A Year in Atwater

7.4.06

There are times when I do feel for the guy who wrote A Year in Provence, say for instance, when my whole house is being painted on July 4th and I’m trying to live normally while eight men whistle, sing, and joke in Spanish. It’s hard work for them, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s hard to try to act normally when there is so much going on and it’s 84 degrees in the house.

The painter, Ricardo, comes from El Salvador, and is about the friendliest painter you’d ever long to find. He jokes, his English is great, and he believes all transactions are for the customer’s sake. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone so conscientious when it came to painting the house. He’d painted the three down the street from us, and now I know why he came so highly recommended.

There is, of course, that stuff you cannot avoid with workmen, the endless amount of trash, broken sprinkler (sigh), and trampled zucchini plant. The dust is the worst. We finally gave in and gave a quick dust today after fighting the urge over the last few days. Every day we would dust and sweep, only to come back and find a thick layer of dust everywhere. I’m just hoping it’s not full of lead.

We have cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And all the cleaning we did just to get the dust off led us invariably to other areas. Wendy found the source of the weevil invasion, three loosely sealed bags of pizza dough that a friend had given us a month ago. Ridiculously, our friend Denise told Wendy we’d need an exterminator to get rid of them. I reassured her all that needed to be done was get rid of everything milled (flour, corn, etc.) that was filled with the suckers. Clean up, spray some of the least offensive Raid on the market, wash up, and be done with it. We had them all the time in Georgia. They’re a pain, but, hell, in the scheme of Bugdom, “merely a bagatelle” as they say.

We started into the closets, in the living room, under the beds. Lord knows why, it’s supposed to be our day off. But we’re stuck here, and we’ll be going swimming in a little while, so we both figured we might as well make the best of it.

The worst part is trying to keep your wits about you while surrounded by dust and general mayhem (as in, “Oh, no, no bother. Just a little dust, and muck, and everything not where I wanted it to be and the heat, and the flies and leaves coming in the windows. La dee da da…”)

Honestly, I have no idea how people (say the aforementioned author of …Provence) managed not to kill anyone while they tore up his house over the year. He actually had it easy. He didn’t have children, he was with his wife, he was wealthy, and he had a whole new country and culture to explore. Not to mention he was gleaning every interaction he had for the book he was going to write when the whole damn thing was over. Much like some of Wendy’s clients, who can afford to rent other houses while theirs are remodeled, it’s inconvenient, but it pales in comparison to folks like Wendy’s mother who moved her kitchen out onto the back porch for 6 months while new cabinets, stove, and flooring were put in.

This is a small job, and only going to take a week, but with everything else going on (my father’s death, asking our niece to leave after lying to us for what seemed like the 100th time) it’s been a tough run of it.

I guess other folks would probably just head off to the movies.

Either we’re not so bright, or we’re industrious.

Or, of course, we are out of our minds.

I’ll leave that up to you to decide.