The inspector's report came back with a laundry list of things "wrong" with our house -- basement windows and hidden leaks and tree roots making their way into the water line. I was suitably dismayed.

One of my oldest and dearest friends is a freelance writer and we talked together tonight -- a last catch-up before I go. He is working on a big story now for National Geographic -- a story about pediatric hospice. After 20 minutes of me rambling on about basement windows and tree roots, etc., the words "pediatric hospice" detonated into the echoing air of our empty house.

I do not care now about basement windows and tree roots, etc. It is good to remember that none of this bullshit matters.

I do not believe that I am moving to Italy. No really. Not in my heart.

I am, at the moment, very much here -- thinking hard about the house, my house, because it has been requiring so much attention lately. And the car. And the utility bill. And the rest of the long list of things that must be done in the next five days. Italy has not seemed real for many weeks now. Or, if it has, only fleetingly, in waves.

We made a reservation at a hotel in Pietrasanta for our first few days in country, before the Rustic Farmhouse With Trusted Gardener is ready for us. The online picture of its lobby puts me in mind not of Italy, but of our very own kitchen floor here at our house, whose checkerboard tiles we installed ourselves one winter, the boys and Jonathan and I.

But then Jonathan got an email from Lorenzo at the hotel asking about our expected arrival time and for one minute, Italy seemed like it was really happening.

We were caught off-guard by the house inspectors, who surprised us by coming over without warning first thing early Wednesday morning. Despite our discomfiture at this, we were fortunate that the bed did happen to be made and that Jonathan was in fact wearing pants. This is not always the case.

We wait now to hear the report -- Jonathan nonchalantly, me with loathing in my heart for our judges. If they can't see that the beauty of the house makes all the tiny quirks (solid roofs are vastly overrated, in my opinion, and really just separate us from nature and our animal kin in a way that is surely detrimental to our very souls) that come with living in such a unique (experience the wilderness!) place worth it, then they do not deserve this house (the elements are our friends -- welcome them with open arms!)

Driving down Union Boulevard last week, we were caught in a sudden deluge when the heavens opened up and it seemed like the sky itself was, at long last, as predicted, falling. Any rain at all is an event around here and we have been known to go out and stand on our porch to stare open-mouthed at a light drizzle, but this was really an astounding downpour.

"You know," Jonathan said to me while bravely navigating between the sudden-onset lagoons that had appeared in the road, "in Italy, we will have to get used to rain." And for just one minute, Italy was real.

The listing for our house went live this morning. I have only cried twice. Maybe three times.

Jonathan and I are now sitting outside at the Dogtooth Café while strange people judge the suitability of our Eden for their own purposes. In a while, we will go up into the mountains and stare at the sky. But for the moment, I have to be somewhere with cellphone coverage so that I can approve appointments through the appointments app. It is all hideous.

We did the last things this morning at dawn -- putting down the edging in the garden, weeding the front flower beds. Our little house is ready now, as best it can be, to make its way in the world without us.

I wonder whether all the years of joy we had in it -- all the bedtime stories and sudden delight at morning glories and cups of tea in the evenings and the hidden messages we wrote under the kitchen tile we put down and the long, slow summer afternoons when we did nothing much but we did it together -- will all of that have somehow soaked into the house so that the people who go into the house will sense it there? Will 26 years of love make itself felt? Will the ghosts of our hearts haunt the place even when we're gone? 

My new best friends the painting crew are here. I am in the only room of the house that is not being painted while they go through a thousand rolls of blue masking tape in all the other rooms.

This is the 10th stage of the process of revolutionizing our lives out of 12 stages total. I made a list.

One: The Wild Romantic Imagination Stage. I think it was cold. I think it was even snowing. Or maybe it was just another bleak winter day when Jonathan and I hatched our plan. I don't remember exactly how it came about other than that it started as an inchoate longing to go somewhere new together.

