Carving Space
Where your Humble Scribe looks around the house he never wanted, and tries to make it his home
“Time counts, and keeps countin’, and we knows now finding the trick of what’s been and lost ain’t no easy ride. But, that’s our trek. We gotta travel it. And there ain’t nobody knows where it’s gonna lead.” - Savannah, BEYOND THUNDERDOME
Google Street View had the audacity to capture the day I moved into the house.
Seven months ago, I moved back to North Texas. I had been in Austin for a year prior, for a job that evaporated four days after I arrived. The same day of the layoffs, my dad died.
Ever since, I’ve been in charge of making sure the house was okay. Keeping it from falling into disrepair while living 200 miles away shouldn’t have been nearly the chore it wound up being, but I had also kind of lost my mind a little. The paper cuts kind of piled up. My planned bi-weekly visits to the house became monthly, became quarterly.
It’s a mammoth house. Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, two-car garage. What I didn’t know about the house was … well, damned near everything. I have never owned a home before. I did know, at 83 years old, Dad had no business doing all of the stuff to the house that needed attention, but he did so until his death. (Literally - he was standing on a fucking folding chair changing a bulb on the patio when his heart went tits up.)
Moving into the house once my Austin lease was up became the plan, so I could get the beast ready for sale. Two weeks prior, I moved half of my clothes and my bathroom stuff north, and started to figure out how to make this work. The first task was clearing out all of the expired food from the kitchen and pantry. Not just from the previous year, but … Dear Readers, there was food in the pantry from 2011. This was the dozens of trash bags filled from just the kitchen and pantry:
I’ll come back to this, because writing it is a lot harder than I imagined it would be. I thought that the depression I sank into in 2022 would be eased by moving back home, closer to my friends and found family… but I wound up isolating myself even more.
I do feel a lot better, now. Much of that has to do with claiming the space here as mine, not just dodging out of the way from furniture I hate, and rooms full of mementos I didn’t collect and have no desire to have.
I look around the living room, and while there’s still horrible carpet that I’ll need to replace, and far too much wooden accents and cabinetry (remember, this was all purchased and never updated after 1998) I’ve made strides. Mounted my TV. Cleared and boxed up the keepsakes, with the deep-seated need to sell off most of it in the eventual estate sale. Unboxed my turntable. Set up the bar.
I don’t know if this will ever feel like my home. It’s far too big, the bills still eat me alive, the ants continue to find a way inside, and (most importantly) it was my Dad’s house.
That said, at least it doesn’t feel like I’m squatting here anymore.