Seasons: Spring

Life as a House
by April Elliott Kent

We bought the house in the autumn of 1997, six months after my mother died.  My husband insists I didn’t push him into buying it, but I suspect I did, a bit.  And even then I knew exactly what was fueling my hunger for home ownership: the foundation of my life had been pulled out from under me.  I was like a plant that had been yanked suddenly and savagely from the ground and was being held aloft, my roots dangling in the air.  I needed to be replanted, and fast.

So we bought this house, a tattered old Craftsman bungalow in a not-terrific part of town.  We didn’t actually intend to buy a house quite yet, but we saw this place and we couldn’t get it out of our minds, although it was a horrible mess; the only things it had going for it were a good roof, a new-ish fireplace, and a heck of a lot of square footage for two people.  We bought it at what turned out to be the rock bottom of the San Diego housing market, for about $10,000 more than we thought it was worth; four and a half years later its value has increased two and a half fold, at least according to our recent appraisal.  A pretty good investment, really, although that wasn’t the point.

It hasn’t been a lot of fun living here, though.  Arguably, after mom died I wouldn’t have had fun living anywhere; I sank immediately into a depression that lasted several years.  But being in this house didn’t help.  The place we’d bought to provide a foundation had, in fact, a very bad foundation itself; we knew this when we bought it, and always planned to fix it, but never found the time to do it ourselves and didn’t have the money to pay someone else.  So for four and a half years we’ve navigated slanting floors and cracking plaster, and everywhere I turned there was ugliness – ugly carpet, ugly paint, ugly neighborhood, uglyuglyugly. 

I look back now and realize how profoundly disturbed I must have been in those first few months after mom’s death, so disturbed that this house… this damaged, ugly house – is the one I had to have, the one that felt like home to me; at the time, it matched my inner landscape so well.  In any event, I suspect I could have spent the last four and a half years in the most beautiful house in the world and it wouldn’t have made me feel any better.

So the depression led me to the house, and the house increased my depression.  Getting the house repaired is something I hoped we’d do eventually, just as I hoped I’d eventually recover some of my optimism and appetite for living.  But to be honest, neither was ever a foregone conclusion, and in fact there were times neither felt even remotely likely.

I’ve always been a bit of a loner; but for the first few years after mom died I was rabidly antisocial, much to the consternation of my husband, a sociable fellow.  But gradually, especially in the last six months or so, I’ve begun opening up, accepting social engagements at an amazing rate, becoming reacquainted with dear friends from my high school days, even initiating a New Years party that was quite a smashing success. Finally I’m beginning to enjoy life – and people – again, and increasingly my native optimism is returning as well, optimism that the future may actually contain events, relationships, and achievements that bring great happiness. 

Repairing the old house is a reflection of that returning energy and optimism. An unexpected increase in income combined with the rather shocking appreciation of the house and low interest rates, finally provided the capital necessary for the work. More importantly, though, I finally felt equal to the challenge of living with chaos and negotiating with contractors.  So we secured the loan and found a contractor to repair the foundations and front porch, and the work has been underway for a full month now.

A crawlspace has been excavated from the front part of the house, the floors have been leveled, and the old porch is being demolished.  Soon the porch will have a new foundation, the driveway will be repaired, and we can plaster and paint inside and out and install hardwood flooring. We hope to have everything done by the end of May, in time to host a party to celebrate both the renovation and our nine year wedding anniversary.

For now, though, the house looks like the proverbial egg that has had to be broken to make an omelet. Stripped of the ornamentation I used for years to try and cloak its ungainliness, it looks shabby and raw.  The old flooring has been ripped out of the living room, leaving rough and splintering subfloor; huge sections were cut out of it long ago to create access to the bottom of the house, and those holes are now left open, revealing the bare dirt below.  Leveling the floors has created huge fissures in the plaster, in some rooms leaving large holes that reveal the wallboards underneath.  It all looks hollow and skeletal and scary.

But in my imagination the spirit of sadness that’s shared this house with us for so many years is dissipating -- thrown away with the clay dirt, flying out of the cracks in the walls and the holes in the floor.  Decades of grief and illness, disappointment and fear, anger and tension – a good deal of it mine -- are being expelled like poison from a boil.  When we walk around the front of the house at the end of the day, after the workers are gone, the place is quiet and beautifully peaceful.  The daily assault on its foundation, floors, and walls, like an architectural Rolfing session, leave it feeling, to me, sore but relaxed, bruised but open and light, finding its balance.

The process of renovating the house has been a trying and scary one, requiring faith and patience. Rebuilding my life, after a spate of family deaths in the course of a few years left me shifted on my foundation, has been similarly trying and scary, and I’ve often lacked the faith and patience to make the transition gracefully.   But the big news is that I'm making the transition at all.

My mother died five springs ago this month, one week before the vernal equinox.  It felt like the very cruelest time of year to lose someone, when the light was returning and everything was new and green and tender. It was like being plunged into an alternate Southern Hemisphere existence, where March divides summer and fall and death and decay enter the landscape.  It’s taken five long years to realign my seasons, to reclaim the exuberance of spring from grief and endings.  I can honestly say that I'm enjoying my first spring in years. 

Like our old house, I’ve probably got a few more days to spend in the sepulcher before my Easter resurrection.  There’s still some renovation left to do, and some days the process feels far too slow.  But spring finds me joyous this year.  Laughing is so much easier, and so is letting go of anger.  I wake with good, clean, Aries energy, to warm sun and cool winds, and with a sense of boundless possibilities of fun and accomplishment; excited at the prospect of living my life surrounded by so much beauty, and grateful to walk on strong and level floors.