Welcome to Rattletrap Manor

You know that dream, the one where you're in the old house? You're wandering from room to room, and you keep finding new rooms and new doors. Half-doors leading into crawlspaces, locked doors leading nowhere that you can't find from the other side?

I live in that house.

Welcome to May's last post, its days scattered like a rhodo dropping its bell-shaped flowers on the lawn. The hot pink month is giving way to summer, and my house is way cool.

The move has been so fluid it's like I went to sleep in one house and woke up transported into another. Someone refolded my flat and it turned from a lemon drop into a coconut-cream-filled Ritter Sport bar, all without mussing my hair.

It's given me a strange weightless sensation. I can't have jet lag -- we're not in a new time zone. I seem to have place lag. I keep thinking I'm still in Vancouver, or I'm about to be. This seems like a really good bed and breakfast (albeit with a curious lack of furniture) that I'm going to have to leave any day now to make way for a writer's retreat.

Still, everything has gone eerily smoothly. Knock wood.

And I can knock wood. I can knock wood until my knuckles go numb because wood is everywhere. Wood paneling to my eyebrows in the dining room. Built-in wood hutch with passthrough to kitchen in same. Massive wood mantle and hardwood floors. And a washer-dryer, not, fortunately, made of wood.

The house has its eccentricities. In the old house, the kitchen cupboards had been cut down from a set torn out of an entirely different kitchen, and didn't even vaguely fit. The doors had to be closed in a certain order or they wouldn't shut, and some would only open halfway. The corner cupboards had hinged doors with absurdly out of proportion partitions -- one tiny bar of ugly beige facing, and one full-size door piece.

Here, the kitchen cupboards are relatively normal, but someone built a shelf out over the end of the bathtub, apparently to catch and save water in case of a drought. Might've wanted to reconsider building it out of wood in that case. Oh, the love of wood has ruined many mighty handyfolk. Sing the minstrels.

But we love it. We love it. The creaking floors, the constant ghostly breeze--

The co-conspirator's room is like a Greek house, or more precisely a Greek glassed-in porch, with windows on three sides and a tame mistral that cleans and conditions. My room is a mad artist's studio the colour of antique gesso.

Strange currents are moving us towards adulthood. We made a Purchase this weekend. No, no, not a car. Not a house. (This is our house. We seek no other.)

We went to Woodpecker. They carry locally-made furniture, sometimes made of reclaimed materials. And we bought a couch.

A real couch. Not a futon doubled over like someone in gastrointestinal distress. Not three inflatable armchairs lashed together with jump ropes. This is a Sofa. It is a vast camel-backed creature shrouded in a fabric I rejoice to tell you is named Quince. Quince is a nubbly greenish-golden-gray of devastating aesthetic value. Mr. Nilson and Mr. Tandram are coming over for tea tomorrow and I am going to explain to them that you don't have to bear fruit to be fruitful. I am living proof.

We walked along the ocean yesterday. The real ocean. Not the tame, pet, dirty, defeated ocean of Vancouver. The wild, chaotic, angry blue ocean that you love more because it doesn't love you back.

Er, sorry, I've been watching Buffy all evening. Season 6 came out about fifteen minutes ago. We would have gotten it sooner, but we were moving.

-rf