Today would have been my Dad’s 61st birthday – and as such, I knew I was going to be spending the day with my mom. It’s also just really convenient to be staying down here right now, and though sometimes she drives me crazy, there IS a sense of home here that I don’t neccessarily get other places… so it’s good to pull into Seabrook and round the corner and see the big old blue van.
There’s usually space for my weathered Saturn in the driveway, and I used to really enjoy pulling onto Wellington Street at a pretty good clip and letting my momentum carry me right up the driveway. I’d learned to be a little more cautious over the last year – once my Father could no longer drive, my mom took advantage of the situation by parking casually (and diagonally) across the whole driveway.
This time, as I rounded the corner, the parking hazard wasn’t in the form of my mom’s Saturn, but in the form of the kitchen. It was in the driveway. All over the driveway.
Apparently my Mom had gotten sick of the kitchen last Saturday. She’d called her brother and her father. They came over with some beer, some Chinese food, and apparently some crowbars. The kitchen was in the front yard by 9pm that night. Barring the kitchen sink, which was (of course!) in the dining room.
And so, when my mother asked what I wanted to do for Dad’s birthday, I figured there was nothing he’d like better than to know we were finally getting the house into shape.
I think this house was the bane of his existance for the past 35 years, and that if I DID have any belief in the idea of his haunting anything, it sure as Hell wouldn’t be this house, cause I’m sure all he ever wanted to do was escape it.
In any case, I woke up this morning to pounding, scraping, drilling. My Uncle Marty was already busily scraping the Hell out of the remnants of the kitchen, and within an hour of consciousness I was priming walls and pulling trim. Oh, and then I learned about “cutting in”. Heather was over pretty early in the day and then things went into full swing.
The daughter of DIYers, Heather’s a monster with a paint brush.
It’s been a long day. Tomorrow we paint the whole thing blue. If I’m up for it. There’s other important things that happen on Fridays after all – Battlestar Galactica for one.
