Almost Home

One week ago I got the certificate of occupancy for the main house in Provincetown. Not for the garage studio suite, but the main house is what really counts.

While I’d done a pretty good job of filling it with “stuff,” according to those who’ve been here, I had not yet really spent any time living in it, nor making it my own. No spices, no place for the measuring cups or storage containers, no muscle memory when reaching for a tea cup or a spoon. For the last six days, Alice and I have done just that.

The restaurant next door closed for good last week, to be converted into fancy condos, and so I was gifted a bunch of wine glasses and tumblers, either brand new or barely used from the bar stock. I’ve brought a number of things from my city home, but I’ve also done my part to keep the local economy healthy by making numerous trips diagonally across the street to Utilities, a way-too-good store selling kitchen and tableware you always or never knew you needed, but clearly do.

The late Stranger & Saints and my house, pre-renovation, in the background. “Loot, plunder, pillage, and play,’ said a tourist walking by my open window one evening, “but no smoking!”

So when I wasn’t hearing all about how the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum was taking their sign and (hideous) mural for a display, I was hearing about who was taking what, and why, from the back of the place, or who was moving where.

“Girrrrrl,” said my new friend Michael with the parking lot and guest house across the street, “you should hear them bitching over that shit!”

Or I’d walk one door over, into Utilities.

“Hi Marjie.”

“Hi Dennis. What have you got for pitchers?”

“Over here. Have you been over to Saints?”

In other words, I said to a friend, I’m now living in Gayberry. I think I might be Aunt Bee.

I’m not at all good at cooking on my induction cooktop, with its nonstick, ceramic-coated pans. I need some fully-stick stuff to get a good sear on things. Dennis needs to up his sauté pan game. Likewise the oven seems great but the sheet pans are not, nor have I learned the temperament of the machine, so nothing I’ve yet made has been good. But the chicken thighs, lamb shanks, roast veggies, rice pilaf, and squash were passable, which means there’s hope. I keep forgetting to buy the thing I need, whatever it is in the moment, that I must buy automatically back in the city, because it’s always there but never here. But it’s coming together.

The retro phone reading light from Etsy is my latest find.

The house is not done. There’s a punch list two pages long, with some very important things and some less important things on it. My bedroom and bathroom aren’t yet functioning for me as there’s no place to put bedclothes, street clothes from that day, the “working bra” and the like, and the bathroom is really cold. The heat and air in the house is wonky, so one is either too hot or too cold at all times. The back entry, which is the main entry as I’ve set the place up, has no management or storage for shoes, coats, hats, and the gazillions of things needed for the many street, path, and beach walks taken each day by woman and beast and visitors, in all weather. Sand and very dirty tourist streets a grubby house make, so shoes need to come off. That means the puppy will eat them.

The studio suite is even farther from done, with a brand new, now-broken oven for reasons unknown to me, and many boxes and mystery objects yet to be unpacked, as well as laundry and a secondary egress still to be installed. Again. Because the powers that be who told us where to put them the first time then told us that door placement was illegal, and that we had to move it. So the hole we knocked through the concrete block, the door we installed, all had to be removed and re-walled, if that’s a word, and then the plumbing re-plumbed (that is a word), new hole in a different wall, same door installed anew. Mmmmkay. It’s clear it’s not their money they’re spending.

But all that will come, and in the mean time it is still, in three words, my dream house, and I am in it, and I can’t believe my good fortune.

I walk in through the back door and look into the one-room main floor, past the floating stairs and the half-bath and the vibrant red dory photograph, a gift from friends by a local photographer.

I’ve met other artists in town, bought some of their work, and I’ve brought work from artist friends around the world. The round, grey chair the beagle and I occupy in the city has been replicated with a round green chair she finds equally acceptable. When I sit at my desk I look out at the main street and all the characters that pass by, or stop at my Little Free Library. That’s if I’m not gazing out through the houses at the harbor, over the copper tray I had made by a local copper maker, where the flowering cactus is throwing bright pink blossoms in the sun.

At night, the steel and fluted glass cabinets shine softly from within, replacing the sunlight with a warm, nighttime glow.

Of the many things left to do here, the biggest is learn to feel settled, and to write. I haven’t been able to do that yet. I’m worried about getting lonely, or being scared of being lonely and rushing to be busy just to make noise. I’ve always been bad at being alone, and this will test that in a way I need and dread at the same time.

But also, this is my dream house. I’ll cook here, and sing here, and write here, have company here, and make new memories here that will start to fill the walls and boards with the things that make a dream house a dream home.

There is so much beauty here, and so much comfort. The wish to get here has been intense and prolonged. In reality, I’ve worked toward this since 1980, when I took in my first tenant and started making Rain Man-esque money moves that, along with a very lucky life, allowed this to happen; when a nutty woman named Dorothy decided to finance her house to a 21 year-old because she “liked my spunk.” Who does that? But that’s for another post. This post is about excitement, and fear, and gratitude.

I have so much of all of those.