It's not about the house.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Concentration and Self-Sacrifice and Toil and Doubt

I got a little bit distracted.


I was going to pull the wood-paneling down in the dining room yesterday, but I realized before I started that it might be one of those talk-to-your-husband-first kind of projects. Not that I need his permission, mind – I don’t need anybody’s permission to do anything. I am a grown-ass woman, and if I want to pull the fucking roof off my own house I’ll damn well do it. But I don’t. A girl’s got to know her limitations. One of mine, oddly enough, is sleeping in the cold, spring rain.

And another one is hanging drywall.

Actually I can hang drywall, but I can’t do it alone, and if Johnny came home to discover I’d gutted a room without so much as a heads-up, he’d find a way to be too busy to help me put it back together for a month, I know it. By which time I will have found a Real Job, or gone off on some worldwide tour, and the wall-less dining room will become one of those eyesores we all have in our houses that we simply fail to see after a while.

We do all have those, right? It’s not just me? They could be as small as the rolling-pin that has for some reason taken up permanent residence on the steamer-trunk in the corner, as dire as the water stains on the living-room ceiling, or as just plain odd as the creepy catch-all cubbyhole under the stairs. Once in a while these things sort of pop into my line of vision and send my heart-rate soaring, but I’ve learned to rub my eyes until they disappear again. Yesterday, though, realizing that the dining room would be a bad idea but determined not to derail my do-something resolution the first day, I tackled one of them.

I put the rolling-pin away. There. Aren’t you proud of me?

The End.




No, no, no. The rolling-pin's still on the steamer-trunk, don’t be ridiculous! I did do something else, though, but you’ll have to wait to hear about it. Partly because it isn’t so much finished yet (I told you I get distracted), and partly because I have to actually be somewhere in a few hours, so I don't have time to tell you now about my moldy shoes...

2 comments:

Sparkle Plenty said...

"...one of those eyesores we all have in our houses that we simply fail to see after a while..."

I think I have at least eight eyesores that I fail to see--but I might have more than eight (I am very good at failing to recall)!

(Moldy shoes?!)

Anonymous said...

I have a whole upstairs floor I have pretended doesn't exist for 10 years. No rolling pin here though!