Mugs procreate on our counters...
It smells like chemical and pigment and metal cans. My house smells like workmen, heavy and masculine with cigarette smoke and black coffee. Tarps cover our warm floors, mugs procreate on our counters, reveling in their recent employment by large hands, rough and capable. I trip over toolboxes when I wake up in the morning, small toes grating against cold metal, spattered with paint and caulking.
Our everyday functions have been packed away in blue plastic tubs, like playdough containers for our lives. Popping the tops of these is almost a daily ritual- to find the magic markers or the spring placemats or an extra pack of batteries. My mother's sanity has been packed away bin by bin with all the accouterments of day to day life...and replaced with frenzied lists of numbers and quotes.
Things, left squeaky, rough, or dull since I can remember are now oiled, sanded and polished. What we never did for our selves we now do so we can whore out our house to the highest bidder. Cracks in the plaster are filled, and paint layed down on walls that saw my fathers first steps and my own. But now someone will come in, size up our stoic old house like a girl on the corner, with no regard to the nine Rizzos that have spent time with in it's walls during the last 40 years. And maybe the owner will remember the name from the paper work for a year or two...but soon it will fade from his memory as he slowly scrubs our memories from its walls. The house will sigh and settle, missing the affection of those who knew it best.
Even when I've long left, I will always remember how to pull the door just right so the key will turn, the metallic taste of the water and the sounds of my father's feet on the stairs. What I will miss most is those stairs, the ones I have tripped up and down, broken my wrist at the bottom of, and sobbed on when no other part of the house understands.
Our house is full of awkward men and strained moments. Fights and hard work, spray paint and quote sheets have paved our road to saying good bye. Soon I'll stand over a kitchen sink that has never seen my tears or my blood, a shower that hasn't washed away sixteen years of grass stains and broken hearts. But for now, I hold on to my house, the walls that have insulated our lives for so long.
My house smells like paint.