bathroom floor

I live in a really crappy house. I mean, it is a really small fixer-upper. Our list of home improvement projects is long and foreboding. We are not folks who watch too much HGTV and got over zealous one night with the honey-do list or who fantasize that our house is a work in progress. Our list includes jacking up the sagging front porch, and overhauling the plumbing.

I’m like the proverbial baker’s wife- who has no bread. I am married to a man who can fix anything, but has no time in which to do it.

Don’t get me wrong- we have made a lot of progress over the years. (and when I say “we,” of course I mean Dave)

Last week, we got to one project we (Dave) had been meaning to do for too long- the rotting bathroom floor.

This floor had always been an eyesore, a dirt trap, and an embarrassment. But ever since the onset of toddler toilet training, it just smelled like pee. Every time one of my little angels would urinate just shy of the toilet, all the wetness would seep into the cracked vinyl and stay there, and so would the smell.




Here is a before shot of our bathroom floor:






Yes, that is me after I gave birth to my second daughter. No, I was not planning it quite that way. Fortunately, I was high on endorphins at the moment of this photograph and did not care a mite that I was half naked on this disgusting floor.


This blog entry is nothing more than a celebration of the fact that, three years later, we (and by “we,” I mean Dave) finally replaced the bathroom floor.


It was no small task:





Neither was it any small sacrifice to be without our only toilet for three days.

We were so excited when this was finished, that we took a series of shots of our adorable second-born in the spot where she was born:





We tend to spend a lot of time on the bathroom floor, actually.





If you think about it, you probably do too.

Nine years in five days

September 1, 2008




"Time, it swallows everything. From the mighty to the meager thing. It's as dark as it is comforting to play along." Amos Lee




We are driving South on highway 87 out of the Adirondacks in New York, listening to Amos Lee on repeat. Last Days at the Lodge has been our soundtrack for the trip. I'm sad that this time is ending- excited to see my girls and give them their gifts but in no other way do I want to go home. It's hard not to mourn the day that we missed due to my sickness, which thankfully, has passed. (I apparently do not have Lyme's, and it was the gross sounding hand-foot and mouth that had me in pain everywhere, especially my hands and feet, during the first part of our trip) I'm very glad not to be seriously ill with anything incurable, and even more thankful that it has passed, but I had to stay home on Wednesday night to get blood tests instead of leaving for Vermont as planned. I couldn't even make the decision for my disappointment at the inevitable- that I was going to short myself one precious day and that I would be dealing with a yet-unnamed sickness while I was trying to relax and reconnect with Dave.




Jon and I left Lancaster at 3am and made great time all the way north of New York City, where we took a wrong turn and drove all the way to Utica before we even realized what we did, adding at least two hours to our trip. We didn't arrive in Burlington until 2:30 in the afternoon, and we had been on target to get there before noon. Day one was basically lost to sickness and driving fatigue. Nonetheless, Dave and I managed to have a great late lunch at the Vermont Pub and Brewery in Burlington and get some needed sweatshirts before heading North out of town to our reserved campground on an island on Lake Champlain.




I thought by looking at a map of Vermont that a campground somewhere on the islands in the middle of this grand lake would be ideal for camping. I have the incomparable San Juans as a reference in my mind for making this kind of judgment. And truly, the islands on Lake Champlain were nothing short of breathtaking. As we wound down the road towards the tip of the Isle la Mont, our expectations were high. This place was so beautiful, and we were ready to put the disappointment of starting out behind us. Working on only a few hours of sleep each and with dusk already settling in, we were eager to set up our tent just about anywhere.




Unfortunately, the particular "anywhere" that I chose on the map was an abandoned RV park with a couple of run down tent sites in a meadow full of mosquitoes and other small biting things. The only other tents in the whole place belonged to some bikers that snuck in after hours and tucked themselves away in the most overgrown site available. We walked around and chose what seemed to be the least awkward place to pitch our tent, which oddly was right next to one of the only occupied RV's. The rest of the camping vehicles were empty, some with tarps over them, some with decks and flowerbeds built up around them, all with tall grass telling how long it had been since it was vacated.

