At times, my house seems to be a malevolent character, and I feel that I'm in a Shirley Jackson novel. Several weeks ago, my spouse went outside to wash the dog--and, within minutes, he was pounding on a window, screaming in distress. This was so startling and unusual, it made me think of "Cloverfield"; I imagined an alien invasion.
I wasn't far off the mark; while searching for a hose, my husband had stirred up a nest of yellowjackets, and several had then performed a coordinated attack.
A large tree began shedding substantial limbs; the adults in the house imagined various scenarios in which we might simply die, having been felled by a rotting tree-tentacle. (And this made me think of "The Evil Dead.")
Finally, the heat seems erratic; at times, we are living in equatorial, tropical splendor, and at times, we seem to be part of Shackleton's sailing crew. Although all rooms apparently have working heaters, each heater has its own brain and mood--so that you can wander from one biome to the next, even while remaining on our second floor.
Neither my spouse nor I have handyman skills--although my spouse is much, much more responsible--but we have a kind of solution to our practical issue. If the house is rebelling, we perform what I call a "speech-act." In this routine, words alone seem to accomplish a magic trick. If you say, "I dub thee knight"--the person is just a knight, plain and simple. So Marc or I might say, "There are moths in the cupboard, and the obvious solution is to purchase tupperware and reorganize all our cereal, so everything is tightly sealed." Just uttering this sentence seems to take me to a dream-world--where the tupperware already exists. Then: I can forget about the moths, at least for one or two days, until I find I need to author the sentence yet again.
This house will not defeat me. I have more than one diploma....
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