The year is dying.

The first hints of fall are drawing near. Yesterday, I stared out of the window of my back bedroom while talking to my mom on the phone and I noticed little dabs of yellow and orange in the lush foliage of the neighbours’ trees. This morning, coming off of an emotionally wrought night, I hung sheets to dry in the backyard. The winds were high and turned them into billowing sails of deep blue and purple. (Once, a reiki healer told me my aura was the colour of deep blue and amethyst.) I smelled the air: green, damp, humid.

I was ushered back into the memory of living above Mikey Connelly’s home in his mother-in-law suite. I would stand on the rusted metal landing outside of the kitchen door and stare into low forests of shrubs, limestone pavement; further out, ocean and moody grey skies. I was alone then, yet I don’t think I was aware of it. Surrounded by monsters and gods in an ancient land, cooking fresh-caught cod in the archaic kitchen for English friends, I was struck by the beauty in contrast: the banal and the divine.

Having just come out of a short-lived but abusive relationship, I’ve retreated into myself. My selfless, kind friend moved in with me to help me regain my sense of safety. He’s pushed out the toxicity and given me back my cocoon. When I’m not at work, I come home and rest in my sanctuary. This morning, I cleaned the entire house and put all of my ducks neatly into a row. Control in an unpredictable and callous world.

Outside I hear crows calling to each other. Winter will be here sooner than I could anticipate. The Indian summer is a trickster. Even so, I take off my shoes and feel last night’s rain on the grass, and let myself swim in memories.

 

Progress in full bloom.

Owning a house and turning it into a home has been one of the most rewarding experiences. Every day I wake up feeling blessed. I have settled neatly into my summertime routine: I let Mishka outside, press reboil on my Zojirushi, grind coffee beans or scoop tea leaves. I head outside to empty the kitchen compost and water my vegetable garden (only after putting Mishka inside, as he goes positively nuts when I turn on the hose, wanting to attack the stream and barking loudly and incessantly until I give in to the game). I do thirty minutes to an hour of reading, deliberately back on my reading game for the last two weeks, and then I carefully plan the rest of my day. I’ve made progress on the house in large and small ways over the past week. I put up new house numbers on the front porch, right above the cheap vinyl stickers placed there before me. I’m having a hell of a time peeling the old stickers on, so for the moment they exist underneath the new ones, a reminder of past tenants and a former incarnation of what “home” meant in this place.

I’m remembering now what my father said when I told him my house number. “1913?” he said, a smile lighting up his face. “That was the height of the Russian Empire!” He said something along those lines, and I couldn’t help laughing because it made me think of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the father constantly ties inventions and accomplishments back to the Greeks. That’s my dad, but with Russia and Russians.

The other day, I set a goal to finally set up my office area. I’m tired of paying bills at my kitchen table and walking my outdated and heavy laptop from room to room like an itinerant. I’m also tired of not having a quiet space specifically designated for office work and for writing — as much as I love to sit on my back patio when I update my blog, I won’t be able to do that when it gets cold outside, or when there’s a torrential downpour and the wind that is forever at play on my hill blows all the rain into my lap and onto my keyboard. My dad tracked down an old (read: not made of shitty IKEA particleboard, not built to be taken apart and put back together with ease) office desk and unloaded it in my garage weeks ago, but I’ve been procrastinating on bringing it into the house. Here’s why: the desk is huge. It’s made of heavy wood — at least the desktop itself, which is easily at least fifty pounds, and cumbersome to boot. It’s too wide to fit up my basement or back patio steps, and too wide to even drag through the upstairs hallway. It needed to be completely taken apart before I could even transfer it to the room where it would live — in my guest bedroom, the one I painted a soft lavender from the noxious pink with which the former owners had tortured the poor unsuspecting walls.

In the time that the desk sat in the garage, no less than four hundred and seventy-two spiders took up in the hollows where the drawers, pulled out and standing separately, were to live. I dragged the desk into the basement before realising it would need to be taken apart as much as possible before being carted upstairs. In the basement, at the foot of the stairs, is where I began to discover the burgeoning arachnid civilization. Mishka is already beginning to learn the screams I emit that are associated with spiders, long-legged centipedes, and all other creepy-crawlies I have intuitively designated as undesirable and horrifying, because he didn’t run down the steps once during the half-dozen times I shrieked and shouted “MOTHERFUCKER” as I simultaneously napalmed the desk with Raid spray and took a vacuum nozzle to every corner. I fought a good fight. I probably have several kinds of cancers now, too. Like a good veteran returning from war, I dragged every piece of that desk up two flights of stairs while alternating between hardened stoicism and the kind of rage-strength that comes in bursts during bouts with exhaustion and frustration.

It took me three hours, in total, from The Great Spider War to Lovely Interior Design Photo, but here is my lovely space:

I have hanging files now, for all my new bills accumulated during the brokest month of the year for a bartender who runs a concert venue, and a comfy chair in which to sit while I lament my water bill as I stare ruefully out the window and will my plants to give me a bountiful harvest already, so I don’t have to spend a small fortune every time I wander into the grocery store.

Speaking of which: the garden is doing quite well. The vegetable boxes I built at the back of my sprawling yard are now home to peppers, tomatoes, some kind of squash (my mother sprinkled some seeds in the front yard during my first week here and now she can’t remember what they are, but I guess we’ll see in a few weeks), cucumbers, basil, and even sweet potatoes — an experiment in itself, since I know nothing about growing root vegetables. (How do you know when they’re ready? Has anyone engineered clear soil yet? I’m in the dark here, literally and figuratively.) The front yard is beginning to yield results. Green tomatoes cluster in hiding under branches, and I even plucked two rather large cucumbers from their vine yesterday. My eggplants and zucchinis are producing the largest and most robust leaves, and perhaps talking to my plants on a regular basis is making me imagine things, but they look positively happy growing out of their plot.

Before I officially closed on the house, during a bout of painting the exterior of the house for twelve hours to fulfill an FHA loan requirement, my mom came and planted three rose bushes — not so much bushes as sad little stems jutting from a shy-looking root system. One died in the first week. The second one, after a week of watering and plaintive begging for it not to die, began to give little green leaves at the base of the stems, though it’s quite slow-going. The third one, after weeks of slowly developing leaves and new shoots, and finally, buds, gave its first flower two days ago.

I am convinced it is the most beautiful flower I’ve ever seen. It’s mine. I made this happen. I grew this perfect thing and now every time I walk into my yard I can’t help smiling until my cheeks hurt.

There is just so much to fall in love with lately.