Homemaking

Homemaking

Before I even began this year away from work, I had spent some moments thinking I might spend the year homemaking.

Girlfriend and I live in a small townhouse on the edge of our favorite neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. We moved in with a windfall from the condo where we’d lived before, and set about renovating our kitchen. Three years and three contractors went by, and we have learned to both build walls and ceilings, shape lovely arches into doorways, and cut exacting curves into expensive cabinets, so that expensive sinks can sit there. (This was the terrifying task, for if we’d goofed, we didn’t have the money to repair it.)

But—still—we’re not quite finished yet. And in the flush of confidence in contractor #1, we decided we would start another project, “of our own.” And so we ripped the ceiling down in our small basement, tore up all the carpentry, and turned a not-exciting family room into a pit unfit for human habitation. So much for living in a larger place.

So when I thought about myself homemaking, there was this macho studs-and-nails aspect to it. And also, the traditional: for perhaps a month, I tried to put a little focus into what we ate; place candles on the table over dinner, think of ways to make our living a little bit more beautiful. Girlfriend may not be funding my sabbatical, but her embrace of it is critical to my ability to steady all my nerves. Putting some effort into making her arrival home each night a little less like strolling into a construction site, a little more like coming home, seemed a small way I might thank her.

The universe, it seems, has other plans. Reviewing my sabbatical from this April vantage point (and really, April is the cruelest month, you know), I see a first month spent on long-range planning, February frittered by with short-range plans of what-to-do. In March, I really started screaming for a chance to get down to my workshop—and then in April sickness hit.

Today’s the 17^th, and I’ve had exactly 1 day in this month of feeling like myself. That was Tuesday, when I finally got off the antibiotics I’d been taking for this Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever crap, which felled me for two weeks. And Tuesday, it appears, I pulled my back with all my springing back to health. And Wednesday, I rebounded with a fever, and my triumvirate of docs agreed that I must return to doxycycline. Another week of feeling like a slightly toxic slug.

Jesus tells his scared disciples that his father’s house has many rooms; that he’s headed there to make a place for them. Was it so inappropriate for me to want to do a little something similar, for my beloved one?

The past two years, we’ve had a pair of cardinals build their next in bushes just off our front porch. This has been a tragic witnessing—one year, the nest was torn apart in heavy rains; the next year one of two fledglings died at home—and lacking cemetery services, the parents took their living offspring on the road. Which is to say, down in the yard, where cats and raccoons prowl. The second fledgling didn’t last the night.

This year, it was robins—consistent but quite lousy at building a nest beneath the eaves. Every day, they’d jam in strips of grass, to overflowing. Every afternoon, the whole damn thing would drop onto the porch. So Girlfriend built put a rim around the ledge where they kept building. The next day, we watched the male shimmying away, shaping the deep bowl of nest with his butt and belly, building sturdy walls to hold his brood.

The day after that, Girlfriend found his mate dead in the gutter.

What the hell? I want to know. What the bloody hell? It seems to me a small ambition, to want to feel at home.

Instead I’m all suspended in my skin and bones, trying not to set the spasm off inside my hip, feeling the weird vagaries of heavy drugs advancing through my system, like the troops at Gettysburg. My doc described it thusly: “well, the antibiotics are killing off the disease organisms, which then release their toxins as they die.” Killing Fields R Me.

And no, it isn’t cancer, and I could be so much, so much worse. But I am trapped here in the bed, with a solitary robin just outside my window, on the wire. And poor Girlfriend gets to greet me every evening, after a day of work and sometimes ferrying me around (the back-thing nixed my any hope of driving). She gets the dog walks and the grocery-shopping, cooking if she wants to eat.

It seems a small ambition, to want to make ourselves a home.