We threw the tent up barely before it got completely dark and fumbled with the rest of our gear. We reluctantly built a fire. We broke out the wine and appreciated the stars. We went to bed. We slept like rocks.




We slept like rocks—that is until sometime in the early hours when Dave woke up to pee and was startled to by the sound of heavy hoofs and heavy grunting. Poking his head out of the tent and seeing his flashlight reflect off of a large pair of dim eyes, he began to narrate to me, sill half asleep, "Cows! There's f*&!ing cows everywhere!" At the sound of his exclamation, I awoke and the herd of cattle stumbled quickly away. I also realized I could not go back to sleep until I emptied my bladder. Unlike David, I had to walk about one hundred yards through wet, ankle high grass to the toilet, all the while wondering in my stupor where the cows went and if they were going to come back. As I stumbled back into my tent, I wondered if this situation could be any more surreal. My wondering ended when I woke sometime later to the sounds of heavy breathing from heavy animals and very impolite mouth smacking. The cows had returned to our site, which was the only one in the place surrounded by bushes of crab-apples, apparently a favorite bovine snack.




There against the tent, was the shadow of a small cow, curiously sniffing our shelter. He must have wondered if our dome was as tasty as the treat he and his friends had found a few feet away. I watched the shadow of his short tongue come in focus against the fabric, and I heard the sandy surface of it slide dryly as he licked us slowly three times.




From this sample, he decided we were not very tasty.




In the morning, we tried to make the most of our situation and stifle feelings of disappointment and frustration. A good morning walk ought to help us shake the sleep out of our bones and give us a fresh perspective. Maybe then, neither of would have to hide what we were really thinking but didn't want to admit out loud: this place sucks. We explored the rest of the ghost town, wondering why the hell you would park your RV, if you had one, in one spot and leave it there. Aren't they supposed to be for driving around? We noted other curiosities about the place: strangely well maintained showers, decorated with personal touches like original black velvet oil paintings, a laundry room with a few sets of washer-dryers and stacks of 1950's romance novels for the bored housewife, a family rec-room where one could let the kids watch VHS cartoons like Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. The absence of people and the presence of so many places where people ought to be made the place feel utterly like a ghost-town. There were, however, a few apparitions floating around who waved and made us realize that if this were not a ghost town, it was at best a summer camp in a time warp.



I'm not sure who said it out loud first, but the consensus between us was "Let's get the hell outta here," and we threw our gear in the truck haphazardly and did just that while there was still the better part of the day ahead of us.




Having no plan whatsoever at this point, we headed across the lake into New York State, where the Adirondacks beckoned to us with the promise of pine trees and mountains, amongst which there must surely be a multitude of campgrounds. It couldn't be that hard to stumble into one of them.




It was, of course, a little harder than we thought. We didn't know which direction to point ourselves, so we started heading north, following a Suburban with a canoe atop and a golden retriever inside. (Outfitted like that, we probably wanted to go where they were going.) This, of course, got us nowhere in particular. When we stopped for gas in Dannemora, we talked to friendly gas station cashiers who had no idea where one might want to camp in their neck of the woods. Pretty sure we did not want to continue our current course, we meandered southward on smaller highways while day two of our relaxing long weekend slipped away from us. We passed through small mountain towns that seemed to mostly be a haven for hillbillies and Uncle Buck.




Still driving southward, and barely beginning to cross the brink of despair and disappointment, we stumbled in to Seranac. I' m not sure the town would have been so charming to us if we had arrived there differently, but we had come meandering aimlessly and rather hopelessly and now found ourselves surrounded by quaint old-world brick buildings snuggled up to sidewalks which wound around Main Street, the whole small town wrapping itself around the weary traveler in a gesture that seemed to say, "Welcome. Glad you found us. Stay a while." Of course, such a traveler could stay in a hotel (and we would, later) but Seranac instead nudged her visitors nurturingly just outside the city limits, amongst trees and lakes into the great green.




