It’s a Friday morning in June and I‘m sitting in my quiet house drinking coffee. It’s been more than three hours parked in the living room on the futon acquired as a temporary solution to seating/guest sleeping. “Temporary” was initially envisioned as "a few months" while I sorted out the guest room, at which time the futon would move upstairs to the guest room/office and be replaced by a proper sofa in the living room. “Temporary” has extended to nearly three years now, and feels tragically permanent.
The comfortable and hospitable guest room/office of my imagination is still hostile territory, full of relics of my former, more interesting self – piles and boxes of photos, binders stuffed with negatives, fabric, jewelry-making supplies, roller derby gear, various dance and Halloween costumes, plus two vacuums – one functional and a broken one I have no idea of how to dispose. It’s a total shit show. Anyone who thinks I am a fully-formed adult with my life together is being misled by my apparently improving acting skills and careful manipulation of social media posts. That, and the fact they’ve not been to my house.
There are various reasons for the haphazard guest room and less than comfortable living room. The primary factor is the basement, which, when the hydrostatic conditions are just right, takes on the features of a water park/splash pad in all areas except the corner where the sump pump is installed. There has been water shooting out from between concrete foundation blocks, a puddle as large as a wading pool, and a fountain forcefully arcing up and over from where the floor and wall meet.
This, of course, means the basement is not practical for storage. The house is a bungalow, with minimal attic storage under the eaves, one side of which is accessible only by emptying half the closet and prying open a door, the other side is not accessible at all. It hurts to have so much unusable square footage (and a room wasted and full of stuff). For a mere $6,000 (to start) I can have a French drain system installed to contain and expel the periodic basement water intake, but the cost (firstly) and the idea of enduring a week of concrete jack hammering (secondly) have this plan on pause. I have an idea for storage drawers to be built into the guest room wall to use the dead space between the wall and the roofline, but I don’t have a carpenter in my life, and then there is the still unknown expense. And no, I’m not going to try and do it myself, as I lack the tools for the job, both actual and mental.
Back to the coffee. Sort of.
I’m on a vacation day, scheduled two days prior after receiving word from HR that I have approximately a million vacation hours accrued and am in danger of losing a chunk of it if I don’t use it by the end of the year. This includes a mandatory week out of the office which was also haphazardly scheduled two days earlier to get something on the calendar before the summer is over with me wondering where it went, like I did last year.
Unlike my colleagues who lead actual, grownup lives and have recently traveled to, or have plans for exciting junkets to Hawaii, Spain, Italy, Paris, Las Vegas, and Montreal, there are no solid travel plans on my horizon. The reasons (excuses) are plentiful, but most boil down to money. There is the expense of canine care, coupled with competition for my funds by various home improvement projects such as the imminent closure of the basement water park, replacement of the front yard fence destroyed after some unidentified driver backed into it in January, the need for a new mattress set, my desire for a proper sofa, etc.). Don’t even get me started on the single traveler penalty where it costs significantly more to not be part of a double occupancy package deal. As if being solo in this world isn’t punishment enough.
Anyway, it was approaching three hours into my vacation day with me in my pajamas (or, as an ex called them, “sleeping clothes”), parked cross-legged on the futon drinking increasingly cold coffee and reading the news and emails and playing Scrabble online with various total strangers. There was a snoring dog bumped up against each of my legs. The load of doggy diapers had finished tumbling in the dryer and the house was as close to silent as a house gets. Mostly. I could hear the ticking of the wall clock in the adjoining kitchen.
Suddenly, there was a notable, random exception to the blissful silence in the form of a weird noise in the house. And by "in" I mean literally IN the house. There was a tapping noise that sounded like it was coming from within the interior wall to my right, the ceiling over my head, and from the electrical outlet under the window in the exterior wall to my left. It moved around in no paticular pattern.
There I sat, head pivoting right, up, left, with each noise, wondering what the source could be. It lasted long enough to start freaking me out. Is an unidentified squatter living in my house – a ghost? A rodent? Giant killer insects soon to be featured in a Netflix Original movie? Does the house always make this noise and I just don’t hear it through the usual soundtrack of the neighbors’ cars and motorcycles, my own TV, and whatever noise is going on inside my head (thanks tinnitus!)? Should I dig out the sage and start smudging? Should I just get the hell out?
And then it stopped. Not a peep for the next hour. The dogs, of course, slept through it all, which is probably better than having to hear them run around and bark at the walls. Maybe I imagined it. It’s likely I’ll be on high alert waiting for it to happen again, for a while anyway. Add this to the lists of "reasons why I might actually be insane," and "damn, I need a proper vacation."
