"A Year's Hard Labor" (Nov. 2010)

One full year into the service of home ownership, and my masters and overseers, "Old House" and "Mortgage"

Here we are again, November - you and I. The election and World Series and the season's first frost all lie in our shared past. Where were we last year when you came to visit? Ah yes, of course - that mad six week dash from closing on the house to actually getting it ready enough to get all our stuff into it on the day of the first snowfall. I remember now. A lot of work you were.

In truth, I've been nowhere near the infamous Fort Leavenworth KS this past year, but I have now officially completed a year at work as "Harry Homeowner". The job description requires a set of skills that I am poorly matched for, but once one accepts the assignment it's skills be damned, or more accurately, "damn, I wish I could do THAT myself!"

Our woes are little different from any who own an old home replete with all its charms. A new furnace and a new section of roof to replaced are familiar items on the checklist to many of my colleagues at this particular firm. We spackle and scrape and paint and caulk and curse and spill and redo and replumb with all the vim and vigor required, but some of us are clearly better suited than others.

But though I survey the rooms of our mortgage company's gamble and see projects to be completed or begun in every direction, I realize the fruits of my labors are bountiful too. A neglected landscape now is free of trashy trees and most of their stumps, garden beds here and there are bulbed and mulched for the winter, and the remains of a surprisingly respectable vegetable gardens hang their heads at the mercy of this season's first hard frost. The peppers safely pack in the inside of our chest freezer ready to bring tastes of summer to our table in the dead of the coming winter.

Our modest kitchen and dining room have become joyful places to sit and converse with friends over $8 a bottle wine or a dram from the local distillery, filled with the scents of good food lovingly prepared. The bay windows of the living room fill with the colors of indoor plants and the last flaming maple leaves of the season. And the basement and attic both show signs of industriousness completed and yet to come.

So while I certainly am not going to be making a video for This Old House anytime soon, I am relieved to find that I actually have developed a few new and useful skills over the last year. And I have relaxed enough about the work yet undone to resume the creative pursuits that are my life in music once again with the same intensity - three new songs last week, and some video production of my own as well as the big live CD and DVD work that is ongoing with my Beyond Borders bandmates. The squirrels outside my windows are hard at work, I guess I'd better keep at it too.

Now, where's that hammer?

(For fun, read last November's essay, "Windows, Walls and Wars")