Two: The Doing Things Online Stage. This is an easy and fun stage. It is easy and fun to surf the net looking at rental properties on hillsides in Tuscany, for example. Or to search for the menus of restaurants that would be near you and decide what you would eat if you were actually there at the moment. Or to drive around on Google Street View ogling the produce outside the "Frutte e Verdure" or the bread in the window of the "Galleria del Pane". It is so easy and fun that, in an excited dither, suddenly (over the course of one full month) we had rented a rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener on an actual hillside in Tuscany.

Three: The Sorting Through Decades of Our Stuff With a Hard and Critical Eye Stage. Visit 1 out of 99 to the ARC donation station.

Four: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part One (also Crying Stage -- Part One). The tiny baby shoes! The homemade birthday cards! The little bag of extracted wisdom teeth! (Well, maybe not the teeth...)

Five: The Making Friends With Skilled Craftspeople Stage. Oh, the parade of people who actually know what they are doing (aka, not us)! Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, contractors, floor refinishers -- we have come to know and love you, been through challenges together (trucks that wouldn't start, damp, spiders, kidney stones, attack dogs) and learned each others' secrets. Our time together has been ... special.

Six: The Standing Together in the Epoxy Aisle of Home Depot Trying Very Hard to Concentrate On How Much We Actually Love Each Other Stage. Nuff said.

Seven: The Finally Packing It All Up Into Storage Stage. Followed very quickly (and inevitably) by the Oops! I Need That Again One More Time substage.

Eight: The Farewell Tour Stage. Coffee and crying with dear friends. Mostly crying. My friends are understanding and tolerant. And also -- fortunately -- waterproof.

Nine: The Precious Relics Stage -- Part Two. Is it possible to pack up and carry away with me enough objects so that I can hold on forever to those years when the boys were growing up here and I had them with me every day? No. (More crying.)

Ten: The Everything Gets Painted Beige Stage. And our life here is erased.

So that is where we are now. There are still two stages and 21 days left to go.

Eleven: The Having Strangers Sit In Judgement Of The Place That Has Been Our Eden Stage. We will try to be out of the house whenever it is being shown by the real estate agent. Obviously.

Twelve: The Walking Away Stage. Actually, driving away in a rental car that we will return at the airport while, almost certainly, crying. And then it will be a whole new world -- the dreams of a bleak winter day made real.

It has recently occurred to me that for the rest of my life, this time now will be "that last summer."

I will turn to Jonathan years from now and say, "Remember that last summer in Colorado when we stuffed ourselves with Pueblo corn because we knew it would be the last?" or "Well, Tris moved to Alaska that last summer we were in Colorado, so that would have been 2022" or "Remember that last summer when we kept getting rid of furniture so that we ate off smaller and smaller tables until finally we only had a kitchen stool in the dining room and then finally at the end we had nothing but picnics on our futon on the floor?"

The contractor has now finished the repair work in the basement. His baby was born 10 days ago, between two of his residencies here. It is a little boy -- everyone is healthy and happy and sleep-deprived, as is customary. This means that we have been working on this house so long that children have actually come into the world during the process. No word yet on whether our new little contractor will be named after me. I am sure they are probably thinking about it, though! Fingers crossed!

There is new beige carpet in the boys' old bedroom, completely changing the quality of the light in there. The house painters will be here next week and paint all the walls beige, which is apparently what home buyers these days want in a house. I find this depressing and also, as a cultural sociologist, an important clue to the general psyche of the American populace. People who would want to live in an all-beige house would absolutely elect far-right fascists to office. The cruelty is the point.

As I write, hidden away in a corner, the hardwood floor is being refinished. It was supposed to happen last week, but the head refinisher had to have some kidney stones out. It's the whole circle of life around here. 

While the finish on the floors is drying, we are not able to walk on them, which means our access to our only bathroom is cut off. For two days. We have bought an 8-foot 4x4 beam which we intend to use as a bridge between the kitchen (which we can reach through the back door) and the bathroom. At first, we thought about just trying to leap across the distance, but even with a running start and an empty bladder, the reality of inadvertently slamming into the projecting corner of the basement stairwell and crumbling into a heap on the (presumably) sticky hardwood hallway floor and being stuck there until EMTs pried me up using (again, presumably) some sort of very large crowbar was, well, off-putting.

