The Never-Ending List
You cross one thing off and ten more things come up. When do you get to rest?
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my house lately. It’s with me in my imagination a lot. Since our roommates moved out, we have twice as much space to manipulate, and I have so many dreams about long red curtains, crushed velvet couches, things that I think are called “light fixtures,” but I can’t be sure, because Googling “light fixtures” does not ever produce what I’m picturing in my mind. I daydream a lot about stumbling on “amazing rescue pieces” (which I understand to be sets of chairs from the 1930s or whatever) from Facebook Marketplace for very cheap.
(As an aside – I can no longer navigate Facebook. I feel confused when I open it, like I’m looking at a map of a mall in a city that I have never been to and never plan to visit. It seems like a lot of the furniture on Marketplace links to websites like Wayfair or Crate & Barrel, which I am completely capable of visiting on my own, and which do not have any “amazing rescue pieces.” The whole idea of a “rescuing” a piece of furniture is that you’re saving it from a terrible fate, like the kind of demon trash compactor that’s in “Toy Story 3.”)
The upstairs living room has the best window in the house, absolutely. It’s a big, south-facing window, and it looks out into a lot of trees. Our former roommates turned it into a cozy sitting room with a huge television and lovely drapey plants. Since assuming ownership, we have so far done two things with it: (1) run around it with Baby T while making noises intended to elicit echoes; and (2) daydreamed about it.
The floor upstairs is crooked. If you put a marble on it, the marble rolls. This is not high up on the list of things to fix.
That list is neverending, as it always is with a house like this. You may have heard me whisper this to you before, but I didn’t think there was any way in hell we would buy this house. The pictures on Redfin were great, but pictures can lie, and these pictures’ pants were on fire. The roof leaked, there were mice in the walls, paint peeled in every room, the haphazard addition to the kitchen rested on cracked foundation, and every appliance was caked in decades of scum. Grime had etched itself in between each bathroom tile. The owner had a problem with collecting broken things from alleys and storing those things floor-to-ceiling in the basement and the garage. The floors were the kind of floors where the person showing the house would go, “Oooooh, these are the original oak floors!” Without looking anywhere to see if that was true, because it must be true, because the floors splintered and appeared to be 100 years old.
I didn’t want to buy it. Luke wanted to buy it. It reminded Luke of always-under-construction homes he lived in as a kid, where he’d sit with his brother eating oatmeal crisp in a nook while the kitchen was being renovated for months or years. He liked living in a place that was constantly transforming. Luke never wants to buy anything, and so his desire for this house was meaningful, and so we bought it.
Since we bought it, we’ve replaced the stove, the washer-dryer, the water heater, the furnace, the air conditioner, the fridge, the toilets, and the microwave. We’ve rebuilt the roof, some windows, insulation, drywall, and certain floors. Other floors were re-done. My former roommate Bethany painstakingly unpeeled wallpaper from an upstairs closet, and knocked out a superfluous wall. Every room has been painted. Some have been re-painted. A mural was added, and a projector. An entire room was created out of an open porch in the back so that our daughter would have a place to sleep her first year. (Someday, she’ll look in that room and go, “THAT room? I slept in THERE? But it’s a CLOSET!” But honestly, it was a great first room.) Leaks have been mended, rats have been… relocated. A raised bed in the back yard for vegetables. A chicken coop. A guest room in the basement, which flooded multiple times a year, and was recently moved upstairs. I am looking at the length of this paragraph with the knowledge that I could go on for at least 2,000 more words, but that you must be getting bored, and surely you’ve gotten the point.
AND EVEN STILL, the list is neverending! Truly, it seems infinite. As Lorelei says in Season 4 Episode 20, “Hey, do you know that if the entire population of China walked by, the line would never end because of the rate of population increase? […] That’s my list. Every Chinese person in the world.”
But here is a thing Luke (my husband, not the Luke in “Gilmore Girls”) has said at least once a week, and usually more like daily, since the day we moved in: “I love our house.” And then I go, “I love our house, too.” And I’m not lying.
