September 08, 2003

Yesterday was our one-year houseversary: on September 7, 2002, we moved into Peapod Manor with all of our stuff and Bob the Cat. We celebrated this weekend by having some houseguests over. We picked apples, peaches and plums, visited the best of the local wineries, and ate wine-drenched London broil (grilled to perfection by me) and fresh apple cobbler (baked to perfection by Pea).

Now that I don't live in a New York Habitrail, I find that I like having guests, especially guests from the city. They remind me how very, very fortunate I am to live in a 940-square foot mansion and complain about the occasional boom-boom car stereos at the car wash beyond the backyard fence while sipping grappa made ten minutes from where I'm sitting on the deck. I own trees! Towering green growing things on my little piece of earth. I've got a shed full of bicycles!

When we first moved in, we noticed large piles of old furniture, busted air-conditioners, and has-been televisions in front of many houses on our street. That, as it turned out, was the town's Annual Large Item Trash Pickup Day. Needless to say, we missed it. And so, for the past year, we've had to store all of the atrocious paneling that I yanked off the walls, the cheap old doors, the mold-musted crap-carpeting, the flimsy molding, the miscellaneous wood scraps, the two-ton pressboard filing cabinet I discovered in the basement and against which I wielded my mighty Tiger Saw so that I could haul it out in easy-to-carry pieces, and the flimsy dresser that the previous owners thoughtfully left for us in the upstairs closet.

Yesterday, after our guests had gone--stuffed full of marinated beef and cobble and local produce, with cheerfully-induced wine-related headaches--I carted all of the aforementioned krep! out to the curb in my Trusty Wheelbarrow, finally claiming the Shed as property of the Peas, thank you and goodnight. All that's left now is the extra gas dryer in the basement and--having discovered that a major appliance and a hammer makes for marvelous stress relief--I think I may discretely dispose of that item, piece by piece, along with the household trash.

By this time, Peapod Manor was supposed to be a blue, white-trimmed, copper-roofed cottage bedecked with cedar bloom-filled window-boxes and graciously landscaped with fruit trees and trellis-climbing roses.

My office is still full of boxes. Pea scraped some of the peeling wallpaper off the dining room walls, and we decided that it would be much better to smash the walls and replace them. Last week I finally got the new ceiling fan in the bedroom to stop wobbling by acquiring a certain screw from a helpful Lowes person, to replace the one I dropped into a heating duct last winter while installing the fan. The house is still covered with dingy concrete/asbestos siding (It's heavy! It's brittle! It's mesotheliomal!). The front porch is still the the rotted remains of a decadent ant-banquet. The basement smells funny and turns anything that was once organic into a thriving colony of parti-colored mold (it's true--even rubber and nylon).

But it's ours.

And we probably wouldn't be here if a certain group of villains hadn't knocked down some tall buildings two years ago this week. We had been looking for a new place to live, sort of, for a couple of months...maybe we'd rent a place, we thought, in the town we so enjoyed visiting on long weekends. Then the world changed, and it suddenly became Very Important for me to leave the enormous bull's-eye that I had always known the city to be. Five days before the first anniversary of the attacks, we did just that. We spent September 11 unpacking and refinishing floors and attempting to grasp that we had just bought a house.

We still have trouble with that, sometimes.

But much less trouble, I suspect, than we would have trying to grasp that one of us went to work one Tuesday morning and never came home.

Our blessings are many, and we are thankful.

Now, I must go downstairs and be nice to the person who had wonderful dinner waiting when I came back from my night ride, because I've been a curmudgeon while I finished this.

My blessings are many, and I am thankful.