"Remember that last summer in Colorado," Jonathan will say, "when we had to have the floors refinished twice?"

I am feeling chastised by my tea bags.

The latest one says, "The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace." Inside my head, the tea bag says this in an exasperated voice, more like: "For god's sake, try to enter it with some fucking grace, unlike your usual pathetic MO." So here, on the precipice of this big life transition into the unknown, I am trying to muster some fucking grace.

This mostly involves keeping the plants watered and eating things other than tortilla chips. Sometimes. Last week I ate some raspberry sorbet, which I feel is a more graceful thing to eat than queso dip straight out of the jar with a spoon. 

I realize that the tea bag is not meant to be censorious and that my reading of it is entirely about my own longstanding feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. But the demands of the moment do not exactly make adequacy easy to achieve.

The contractors are here working on the basement all week and my finished manuscript is due at the publishers on Friday. I am in the footnotes/bibliography/permissions phase and have been for several days now. It never occurred to me that The Chicago Manual of Style would ever come to play such a large part of my emotional life. But here we are.

I have typed the sentence "I am in footnote hell" into a few emails. Scarily, this had led the data-mining algorithm that rules our lives to switch all the ads I get on YouTube. They used to be dominated by ads for Vrbo vacation homes. Now they are almost all suicide prevention/counseling/antidepressant ads. This, I think, is going too far. While figuring out how to get permission to reprint text from a now-defunct one-off 1937 magazine is tedious, I'm not going to kill myself over it. Not while I still have all these tortilla chips to eat.

The landscapers have come and gone, taming our overgrown jungle, once so wild and tangled. Now it is a tidy and respectable yard that any normal person would be pleased to have.

"I hope you get a chance to enjoy it some before you leave," the head landscaper said on his way out.

"It looks great!" I said. I did not say that I had enjoyed it the way it was before or that I had always thought there was something magical about the jungle. I did not say that the wildness was on purpose.

When I first moved into this house, I painted a poem on the ceiling of my bedroom with green paint. It was nice to have poetry to read in the night when the babies were at last asleep and I could hear the sounds of the trains when they came through town in the dark and the quiet.

It was a long poem and it took me two days to paint it. It is surprisingly hard to look straight up for two days. At the end of all that time balanced on a step-ladder with my head bent back, a paintbrush in one hand and a can of paint in the other, I had a newfound respect for Michelangelo. Painting just one poem on a ceiling almost permanently debilitated me. The Sistine Chapel must have been a bitch. But it was worth it for the poetry in the night.

Then, when we moved back into this house after our two-year Swiss sojourn, the movers who were carrying our boxes in assumed that we were new to the house. One of them saw the poem.

"Jeez," he said, scowling and perplexed. "Did ya buy this place from some Satan worshippers or something? There's a poem on the ceiling in there!"

I didn't tell him that I had painted it myself, that I had always thought there was something magical in it, that the poetry was on purpose. The Devil apparently speaks in rhymes -- the better to beguile us, I guess.

But the poem is gone now, too. Anyone normal would be happy to have this house.

The landscapers are here today, using actual muscle power to dig up the weeds that I have been merely snatching at in a desultory way for over twenty years. The workers seem very competent and knowledgeable and efficient. After experiencing me all this time, I hope the contrast doesn't cause the lawn to die of shock.

We had maintained a high degree of hope. This is because an unflagging optimism is the essential hallmark of our characters. And also because the recent residencies of both the plumber and the electrician had led us into an, as it turns out, unreasonably rosy view. But the real estate agent, who came for the first time today, did not beat around the bush.

We have damp.

Not fatal damp. Not damp that cannot be ameliorated. But damp nonetheless.

