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It’s 10:15 and I’m in my usual writing spot, only a bit later due to a routine dental appointment. Now I’m sipping my skinny vanilla latte, the old standby, and hyperaware of the fluoride coating on my teeth. I have seven more days of class/three-and-a-half weeks/one lit mag launch/one creative nonfiction workshop/one 47th birthday party/one grant-funded discussion/one writing retreat to plan until the end of the semester, and Lord knows I am ready for it all to be done. ** The older I get, the less I understand how time passes. It is April 11. Yesterday it hit 80 degrees for the first time, and my students, arriving sweaty to class, pronounced it the official beginning of summer. I have planted some seedlings in the raised bed, and other than two squash which look very sketchy, nothing has died. I’m still in the leggings-under-dresses phase of my annual wardrobe, and it seems both too late to be wearing warm clothes and way too early to be thinking about the punishing heat that will soon be here. ** I wrote in an essay-in-progress about something that happened to me recently, followed by my question How the hell did I get here? “What did you mean by that question?” my writing partner asked, tapping her pen against the line. I suppose she was looking for the short-term answer--I got in my car and drove, which was more or less how I’d intended the line when I’d written it, but the answer didn’t seem right to me now, at the moment we were considering it. It seemed more of an existential question, something meant to probe years of decisions and coincidences and accidents, family history, the branches leading backward to the beginning of time. This is the story of how the hell I got here. ** At the Starbucks where I park myself for four hours every Tuesday and Thursday, as well as some Fridays-Sundays when life permits, they have a keypad lock on the bathroom door. At times, the baristas sing out the five-digit code to anyone who asks, and at other times, like now, that information is strictly need-to-know. Something must have happened, like vandalism or a patron who wouldn’t leave, and so now when they are asked, the baristas make an effort to conceal their annoyance, come around the corner, and punch in the code for each guest. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I say when I arrive, fresh from an hour in the dentist’s chair, the orange juice I consumed before that heavy in my bladder, “but could you let me into the bathroom?” The barista, her impressive head of hair piled in a high bun on the very top of her head, glances left and right and leans forward. “I’ll just tell you,” she says, and whispers the five digits that I immediately commit to memory. I have passed a test. I have been deemed worthy. ** Yesterday, after my last class, three students stayed to talk to me—one making a plea for leniency, another providing an explanation for the wrong file that had been uploaded, the third just needing someone to listen. I was lenient with the first, assured the second that we all make mistakes, listened to the third. I left exhausted and made my way straight to the parking lot. It was still warm—the unofficial start of summer, after all—and students were out and about, sitting on benches, skateboarding past. Two students were taking pictures on the sidewalk next to the building with the owls’ nests, and I stopped to ask if they had seen the owls. It had been weeks now since I last spotted them, before the time change, back when I was leaving campus in the dusk. In response, one of the students pointed—not up to the third floor where the branches from their nests still hung over the louvred shades—but straight ahead, just behind the hedge, to where an owl was watching us. It wasn’t one of the parent owls, with their impressive wingspans and weathered faces, and it wasn’t the baby owlet that had blinked down at me weeks earlier. Except, of course, it was—bigger now, maybe an adolescent, with the cool gaze of a teenager. And once again, I don’t understand how time passes. 
