learning to be home

At 6:25pm DanO and I crossed the threshold of our home without wearing gas masks for the first time  in 12 days. It was 12 days ago that we emptied the entire ground floor, packed our suitcases, and went to live with friends. It felt good to be home.

By 6:35 I was wearing work clothes and painting the baseboard.

You cannot relax if you are married to this man, I swear.

At 7:30 I realized that it was really 8:30 to me and that Nugget was quite hungry, so we planned to wrap up at 8:00, make ourselves some Kraft mac’n’cheese (for evenings such as this), and watch LOST. This was beginning to feel more like home: work until we’re so hungry we realize it, then set a stop time and a well-rounded menu. Sounds about right.

Except, the house doesn’t smell like home. It smells faintly of polymers and latex. But the floors look so ridiculously fabulous I can hardly even stand it. And the trim is in, which is huge. Smell aside, it was good to be home.

We don’t presently possess a key to our own home, which is a strange feeling. We doled our two keys out (we had a spare at one point, but then the snow came and we never left our house anyway and we haven’t seen it since), one to our goodly friends/neighbors/hosts/mail-service/wedon’ttakethemforgranted and one to the in-laws, who were so amazingly amazing and generously generous as to install the aforementioned base trim in our absence.

Why yes I did marry into a family of saints with the work ethic of Mother Theresa and the skills of Frank Lloyd Wright. Thanks for asking.

This morning after locking up the house in hopes that we would solve the lack of key issue before, say, dinner, I realized that my makeup bag was sitting on the other side of a locked door to which I have no key.

Whoops. I guess ‘bare-skinned Florida tan’ is the look I’m going for today.

Seriously, check out these freckles.

At 8:00 we started watching LOST while noodles boiled, DanO moved furniture, and I continued to paint trim within sight of the screen.

What? Who doesn’t do 4 things at once within 2 hours of returning from a vacation during which you traversed the largest amusement park in the country? Please. It’s not like I’m 7 months pregnant.

Commercial breaks consisted of frantically: washing out the paintbrush, putting the couch cushions back in, and running to the gas station convenience store because we had no milk to make our mac.

I think I actually sat still sometime around 8:45.

It feels good to be home.