaction, against stretching the family budget to accommodate the fixer-upper only to find yourself pushing a reel mower through the small patch of grass at the foot of the porch stairs, the one bit of maintenance you can still manage without paying a third party, the one thing that you can control while the rest of the property folds and begins to fall in upon itself.
And perhaps there is an element of empathy that sustains our interest in this house, as My Better Half and I feel a sort of kinship with the poor people obviously waging this hopeless war against time and money and wood rot. We have intimate experience with just such a battle as we struggle to prop up our own crumbling home. We are just thankful that OUR humiliation is safely set back from the street, sinking into its degradation behind the privacy screen of scrub maples and poison ivy. There is no public witness to the state of our neglect and only those we invite to experience our folly are privy to our leaking sink and faulty toilets and the bats roosting in the attic.
We can understand these strangers strapped to the weakening joists of their centuries old home, keenly, intimately, as we too watched one too many episodes of This Old House and convinced ourselves that it was possible. We can imagine the arguments sustained over how to spend the last dollars in the bank account, he insisting that he is up to the task of demolishing and rebuilding that listing front porch, she remembering the basement drainage project that ultimately involved hydraulic drill rentals, forty eight hours of rattle and roar and the choking drifts of fine concrete particulate floating up from the cellar to settle on upholstery and counter tops and, remarkably, on all food items in the refrigerator.
And we secretly consider adopting the very public surrender that seems to have earned this desperate couple some sense of connubial balance. As the weather warms and the swarms of black flies begin to dissipate, the residents of 12 Elm have pitched a large, accommodating tent on their small patch of grass just to the right of the porch stairs, assuming the attitude of squatters on their own front lawn while the whole monstrous mess behind them crumbles and disintegrates, unsalvageable at last.
Now that they have declared defeat, they are free to focus on manageable tasks like keeping the tent flaps closed to the clouds of mosquitoes moving through at dusk, repairing rips and rends with a needle and thread, stringing up a sort of clothes line between two tall pines they once considered removing and have now come to think of as just two more residents on this piece of property that has finally bested them.
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