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Yesterday, a student emailed me to ask if we had class—basically, if spring break was really over. And while I barked a laugh of amazement at her question, I was kind in my response. We do, I wrote back with a smile emoji. We’re in the home stretch now! But on a deeper level, I get it. I entered spring break with a to-do list a mile long and finished about half of those things, some which I’ll push to summer (closet sorting in the spare room) and some which I’ll scramble to finish this week (notes for a presentation I’ll give next week). For a combination of reasons—tooth infection, lingering cough, exploding sunroof—I’ve felt wrong-footed all semester, only a step ahead when I should have this in the bag. But here we are, back at it. ** Yesterday, I left a mandatory department meeting twenty minutes after the hour and rushed to my class across campus, arriving five minutes late, while my students were clustered near the door debating whether to leave. “It’s only been five minutes!” I said, breathless. Wind had been gusting at 45 mph, and my hair was a tangled knot I itched to work my fingers through. “But you’ve never even been one minute late before,” M. pointed out. He is over six feet, a gentle giant, and his gaze is sympathetic as it travels over my windswept appearance. “It felt momentous.” ** Today I’m at Starbucks for a few hours ostensibly to write, but also I’m behind on my grading, and if I don’t finish at least five papers, I’ll be well and truly screwed by tonight, when I need to read/skim sixty poems and short stories for the lit mag class for which I’m the faculty advisor. These are the kinds of motivational bargains I make with myself: grade one paper, answer an email, grade another paper, five minutes of online browsing for a new area rug. Grade five, and I get to work on my novel. The other day, meeting our nephew’s new girlfriend for the first time at a hotel bar, my husband said, “Paula has a more interesting job than I do” and I nearly choked on my martini. ** Grade, hate myself for assigning so many words in the first place, repeat. ** But even though I’m trying to focus, I can’t turn off the fiction writing part of myself so easily. For example: Two people just entered in full winter coats, hats and boots, abominable-snowman style, asked the barista for the bathroom code, and as I watched writer-eyed, entered the same single-stall bathroom. Was this the perfect setting for a romantic tryst? Were they naked beneath those heavy coats? Would they buy coffee afterwards? Ten minutes later they emerged, hoods clinched tight around their faces, and exited the store. Sometimes the stories just write themselves. Yesterday I planted for the first time in the raised bed planter that was last April’s birthday gift. I meant to plant then, but we were heading out of town for three weeks, and then it was summer, which is unspeakably hot around here and lingers until the middle of October, and then it was winter, and this winter has been wet and windy with surprising cold snaps, and so today in full but feeble sunshine, I finally did the planting.
It was only when the seedlings someone else had started were in the trunk of my car that I realized I have never planted anything before—not really. I transplanted a jade from my father-in-law, and I’ve assisted Will in replacing things that died in our 115+ heat wave last September, and I wrote the check years ago when a nursery came in and planted the trees in our backyard after considerable manipulation of our basically-clay soil. I’m the planner, but not the planter in the family. And so, as I gently removed plant after plant, making a well in the topsoil, and tamping soil firmly back into place while the neighbor’s German Shepherd whined on the other side of the fence, it occurred to me that this entire effort might be a colossal failure. It was suddenly clear that I bought far too many plants for the space, and a whole pack of Swiss chard and three jalapenos won’t be going in. The strawberries are too close together due to a basic math error, I ended up with a squash that is probably perfectly lovely but is not the squash that I thought I was buying, and already I am fighting the urge to overwater everything. On the YouTube videos I watched, too impatient to do anything other than skip ahead to the good parts, people have vibrant gardens, lush and leafy and natural and (seemingly) effortless. These growers seem calm and happy, and probably garden only after half an hour each of yoga and meditation each day. I know I will tend my plants haphazardly, distractedly, my body a ball of stress, the mere existence of my endless to-do list producing great anxiety. But. I have started a thing. It’s a very small act of bravery, a very small act of creation, a very small sign that after this long winter there is hope, and maybe even a vegetable or two, on the horizon. * [I used to do "morning pages" on the regular, but I've gotten out of the habit. It's a way to get all my thoughts out so my mind can just focus on fiction. But lately I've been dabbling in creative nonfiction, too, so I've decided to start posting some of these entries. Here goes nothing.] The barista calls me “hon” twice while filling my order for an English Breakfast tea. She is probably twenty years younger than me, which means I have possibly reached the age where age is a liability, where age makes me grandmotherly, where age means I have to be talked to loudly and slowly, in a patient customer service voice.
