Paint Fumes
Seth and I moved into our new house before our things arrived. All we had was a couch, a mattress, and a folding table, while our life, packed in a truck, was puttering around somewhere halfway across the country. It was like this for six days, though if you asked Seth, he’d say it was only two, maybe three. All sense of time has gotten distorted. We moved here much sooner than we expected; and yet, now that we’re here, we can’t understand why it’s taking so long to put things right.
On the one hand, it feels like just this morning when we stepped into this house for the first time to poke around the attic, when the sellers were sitting on their couch, telling us over and over, “Sorry, we forgot about this, we really should leave shouldn’t we?” Every time we walked by where they were planted on their couch, they’d say, “Sorry, we know we shouldn’t be here,” while very much being there as they told us stories of the house, which we took in hungrily. That night I stayed up for hours looking at paint colors, rugs, complicated mural ideas, imagining where the cats would go, where the plants would go. I could already see our new life, sitting in a yellow kitchen, shooing squirrels off the bird feeder, writing books in the cozy red office, moving to the blue living room to watch a movie, retiring to a massive bed with pillows and blankets for days.
A month and a half passed, this blurry vision becoming more distinct, and now, we’ve been in this new house for eleven days. Yet our mattress, though it is very big and wonderful, is still on the floor, and the kitchen is not yet yellow and the bathrooms are not yet blue and there is a veritable jungle gym of excess furniture in our basement. How did we get so many little sets of drawers? The pantry is spilling out with spices covered in baking powder, which exploded open in the moving truck, and the shoes are on the bookshelf because the shoe rack is covered in gloves. The moving truck, when it came, downed our neighbor’s internet cable, and that’s how we met Tyler. We spent last weekend painting with the windows closed because the hardware store guy said we could, then we walked around with splitting headaches wondering why we felt so strange, until Seth googled ‘too many paint fumes’ and it all made sense. I couldn’t say the word ‘paint’ or ‘fume,’ it came out ‘plaint flume. Flume. Flume. FUME!”
Even though I grew up in Madison, I don’t know it in the way I know DC. And I don’t want to. At least not yet. I want to feel like it’s all new. I want to explore the east side of town. I want to set foot on every single lake beach. And our backyard, I want to discover the world in it. We have two owls that hoot us to sleep, I haven’t seen them yet. We are surrounded by very tall trees and I don’t know what kind yet for they don’t have leaves. Future tree houses? Current tree houses, for the birds and bees. We live a five minute walk from a wetlands conservancy, full of dogs and dirt and birds, birds, birds. Dozens of sandhill cranes fly overhead, and when you can’t see them, you can hear them, walloping like monkeys. There is a bald eagle nest, and industrial-grade binoculars set up on a viewing platform perfectly aligned, so any old person can walk up, look through the viewer, and see its angry feathered head. There is a hill that looks out at the water cutting through the plain, where you can see all of Wisconsin, at least if Wisconsin shrunk its borders to this, which would be just fine.
I’ve written about how I need to bike around to feel out a place. So we went to buy bikes. It was the day of the plaint flumes. I waddled into the store—wearing many jackets, it was very cold—and found one immediately. It had a purple-blue pearled frame and a plush seat and it was just my size and in my price range. I sat on it, right there in the store, and bumped up and down to feel it out. The seat felt just right. Then I tried to get off. But my legs were stiff with cold and awkward when I pulled my left foot over, and somehow the ground wasn’t where it was supposed to be because my left foot was still swinging over, looking for it, and my right leg had lost its balance, and so my whole body fell to the right, very, very slowly, still holding this bike, which not only came down with me but crashed into another bike beside it and pulled that down too.
Of course this all took place about two feet away from the bike store guy and a customer, both of whom saw the whole thing and stopped what they were doing to help me, which made the whole thing worse. “Sorry sorry sorry,” I kept saying, apologizing about the bikes, but the bike store guy kept assuring me “I care more about you than the bikes,” as if I had just gone through a traumatic experience, which I suppose I had, but not really. “I care about you,” he said to me, splayed on the ground. I wanted to tell him to stop, that it was seriously nothing, which it was, as I was well-cushioned from my many layers. If I had been alone when this happened, it would have been just fine. But there were people and there was no escape so I tried to laugh it off even though it was too late for me.
You’d think this would be the end of the story but it wasn’t. After buying the bikes, we bought our bike accessories: lights, bells, and heavy Kryptonite locks. The bike store guy put it all in a plastic bag, to which I added the heavy locks, promptly making the bag split open so all its contents could fall to the ground. Somehow we got home with our bikes and accessories and that’s when I tried and failed to say ‘paint fumes.’ Then we opened our windows and went to sleep and continued painting the next day too.
Now there are still so many things to do—curtain rods to hang, rooms to paint, closets to organize, and don’t think about the basement—but we have real silverware and a microwave, two things I’ll never take for granted again. We can walk from room to room and the kitchen counters are clear. And we can bike. We biked to a state park on the other side of the lake that you can almost see from our house. We forgot our lights but brought our heavy locks and forgot about those too, because we had bikes, why would we leave them? We passed a red-tailed hawk, touched the beach sand.
It would be nice to have binoculars perfectly pointed at the dream of our finished, final house, painted and organized and correct, then simply step into our nest and be done. It’s hard to see the end of all we need to do, because once we do all those things, there will be more things, too. But it’s nice to figure it out ourselves. And the vision of the house is getting more distinct every day, as we put our shoes away and clean off the baking powder and adjust the lenses of our glasses into finer focus, as we stumble into our new lives.
-Denise
PS the cats are settling in just fine:
and so are we:
