Be it Ever So Humble

I haven't written a lot lately. Mostly, it's because life has been routine and there is little to write about. I guess I could complain about the house falling apart. The refrigerator sprung a leak and the floor soaked it up. The water was soaked up by the sub floor. When you walk in our kitchen, water seeps up between the linoleum tiles. Now I am forced to replace the floors, but I don't know how we're going to afford to do that right now. I simply am not going to replace the floors with linoleum again. This time I am going to lay tile.

That is not the only home repair begging for attention. We also need to replace our five year old central heat and air unit. That really makes me angry. We paid a lot for the unit and have had nothing but problems with it from the beginning. Later we learned that the wrong size unit was installed so the darn thing has been working overtime to try to heat and cool a house beyond it's capacity. Of course, the place we purchased it from disappeared shortly after we bought it. We have unloaded tons of money into that unit starting just months after purchasing it. All problems not covered by our warranty. I'm not sinking any more money into it. We'll replace it. For now we're using our back up ceil heat. Again, it's a big financial burden to replace the unit.

Then there's the million and one things that need to be done. We need to replace windows, refinish the hardwood, repaint, replace gutters, replace garage doors, etc. Being a homeowner is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes I wish we rented so someone else could worry about these kinds of repairs, property taxes, etc. In the last eight years we put in a new roof, replaced flooring, fixed numerous leaks, remodeled the kitchen and both bathrooms (which were done very shoddy), painted more times than I can count, replaced doors, bought two new water heaters, a new central heat and air unit, replaced the washer, replace the refrigerator, and numerous little things. Once you take care of one thing, something else is always cropping up.

With all that, I'm still grateful for it. I came home from the hospital to this house. I grew up in this house. If I was struck blind today I would know every inch of this house by heart and would have no trouble navigating it in complete darkness. There's little footprints in the garage in white paint. They belong to my brother, Jackie. He got into the paint when he was two. Nobody has removed them. I'm sad that they're are fading away with age. I might seal them in. My husband and I share the room that was my room as a child. I remember my friend, Barbara, and I having a "party" one time. We carefully brushed the shag carpet with hair brushes to make it pretty. A couple of neighborhood kids came. We sat on my bunk bed and listened to music. The shag has been removed to reveal lovely old hardwood, but the memories still linger in there. I have had sooo many birthday parties here. The Kerns Merry-go-round was here for all my childhood parties. My grandmother always had a little garden in the back yard where Jamie's swing now sets. I, myself, have a black thumb. If you climb into our attic you will find that little has changed since I was a child. My old dolls are still bagged up there. Baby clothes and baby toys practically block access completely. A new artificial tree has replaced the artificial tree I grew up with. The artificial tree I grew up with replaced the Aluminum tree of even farther past. All of them reside in the attic.

Sometimes I dream of selling this house and moving into a nice new one with a better layout and bigger closets, then I look around. This is just home.