Aging is the subject of constant comments, either bemoaning it, embracing it, or something in between. I have always liked the comparison of aging to the whack-a-mole game: You no sooner beat one thing down than something else goes wrong. And recently I’m thinking how my old house and I are playing the same game.
First there’s the foundation that begins to settle. I’m told that’s what causes the cracks in the plaster after many years of holding firm. Unfortunately, the one room where I have stenciling around the top of the walls is taking the biggest hit, and there’s no way to fix that. Every few years when I get measured at the doctor’s office, I discover that I have settled again. I used to love getting measured by marks on the bathroom door—proof that I was, indeed, growing up. But now both my old house and I are sinking lower and lower into ourselves, and the plaster cracks and I are getting wider with settlement. But we’re not sunk yet.
On the house exterior, the paint is peeling in spots, and there’s also evidence of patched places in a slightly different shade of red. My skin is “patchy,” too, and becoming more and more difficult to cover over. What used to be faint lines or “bumps” could be camouflaged with a few strokes of powder. It takes considerably more to cover age spots and whatever else appears. I could get aluminum siding for the house and plastic surgery for me, but both are expensive, and besides, we’re both in a historic district.
I remember thinking about it, though. As a really big birthday approached, I Googled a writer whom I remembered as having made turning 40 hilarious; I wondered if she could do the same for me now. Staring from the screen was a dark-haired woman, wide-eyed, as though she were seeing a ghost or an alien. Her forehead and cheeks were so taut they looked as though they could spring back at any minute, like a window shade, and fold into ripples of wrinkles. I noticed she had, indeed, written a book on turning 80, but clearly she hadn’t thought it funny enough not to do something about it when it happened to her. Looking at the woman on the screen, my face hurt, and I realized how unsettling it would be to have a surprised woman always looking back at me from the mirror. I’d be looking behind me to see what was there. A new coat of paint on my old house would make it look surprised, too.
But it’s not just about the surface of things. There are cobwebs in the basement of my house, and in the attic for me. I’m sure there are spiders busily spinning in the cellar, but worse is the lint from the dryer. When I moved the washer and dryer to a front hall closet, the dryer hose had to vent into the basement. I rarely go down there—it’s accessed by a bulkhead that requires a trip outside—and when I do, I feel as though I am surrounded by wraiths, with gray fuzzy arms reaching down from the pipes to grab my hair. Once, when they were young, the grandchildren were “doing chores” for me, and Ben’s job was to sweep down the lint in the cellar. He immediately came out crying, “Grandma, why did you send me down there?”
I have lint in my head. I walk into the kitchen and wonder what I’m doing there. I see someone I know and the name teases at me from behind a wall of fog. I show up somewhere and only then remember I was supposed to bring something. But what?
A lot of our mechanicals are starting to fail. In any given room, one outlet will give you a light, but one across the room? Nothing. Last winter the furnace triggered the fire alarm twice before the service man figured out what was wrong. I’m finding that if my knee doesn’t hurt, my head does, and if my head doesn’t hurt, I’m a little bit nauseous. Nothing yet that my service people can’t take care of.
So my house and I keep playing the game, and aim to keep winning as long as we can.