How is it possible, we ask ourselves, living as we do in a freaking desert, that we have damp? Wildfires rage around us. The backyard shrubbery withers in the relentless sun. My own personal skin is so dry that I am beginning to look like beef jerky (well, I'm pretty pale, so I guess chicken jerky.) But my house! My house has moisture to spare! My lips are cracked, the skin of my heels is like hooves. My hair is as dry as straw. But my basement is moist and glossy.

The Clairol Company called. They want the basement to star in a new series of conditioner advertisements where there will be several slo-mo shots of it to show how silky and moisture-rich it is. I asked if we would shoot on location or if the house would have to travel to Hollywood. They are checking with the producers and will call us back. We hope the residuals will cover the costs of repairing the damp. Fingers crossed!

A lot of action here at the house this week. The contractor has come and given us an estimate -- 6000 clams to get everything done. The landscaper ditto -- 10,000 clams. That's a lot of clams before we even get to the part where new paint and wallpaper are installed by someone who actually knows what they're doing (i.e., not me). I prefer to think of the cost in clams rather than in dollars because that makes it seem more palatable.

It also makes me much more reconciled to the idea of selling the house and never again seeing the ineffable quality of light in the boys' old room. At 16,000+ clams, those are some pretty f-able sunbeams.

We are at the stage now of donating furniture -- a big chair, a big table, a little refrigerator, other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. This is a happy part of the moving process if only because someone other than us (strong young whippersnappers from the ARC, presumably) will be the ones to lift it all up.

I was really elated yesterday to find that the rolling cart which had disappeared from the storage facility for the past month has now returned. It was the best news of my entire week. This says something profound about my life this week.

What it says is: "For someone supposedly so passionate about Marxist theory, I sure own a lot of shit."

Yesterday was it -- the last day ever of my teaching career. The last reading assignment was two chapters from Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Façade and the very last line of reading that we discussed was Robert Venturi's quote about valuing the "the difficult unity of inclusion over the easy unity of exclusion" and how inclusion may indeed be more difficult, but it is also so much more beautiful.

The class is a group of really lovely students and they had made a card for me and we took a picture together and several of them spoke to me afterwards in really heartfelt ways and I, naturally, cried hard.

But now that part of my life is over. This morning, I am sitting home drinking coffee while they are beginning their final exam. I have grading still to do, of course, and the last scraps of bureaucracy. But the thing that has been one of the centers of my life for three decades -- talking with undergraduates about ideas and issues -- is over with now. I have no idea what my new reality will be.

It will certainly involve power tools, though. The contractor came in the afternoon to look at the hole in the basement wall created when Jonathan fell through the window-well two years ago. His comments on seeing it can be summarized mostly as, "Oh, my god." He is sending an estimate for the work today or tomorrow. The work itself probably won't be completed until June.

Jonathan and I shared a split of The Widow last night (in commemoration of the teaching, not the contractor) and ate some treats from our favorite bakery. And today, as I sit surrounded by boxes and empty walls, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it is time for class and yet somehow I am not in class.

 

The inspector came on Friday to inspect the repairs we've had done on the house lately. We were pretty nervous about it. We have learned the hard way over many years of experience that it is generally best for us if we are not inspected too closely. It is generally best for us if we are, instead, observed only dimly, in passing, and from a distance, so that we can retain an air of considerable mystery.

We went into this whole "inspection" thing, therefore, with some trepidation. 

So the plumbing inspector showed up at 8:59 a.m. and was finished by 9:03 a.m. (I looked at the clock.) 

We passed. All was good. No problem. We had even begun to celebrate the fruits of our victory by drinking from the hose in the backyard.

But then the other shoe, as it inevitably does, dropped.

The ELECTRICAL inspector showed up. We had not realized that we were going to be electrically inspected as well. There had been no mention of it during our lovely friend the electrician's multi-day residency at the house. We were taken unawares. And I'm sorry to report that we did not pass the inspection.