The fact that we should deal with the wobbly deck hasn’t prevented me from lounging in a chaise on it for actual hours, staring at tree tops or listening to music. Our bricabrac dining room sees a joyful, delicious family meal almost every single night. (Once a month or so, someone makes something that is too salty. I don’t know how this happens — I am a person who will eat salt right out of the shaker and find it pretty satisfying, but still, sometimes the brusselsprouts feel smothered and parched, and those meals aren’t delicious. However, we always say that they are, so the cook’s feelings don’t get hurt. You only know for sure that the meal you made was bad when the leftovers get quietly thrown out two days later, without any fanfare.)
Maybe it’s a little easier with a house than with a life. With life, too, there will always be so many things to do, and there’s an impossible belief that someday all the things will get done, and then you can finally rest, and find pleasure in what you’ve made. You’ll finally be thin enough to enjoy your food, and successful enough to enjoy your job, and rich enough to enjoy your money. (Or to give some of it away.) As a person who has been enjoying her forever-unfinished house for four and a half years now, I can attest to this: it’s OK to enjoy it now. It’s worth it. Time is not like money: it doesn’t accrue if you keep saving it. Unfortunately, heartbreakingly even, it only runs out faster.
Since I met Luke, I’ve been totally bug-eyed at his ability to be content. He can have thirty-five things on his to-do list (and I can KNOW THAT THEY’RE THERE, because I PUT some of them there! Those spices aren’t going to decant themselves, Luke!), and there he’ll be, lounging on the couch reading a New Yorker on a Sunday afternoon. “HOW?!” I used to wonder. And I’d write it off as being obviously so much easier for men. And there is some truth to that.
But also, he grew up in one of these houses, where someone was constantly hammering; and nevertheless, there were family members happily gathering and his mom made oatmeal crisp. No wonder he wanted to buy this one. This kind of house doesn’t let you get everything done, and so you have to choose to rest while it’s all still a big mess. And once you do that, the secret’s out: the mess doesn’t get in the way of the joy. You can have the joy right now.
I hope your fall is unfolding into something that is giving you some space for this kind of joy. I can’t get over the yellow flowers in my back yard, blooming in the cold.
Love,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
T wants to walk. For whatever reason, she feels safest practicing all her walking stuff in the bath — which, I don’t have to tell you, is the most dangerous place for her to practice it. She likes to pull herself up on me (I sit with my feet in the tub while she takes a bath), and then STOMP until she splashes her own face. She goes up and down and up and down again, and crawls the length of the tub, and then she pulls herself up using other tub features: the faucet, the little drain stopper thing, the edge, a bottle of conditioner (which doesn’t work, but she ends up with conditioner, which amuses her). Then she does the scariest thing, which is squat down and donkey kick her legs straight up in the air like she’s doing a yoga handstand, and then shoot straight up into a sort-of foot-stand, and then fall. I think she likes falling in the bath because of the splash. I find it terrifying — not because I really think something horrible will happen to her anymore (I mean, I’m right there, and she’s resilient), but because I feel like she might bonk her head and that might make her cry, and that then she will cry uncontrollably, and I’ll have to take her out of the bath, and she’ll be slippery and inconsolable and I’ll walk her around the house wanting to take her pain away but being unable to do that; and because it’s night, I might not have it in me to do this without letting my heart break.
This Week In Sophie
In a dream-come-true twist of fate, Sammi and I have the cartoon that is up for the caption contest this week in The New Yorker! All I want in the world is for a YADAGEJ reader to win the caption contest, so hurry up and get your votes in!
Also, if you’re down here, and you’re a free subscriber who appreciates this work even a tiny little bit, please consider upgrading your subscription! There are many perks (lots of extra content, and not just writing, either), not the least of which is that you are supporting an independent writer directly, who does all of this for the love of the craft. (But let’s face it: it takes hours!)
Congrats on the caption contest!! The winner must say something about a rug I think.
You are doing a good enough job Sophie!