The New York Minute: Day 1

Better Days

I am worrying about my dachshund, Butterbean, as I yo-yo up and down Hwy 70 between my rental house in Haw Creek and my new home in Swannanoa. Bean is still recovering from an intense and expensive back surgery. If I get tired of that, there is still a plethora of worries to choose from: money, the miles I am forcing daily onto my 18-year-old Toy truck, repacking boxes I barely had time to unpack, how to find a mover, where the fuck I will put all that stuff in a 700 square foot house, the untangling of a 25 year marriage, money.

I consciously ignore the iffy mammogram results I got before Christmas and the subsequent needle biopsy scheduled the week after. Was that just last week? Is this really how 2024 starts for me? Mom always said, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Or not. Seems to me, time simply flies. Nobody from Mission has called with the results. No news is good news, right? I was reassured by women friends that this would happen to almost every woman at some point in their lives. It had happened to many of them. It happened to my mom. I lean that troubling trifle in a dark, dusty corner of my mind among billowing cobwebs, where it stays quietly in a clutterfuck of boxes and junk I would rather ignore.

I sit inside Black Betty, heater blasting, keeping a bitter cold January day at bay while I sit and stare at my new place. She’s a real heartbreaker of a house. Perfect, pretty, small in a way that suits the houses on either side. In fact, the entire block of houses, all five, were built by the same architect in the late ’40’s and early ’50’s. Once I understood this, I recognized his trademarks in each one: the front picture window, the peaked roofs, the style of hardwood flooring inside.

Here in my Happy Place, I don’t have to think about anything but following the bead of paint at the tip of a brush as I cut in the light adobe color against the bright white ceiling. I choose paint colors partly because I know what I want, but also because of their names. In the kitchen, as well as in the open space that is now both dining and living room, “Old Country” is a fresh neutral creamy color, slightly pink, a little bit tan, adobe but lighter. The trim is called “White Heron”. You get the picture. I have always wanted a part time job as a paint namer, an occupation probably held by AI now. Shame, that.

I sing along with my favorite playlists broadcast over the Kohl bluetooth construction worker’s speaker. I love that thing. Drip paint and mud on it, drop it on concrete, slam it around in the truck as you careen between one place and another. It will play the same every time you turn it on, loud and clear, a little heavy on the bass end. It is an essential part of my paint box, trustworthy as the brushes I keep clean and snug in their cardboard jackets. The Kohl requires little care. It’s dependable, durable. It has become a metaphor for relationships, whether they last or not. My Kohl speaker remains a role model for future connections.

With an hour left to paint, I crack one of the beers I keep in a small cooler on the back porch. Dark comes early. When 5:30 rolls around, it’s either happy hour or lonely hour, so I break all the rules to keep it happy. I finish up for the day, wash the brushes in the sink, and slip out of my work boots. Resting my aching shoulders against the southern wall between two windows, the waxing moon rises over my lovely little house. Lights blazing beneath new, bright white ceilings. Where once asbestos tile crumbled to the floor, they are flat and smooth as movie screens.

“Old Country” glows on the walls. I imagine Jane’s artwork hanging in the living room. The floors are made of the the slenderest golden oak hardwood I have ever seen. I immediately had them refinished; sanded, waxed, polished. One large horizontal strip breaks their vertical direction. I imagine the wall that once separated living room from the “dining room” and kitchen area. Wow! People took up a lot less space 70 years ago.

Pride of ownership blooms like the few hot pink roses left out front. The house is empty, waiting to be filled with whatever I choose to put inside it. At the moment, I wish it could remain empty so I could see every clean corner of wall, every square inch of April blue sky paint in the bedrooms, the subtle shades of gray in my brand new bathroom. I feel my spirit expand in the open space. It doesn’t have to be big, just empty. My body relaxes. There’s room to just be. I feel a sense of clarity in these early days of no furniture, no clutter. Right now, nothing, not even a tarp or rug, breaks the beautiful, open plane that fills my house. My house. My home. My very own home.

Every overhead light is on. There are no window coverings of any kind. I love glancing in the windows of houses when I walk at dusk, before the curtains and blinds have been pulled and people’s regular lives are temporarily center stage, whether backlit by lamps or lit up in a kitchen where a cook prepares supper. The houses themselves are jack-o’-lanterns viewed at dusk before the candle is extinguished. Parents pick up toys their kids left scattered. A young couple pours two glasses of wine. Nine-to-fivers kick off their shoes, curl on a couch and read a book or catch up on texts. For just that long, we are a part of one another’s lives, one human family moving quietly behind the scenes.

When I move out of a house in which I’ve made a home, I leave it better than it was when I arrived. This is what I was taught as a child. This is how I was raised. There’s something more to it, though. My sense of place demands it of me. Until I have loved each square foot and every bit of acreage upon which my house sits; until I have run my hands over the doorways and windowsills; turned the soil with the strength in my arms and legs, and sifted the dirt with my bare hands; until I have planted trees and flowers and weeded my vegetable garden, then I cannot know the place where I live. You cannot love what you do not yourself tend.

There is nothing quite like saving an older home and the land that surrounds it. There may be nothing harder, either. But one day you will sit with your back against the trunk of a tree, sweating from your labors, shaded by the limbs of an old oak or maple and say, “It is good. It is very good.” If I loved my own body and soul as much as I love those of my houses, I’d be in a lot better shape. That’s a truth that lives back in the cobwebby corner of my mind with the rest of the stuff I don’t care to acknowledge.

Sitting on the floor of my newest old home, I watch the dark come down like shades over the windows. I am in the limerence stage of new love, still infatuated. I don’t care how hard I have to work to make her right. I’m willing to spend what I must, whatever I have, to make her mine. Resting there, I hear the repetition of the three note intro signaling one of my favorite songs. “Better Days Are Coming” by Dermont Kennedy is beginning.

At first I sing along with Dermont, wanting, as always, for those words to be true, to hold me up and float me like a kite on a high breeze through a cloudless sky. My heart whispers something different to me, though, every time I hear it. The pained, strained sound in the first line of the chorus enters me like hands prying open a stubborn melon. The ripping sound that follows leaves me starving for something that is not mine to eat. “I know you’ve been hurting/waiting on that train that just won’t come.”

I rise to my feet all the same and hit the replay button. Haloed in light, for my entire new neighborhood to see, the 69 year old woman going on 26 begins to dance in her new old house. The walls echo Dermont’s words, “the rain it ain’t permanent, and soon we’ll be dancing in the sun, we’ll be dancing in the sun, and we’ll sing your song together.”

Oh, those fine slick oak hardwoods beneath sock feet; all that empty space for a woman alone to move with no coffee table or sofa, nothing to bump into, no rug to trip the toes. I am flying through every room in my house, my home. My spirit is soaring with a sudden belief in his words, “Your story’s gonna change, just wait for better days. You’ve seen too much of pain. You don’t even know that your story’s gonna change, just wait for better days. I promise you, I won’t let go.”

Better days are coming. Maybe not tomorrow, or the next day, or even in the next year, but better days are coming.