I am sitting in the somewhat cold—decked out in long sleeves, a sweater, a vest, and a fleece—in an old, old kitchen that’s taken hold of me. I am in an old, old house that’s swiftly worked its charms on me; beguiled me in but a short bit of time.
I’ve come to love this place, a shingled house with a broad front porch, a porch plenty wide for two pairs of old white wicker chairs (one on either side of the front door, with plenty of room for private conversation on either side, or as one if conviviality is the order of the day) and enough ivy to trip anyone who’d dare get tangled in its vines.
This old house becomes a centenarian when the new year turns, and we are now its keepers. Technically, I’m but the interloper, the mother of the owner (the law professor) who could not, could not resist loping into town to play house and turn a motherlode of moving boxes and a mess of painters’ dust into the real-life iteration of HGTV’s latest episode. It’s before-and-after city over here. I’ve scrubbed a century of grime out of bathtub corners, and stalked the aisles of the big-box stores in search of just the right whatchamahoojie and whatnot to whittle away my fix-it list.
And yet, and yet. . .
It’s about the somewhat cold.
Old houses keep secrets, we all know. And two mornings ago, as I was merrily working my way room to room, the long-awaited duo from the air-duct cleaning crew arrived. They donned their hotpink moonboots and headed for the basement, where a fine furnace churns. It took but a minute for the fellow with the fine Hoosier accent to clear his throat and begin:
“Ma’am, now I always hate to have to say this . . .” (here he paused, and let my heart pick up its kettle-drum pounding) “but” (here he points up toward the duct work that looks just fine to me, taped at all the seams) “that’s asbestos tape,” he says, “and we cannot do the job. It would blow asbestos fibers into the air and it’s not safe. You’ll need remediation.”
At this last blow in his breaking news, I am only somewhat standing, feeling my knees begin their wobble dance. As he goes on to tell me all about asbestos fibers, how they’re like “microscopic fish hooks” that attach to your lungs, I am suddenly picturing the wall of an old bait shop, the dark and dingy ones never far from fishing holes, and I am thinking I do not want my little lungs to make like they’re a bait shop fish-hook display. And I am thinking this must be a bad movie into which I’ve suddenly been cast—in the role of the old lady who gets to bear the brunt of this icky, icky news.
It’s not long till the poor fellow is looking into the face of a somewhat shaky old lady with tears welling in her eyes, one who is trying hard to catch her ever-elusive breath. It must have been a pitiful sight, because the kind fellow reached out to take my arm and tried in his air-duct-cleaner way to soothe me.
Sad fact is, I’ve spent the last three years thinking a lot about my lungs, how they’re missing half of one, and plenty polka-dotted otherwise, scars from this or that of unknown origin. My little bellows have already taken a beating and the very last thing I wanted to hear was they’re up against one more hurdle.
Breathing, you might guess, is not something I take lightly. And air, well, I’d prefer it on the purer side. (Three years ago, for anyone new to this old chair, a lovely surgeon broke it to me that what they’d found lurking in my lungs was a rare, never-smoker cancer, and once you’re in that club, the in-and-out of air is not something you take lightly.)
This asbestos equation gets a wee bit more complicated, and I’ll spare you all that, but suffice it to say that while I search high and low for men in moonsuits to come suck the toxins out of this old house, I’ve been told not to turn on the furnace.
Which leaves me a bit cold as I sit here typing, puzzling just what wisdoms the universe might be offering in the belly of this asbestos beast.
Mostly I just keep thinking how it is when you love something, make it your own. Part of the equation of love is its attachment, the way you leap straight from love to fierce protection. No questions asked. We leap on the next flight to get to people we love when they find themselves in dire straits. We look the surgeon in the eyes and ask the hardest questions. We drive all night, gosh darn it; sleep on bathroom floors when the poor kid’s retching will not cease.
To love, in the book I read, means to muscle what it takes—no matter what it takes—to try to douse the flames, rinse the wound, face the demons, stitch the broken heart.
Even if what you’ve come to love is an old, old house whose breathing has grown labored. Whose arteries are clogged. And whom you will not abandon. Funny thing is, you find you love it all the more for all its quirks: its upstairs floorboards that don’t sit level and leave you feeling like you’re walking through an amusement fun house; the doors without doorknobs and the old barn-door garage that, like the upstairs hall, leans at a decided angle. The list goes on. And the fact is, I’m in for the long haul. We’ll get this old house fit and fiddle and breathing again.
It’s what love aims for, promises, to have and to hold, through thick and through thin. Time and time again…
Do you have a story about hard lessons you’ve learned about love, be it from an old house or a new someone?
And a wee bit of news in the book department: My little book, Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love (Brazos Press, Feb. 9, 2027), has a new cover. Yessireebob, just yesterday, amid my asbestos horrors I peeked at my phone to see that the lovely lovely folks whose job it is to get books into the hands of readers had sent me news that they’d decided to put no less than Pádraig Ó Tuama at the tippy top of the cover. Here tis (except for my boys— that is my four brothers, and the holy trinity that is my beloved Blair and our two boys—you’re the very first to get a peek):
One last, last thing: This magnificent wisdom on the measure of success wafted by me yesterday from Arundhati Roy, the brilliant Indian novelist, and I want to leave you with at least one morsel this morn.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
And happy, happy birthday beloved Melissa if you happen to be pulling up a chair….
Oh dear you! Blessings on your lungs and the remediation and on your BOOK COVER! That is a thrill. I look forward to reading it! Much love and thank you for writing today. Stay warm, sbb