The rest is less interesting—though not without more antics. Conniving for a spot in one of the overfull campgrounds (being Labor Day weekend, and our only reservations had been at "Camp Cowlick" we were not guaranteed any spot). We actually raced through backroads to beat some potential campers on the way from one full site to the promise of another. David navigated us skillfully enough to drive in ahead of the other forlorn pair, and we "settled" for what ended up being the coolest spot in the whole campground, high in the trees, with our picnic table perched on a steep slope above the creek and everything cozily arranged around a generous fire pit. No one wanted this spot, because it was not "on the lake." Hence, none of our other creek-side neighbors had obnoxious motorboats or ridiculous RV's. In fact, no one was next to us at all.




After doing a little dance around the campsite, complete with hand clapping hopping, I helped Dave get our things in order—the way we originally envisioned. Wasting no more time, we rented a canoe and bought a trustworthy map, consulting one very cool outfitter of outdooring enterprises, and paddled ourselves from one "pond" to another, exploring the vast beautiful silence around us. Thirty minutes from our busy base camp, and we were a million miles from nowhere. Finally.




All that, as I've said, is a lot more boring. We chronicled our conversations in a journal, because it was important to us—and we need to remember. But I'm not going to share it here. I am going to say that I remembered celebrating our first anniversary eight years ago in somewhat the same way. Then, we camped ruggedly with our backpacks and our tiny tent on Mt. Rainier. I was terrified by the obvious presence of an elk in the middle of the night. This time, I was licked by a cow in Vermont. Was this somehow symbolic of where we are in our married life? Does the initial excitement (that borders on terrifying) eventually give way to weary disappointment?




It is possible that this is a fair metaphor—or it would be, if only it weren't for Seranac. Savingly, there is also a place of peace, contentment and deep green, once we wind through the woods to get to it.

god bless her!

Lydia received a letter from her future kindergarten teacher today, telling her she was excited to meet everyone and giving an idea of what to expect on her first day of school. At the bottom of the letter, she taped a shiny new penny with a note that it was “lucky” and meant for best wishes in the year ahead.

Lydia carried the penny around with her most of the night. (Sometimes, she also put it in her mouth.)

At bedtime, when her dad was tucking her in, she solemnly gave the penny to him.

“Daddy, you can put this penny in your jar. I can tell you and Mommy really need a vacation.”

a last word on bugs

I am going to have to stop going on and on about bugs. I am also going to have to stop going on and on about Seattle, and a number of other topics that I just seem to return to, again and again, to the annoyance of my closest friends and relatives.

But really, I have learned to live with bugs. My house is a lot like Joe’s Apartment - an MTV comedy sketch that was almost before my time, but came at just the right time for me to be old enough and concerned enough to get around the parental controls on my parent’s TV. You might remember how Joe co-existed somewhat happily with a prolific colony of cockroaches in his disgusting bachelor apartment. I’m no bachelor, and I don’t think I am disgusting, but I am learning to co-exist with my own colony of f***ers.

That’s what I call them. F***ers. I use this word so rarely that I can’t even bring myself to write it down without asterisks, but my tongue comes unhinged whenever I see one in my home.

Out here, people refer to these horrible beasts as water-bugs, which I think is kind when they are referring to one seen on my patio, but basically denial overall. My good neighbor, who shares my East wall and my bug problem, looked these “water bugs” up online and discovered them to be “Oriental Cockroaches.” I think there may be other varieties living amongst the Orientals, but mostly it’s these big black beasts that I am referring to when I familiarly use the term “f***ers.”

I was pregnant with Vivienne when we moved into this townhouse, in an “up and coming” section of the city that is currently a lot less prospective than that term seems. One night, pregnant, feverish, depressed from broken down car situation, and alone (Lydia with in-laws, David working out of town) a young co-worker dropped me off at my new home, where I spent most of the night paralyzed with fear on the couch, eyes completely glued to a large specimen on the other side of the first floor- about 15 feet away. Fortunately, all my family lives in a time zone three hours earlier than mine, so at that late hour I had a short list of people I could turn to. In this case, it was my dad.

