Christmas lights

It was daughter K.C. who kept up the nagging about Christmas lights. She is 14 and her priorities never cease to surprise me. Just now I put on some music for doing laundry and she looked over the counter and said “Bob Marley?” I could not tell if there was enthusiasm or reproach in her voice.

She had been talking about decorating the house for Christmas. It was more certain to happen this visit, they came to be with me on Thursday. I had been telling the contractors all week we were going to occupy the house this weekend. Not one more week in that trailer, it is too cold and too small and too dingy, I was not keeping life on hold for one more week.

Alan and Larry and Curt and Mike and Rod and Rick and John and Ron, they all made it happen this week. I had been cleaning up a little, a box of debris here and there, and then I just moved the girls’ beds in from the tipi, their sleeping bags from the trailer. So when the girls got out of school on Thursday, we went from piano lessons to buy sheets to sushi to what is now home.

We are home.

It’s not finished yet. Trim boards and paint and lacquer are yet to be put up or applied. But we have heat and sinks and a stove. A refrigerator, a still-unused dishwasher which may not see use even once a week. And a washer and dryer! No more scheduling around laundromat hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., lugging the laundry basket to and fro.

I slept in a nest of blankets on my own mattress placed on cardboard on the floor downstairs on Thursday because I was too exhausted to drag it upstairs. Friday I cleaned my bedroom and bath and Alan helped me to put the frame together when we had to take a break from the technical difficulties of reversing the handle on a dryer door.

It’s been a very rough few weeks since the divorce was final on Halloween, among the roughest, for reasons that will get no elaboration. But K.C. kept bugging me about Christmas lights. At their mom’s house, the girls put up all the decorations. I didn’t have any of my own, of course.

Bob Marley sings, “Take it easy,” after two days of listening to Alegria. We are home.

So yesterday after looking for stuff for their rooms, we stopped and bought some outside lights. This afternoon, in bitter cold, I screwed hooks into fascia shadow board, brass hooks that sit behind the drip line of the corrugated steel roof and that will be there for as long as I live in this concrete and steel mining barn on a hill top facing the east slope of Cascade volcanoes.

The girls handed up strings of lights that we stretched tight. There were enough extension cords on the job site, some of which will be reclaimed tomorrow for power saws and compressors.

But tonight, in a right now that flows outward in time and place and in peace, they power the smallest of lights because K.C. wanted to get it done. She was right, of course.

Sometime this week we will get a tree, Sabrina says it must divide the room against the wall where the window looks out on the mountains. She gets to decide. That works for me, too.