the keeper

today is husband's (also known as the keeper) birthday. he's thirty-seventeen and mildly alarmed that fifty is only three years away.  but honestly, he's aging very well and somehow this seems like the right age. i baked him two kinds of brownies (raspberry truffle and raspberry cheesecake) and homemade buns to have with cocoa mid-afternoon. i was getting these yummies packed into a basket to take down to have a little skating party on the lake when i heard water dripping in the other room. turned out there was a deluge in both sabin's bedroom and the living room, thanks to pipes upstairs that had frozen during our cold weather and which were thawed out today in slightly warmer temperatures.

not exactly how husband wanted to spend his birthday or i our 13th anniversary, but there you have it.

we'll be without heat overnight, as it's the radiator pipes that froze, but husband has it all cleaned up upstairs and the plumber will come and fix it tomorrow. of course, the insurance doesn't cover it, as it's a bunch of pipes that were cobbled together by the previous owners out what they could find at the dump. but such is life in a really old house. the ceilings were made of repurposed pallets anyway, so they can take a little water and despite a having a little shower, even sabin's computer is just fine (big relief).

it was quite enough excitement for one weekend.

wisdom is a tooth

dec, 10 – wisdom: wisdom. what was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

in this year of change, we made a lot of decisions (some wise and some not so wise). probably the biggest was that we decided to move to an old farmhouse that came with 17 acres of land and one end of a small lake on the other side of the country. the house is in way worse shape than we thought it was (you don't tend to start removing big expanses of plaster from someone else's house while you're deciding to buy it) and there have been moments when we've thought holy fokkin' shit, what have we done?  but then there are moments. lots of them. where i wander the property in all kinds of different weather and i feel, deep in my soul, that we made a wise decision. i feel a sense of peace here. a rightness of place. and i realize that whether something is wise or not takes time to figure out. it might take years, but it feels again and again like this is where we belong.

haunted

are there ghosts among us?

since moving to an old house (it was built in 1898), we find ourselves in conversations with people about haunted houses. despite actually hoping this house is haunted, it hasn't thus far shown any sign of it, unless that sense of irritation i sometimes feel overwhelmed by when i'm working in the kitchen isn't caused by missing my smeg stove and refrigerator from the old house but by a dissatisfied spirit instead. maybe one who, like me, has good taste in kitchen appliances.

there's a guy in the neighborhood who told me about one evening when he was watching t.v. and felt a weight on his shoulder. he thought the dog had come up behind him and laid his chin there, but when he turned, the dog wasn't there. the same dog raises its hackles and growls at thin air, so he's pretty sure that his house is haunted. he says occasionally all of the pictures on the wall are suddenly hanging crooked. i love such stories, they give me goosebumps in a very good way.

we had friends to dinner last evening and they live in an old farmhouse as well. they've traced the origins of their place to 1600-something and in one of the barns found evidence of a stone floor from that original building. their project is even bigger than ours and they actually think our kitchen is nice in comparison to the condition of theirs. (i haven't seen theirs yet, but find it hard to imagine how bad it must be if ours looks good in comparison).

the first night they slept in their house last summer, they had a strong feeling that they were unwelcome. it freaked them out so much they actually got up in the middle of the night and drove back to their old apartment to sleep. regularly, they wake up in the night and the humidity has shot up to 75%, from a normal 60%. they actually got a humidity detector (what's one of those called?) and documented it. they wake up from it and then within minutes it dissipates and goes back down to the normal 60%. they've tried to trace it to the furnace and such, but can't find any physical reason for the humidity swing (and they're both engineers, so they should be able to). one night, after it happened, they could hear their dog down at the bottom of the stairs, wagging his tail and greeting someone, as if it was one of them going down the stairs. they regularly hear footsteps overhead when they're watching t.v. and have combed the attic, looking for evidence of an animal, but there is none.

they also have both seen a blueish male figure passing through a wall and crossing the room. the lights flicker when he's there. they took a closer look at the wall where he passes through and realized that there had once been a door there but it is now covered up. they were both in the room and they turned to one another and one said, "did you see.." "...the blue man," finished the other. they had both individually seen him and not said anything.

i get the most delicious creepy sense when talking about such things. i get completely covered in goosebumps, but i feel it in a very thrilling way and i don't feel frightened by it. in all honesty, i totally have ghost envy. i want one too, but i 'm not sure you can wish your way to one.

husband and i laid awake talking about it last night (that's what you get for drinking coffee at 11 p.m.). husband, thinks it's flashes of access to another dimension. one that we don't normally see or feel. we recently saw the others, a 2001 film with nicole kidman (who i normally hate), where you realize at the end that she and her children and the servants are dead and still living in a big house that a family has moved into. it's a well-done film and raises that question of whether when we die we just move to another plane, but still hang out in the surroundings where we were. if so, think of the layers upon layers in an old house. i do wish i had access to the ones here.