I don’t even remember how that showdown ended. I know I had a lot of telephonic moral support, but I think I might have let the beast actually get away. I think that I spent the better part of the night on the couch, on the phone, sweating with fever and fear. I’m pretty sure that my nemesis went under the baseboard, where he/she had many, many little baby bugs, which have plagued me for the rest of my years in this house.

I am actually ridiculously, meticulously, and obsessively clean- to an annoying degree. I am constantly on my toddlers’ heals, snapping at them about their mess, constantly following my co-workers around the store, cleaning what they have already cleaned, and going after my dear husband, putting things away where he can’t fathom to find them again, in a sincere effort to organize. My efforts, however sincere, are constantly thwarted. My house—the structure itself—is a greater force than my own neuroses.

I’ve found myself in the throws of combat. I actually have bombed my own house with Raid, once a year, for the last three years. In all other respects, I am totally “green” and overboard organic, of coarse. But when it comes to these bugs, I don’t mess around. I understand that I am subjecting myself and my dearest loved-ones to carcinogens which will likely shorten my life-span, and this is a sacrifice I am willing to make. It’s me or them.


Recently, my mother in law compared me to our missionary friend, who lives in one of the poorest countries in Africa. She made this comparison after witnessing me kill a crane-fly (incidentally: what a stupid bug). Our friend reportedly has killed African sized f***ers in her kitchen with her bare hands. Actually, she has admitted as much. It’s true. Well, friends, this is the level I have come to—being compared to my African missionary friend, just because I have a tendency now to go after a swarm of baby “water bugs” armed with only my fist and an angry slurry of “F***ers! F***ers! F***ers!!!” and other curse words.

I know my friend does not swear when she kills her cockroaches!

So this war, among a few other things, has contributed to my discontent with my home. A truth I only recently admitted out loud to David. I’ve never wanted to add this burden to what he carries- that I hate our house. I felt like it was very vain to feel this way. There are a lot of serious problems in this world, and I am going to complain because I am the proverbial baker’s wife, who has no bread. David beautifies other people’s homes and front walks all day, and our pipes host generations of water bugs.

I really do not want to list all the renovation needs of my house here. Everyone thinks they live with a list of home improvement projects, but ours stand out to friends who visit: a “caution” sign over our stairway, where plywood holds the crumbling drywall up. The sagging front porch. The scary basement that smells of feral cats.

Often, I feel trapped here, in my own home, afraid to do my laundry downstairs, not wanting to keep my shades up so that my crazy neighbor can peep in, or unable to make full use of major appliances. It’s a frustrating, stifling feeling. And I think that I have transferred a lot of how I feel about my house to how I perceive the place I live in general. I think of this town as stifling. I think of this culture as exclusive. Parts of it are cute because I’ve decorated or remodeled a little, but the space itself is not comfortable. I can’t relax.

I’m wondering if my perpetual home-sickness could be blamed largely on the level of discomfort that I continue to operate at in my every day life. When something is difficult, don’t we naturally remember what was easier? Of course we look back to better times. When I was sick as an adult with the flu, I felt such a longing for my mother. I wanted her to be there to comfort me and just hold my hair back from my head. I projected all the longing from my lost childhood onto my one lonely moment as a sick, single college student.

Don’t we all do that, from time to time? Just a little? Maybe now that I have named it, I can get over it.

What’s amazing is that someday my daughters will look back at this time. Their memories will be a little hazy, with some very clear spots. They will remember this little house, and it will be big in their minds. They won’t remember bugs, except that their mother was swift and fierce in removing them. They will remember delicious dinners around our small table and all the wonderful days (every day!) that Daddy came home from work late—very late— and played with them. They will grow up, and they will long for another time and another place that is no longer accessible to them. And what is so detestable to me now will be the very things their sweetest memories are made of.

origins

I got a call the other day from the school district. A lady doing data entry for the entering kindergarten class wanted to know the official date that we moved to Pennsylvania and became residents. Most of the time, I can’t remember what I ate the day before, so of course I had to look this information up.

