Substratum

She tells me she’s putting her house on the market, describing all of the depersonalization her real estate agent prescribes to speed up the sale.  I’m a staunch opponent of this approach believing no one should dictate the number of objects living on my kitchen counters. It’s ridiculous, I say, to invest my money in cosmetic changes to a property I’m exiting; worse yet guessing what might appeal to a prospective buyer who will likely make changes before the paint even dries.  My house is who I am, to alter it to be what others think it should be goes against, well, pretty much everything I believe.

I don’t consider how much my home has to say about me until he shows up to start fixing it.  The need to replace roof vents leads to patching ceilings, which stretches into drywall repairs of all kinds, and well, if we’re going to paint, after twelve years I‘d like some new colors please.  The more good work he does the more I find for him to do.  And as he gets intimate with my home uncovering nail pops and drywall seams behind brightly colored walls, he gets intimate with me.

He asks questions about what he sees, and as he’s mudding my kitchen ceiling we talk about art museums, Les Mis, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Chihuly exhibit in Phoenix.  He sees not just the home in my life, but my life in this home.  He says he likes the dynamic he witnesses between me and my boys; he says he can tell I’m someone who’s been through a very challenging time coming out the other side with grace.

Validation comes in unexpected places sometimes. That what I’ve been working on for so long, so pointedly, so determinedly is manifesting itself in ways others can see, appreciate and even admire leaves me vindicated.

It’s never easy to go it alone, to parent from the gut when your gut goes against the grain, to lead from the heart when others lead from the wallet, to paint the shutters purple when the neighborhood is clearly grey. But now that I’m actually doing it, I can’t imagine it any other way.  

It makes me wonder this:  Are those who need to see a vanilla house in order to imagine it as their own maybe living a life that’s a little too vanilla?