It turns out that we need a new special kind of circuit-breaker now. It is a new regulation that has only come into effect recently and has apparently surprised everyone. It certainly surprised us. The inspector was quite kind and did not blame us for the state of our circuit-breakers because there is really no way we could have known. But the fact remains that our lovely friend the electrician will have to return for another engagement in his residency. Sort of a postdoc, I guess.

So we passed our test, but failed the pop quiz. Having given so many pop quizzes myself during my career, I can only wonder if this is not instant karma coming back once again to bite me.

Our lovely best friend the electrician came to visit yesterday and stayed with us for seven and a half hours. He is very friendly and capable and he fixed absolutely everything. We now have working lights with non-taking-your-life-in-your-own-hands wiring down in the basement and all of the electrical outlets (both inside and outside of the house) now have actual electrical current reaching them and the ceiling lights in the bathroom and the dining room are no longer sort of dangling. He even replaced the light over the kitchen sink that went on the fritz immediately following his last visit. It was more than just the broken baklava and he had to replace the whole thing, but it is all new and shiny/shining now.

As things had slowly disintegrated over the past couple of decades, we had gradually gotten used to it -- carrying a flashlight down in the basement, not plugging things in on the front porch. We had accommodated ourselves. But now it is blindingly bright and electrified everywhere and we even practically need sunglasses in the basement. When Jonathan first went down there, he said, "Wow!" When I first went down there a while later, I said, "Wow!" It's like we are Neanderthals discovering fire.

Our dear friend left about seven o'clock, leaving us (at long last) in a house where every single light, outlet, socket, wire, and switch was in perfect working order. We sprang into action making some dinner. Jonathan turned on the light over the stove and -- may the gods strike me dead this very moment if this is not absolutely true -- it came on for two seconds and then died.

 

It's not that we don't try. God knows we try. And God laughs at us.

We had the electrician in. We had a long to-do list. The electrician did some of the list and is coming back next week with the parts to do the rest. He gave us an estimate of both time and money. We gave him a check. We handled it and it is supposed to stay handled. For at least, you know, a week.

But now, the light over the kitchen sink has stopped working. It is not a regular light -- even I can just change a regular light bulb. It is a special light and I am flummoxed.

"Ah," Jonathan says. "It needs a new baklava." (In actuality, he says a technical, light-and-electricity-related word starting with "b" that means nothing to me and that I immediately dismiss from my consciousness.)

Jonathan then buys a new baklava and disassembles the light and removes the old baklava and puts in the new baklava. I watch, rapt. But the light still doesn't work. He does various things, most of which seem to be turning the light off and on again repeatedly, but nothing happens. (To be clear, I did not marry him for his electrical expertise -- I married him for his body.) I wander off.

We will tell our new best friend the electrician about this when he comes again this week and hope he can figure out what is wrong. He seems to know his stuff and is very kind.

But I look around the house suspiciously, trying to figure out what will go on the fritz as soon as he leaves. It may be electrical or it may be something else entirely. The gods like to keep us guessing. They are assholes like that.

The electrician was here yesterday. He was a lovely person, which is good because we will be seeing more of him in the coming days.

We had a to-do list and a sense of dread. It was a long list and a well-justified sense of dread, given the state of things. We have relied on duct tape and prayer for many years now. But it wasn't as bad as we feared. At least we do not need to have the entire house re-wired, which was my big -- and completely reasonable -- anxiety. But it was a long list and he will be back next week to do more of it.

In the meantime, I moved the first load of books into our new storage unit today. They are very heavy and turned our Subaru Impreza into a low-rider. The important thing to remember about your car's suspension is that it likes to be tested, to be challenged, pushed to see how far it can go. Otherwise, it becomes restless and irritable. Also, after a decade of Jonathan's driving, we are selling the car for parts in May anyway.

And we sent an email to the rental agent about the rustic farmhouse and got back a very favorable reply. The rent is more than we intended to spend, but we couldn't help ourselves -- we were swept away by beauty. It's the old story. We are talking to the agent tomorrow on the phone to settle everything.