I unearthed old calendars and date books in the basement and found the exact date that we packed the last of our things into the car, the contents of our house having gone ahead of us in a van and our firstborn having gone ahead of us as well with her paternal grandmother and Auntie Joh on a plane at the tender age of seven months. May 2nd, 2004. Not quite four years ago.

I thought it was a lot longer than that, actually. For one thing, we have been telling people that we’ve been in business four ourselves for nearly five years. (Kind of like how the camera supposedly adds ten pounds- being in business for yourself adds at least a year to your memory and subtracts at least twice that much from the total years of your life.) On that date, we packed the remainder of our belongings (our important documents, duffel of clothes, and two cats) into the car and didn’t stop driving, with one major exception, for three days. We took turns at the wheel, David’s turns always being much longer than mine, until we were both insane with fatigue and emotion and possibly one of the more dangerous vehicles on the road. David actually lost his mind just east of Chicago, which we passed through during morning rush hour. He thought he was a character in Top Gun and that he was flying a fighter jet instead of driving a ’93 Altima. That’s when I took over and piloted us through to Pennsylvania.

What a strange place. I wonder, if you weren’t born here, do you ever really belong here?

When we were young and dating, I would visit for the summer and live with David’s family in Delaware. I considered the ugly highways, dingy malls, and massive business complexes I encountered to represent the small sate, and I pronounced Delaware to be “the armpit of America.” I decided years before I needed to that if we lived on the East Coast after we got married, it would be in Lancaster, for sure.

David grew up in Lancaster. His family moved from Minnesota when he was about to enter junior high. While I lived with his family, we went back to Lancaster often to visit friends. It was green, and quaint, and even at just the right moment of the evening when the sun was setting over the farms on the hills, Lancaster was magical. I likened it to the Shire, where Tolkien’s beloved hobbits lived in Middle Earth. I still think there is something about the place that makes it seem like it is from a different time- possibly the prevalent Amish and Mennonite cultures here that give a nod to the modern world as it drives by. There is a sense that time doesn’t have that much of a stronghold here.

I’m just trying to make sense of why I have let four years go by without getting over a feeling of being a fish out of water. How much of that is due to the culture of a place, one that I do not identify with much at all, and how much of that is my own fault, a “grass is always greener” syndrome.

Washington is the Evergreen state, actually. Ironically. It’s literally green all the time there, due to the rain and the pleasant, temperate climate that is never really too hot or too cold (well, people who live there think it gets plenty hot and mighty cold!)

I was sure about my decision that May. I had been waiting for the moment in our marriage when I would be called upon to choose, and I had already prepared myself. Not because of a lack of love for my own family, but because of David’s special closeness with his, I knew we would eventually move back East. I knew this because years before, when he was young and free to go any which way in the world pleased him, he moved across the country for me.

I was well aware that it was a big decision, and one that would prove to be a difficult adjustment in ways I was not able to imagine at the time. I suppose what I underestimated is just how long an adjustment might actually take

I want to try and write about it. I keep coming back to this thing, this internal struggle where I am trying to find my footing in a strange new place. At this point, I need to figure out why it feels strange after four years. Is it that the place is so odd? Lancaster is unique, to be sure. Even people from other parts of Pennsylvania or the neighboring states will tell you as much. I’m really afraid that it is something in me, that at a (relatively) young age, I’ve become set in certain ways, in certain ideas of the way the world should be- about what is beautiful and good.

As a college freshman studying “Humanities of (Insert Other Culture Here)”, I had a professor ask what we thought made a person identify so strongly with where he was from. We were reading Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (still one of my favorites), and the question was central to the theme of our text. Now I find it central to the theme of my life.

None of us really came up with a good answer then, on the spot. But I feel like I need to figure it out now, for myself. It might take me a while. It’s taken me about four years to even realize that I want to figure it out. I’ll appreciate any thoughts you might have along the way.