Neighbors

The neighbors have been great about stopping by and introducing themselves since we moved to our hundred-year-old house three months ago. There's Earl. Darwin. Pickles. And this timid male who comes frequently but as of yet hasn't introduced himself. Oh, and Patches, of course.

Evil Patches.

These cats come at regular times throughout the day to visit our cat Alex and to partake of the bountiful bowl of cheap kibble my son fills every morning. The bowl of food (and usually a bowl of milk as well) sits on a plastic Rubbermaid cube, three by three by three, that houses summer flip flops, old work shoes, and other smelly footwear from which my children refuse to part.

Earl, a beautiful grey male, comes in the morning, eats daintily, then settles in for a nap beside Alex, both cats' tails gently moving in the misty morning light.

Sometime around noon, Darwin, the new cat from overseas, leaps onto the front porch, walks along a piece of white trim past the dining room, around the corner to the kitchen windows and on to the back porch.

The dogs are indignant at the cats' visitations. Tails up, ears up, they stand at the window, barking, turning around at me, wondering why I don't intervene with these freeloaders who, unlike Alex, don't bring me presents of chipmunks and mice, setting them at my feet with a proud and gentle mew.

But I let them eat.

All except Evil Patches who beat up Alex on his first night in the neighborhood.

Evil Patches is not welcome here.

Read more »

Front Porch

Nearly twenty years ago, my husband and I purchased our first home for sixty-nine thousand dollars. The real estate agency described the house as having old world charm, a nice way of describing its many flaws.

The kitchen tiles were yellow and chipped at the corners like aged teeth, and when we caught a square with a foot in just the right way, we’d dislodge it and send it skittering across the room. A previous owner had painted the bricks of the fireplace tan. Someone else had cut a hole in the floor of the living room, replacing it with a 4 by 6 piece of plywood. And despite my best intentions, the stairs would never quite come clean: Eighty years of dirt and grime and dust had accumulated in the space where the tread had divorced itself from the riser. The shower leaked; the bathroom floorboards were rotted; the basement was musty. A monkey had been raised in this house.

Yet it was in this house that my husband and I learned how to be married as we discovered the stresses of homeownership; as we began a family; as we both privately wondered whether our new and fragile marriage would last.

Read more »