|
|
|
the freshness of newly-milled lumber
Saturday, July 24 2004
I've cast a lot of aspersions on the Eagle's Nest house, the one our realtor Larry bought a few months ago, the one on which I am doing electrical work. But I have to concede that it's actually much more inhabitable now that it has brand new hardwood floors, reconstructed drywall, and widespread use of wainscoating. The most important difference is the way the place smells. That sickeningly sweet funk is gone, replaced with the freshness of newly-milled lumber. I love that smell. It's the smell of hope and possibility, a smell not obscured by the combined funk of imperfection, exploitation, boredom, accident, and failure. Nothing changes a house like fresh new surfaces, since that's really most of what an experience with a house connects with most of the time. There are, of course, many other things about a problematic house that are not so easily remedied: floor plans, room sizes, structural integrity, and resistance to various burrowing creatures (which in this house includes animals such as squirrels, snakes, termites, and carpenter ants).
I was at the Eagle's Nest today on two occasions to attend to electrical matters. It was a mistake to go there this morning, because the place was crawling with people: a plumber and his plump female assistant, Darren the drywall guru, and then, sometime later, an unexpectedly glamorous sundress-clad woman with a small blond daughter. I couldn't help but notice that this woman was making a point of talking to Darren while ignoring everyone else. Darren had been showing me how he'd recently pimped-out his Cadillac with video screens on the backs of the front seats so his kids in the backseat could play video games on a Microsoft Xbox. I'd grumbled my obligatory approval, of course, yet it had seemed to me like a poorly-considered method for silencing children during long road trips. But when Darren was showing the glamorous young woman this new feature, I couldn't detect anything except fawning admiration in her reaction. Then again, she was uniformly impressed by everything Darren said or had done. She was not, however, impressed with my dogs Sally and Eleanor, from whom she neurotically tried to shield her daughter. Eleanor growled at her at one point, an act of aggression I almost never see her display.
By the way, Darren seems to have a preference for Eleanor. I guess that this is mostly because she looks like a scrawny Pit Bull and, though he's white, he has a fondness for trappings of urban Hip Hop culture. At one point Darren held a board firmly in front of Eleanor's face hoping she'd jump up and clamp onto it (in the manner of aggressive urban Pit Bulls), and he seemed disappointed when she gave him a puzzled expression and slinked away.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040724 feedback
previous | next |
