Improvements
I am writing this to you from my kitchen table.
That’s a thing you may not know; I now own a kitchen table. I own a kitchen to put in too.
Some more things you may not know:
I bought a house.
I have access to family weath that enabled me to buy a house.
My dad thought it was a good idea for me to buy a house, and I thought about it, and I said yes, and he gave me the money to buy a house.
I have conflicted feelings about my ability to buy a house.
I have conflicted feelings about how much I like having a house.
My family has not always been this rich. I was brought up by my farm-kid parents, solidly middle-class and striving with the repurposeful waste-not attitude of my Depression-raised grandparents. I struck out on my own at 17 and have, for the most part, taken care of myself ever since. I have never been personally wealthy, and I have never asked for money. I have, at times, been crushingly poor - the least I ever made while gainfully employed was $650/month, and my then-partner and I made it work. I know at least eight recipes for lentils. I can tell you the locations of the best food-containing dumpsters in Montreal. It was never in my plans or even in my daydreams that I would one day be the owner of a white and airy split level with a view of Mount Currie out the back door. I made less than $10,000 last year.
I moved on May 1st, and people keep congratulating me. I don’t know what to say. The house is empty and under repair - I did not save and scrimp and strive towards it - it does not feel like mine. The sudden shift disorients me. I am unbelievably grateful to have a project to work on, and for the extravagance of my father, who has driven out solo to help me with the renovations and the paperwork. He socially distanced in his camper all the way from Winnipeg. We spent $26 on a pizza this evening, a ridiculously indulgent expense in my way of thinking. Even when he reminded me that it was just $14 each, dinner for two, I calculated the cost of each slice out of habit. Congratulations do not seem correct to me, but we opened a bottle of bubbly last week anyway. I am a champagne socialist now, and I cannot decide whether the verb is “ascended” or “devolved”. People seem to agree that I have moved up in the world, and my dad keeps reminding me that by dint of the mortgage-helper suite, I am a landlord. I can only reply, shamefaced, “don’t remind me”. The disconnect between my values and the consensus turns me blank and compliant. My life as a tresspasser, a drifter, a scrappy scavenger; all this seems to have been wiped clean. I’m an empty slate on which to project fantasies of conventional acheivement and success. It’s like I never really happened at all. I am mindful of the ways in which I have capitulated while I lie indoors on a comfortable bed. I did choose this. What do I choose next?
I have two entire bathrooms at my disposal, and a shower with as much hot water as I could possibly want. I can turn it on and take one whenever I like, which is often now, because of the drywall dust entangling my hair. I stand before the bathroom mirror (my bathroom mirror), and examine my body’s new shape. The soft accumulation of flesh on my stomach, which I so deliberately cultivated in preparation for the summer’s rigours, has turned from potential energy to unsightly excess. I squeeze and prod the changed contours of my body, pinch aside the thickness in my thighs that obscures the once-muscular gap between. I earned this fat, as little as there actually is, and all that effort is going to waste. I once wore the sun-deepened furrow in my brow and my burned-in smile lines as badges of honour, as markers of the noble scavenger. A tough and leathery outdoorswoman. Now that I am pale and indoors, they make me feel old, and I wonder about collagen creams and retinol. I wonder if these considerations are a product of my new station. What would my younger self say if she could see me? I feel tenderness and compassion for that fierce little anarchist of not-so-long-ago, but she is a stranger to me now, and I cannot read her thoughts. I consider myself in the mirror as I flip perspectives back and forth - potential energy, excess. Excess, potential energy. It all depends on if I get to keep moving.
There is a post-it note that I wrote to myself some years ago. I placed it on the bulletin board in the van, where I can see it as soon as I wake up. It reads: YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED. I take my only mug out of my gleaming empty cupboards, leaving the shelf bare. I worry about the border as I make a cup of tea. I think about what I will do if my partner cannot make it home to me, to his new home across the border in our big white empty house. I sit on a lawn chair in the middle of my empty living room and worry about a friend diagnosed with covid-19, half the country away in Montreal. I consider the work that is yet to be done, and wonder what I will do when this project is over. I drink my tea. I consider the drywall, the rotted stairs, the single mug now sitting lonely in the empty sink. I remind myself that I have always had everything I need.
Take care,
-Magpie