Who is popular today?

From dust we came and to dust we return. No truer words.
Yes, renovations to my abode are nigh. This feels like an insurmountable mental and emotional affliction more than a home-improvement exercise. And it’s not even started as yet.
When houses find themselves in disarray, the only sensible option is to flee the scene entirely. Move in with a loving relative. Buy a small hotel. Seriously consider your position on the ancient habit of kings of simply seizing a desirable structure and making it yours.
The Cats’ Father thinks my angst has to do with an aversion to change. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I embrace change. I embrace new dogs, cats and sleek bookcases. I wrap myself around sturdy ladders and cordless drills and all manner of things I foresee adding to my happiness.
Especially if that joy comes without dust and having to pack things in boxes. In my very limited experience, renovations come with all the stress of finding a new house, but with exactly no new house forthcoming.
There are coping mechanisms and good therapy for so many major upheavals in living – where are the reno-psychologists? The reno-meds? The home for the reno-induced mentally unstable? Remember the time the dog went missing? OK, the dog went missing when he was really young. He was gone for five days. In the time my friends spent searching the neighbourhood, I went into a sort of paralysis. It was too much. It was (I was to discover) unbearable. My immediate reaction was one of such deep despair I couldn’t get my head around how he could be found. So I shut down. Not intentionally. Most of me just stopped working.
Renovations are exactly like losing your dog. Except for when it’s not.
It’s one of those situations – and it’s certainly not the only one – in which you are called upon to live in the spaces in between the chaos.
I come from a really big family that celebrates both Divali and Christmas; you’d think I would have a firm hand on this. But somehow no.
Back to the dust. An interrogation of the space was made. Pictures were taken; wooden cupboards checked for termites; holes in walls have been made to check for whatever you check walls for. This pre-reno work has created dust so thick there are paw – and footprints in every room. Even the ones where nothing was touched.
I was an allergy baby. Some people still think I’m a bit of a baby. Debatable. The allergies are not in question. I sneeze if there’s a dusty or mouldy room in a movie. I have what a friend charmingly calls a bad case of bug-eye. Rashes are making free with my arms, legs and face.
And, worst of all, the grunting is in full force. If you suffer from anything that compromises your breathing, you may already know about the grunting. If you don’t, try to imagine snoring with a cheese grater stuck to the roof of your mouth. You have to pretend the cheese grater has a voice. And the snoring has to be of the piggly variety.
I might be able to brave through the things that will not kill me (though it will feel like that is a likely outcome) if I didn’t have the accompanying anxiety. Things will almost certainly take longer than estimated. I don’t really know how anything will look in the end. I don’t know if things will be so much better that it will all be worth it.
The Cats’ Father’s latest show of superhuman strength was hitting his head on the dryer door and denting it. I may not like it, but I feel our relationship is strong enough to survive it. I’ve forgiven him so many broken coffee cups and beloved plates, what’s a dryer door?
But I really do hate losing things to carelessness (and hard heads). I am now tormented by the idea that something or some things will be trampled, crushed or tossed aside no matter how many things are boxed, bubble-wrapped or under divine protection. And how are the cats to survive all this upheaval?
Not for the first time I wish I was more like the Cats’ Father. As we stood in an empty room we are able to inhabit, he remarked on the excitement of the new. He loves the feel of the space and thought of making it ours, even if temporary.
You see a man full of hope. I see one whose eyes don’t swell up when there is sawdust in the air.
The post Havoc in our sixth year appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.