Twenty-Five Bucks in Trinkets and Beads

Tomorrow, I will become a woman. I met with my very first real estate agent last week to begin the process of finding, and then purchasing, our very first house. I very nearly died.

Neither my husband nor I have ever bought a house. We decided to mortgage our educations instead. We did not follow the proscribed steps to adulthood with which we were raised: go to college, get married, get a job, buy a house, have kids, buy a bigger house, buy a mini van and so on. Our route looked something like this: get married, go to college some, move across country, go to college some more, move to another state, go to college some more, have kid #1, finish college, move across the country again, get a job, move across country again, have kid #2, pay on student loans forever.

Since I am the one with the most time on my hands, it has been tasked to me to do that which frightens the tar out of me. Tomorrow our real estate agent with very expensive hair is picking me up. I will ride around town in her moderately expensive car hoping I don't smell like last night's cheeseburger and look at houses. This makes me so nervous I feel like I might vomit said cheeseburger in the footwell of said car.

This is roughly what we can afford in our current neighborhood.
Photo courtesy of The Morgue File

Remember when there was a housing crash? Well, Seattle doesn't. Sure, the houses went from astronomically overpriced to appallingly overpriced a few years ago, but the Chief Lou put it best when he said: "It seems a little strange to think of a quarter million dollars as an incredible steal."  And that is precisely what we are looking for: an incredible steal. You see, we have these kids. They like their schools. I like their schools. The PTA has grown accustomed to my face. The fact that we are renting in a neighborhood that is really populated with more well-to-do (or at least more fiscally organized) people than we are never really occurred to us when the jBird took her first gleeful steps up the hill to kindergarten at our neighborhood school. We're "live in the moment" kind of people. This moment is distinctly uncomfortable for me.

I am a vagabond at heart. The six years we've lived in Seattle is the longest I've lived anywhere since I was 13 years old. I have no hometown. There is no house with my childhood bedroom still intact somewhere. Home, to me, has always just been whatever structure contained the people I loved. Like the early Native Americans, the notion of owning land is somewhat foreign and preposterous to me. I am hoping to run into a like-minded soul who will sell me some prime real estate for twenty-five bucks' worth of trinkets and beads. I probably have that much saved up in my couch. Yet, in spite of my protestations, I long for paint colors that I picked out. I want to be able to rip up carpet if it smells like a dog. I want to build a chicken coop and raised garden beds. I want to change out an ugly faucet if my heart desires it. I want to settle. My vagabond heart will always want to wander, no matter where I live, but my traveling shoes are wearing thin. I have these kids, you see. They like their lives. I like their lives.

So for them. Tomorrow I will put on my grown up pants - the ones without holes, the ones that don't fall down as much, the ones that feel a bit stiff and uncomfortable - and I will choke back the rising gorge of cheeseburger and fear and I will look at houses. I will look at houses so that they can have a home.

Keeper of Corpses

I've been working on a post about reality, but it will be waiting in the wings as I deal with an actual, nefarious, and unavoidable reality.

Remember the foot smell? It was suggested that it was the pipes, or the produce, or the Hooligan. Well, drain cleaner a-go-go to no avail. Sparkling clean kitchen, refrigerator, fruit basket (I even checked all my shoes because sometimes produce ends up in there. Don't ask.) The Hooligan is an advanced little boy and he can generate some very mature smells for his stature, but alas, I have never known him to smell like a corpse. I sniffed him just in case.

Yes, foot has progressed to corpse in the continuum of bad smells. Dead, rotting, bloated, reeking corpse in an, as yet, undisclosed location. It is beyond a mild "did you catch that whiff?" kind of smell. It is evil incarnate, winding its sticky fingers around the back of your neck and breathing its hot, fetid breath right up your nose. It assaults you. It bludgeons you with slime covered billy clubs and then kicks you while you lie there in a fetal position gasping for your life.

I have long been convinced that there were hobos living in our garage, and now I think one of them has crawled under the house and expired. It may be a squirrel or a raccoon. Possibly a rat. Our neighbors keep chickens and you know what they say - where there're chickens... I don't suspect it's our resident donk-um ('possum the size of a donkey) because he died under our other neighbors' house last winter. It can't be a mouse. The stench is just far too large. So tomorrow will be spent in the crawlspace under the house, looking for remains among the mud and the shanty town that I'm positive exists down there.

I have joked about this. The Chief Lou emailed me last week about an outstanding bill (it wasn't just great, it was outstanding!) and I promptly replied: "I've taken care of it. I put a horse's head in the appropriate bed." Sometimes I tell the monkeys to "hide the bodies" when we do that last-minute blitz clean before Daddy comes home. When the fire dies too soon and it's chilly in our bedroom, I tell the Chief Lou that I will warm up by slitting him open so he can be the Tauntaun to my Han Solo. I have joked about this. This isn't funny anymore.

As I type, the Chief Lou and the monkeys are en route to the airport to pick up my mother-in-law, who will be spending a few days with us. I have an amiable relationship with her because her only son has been happy with me for nearly 15 years and I raise and feed two of her grandchildren, but she has always thought I was a little bit odd. I have lit heavily scented candles in every room of the house. I have burned incense. I have scrubbed all that can be scrubbed, including myself (just in case.) I have done everything short of calling in a priest for an exorcism, and yet it lingers. In a very few minutes I will have to welcome my mother-in-law into a house that smells like the lowest circle of hell (with heavily scented candles) and concede that I am, in fact, odd. Yes, that's me, your strange daughter-in-law: sewer of clothes, lover of underdogs, breast feeder of babies, protector of trees, eschew-er of make-up and bras, keeper of corpses.