When Teenagers Wash Dishes

Some years ago, with a new baby in the household, we decided we were fed up with commuting all the way from Hutto to Austin. We gave up our grand but demanding century-old Queen Anne for a spotlessly unused spec home, closer to town. We couldn't wait to move in. The A/C would be correctly sized! The plumbing would all work all the time! The closets would be huge!

Within months, we felt weird there. None of the windows had any molding. The Swedes who had built our former home had believed that a length of egg-and-dart fixes any problem. The new house looked bare naked, more like an office than a home. And nothing felt right under foot. After years of pine floors, we had no idea that carpet could feel and smell so odd and dusty, even when freshly vacuumed.

After two years in the new house, we more or less fled to our post-war home near Shoal Creek in central Austin. There, I felt at home again, despite the eight-foot ceilings. Oh, and a master bath big enough only for the presumed master of the house, the harassed 50s dad who wants a small space for shaving in peace. While the little woman gets the kids ready for school. I live for these echoes of the past. On the first night in the Shoal Creek home, I carried my 3-year-old to bed and felt the swaying of the floorboards as I stepped into what surely must have always been a kid's room. The floor creaked, right where it should do, a record of all the parents who for five decades had felt the need to check in on their little seedlings at all times of the night.

Now, ten years on, I still have a weakness for the somewhat funky. The wee Long Island cottage we are now living in was perhaps an easy choice over the corporate apartments that were also available. Glorified hotels, they struggle to present themselves as totally new-for-you. Maybe it's the deception, the deliberate act of lying that I find so objectionable. The Wee Cottage makes no pretense of newness.

Finding the place was itself an adventure. For the first time in twenty years, I had to travel alone. I was so used to the company of Husband Mike on all forays involving more than two-hundred miles, I wasn't sure I'd pull it off. I knew I'd cope alright, but I doubted that I would succeed. I was certain that I would fly up to New York, get lost somewhere two miles from JFK, spend the night back at the airport, return home empty-handed.

Indeed, things did start out rather ominously. The nice lady at the Budget Rent-A-Car counter, despite the sort of fake fingernails that could rip up carpet, was able to push the right buttons on the GPS system, thus getting me started. It was an easy matter to tell the machine to take me to an address in Huntington by the quickest route. You'd think "Quickest Route" would involve an expressway, wouldn't you? For some reason, my GPS showed an affection for Queen's seamier parts, and a dislike of the highway that I could see less than a hundred feet from where I was travelling. I didn't dare stop to ask for directions. Texans expect to be knifed the instant they speak in New York, and I wasn't taking any chances. Eventually, I decided to ignore the GPS and to follow my nose onto the big six-lane that was beckoning. "Recalculating," said the weary GPS, resigned.

I made it to my friends' house to stay the night, then roared out of bed the next morning to get started on hunting for the cheap-but-good rental we'd need for the summer. Looking at four places in one day, driving up and down Highway 110, notoriously crowded and almost useless after mid-day for the purposes of mobility, I found myself too strung-out and exhausted to wonder if my family shared my love of the funky. I somehow got back to the real estate agent's office and signed a contract.

Now that my family is here, I'm heartened to say that they are as happy as nits on a human scalp. Even my teen, understandably put out at being taken from her friends for much of the summer, is gaily adapting to the new regimen, one where everyone pitches in and washes the dishes. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little. She thinks I'm more evil than Snow White's step-mum. But at least it's the work that she objects to, not the funky house I've chosen. I'm a dazzling success!

And it's not like she even has to wash dishes, not really. She merely has to prep them for the teeny, tiny dish-washer. I didn't know that they made them that small. Is this a New York thing? Of course, had the machine been any bigger, the installer wouldn't have been able to get it in through the front door of the Wee Cottage, the layout of which you can stroll around in 3 seconds or less. It's, like, small here. After the top floor, you can go down to what my grand-father would have called the 'half dug-out', i.e. the basement, there to breathe in the mold. The landlord doesn't attempt to rent out this lower apartment because it's not safe.

If Long Island landlords are overly burdened with electrical inspections, there's no evidence of it here. I'd take a picture if my camera hadn't died this very day, but to get an idea of what I'm looking at, especially in that region of the living room where modems and wireless routers and lap-top cables do inter-breed, just think of those episodes in The Simpsons where a dozen appliances, sharing a single outlet, shoot sparks. In the Wee Cottage, every single outlet is either cracked or is set into plaster that is cracking all around. Many of the outlets tilt ominously as you try to plug anything into them. Only a few are grounded, so we have to run an 80 foot cable from Jesse's room's window-unit to the kitchen's grounded plug. They say Yankees are too fond of safety regulations but I'm thinking: to Hell with regulations! The point I want to make to my landlord would best be conveyed with a small side-arm.

But I sleep well, nonetheless. I've lectured the new dish-washer on correct behavior around faulty wiring. She still stands too close to the toaster-oven with that soppy rag in her hand.