I pay the $3.45, which is basically just for the tea bag. The manager compliments my shoes, which are green, and asks if I wore them just for today. It’s not until I’m sitting down with my laptop open that I realize it’s St. Patrick’s Day and for possibly the first time in my life I have unconsciously dressed appropriately for the situation. “We’re all out, I’m sorry,” the barista says to someone picking up a mobile order. The man looks annoyed, takes his drink in disgust, and leaves through the double doors, which flap shut behind him. Someone taps me on the shoulder and I jump. I’ve been thinking about nouns and verbs, and when I think I imagine I’m invisible. “Is there a code for the bathroom?” the woman wants to know. She is old enough to be my grandmother, although really I’m referring to the age my grandmother was when I was younger, because if alive, both of my dead grandmothers would be well into their 100s. It’s only because I’m startled by the touch that I don’t help her. I know the code. I’ve heard the baristas sing it out to every other person who enters. “You can ask for the code at the counter,” I tell her, and go back to thinking. Out the window, cats slink by, dash under the outdoor furniture, scuttle around the corner and disappear into the bushes by the drive-thru. Why doesn’t someone adopt one of these cats? Why don’t I adopt one of these cats? That’s crazy, I can’t have a cat. The Usual Couple come in. I see them here often and wonder how they can afford treinte iced teas and grande mochas every day, since they are clearly retired and drive a car that has had a sizeable dent as long as I’ve been aware of them. He has had an injury of some kind and walks deliberately now, one foot forward and the other forward exactly to the place where the first foot stops, and repeat. I wonder why the wife who can clearly afford Starbucks on the daily doesn’t spring for a haircut; she would look so much better. But even as I think it, I know that’s rude of me. Once I heard the husband refer to Michelle Obama as a man, and so by default I don’t like them. But also once I saw him pay for a homeless man’s coffee and sandwich, and sometimes people are more complex than they seem at first sight. Not all good, not all bad, not always wrong, not always right. The weather is lovely and so we aren’t talking about it. People enter in shorts, exit to linger under the green umbrellas to smoke and chat with friends. Four women have been talking at a table on the other side of the restaurant for a couple of hours now, ever since I entered with the big plans for what I was going to write, how I was going to revive my flagging writing career, how I was absolutely not going to go online and look for a new dress for an occasion that hasn’t yet presented itself to me. One of the women is the one who tapped me on the shoulder. I decide to forgive her for this, since anyway she doesn’t know there is anything to forgive, and the burden is all mine. The women look happy. The women are glad to have each other in their lives. A young couple comes in. Young is relative, like old, or older. They are each wearing hoodies and joggers and carrying books. Maybe they are coming right from campus, which is just over the freeway. Maybe they have met to study. Maybe they meet here every day before class because they can’t imagine a day where they don’t see each other. A man smiles at me as he enters, and I wonder if he thinks I’m someone else. It takes a beat before I remember how to engage my facial muscles, and I smile back. Ok, so I'm late with this list. Also, for the first year in a long time, I didn't meet my reading goal. I planned to read 75 books and read 69. But the teacher in me knows this is a 92%, so I don't feel too bad. :) Here's the list! 1. Real American by Julie Lythcott-Haims 2. The People We Keep by Allie Larkin 3. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid 4. The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri 5. Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch 6. My Darling Husband by Kimberly Belle 7. Hell of a Book by Jason Mott 8. The Last Karankawas by Kimberly Garza 9. One Night, New York by Lara Thompson 10. Watch Out for Her by Samantha M. Bailey 11. The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard 12. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 13. Dark Roads by Chevy Stevens 14. American War by Omar El Akkad 15. Hard Cash Valley by Brian Panowich 16. No-No Boy by John Okada 17. Dietland by Sarai Walker 18. The Guest List by Lucy Foley 19. The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford 20. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donaghue 21. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell 22. Pieces of Her by Karen Slaughter 23. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 24. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris 25. Nowhere Girl by Cheryl Diamond 26. Blue-Skinned Gods by SJ Sindu 27. Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell 28. Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch 29. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley 30. Reputation by Sarah Vaughn 31. Five Little Indians by Michelle Good 32. The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi 33. The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill 34. The House on Fripp Island by Rebecca Kauffman 35. Sankofa by Chibundo Onuzo 36. Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu 37. Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult 38. The Maid by Nita Prose 39. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert 40. Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin 41. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen 42. Goldilocks by Laura Lam 43. Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner 44. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 45. The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead 46. Lady Killers by Tori Tefler 47. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee 48. Women Talking by Miriam Toews 49. The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson 50. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett 51. Into the Jungle by Erika Ferencik 52. Moloka'i by Alan Brennert 53. Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson 54. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson 55. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson 56. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley 57. Blake Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson 58. The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead 59. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig 60. In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead 61. Fake by Erica Katz 62. The Misfortunes of Family by Meg Little Reilly 63. The Personal Assistant by Kimberly Belle 64. Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley 65. Deep Water by Emma Branford 66. All You Can Ever Know by Nichole Chung 67. When We Were Bright and Beautiful by Jillian Medoff 68. Dark Corners by Megan Goldin 69. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadette Evaristo I set a goal of reading 75 books and I read 91, plus some ARCs not listed here and a million student responses. So! A lot of reading. It was a good year, by that metric alone.
