“Everything you own, ends up owning you.” – Fight Club
I spent a few hours yesterday rampaging through my yard with a mini-chainsaw and some Felco shears, savagely cutting back the verdant jungle that had sprung up in my yard during the heat, constant rain, and humidity of the last few weeks.
I’d been getting that unsettled feeling I get when I want to just burn it all down and start over. We own three lots – about a third of an acre – half of which I’ve carefully cultivated so it’s got the feel of the Deep Woods. What folks often fail to note about cultivating a “haven for wildlife” these days is that it’s a haven for ALL wildlife, including swarms of mosquitos that find my sweet, sweet blood irresistable. I found myself hacking back pokeweed stems as thick as my wrist and taller than the 8ft chicken fencing. I yelped at one point when a spider with an abdomen as big as my thumbnail appeared on my shoulder. Some extremely large insect, long as my index finger, appeared on my thumb at one point, grasping at me stickily. It was only after yelling and shaking it away that I realized it was most likely just a praying mantis. Halfway through clearing out around the pawpaw tree, I discovered I was working dangerously close to a poison ivy plant, innocently nodding at me from the duff.
NATURE IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
I moved 9 times in the 10 years between ages 19 and 29, and when we ended up in this house in 2010, I was ready for somewhere to put my books. But there is nothing that will teach you about entropy as quickly as owning a home (and a yard you’re trying to turn from bare, scorched lawn into a forest).
Our back porch started leaning and rotting a few years back, as did key areas of the exterior, exposed to the runoff of a clogged gutter. We pumped $32k into home repairs this year, just to get the outside to stop leaking, only to discover that the painters had not properly caulked the new window trim they’d installed outside, so our interior kitchen windows now gush water during severe storms. Next on our list is a suspicious series of water stains on the dining room ceiling that I strongly suspect come from a leaky pipe funneling water from our upstairs shower, and spouse thinks is coming from the failed exterior seal that links the jut of our dining room bay window to the house. Can’t wait to find out which of us is right! And then there is the basement, which has mortar in such rough shape that every year we sweep out piles of it and every year it flakes off more, exacerbated by a series of mice infestations that I only occasionally get under control, only to watch them surge back. I also strongly suspect we have an ongoing termite issue, at least at the perimeter of the house. This doesn’t even count the ongoing war with the bamboo (no matter how small and innocuous it seems, believe the inernet on this one and either put it in a metal trough or never, ever plant it. Sometimes the internet is RIGHT).
I am in an ongoing war with time and the nature, constantly fighting to keep my 120 year old house from disintegrating and being swallowed back up. I was outside the other day looking at the area around the lower pond and realizing it looks like it’s sunk at least a few inches, likely because there used to be a house there, which has since been bulldozed and its basement filled in, but which continues to compact over time.
And if you think, well, Hurley, you’re getting some equity in all this, that’s what home ownership is for! This does not take into account the tens of thousands of dollars we’ve put into said house just to keep it standing (and to turn half the lots into a forest). Literally three months after we’d dumped $32k into exterior repairs to fix the rotten exterior wood, the rotten back porch, and repaint the whole thing, we received a note from the city telling us that their estimate of the home’s worth had gone DOWN $35k. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take the lower taxes. But these days, it’s become clearer and clearer that home ownership is indeed only for rich people.
Then, of course, there are all the things inside the house. The things that need mending and dusting and cleaning just to keep up, let alone manage the dishes. We had the peeling laminate countertops coated with that cheap Miracle Method finish just to cover up the rot last year, and had the upstairs porcelain tub refinished to the tune of $800(!!) because all of the interior coating had come off. As for the peeling upstairs bathroom tile, I was quoted $15k JUST TO LAY THE TILES in the kitchen and bathrooms (that doesn’t count the COST OF THE ACTUAL MATERIALS) and decided I was fine buying a few more bathroom rugs and just covering all that the fuck up for at least another twenty years.
I think back to how it is my grandparents actually kept a house going, and the answer is that they were certainly much more handy, but also my grandmother was up from 5am to 11pm constantly in motion to keep shit tidy. The only times I ever saw her sit down and relax was from 1pm-2pm when she ate lunch and watched One Life to Live after feeding us lunch, and then again for an hour after feeding everyone dinner, where she was usually watching the news and reading through her tabloids until it was time to darn some fucking socks. But their house, too, was no fucking HGTV. Some of the furniture came over from when they lived in France during the war, items passed down from her family, and was good enough that it was never replaced. My dad and my uncle rehabbed her kitchen themselves. No one was paying $15k for somebody to lay some fucking tile.
When my mom once asked my great-grandfather how he’d saved so much money, and stayed married so long, his answer was blunt, “We didn’t want as many things then.” So, you know, lowered expectations, I guess.
But you could also survive on a single salary in a way most homes can’t anymore. I can only keep up with the garden because I work from home, and have a lot more flexibility in how I spend my day. I don’t have commute times eating into my week (when I lived in Chicago, I was commuting 15+ hours every week. I read a lot of books).
And then there is the tide of STUFF.
For a decade I could fit everything I owned into 10-12 boxes. Once I set those boxes down, it… proliferated. The sheer tide of shit one accumulates over the decades can be overwhelming. I’ve instituted rules that say that when I get something new, I have to throw out something old, or it has to be something like soap and toilet paper that actually gets used up. Every winter, I spend my time inside doing house organizing, planning repairs, and throwing shit out. As I’m tossing crap into a bag for Goodwill, I hear Tyler Durden from Fight Club repeating over and over, “The things you own, end up owning you.”
You may think this obsession with stuff is a sign of the times, of excessive consumption, but hold on there, donkey. Accumulating shit is actually far more common among people who grew up poor. My grandmother’s basement was filled to bursting with old National Geographics and Reader’s Digests. You did not throw anything out… because you were fucking poor, and you couldn’t afford to buy a new one, and maybe someone would need this, or you could repurpose it. Minimalism is for itinerant students who can ask mom to borrow the leaf blower and rich people who can buy a new toothbrush at every hotel they visit. I am keenly aware that both spouse and I are constantly battling a deeply ingrained need to hold onto items that may be of use and that spark joy without being buried in them like Sarah from Labyrinth.
I have reached a time of life when I want to buy a camper and drive off into the sunset, laughing manically. Luckily I also know enough about myself and the jaunts others have taken at similiar points in life to know that this is usually a temporary hiatus of a few years, after which you once again start longing for a place to put your books and end up selling your camper and accumulating all your shit again, often for more money, from ebay.
There has got to be an inbetween place, though, surely? Perhaps what I really need is to RENT a camper, get a housesitter for a year, and me and spouse and the dogs can live it up on the road, get sick of each other, and learn to appreciate all the shit again. There’s a reason the hero’s journey is so popular, and that so many people want to do it again at middle age. You just want to leave home behind, but then come back home knowing you’re still a badass, but also appreciating home a lot more.
As the days get shorter and my need to declutter intensifies, it is this part I keep in mind. That the human mind appreciates both comfort and novelty, the familiar and the strange, and that each of us are in a constant battle between the two, the same way we are with entropy, with living here in this liminal space, between birth and death, always in the process of becoming.
