Entry #83
October 27, 2024 — 5:15 PM
Rain has been steady since noon. It turns the back lane to a ribbon of slate and lays a fine hiss over everything. The gutters cough. The workshop lamp throws a small gold oval on the floor and then gives up at the edges, where the room cools and the damp creeps in. My hands smell like wet pine and the sourness of old drywall.
I noticed today how long it’s been since anyone crossed the threshold. I thought about it while prying baseboard in the dining room, paint curling off like dry skin, the pry bar sticking where the nails have rusted themselves smug. Practical reasons are ready at hand. I’m behind on work. The place is a wreck. There are open runs of wiring, tarps underfoot, a ratio of sawdust to air that guarantees coughing. By the time I finish a shift and then a few hours here, I can feel sleep pulling at the back of my skull by eight.
The mess looks worse to other eyes. Even on the days when I think a room is presentable, there will be something: a ladder collapsed in the middle of the hall like a broken insect, a stack of sample tiles spidered with hairline cracks, a trail of plaster dust that ignores every sweep. The house throws up these snag points that take explaining. I don’t feel like explaining.
I keep thinking I should invite Mark over to see the progress, or have Julia swing by to look at the trim profiles I found, but I don’t pick up the phone. The last time someone stopped in—delivery, wrong size sink—the front room felt a degree colder while we stood there, and the light from the window went oddly flat, the kind that makes everyone’s face look tired. His boots scuffed, louder than they should have, and every board he stepped on answered with a different sound. He was polite, quick to leave.
There are small changes when it’s just me. The hall keeps its dimensions. The stair complains in the same three places, no improvisations. My voice doesn’t set off that thin metallic ring I heard the day I tried to walk someone through the plan from memory. Alone, the rooms settle. Alone, the seams hold.
On the mantel under the soot, I found two letters earlier this week—an E cut with a pocketknife and something like an S, or maybe just a lazy curve. I left them in place and sanded around. I don’t know why. The rain tapped the chimney cap while I worked and the draft brought in a smell of wet brick and ash.
It’s easy to chalk all this up to tiredness and the logistics of a project that leaks into every hour. Easier to say it’s unsafe, or embarrassing, or that I’d rather meet somewhere with a decent table and light that doesn’t hum. But there’s also the question of what other people would see, or hear, and what I would have to watch on their faces if they heard it too. I don’t want that moment. I don’t want to confirm it for anyone.
So I stack the scrap wood against the wall where a couch would go, keep only one chair in the kitchen, and put the second mug back in its box without thinking. The porch light has been burned out for a month. The bell sticks. The path pools at the low spot near the threshold. None of this is impossible to fix. I haven’t.
Renovation is an easy excuse for becoming difficult to visit.
— Thomas Hale