I Am Afraid of My House

We hardly know each other, really. I mean, she's mine, I've got the mortgage papers to prove it; but we're near strangers for the most part. And I'm afraid of her.

I've occupied this house for over seven months now. The winter was cold and harsh, it felt like a season of survival mostly, learning the ropes of country life - of emergency kits and snow plowing and frozen pipes and wood-hauling and propane delivery. Come spring, yard work called, the grass growing tall all around, and bugs bugs bugs. Plus the dust - red dirt - which kicks up like crazy every time a car drives by.

So I'm learning how to exist in the house, how to exist here on this piece of earth, on this dirt road, in these woods, on this farmland. But I can't say I've yet begun to know the place. It's both the unknown, and the larger-than-me, that frighten me. When it comes to tackling house chores and maintenance, I feel more like a lion-tamer than a caretaker (Back, Simba!). Today, I wrestle with the water-filter, which makes the well-water here safe for drinking. It's about a month older than it should be, and it's started to leak, which tells me it's probably saturated. I can't unscrew the cannister, it's too tight, even as I'm using all my strength, my whole body. I give up, demoralized. I am too weak, too alone, in over my head. I am now afraid to use the washing machine, because I see from this morning's load that there's been a lot of leakage. All I need right now is a burst filter.

There are other things: vents that don't quite reach outside, slanty floors that seem to get slantier (or is it just my imagination?), wobbly bannister, a furnace on its last legs (18 years), wood-rot in the siding, kitchen sink pipes that freeze in winter but are housed in an unreachable crawl space. Just that phrase, crawl space, makes my heart sink. Will I really have to crawl in there to remedy my problem?

I wonder what it would feel like to really be at home. To see your home as your ward, your child, maybe even something like a spouse or partner. To know your home, and to love her. To approach her ailments as you would tending to a sick friend.

I guess for now I am still a city person, or even a suburban person, at heart - a renter, a vacationer, an occupier: I live here, but someone else takes care of things. We grew up in a new home, completed just before we moved in, and anything related to the house's care or maintenance was pretty much invisible to us; mom called The Guy (dad is not only not handy, but not even handy enough to call The Guy). Here, sometimes the nearest Guy is sometimes 60 miles away (I learned this when the refrigerator gave out), so this is not really an option.

And besides, I'm here with the idea of place in mind, after thirty-something years of a lot of placelessness, of moving around, and packing and unpacking, and never really knowing a place, a home, a landscape. It feels at this moment - embarrassingly - like an impossibility that I will ever be able to change that water filter; but hope springs eternal. A month ago, getting the lawnmower repaired (I actually have a phobia of repair guys, who I am certain lick their chops when the little Asian girl arrives, ignorant and oh-so-easily swindled) felt like a gargantuan task, but it got done, and now I know where to go; and a few months ago, I thought I was trapped here, snowed in, but I got on out there with the garden shovel (hadn't yet bought a snow shovel) and dug myself the heck out. So maybe, over time, I won't become Bob Villa or anything, but I'll learn a thing or two, I'll settle in to this place, which is - miraculously, a little randomly, and somewhat inexplicably - my house. Maybe, like Annie Dillard, I may even get to know my bugs ("There is a spider in the bathroom with whom I keep a sort of company..."), and I'll hold off on the obsessive vacuuming of spiderwebs, and of the fly and moth and mosquito carcasses which pile up in the corners of every room.

So we are not yet friends, me and this house. It's going to take some time.