Small repairs

The wall of humidity has finally broken: today’s high is supposed to be 82 degrees, a mere 28 degrees Celsius, and it’s meant to feel like 82. The last month or two have felt like living in some kind of extended greenhouse, my green little subset of the world encased in an invisible dome rising high above us, so this is a relief. The weeds and vines have loved these inhuman conditions, and their tendrils have curled and knotted up the walls and through bushes. Hopefully, in a temperate climate, they’ll give it a bloody rest.

The house has been challenging. It’s a creaking, old thing, old for America at least, and it needs more love and care than I’d hoped to have to give it. In the winter, it’s heated by a great steam boiler, which we had dutifully serviced each year until the last person at the maintenance company who knew what to do with it died. One of the radiators is blocked, and before the deep cold sets in again we’ll need to replace its hundred-year-old valves. In the meantime, we’ve had to replace a retaining wall that burst because it didn’t have weep holes to let the moisture through; an air conditioning unit that died unexpectedly; an electricity panel that wasn’t grounded but was overloaded past any reasonable capacity; ancient windows whose glass one day simply fell out; and a chimney crown that wasn’t made of the right material and cracked apart. Oh, and we had a small tornado on our block, too, which was very dramatic in the moment, knocking out trees in its path and leaving us without power for days.

But as I sit and write this, a squirrel is crawling up and down the tree outside my window, its tiny feet scrabbling past the pink blossoms that seem to be exploding everywhere. Birds come and go — a red cardinal, a bluejay — and children rush past on their way to the playground down the street. Maybe we’ll go there later, too, but right now the sofa is serving as a reasonable alternative. For a while, I thought I’d made a mistake by buying the grey Costco sectional, not least because it constantly gives me static electric shocks in the winter when the air is dry, but it’s become a sturdy trampoline adventure playground for a two year old.

I’m trying not to descend into obsessive depression. I don’t want to ignore it all; I feel like if I don’t say anything, don’t do anything, if I’m not friction in some way, I’m contributing to it happening. But if that’s solely where my attention lies, I’ll miss so much. I’ll resent it: I don’t want to miss the first few years of my child’s life, those smiles, those adventures, that learning, because I was fixated on ICE smashing their way through car windows to capture innocent people and send them to El Salvador, or the complicity of dead-eyed founders signing government deals for their tech companies because they see a generation’s suffering as an opportunity for profit. So there are still blossoms, there is still ice cream, there is music and joy. I want to write about things that aren’t them. They don’t own me.