On days like these, I’m reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man’s shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem (“You see the silvery one?” he says. “No, not that silvery one, that silvery one.”). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some “fraying,” but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. “It’s dead rodent,” I assure him. “I got very used to that smell in my childhood.” Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn’t, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

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I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We’re in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it’s Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don’t want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we’ve lived here–how long? nearly two years?–it fits us. It owns us if we don’t own it.

I think about this sometimes (I’ve probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that’s too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don’t think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?–say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it’s early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we’re here, they aren’t just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o’clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven’t actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that’s what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I’ve been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn’t swim in Walden Pond after all.)

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This morning, after we awoke to the sounds of an electric guitar and feeling of two terriers bouncing on our bed, after we packed the kids off to school (no, not our kids and no, not our terriers), after we cleaned up the puppy poo from the floor and loaded the dishwasher (alas, also not our dishwasher–a dishwasher being in my mind the height of domestic luxury) and bought cinammon rolls from the shop next door, we indulged, whilst waiting for a taxi to take us back to our real life in Oxford, in some television.

Some people, channeling fond memories of childhood, might opt for cartoons or sitcoms, but as the Man and I were not television children, and neither are we in the least bit ordinary, our greatest TV pleasure is anything that has to do with houses. Programs about selling houses, buying them, rennovating them, decorating them, living in them: it doesn’t matter. We both seem to have this sickening need to scoff at how badly other people have designed their bathrooms, and/or drool over their opportunities for buying (and therefore fixing up) property.

This morning it was a program called “Wanted Down Under“. A family was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to stay in Britain or make the move to Australia, and we followed them on a house-hunting expedition, slightly sullen teenage son in tow. Then it was “Axe the Agent”, which, sadly, we only got middway through before our cab arrived. The family with the seven-bedroom house had just finished cleaning it up, but I still wouldn’t buy it (too reminiscant of the sprawling ultra-new California mansions I loathed as a youth).

I don’t know quite what it says about us that the sort of television we most enjoy watching is on at 10 am on a weekday morning.

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I’m on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn’t even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a–let’s call it a “healthy interest”–in bookshelves. Anyone who’s been to our house knows that the Man and I don’t seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it’s actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I’m such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there’s something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist’s studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we’d chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here’s what we’ve ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn’t do the incredible green real justice). It’s called “wake-up call” and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn’t realized it at first. How apropriate:

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Since I’ve been in California (the first time I’ve been back since March of this year, when I spent a few early-spring days soaking up as much thin warmth as I could before returning to Boston) I’ve adopted a new ritual, one which I seem to have absolutely no control over. It is almost as if some sort of timepiece has crawled its way into my consciousness, embedded in thoughts and dreams—for the instant the digital clock on the oven hits 9 PM, my body drapes itself wearily upon the couch, my eyes hover half-open for a moment before shutting fast, and my breath becomes sleepy.

Last night I caught the household milling around me, wisps of conversation floating into half-attentive ears: “she’s asleep,” “what are we going to do about her?” “do you think she wants a blanket?” No, I thought, I do not want a blanket. If you give me a blanket, I will sleep here all night, and wake up with the buttons of my jeans pressed into my skin and my arm numb from all my weight crushing against it. I think what came out of my mouth, however, and in the form of a feeble mumble, was, “mmmm num num.”

In the morning, we awake drenched in hot sunlight. The two comforters my mother has kindly placed on the guest bed seem excessive and I throw them off dramatically, leaving my skin to soak up bright yellow lines of sunshine. It is rarely any later than 8:30, and we find we cannot find sleep again, so we get up. We have breakfast. We marvel at the morning.

It’s something to do with the light, of course. But also to do with the stillness outside. When nature itself seems to be sleeping, curled in on itself, the hills lying flat, black silhouettes on a navy sky, no artificial light but a small stream from the house spilling onto the silver line of driveway, it takes all my will to convince my body that it, despite all of the world’s cues, should stay bright and awake.

Part of me feels this is the right way to be: attuned to the rhythms of something greater than oneself; lying and rising to moonlight and sunlight. Another part of me craves the proximity of a city. I think of Oxford, where I’ll soon be, and how refreshing it is to be within walking distance of one’s friends, to have the glow of streetlights to guide you home late at night. I find I cannot reconcile these duel desires except to console myself that each belongs to me, in some way (or I belong to each, perhaps more accurately); that each draws me and repels me with equal force, and that no-one except myself would ever demand that I make a permanent choice about lifestyle when I am still so young. And so I free myself.

This afternoon, inspired by bright skies and dramatic clouds, we drove down Santa Rosa road for tea with the Cadwells. Their house from the outside blends into the countryside: a simple, one-story cottage, with a tiled roof and vines climbing up its sides. Inside it looks like something concocted in a Bohemian reverie: dark wood with cracks and character, bright teal walls in the kitchen, peach colored ones in the office, and yellow ones in the lounge, tablecloths with flowers and patterns that only someone high could come up with, but anyone can appreciate. There are papers strewn about and wildly imaginative artwork displayed above a creaky piano that has been out of tune since I first met the Cadwells, about twelve years ago. We sat at the dining table and drank tea from delicate cups with saucers and ate lots of things with sugar (mini macaroons, honey-filled biscuits, English Christmas pudding that Xander carried all the way from Britain), alongside English Stilton cheese with persimmons and walnuts.

Meanwhile, Clara’s baby, nine months old and dressed in a striped jumpsuit, crawled his way around the table and bounced happily from open arms to open arms, deigning to crack a smile only on rare occasions but mostly looking slightly disgusted with the gluttony of the adults. Once he tried to feed Olive a slice of persimmon; she took it willingly in her teeth before he suddenly yanked it back, as if he had decided at the last moment that in fact she would not do, this silly aunt of his: not worthy of persimmon slices, not worthy of his efforts. Olive, collapsed in giggles, ruffled his hair and he snuggled deeper into her lap. Outside, the light was trying to turn to dusk but only half its heart was in it: the brightness lingered, settling over the horizon, shooting down over the fields below.

We decided to make an attempt at wine-tasting further down the road. We arrived just as they were closing up the tasting room at Sanford, but very kindly, we were served anyway, and I learned to properly swish the wine round my glass (something I’d only partially mastered before), and that, according to Xander, you get the strongest taste by making silly sucking noises through your teeth (the air does something to the wine, allegedly). We watched the sun simper down towards the horizon, hesitating, shooting glorious rays our way, coyly hiding behind bare tree branches, teasing, taunting, until a fuzzy grey darkness finally covered us.
On the way back we looked at real estate ads in local papers: this one’s just $24 million, and look! A bargain at $15 million.

Earlier I had been caught up in thoughts of how I wanted a house like the Cadwells’—shabby but warm, with the smell of a wood fire in winter and the french windows opened wide in summer. Now all I thought was: how do people in the modern world afford to make a home of their own? Whilst I ponder that, I shall work out how to cover my $100+ electricity bill—the product of the first month of a Boston winter, and quite a change from my September bill, which was only $12 (I am reminded yet again to be thankful that I no longer live there). The bar graph on the bill looks like an error, but it isn’t—it’s just a map of the jump between seasons.

Now we are home, and it is 7:30, and one suspects that as the clock strikes 9 I will again become hopelessly sleepy.

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