Here's the list, in December-January order: 91. Stay Awake by Megan Goldin 90. Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West 89. Find Me by Anne Frasier 88. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones 87. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavincencio 86. What’s Done in Darkness by Laura McHugh 85. Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah 84. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker 83. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel 82. The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf 81. House of Correction by Nicci French 80. What You Wish For by Katherine Center 79. The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth 78. Bone Canyon by Lee Goldberg 77. Lost Hills by Lee Goldberg 76. What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster 75. A Nearly Normal Family by M. T. Edvardsson 74. Who is Maud Dixon? By Alexandra Andrews 73. Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger 72. The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee 71. Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan 70. Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurlan 69. We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper 68. The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline 67. America Pacifica by Anna North 66. All the Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth 65. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich 64. No Hiding in Boise by Kim Hooper 63. Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau 62. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 61. The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe 60. Call Me Elizabeth Lark by Melissa Colasanti 59. The Last by Hanna Jameson 58. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener 57. We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida 56. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz 55. The Last Story of Mira Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim 54. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 53. You Will Remember Me by Hannah Mary McKinnon 52. The Animals by Christian Kiefer 51. The Road by Cormac McCarthy 50. All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage 49. Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore 48. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam 47. Before and After by Rosellen Brown 46. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salasses 45. When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain 44. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 43. Broken People by Sam Lansky 42. The Monsters We Make by Kali White 41. A Dark and Secret Place by Jen Williams 40. The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2020 by Lawrence Harbison 39. Contemporary Monologues for Twentysomethings by Jessica Bashline 38. Know My Name by Chanel Miller 37. His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie 37. The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee 36. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay 35. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone by Heather McGhee 34. Saving Beck by Courtney Cole 33. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah 32. Blindness by Jose Saramago 31. Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica 30. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 29. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver 28. Lakewood by Megan Giddings 27. Utopia by Thomas More 26. The End of Policing by Alex Vitale 25. The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner 24. The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell 23. Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman 22. In Her Bones by Kate Moretti 21. Hunger by Roxane Gay 20. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett 19. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner 18. The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins 17. The Absolutist by John Boyne 16. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips 15. The Gone Dead by Chanelle Benz 14. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes DuMez 13. Severance by Ling Ma 12. The Line that Held Us by David Joy 11. Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 10. Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett 9. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson 8. Americanah by Chimimandi Ngozi Adichie 7. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert 6. Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy 5. A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler 4. Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby 3. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep 2. Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn 1. All That Remains by Sue Black It’s a good thing the crew came by yesterday and removed the mound of materials that had been gathering in my side yard--the framing posts, the extra drywall, the puffy piles of pink insulation--because this morning, at precisely 5:15, heralded only by the sudden growling of Humphrey, it began to rain. I picked up my phone from the nightstand and saw that three friends had beat me to it with their Facebook posts. It’s raining! I love the smell of rain in the air. Omg, it’s officially Fall. This means we at the DeBoard house have survived Summer Part 3, those endless 90 degree days where the eighteen-year-old A/C still kicks on weirdly late in the night. We have arrived at open-window Fall. We have made it through the last of the Central Valley dust that settles in the middle of July and then hangs around, sweeping into nooks and crannies, lodging in corners, coating our air filters. We have arrived at sweater and legging season, at random afternoon hot chocolate, at roasted vegetables and pumpkin-flavored things. Well--at least in five weeks, I should be able to roast some vegetables.  Look, dogs: a dance floor!  I brought the crew some donuts and because I'm a saint, I didn't even eat one myself. Yesterday our kitchen started to look like a kitchen again. The plastic is down; the subfloor is in; the drywall is nearly there. Is it weird (yes, I know it’s weird) that I started crying the second I walked in the door? There’s all this space. And sure, it’ll be filled with appliances and cabinets and the table I haven’t yet purchased, so the space will be much less space, but still. This was how this kitchen was supposed to look, I just know it. The wall was a mistake, one of those things that seems like a good idea on paper. I can imagine the original construction crew, all fresh from beating the Germans in the war shaking their heads and saying, “All right, if that’s what the boss wants.” It’s a small thing--I shared it with my family on our group text and got two measly “likes”--but I can see all the way from my office at the back of the house down the (still narrow, sure) hallway and all the way to the window at the front of the kitchen. A friend commented on Facebook, after my initial before-video tour, that she was generally not in favor of removing walls, and in fact, had wanted to add a wall in her new kitchen. Still, she agreed that my wall had to go. Back in one of my previous lives, where I wrote about real estate for the now-defunct weekly edition of my town’s newspaper, I toured new home developments, the kind where the house was almost as big as the lot, and the houses themselves had giant, boxy footprints. Six or seven bedrooms, three or four baths, an open concept main floor. It was the open concept that got me every time. In its empty, undefined state, it was simply too much space. What the hell, I’d wonder, did someone do with a thousand square feet of beige carpet? But then, I’ve always lived in small places. And even when they weren’t technically small--I think the house I grew up in was around 1800 square feet, which doesn’t feel small to me, if you included the space from the converted porch--I shared it with a lot of people at once. My three sisters and I shared one bathroom and only broke into raging fights once a week or so. We had an entire room that was only used for company, and even then, only on holidays. Come to think of it, that kitchen was probably too small. I never cooked in it myself--as third daughter, I split every-other-night clean-up duties--but now I can see the space would only be improved by knocking out a wall.  Humphrey has questions.  You can now see from the back of my house to the front of my house. (I mean... it is a small house.) Bonus points if you can spot the terrier. We have new developments: two of the kitchen can lights are operable. The motion sensor light on the back porch is working once again, and the refrigerator--still outside on the patio--is now plugged into its own outlet, rather than relying on a twelve-foot extension cord. It’s not magic, but close. ** Some of us are handling this remodel better than others. Thursday, making the hour-long drive from campus, my thoughts were racing. I couldn’t grab one and hold on to it--they were there and gone, each a nonsensical burst of syllables. An idea for my class. How to revise the first scene in my new book. What if something goes wrong with the electrical. What if this project never ends. I pulled over at the halfway point, realizing what was wrong. I’d had nothing to eat in the last eighteen hours, but I had consumed three giant cups of coffee. And while I usually try to balance coffee and water consumption, my water bottle was still filled to the brim. I glanced at my phone and see that my dad had responded to my early-morning text, sent after I realized that Humphrey hadn’t eaten any of his morning food. Humphrey may be sick since he threw up after getting here. Well, shit. Humans and animals alike are being affected by this remodel. ** On Friday night, I go to a friend’s birthday-month kick-off: four women, good wine, a charcuterie board and some burrata sprinkled in sea salt that makes me want to close my eyes and die happy. The conversation is wild and interesting, and I love that I’m the least accomplished one at the table, the one with the most to learn. But