This is a video of us making the decision:

If there is one thing that global climate change has taught us, it is that you never know when summer will come, how long it will last, or how much of it you will get all at once. Today we have: a Red Flag fire alert, snow on the ground, sunshine and 60 degrees, and a snow storm predicted for tomorrow. So I painted the fence.

Not all of it -- only about two-thirds of it and then, thank god, I ran out of paint. The paint had been sitting here on the living room floor unopened for almost a year. I bought it last spring, planning to paint the fence as soon as the blizzards stopped. It turned out, though, that the thing that stopped the blizzards was a record-breaking, sudden-onset heat wave that lasted all summer.

At first, I felt bad about the paint, just sitting there looking at me, all ready in its can with its paintbrush and paint-can opener and paint-stirring stick on top of it. But after a while, as the killer heat wave just went on and on, I thought, "Fuck it." It's like washing your car to make it rain. If my fence-painting plans are the cause of so much misery -- lawns and gardens destroyed, wild animals suffering, farmers ruined -- then I'll just have to let that paint sit right there forever, stirring stick be damned. I did sort of move it off to one side of the living room, though.

But today I outfoxed the weather gods and painted (two-thirds of) the fence on a balmy summer day in February. I expect the fence will catch fire and burn down tonight. I just hope no one is hurt.

Regarding yesterday's residency by the plumber ("visit" is too slight a word): 

It has been so long since we've had anyone over to our house that it felt somehow momentous that another human being would be here. The effect was to cause me to re-evaluate our interior "decoration" through the eyes of a stranger: Jonathan's juggling clubs hanging on the wall in the dining room, papier mache pigs flying around everywhere, the "cork tree" I made a few weeks ago by hanging wine corks from our potted hibiscus tree, the glowing cardboard sun. Only now do I realize that our large and lovely wooden carving of the Rarotongan god, Tangaroa, showing very clearly why he is considered the god of fertility, perhaps could have been displayed less prominently.

He never asked about our jobs, despite living with us for so long and having seen so many secret recesses of our world. I hope it's because he just assumed that we are circus performers.

The plumber was here for five hours today. During that time, darkness fell and the snow began to fall. I contemplated the nature of time and the universe and also did our taxes.

But all of our plumbing is now like plumbing that normal people have.

We were going to have a lovely chicken and lentil curry for our dinner, but that has not happened because of no running water for five hours. We are getting a pizza instead.

Looking at my old journals from when I lived in Italy 40 years ago, I found these soup labels. You might not have thought that Campbell's Soup would have been widely available in Italy in 1983, but apparently it was. I would not have thought I would have eaten it, but apparently I did.

Today I took the first step in the massive home repair monstrosity that will make it possible for someone else to live in this house. We imagine that the entire colossus will take us about six months.

Over time, houses evolve and we have evolved with this house. For example, when I bought this house, you turned on the water in the outdoor faucet in the front yard by turning on the outdoor faucet in the front yard. Those were simpler times. Now you turn on the outdoor faucet in the front yard by flipping a lever down in the basement in a hidden secret recess behind the water heater. There is a reason for this, but it is a complicated reason that evolved over several months and several plumbers and I am afraid that other people would not understand. I won't even go into the story of the light switch in the exact middle of the bedroom wall or how to work the garage door.

(A friend of mine was once rejected by the cleaning service she had called because they said that they would never be able to clean the gunk off her screen door. "But couldn't you just ignore it?" my friend said. "That's what we've been doing all this time." Exactly my point.)

We have evolved with the house over time and now the enormity of deep repair is upon us. It is best to ease into the situation slowly, though, as if you are about to swim with sharks. No one wants to make any sudden movements or big splashes. And the first step is the hardest.

So today I glued the broken picket on the front gate back together with wood glue. It is setting right now, temporarily held together with duct tape. Fortunately, snow is expected in the next couple of days and this will delay my plan to re-paint the fence, giving me time to rest up. But I have now crossed one thing off the gargantuan to-do list. Only nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine more to go.