(Not) Our House

Our first choice for a house was owned by a very nice man. When another group of his tenants suffered a devastating fire in their house he offered them “ours”. We did not get that house.

My Ambassador and I discovered our second choice of a house while on a walk around the neighborhood. We were (or, at least, I was) on a St. Patrick’s Day quest for Guinness and noticed the house. Two blocks down from our current moldering roach trap. Three bedrooms. Two stories. A back yard. A detached, two door garage. A finished basement complete with carpeting and a secret room I’d loved to turn into a Batcave…all this and a tree in the back yard, its branches pruned and sawed away, true, but it was still a live and I planned to see that it grew strong in time…but we were slow.

As a unit, as a household, we were slow. Uncoordinated. There are four of us now: my self, my Co-President Dye, my Ambassador (who is also my love and heart) and our new member who of this writing has not received nearly enough ceremony. She has yet to be initiated into the modern self-made family/nation state we call Monster Island. I supposed she will be Speaker for the Conclave at some point (thereby giving us a Legislative branch to balance our Duel Executive) but that point has yet to come. At present she does not even live with us. And while she has the soul of a patient confidant I have the distinct impression that she is not yet One of Us…and will only become so through the same patient weathering process that drove all of us toward each other and made us all what we are now.

We will find a house. We must. We can no longer manage this place. Rent is up a hundred dollars in three years and we’ve suffered a parade of foolish, self-infatuated toads who’ve posed as our Apartment managers. The current batch are no better than their predecessors. They check smoke detectors. They hand out maintenance request forms. They accept rent checks and general ignore us, their “valuable” tenants. There is no doubt that when (no longer “if”) we get our house they (and their corporate masters) will rape us for every penny they deem necessary to repair all the “wear and tear” in this moist cardboard box.

I suppose I should take another walk. It’s warm enough. Spring has come and my adopted city is green and good again. Who knows what I might find.