The brief but hopefully telling summary of my recent history.
Right now I am living in a house in Oxford, on the eastern shore of Maryland. It’s an old, settling wooden house with chipped paint and a screened in porch. John, the son of the aged owners, comes over every once in awhile to scrape and paint the porch or a closet to get the house ready for real renters. The floors slope almost precipitously and there is a secret passage from the kitchen to the bedroom above, which has cracks in the painted maroon floor where centipedes hide (I saw one scurrying today (“J, get some toilet paper, quick he’s going to slip down the …. Too late. Never mind.”)) There are two more bedrooms, all in a row. Families were close back then. (when? I don’t know, but I think in the 1800’s. although this town is pretty old. 1600’s and all written all over the history books in the one room museum. Across the street from the one room library. Ok, ok, small building library.)
Apparently distractions rule this evening in this house across from the world’s greatest park. The sun sets over the water of the Tred Avon, behind the swingset and between the trees whose leaves are almost all gone, piled in red and yellow clumps along the grass.
J and I are living in this house in Oxford while the yacht we work on is being painted in a nearby boatyard. It’s the first time we have ever lived in a house or apartment without sharing it with someone else, namely his or my family. Unless you count the place we rented from One Tooth Bob in Florida. We were looking for jobs on megayachts and found a studio for 400 bucks for the month. It was a room with an inflatable bed and a microwave. And a bathroom that smelled like lysol. Bob walked around in his tighty whities with his tanned belly hanging over the elastic. He smoked a lot and had a stripe of yellow in the middle of his gray handlebar mustache. And he only had a few teeth, which were also tinted tobacco yellow. There were chickens and stray cats running around the parking lot. Bob was a good guy. We liked him. But then we got a job and gave our notice. I still get nostalgic every time I see a microwaveable pasta meal, which we ate quite often as we were poor and stoveless.
The first night in this house, after living on boats for almost four years, we wandered around the rooms sitting and looking, then standing up and moving to the next. I spent 3 hours cleaning out the pantry. Then I made tea and tried to find a wireless signal. We set up an “office” in the funny little room with the secret passage (it feels like you are climbing down into the hold of a ship) to the kitchen. I found a wireless signal J’s mac doesn’t find. He dials up (local call. We haven’t had a land line since college dorm days) and now we don’t see each other much in the evenings. Maybe we should start emailing each other. Is this what life on land is like?
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