Notes from Maine - 2022/03/13
I just had my first cup of coffee in a week. It wasn’t great. I expected more. By the middle of last week, a few days after taking a break from coffee, I was starting to question everything. Why am I here? What am I doing? What’s next? The coffee had been shielding me from all these existential questions. When I ripped away the veil of caffeine, I found the world to be much more dusty and bleak than I remembered.
Now, I’m sitting here, hoping that everything will be okay. It will. I’m sure of it. I just need to lose myself in some task and feel like I’ve accomplished something.
My mother works on a point system. When she does something altruistic, she’ll say something like, “I earned major points for that one.” She’ll finish a project around her house and say, “Big time points.” If she calls and informs you of something, she’ll ask, “Do I get points for figuring that out?”
I’m not sure that anyone is keeping a tally of these points, which is a shame. Over the course of her life, I’m sure she has accumulated a record number. By now, she should have enough points to redeem for a row boat or a sewing machine.
I’m thinking about my mother because it’s her birthday this week, and she’s coming to visit. I’m in a little bit of a panic, because I don’t have anything for her to paint. If I can point to a ceiling or the wall of a seldom-used room, and tell her that it needs a fresh coat of paint, I know her trip will go smoothly. If I don’t have a project lined up, then I’m going to be left dealing with whatever project she invents for herself. She enjoys tearing a bathroom down to the studs and then informing me that it’s ready to be remodeled. Typically, her demolition commences a day or two before she leaves.
Maybe I could get her to work on one of the broken windows in the barn. When Earl turns around, he’s not always cognizant of his size. One of these days, he will knock down an entire wall. I wonder if I could convince her to pick up some of the branches that have fallen over the winter. I doubt it. That’s not a marquee project—a project where she can demonstrate a new skill that she has acquired. There are no points involved in doing regular chores.
If you’re wondering, I didn’t invite her up just to exploit her free labor. In fact, she informed me that she was coming up here because there was, “Nothing to do anymore.” She has run out of projects at home. My siblings are often curious as to why she doesn’t go to their houses and work on things. The answer is simple—she values their opinion too much. My mother has convinced herself that she can’t work up to their standards, and so she doesn’t want to try. Here, she’s allowed to experiment and get things wrong. She can leave footprints in the grout. She can grind a screw head into a perfectly smooth surface by misaligning the bit. It doesn’t matter to me. I do sloppy work too.
Ever since moving in here, I’ve been a DIY person. I don’t clean out the septic tanks myself, or clean the furnace, but almost everything else falls to me. Leaks, rot, plumbing, electrical, windows, and remodeling are all under my umbrella. It’s not because I wanted to learn all these things, although I did. When I first moved in, I called a dozen places looking for someone to clean the chimney. Only a couple answered or returned my call, and nobody was willing to set an appointment. I still don’t know why. Was I supposed to beg them? Keep calling until they relented? Feeling powerless and with no other recourse, I bought a brush and learned how to clean it myself. I hated it—still do. I think I got big points for it thought (I’ll have to check with Mom).
To save myself the embarrassment of calling people to come do work, I just did things on my own. Lots of things got screwed up and had to be redone. Some things are still screwed up. Maybe that’s why Mom feels comfortable coming here to work on things. Nobody checks her work here—I have low standards. I like the sock prints in the grout and the bumpy wall in the gym. They remind me of her. Hope you’re well.
