Mo Perry's Word Circus: Home is Where You Hang...

Mo buys a house, opens a sweet can of worms.

Image credit: Tate Carlson

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Mo Perry's Word Circus: Grope-on?

By: Mo Perry |   August 2011   |  From the print edition

It all started because I wanted to get another cat. My landlord wasn’t in love with the idea and wanted a debilitating pet deposit. I balked; the same defiant nature that led me to violate every curfew as a teenager flared right up, and I found myself hurling headlong into homeownership. There must be worse reasons for taking out a six-figure loan, but I can’t think of many.

Now here I am: an awestruck and exuberant new homeowner, transfixed by the idea that this place is mine—the walls, the floors, the airspace above it and the ground beneath it all the way to the earth’s core. I own a real thing, with its mysterious past and unknowable future. And it’s a thing that is regarding me expectantly, bemusedly, like a worker who’s been on the job for decades and just got a clueless new boss straight out of college. Sure, she says drolly, go ahead and peek under that dropped ceiling in the kitchen. Tear it down, knock out the plaster and lathe beneath it—I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I could sense the place laughing at me while the project unfolded like a Russian nesting doll, revealing layer after layer of labor: the old wallpaper under the paint, the mold beneath that, and the indestructible glue beneath that. Just wanted a peek under that ceiling, huh?

Then there’s the wildly untended backyard. And the roof, which spontaneously shed a patch of shingles days after I signed the mortgage papers. And what about the enigmatic gallon of sand lodged in the bathroom pipes? Did the previous occupant have an exotic exfoliating ritual? Lord knows Columbia Heights isn’t renowned for its sandy beaches.

But I think the old place is coming around, softening under my bumbling but sincere touch, like Harrison Ford with Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory (and every other cranky old fart in all those variations on the same plot). I’ll charm her yet. I know how this movie goes.

In the meantime, the lessons keep coming. Whole episodes in my life now make sense—things I’ve noted in homeowners for years with a dismissive eyeroll. The way my boyfriend, who has owned his home for as long as we’ve been together, will sometimes pause a movie mid-scene, cock his head like a guard dog, and after a pregnant pause, ask, “Did you hear that?” I never heard it—and I never got it. Now I do. The slightest noise—a pinecone falling on the roof, the house settling, the neighbor’s stomach rumbling—now portends instant doom: home invasion, roof collapse, unspecified calamity.

More: the way he’d eagerly ask me, every time he mowed the lawn, “Hey, how does it look?” “I don’t know,” I’d say, “It looks like a lawn.” I was blind but now I see. There’s nothing quite like a freshly mowed lawn to the eyes of a put-upon homeowner. After two hours of sweating, suffering scratches from the pine tree because you just have to get a little further under there, and going up and down the little hill in the front yard that might as well be the REI climbing wall, you better believe that lawn looks good. That lawn is the fucking Mona Lisa.

And most of all, the heavenly glory of an unattended dumpster. I remember my dad whooshing through the front door when I was a kid, cryptically exclaiming, “Dumpster down the street!” and racing off again with a backseat full of detritus—crap too big or bulky to fit in the trash bin, crap you weren’t supposed to just throw away, crap that otherwise would have required a methodical system of hiding at the bottom of the bin over the course of weeks or months. Yard waste, electronics, a metric ton of demolished plaster and lathe. I’ve anxiously watched the curb from my bedroom window every trash day since I moved in, praying that the sanitation crew will accept my overflowing refuse bin. So far I’ve been lucky, but I don’t know how many more bins of concrete and broken metal grids they’ll take without a fuss. My kingdom for one half-empty dumpster in the dead of night.

So I’m deep in the trenches, wide-eyed and dopey like a teenager who just discovered the opposite sex and is finally learning what all the fuss is about. It’s uncomfortable and new, but I love it—the weight of it, the completeness of it, this commitment to a place, to physical reality. The irony, of course, is that I still haven’t gotten another cat. Now I can’t afford one.