a part of my mind is with my dogs, hoping they stay on the non-demoed part of the plastic, wondering if they’re sitting in the dark hating me for leaving them alone. ** Part of the problem is the whole leaving the house thing. It never felt like a big deal before, back in pre-March 2020 life. But then the whole world was asked to stay at home unless otherwise necessary, and it turned out that much of my life wasn’t necessary. It turned out I could write and teach from home, and order groceries from my home, and Zoom with anyone from home, and go to church in my pajamas from my couch, and the truth is maybe that wasn’t a weird diversion from life but was my actual life. Maybe I liked staying at home. Maybe I liked a pared-down version of life, where I didn’t wake up already feeling exhausted, where I had a fairly good idea of what the day held and how to tackle it. And then, we went back to almost-normal life--vaxxed and masked, but I’m back in the classroom, back on campus, back to Friday nights with friends. And then coming home, it’s not to my safe little space, but to a wall of plastic sheeting, and wide-eyed dogs who are terrified anew every time the A/C kicks in and the plastic rustles, and a lot of uncertainty despite the carefully laid-out schedule. The truth is, I never appreciated my little home properly until it was my only space, when I was forced out from all the other spaces that had been part of my life--the classroom, my office, the Starbucks where I wrote two novels back to back. And now, here we are.  Not gonna lie... things are looking bleak. Every day, coming home from grandparent camp, the dogs want to sniff every nook and cranny--which is a reminder, if I needed it, that other humans have been here, in our space. Also, if I want, I can see them on the security system, which lets me know when a door or window has been opened and sends me short video clips of people getting into and out of trucks at the curb. On Tuesdays, I stop by after work to change clothes, and I find the men sitting on the back step eating sandwiches or listening to music on the patio. It’s their lunch time, and I tiptoe around. My instinct is not to disturb them, although that seems silly. Don’t mind me! I’m sorry if I’m in your way! Later, there are obvious signs that people have been in our house--the drywall down, the gas line moved, new tubes and wires--and more subtle ones, too. A box of nails sits next to the French doors. A Doctor Pepper can, crumpled, in my recycling bin. But mostly, these men are like ghosts, flitting in and out of my peripheral vision. It’s strange to think that by now, they know more about me than I do about them. ** Today is marked “Rough Electrical,” the second of three days with the same designation on the schedule taped to our front door. My dad, probably annoyed by my daily appearance in his home, wonders out loud what’s taking so long. I remind him that it’s a ten-week project, and we’re only in the second week. “You should be there keeping an eye on them,” he tells me, and it’s hard to tell if this is out of concern that I’m being ripped off, or whether he would rather not have my dogs vying for cuddle position on his lap. How exactly would I keep an eye on them? Stand in the corner with a hard hat, pretending I know what the heck is going on? I remind him that I’m in daily contact with the project manager, that we have a schedule, that things seem to be moving right along, but he seems unimpressed. I tell my husband about this conversation later, expecting him to be as exasperated as I am, but instead he’s sympathetic. “Your dad probably wishes he could be there, working,” he says. “Those days are behind him.” This is confusing, because in the eighteen years I’ve lived with this horrible kitchen, no one in my life has ever offered to do practical things like knock down walls or rewire electrical for me, and while my dad is decidedly handy, I’ve never known him to do things like this in his own home, either. “It’s not about the exact work,” my husband insists, when I raise these finer points. “It’s about being able to work.” ** Yesterday, I stand in the doorway and realize that all the furniture--the sofa table, the modular sectional, the trunk that holds DVDs I have no idea why we own--seems askew, as if it has all been shifted a few inches to the right. It’s only at that point that I look up and see that six holes for can lights have been cut into the ceiling, that they’re wired for action. I imagine the electricians heaving the bulky pieces of the sectional out of the way, stepping around throw pillows and the basket of dog toys, wondering (as I often do) why someone needs three remotes, and then putting everything back, more or less the same, at the end. It’s not a huge leap of metaphor to say that all of life feels like this for me right now--similar but different, slanted, off-kilter. And dusty. So effing dusty.  Dad and the pups.  Mom and the pups. (Secretly, I think she likes them.) |
Paula Treick DeBoardJust me. Archives
January 2026
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