For Sale

My recurring naked dream invariably finds me amid the rush of university life, heading to class on one of the old buses that ran from one college apartment complex to the next down Nicholson Drive, toward campus. Students fill the seats and then the aisle but I am already sitting on one of the side-facing benches behind the driver. With an audible breath I notice my bare feet resting on the ridges of the bus floor, my toe nails a blazing fire engine red. My full nakedness shocks and embarrasses me and, unable to meet the gaze of the crowd of students around me, I stare at the stack of textbooks that weigh heavily on my bare lap. The bus jostles benignly down Nicholson with abrupt starts and stops while I ponder my predicament. What am I to do? I have a geology final in minutes. I have no choice but to ride on to campus, take the exam and then rush home to dress.

Once familiar in the landscape of my dreams, I can't remember the last time I woke, still panicked, but clothed in a wave of relief and pajamas. Placing our house on the market initiated as similar a feeling of exposure as that bizarre dream. A home that physically contained so much of our family's joy and proved so comfortable and appropriate for me now resides in a catalog of MLS listings while we wait with bated breath for another family to pronounce it a desirable back drop for their own inner-workings.

I do nostalgia. Read my blog. Ask my siblings, my children, Craig. As we move swiftly to complete the finishing touches on a project that lingered and evolved for over fourteen years, the entire process unfolds before me in vivid snapshots. Craig, with his characteristic enthusiasm but without the grey hair, stands knee deep in plaster and lathe from the ceiling and walls. Sledgehammer still in hand, he removes a mask to reveal a dirty, chalky face. "We can't change our minds now," he grins wide enough for his eyes to crinkle at the corners.

A few months later we painted the living room a paint color that has since ceased to find its way on those cards of paint samples. We bring the formula for Pronghorn with us now when we buy paint for the house. Pronghorn is to us what Whale Ivory was to my parents back in the eighties. Seven or eight months pregnant, I slowly moved around the room with the paint and a roller while Craig edged the walls from on top of a ladder. The rosin paper that covered the newly finished floor beneath our feet boasted a carpet of artwork as Miren drew picture after picture with handfuls of crayons when we worked. I momentarily feared that Miren would continue to express herself artistically on the newly painted walls or on the bare floors but she didn't.

The studio came as a study Craig wanted to do in the use of a grid based on the size of building materials that would minimize cost and material waste. We stood from across each other at the inception of implementation and smiled at the relative ease the two-man auger between us provided in digging the first of eight footings. And then we tried to lift the auger out of the hole. We managed but only after adopting more cantankerous dispositions. Our energy outlasted the daylight and often our children in those days. Lise appears, her round toddler self, in a sundress and white leather sandals, sprawled asleep on the plywood sub floor as Craig and I frame the walls around her. She doesn't even flinch with the pounding of nails.

Mom and Dad often supplied manpower and babysitting as one project led to another. I think Craig preferred my Dad's help even over mine because of his willingness to do Craig's bidding without question and, after a few projects of his own through his life, his ability to anticipate the next step. I see them both intertwined in the framing of the twelve on twelve pitch of the studio roof. Mom pushed the girls on swings in the yard while Miren sang and Mom met my gaze from time to time as she surveyed the steep fall of the yard from the studio to the house. Craig hopped down for more nails and whispered his concern.

"Your dad makes me nervous up there," he confessed, nodding toward the steep pitch. I agreed and continued cleaning the construction debris.

Dad climbed from the roof. "Craig makes me nervous up there," he confided as we looked for the level. I agreed.

After lugging sixteen foot, treated two by twelves up the driveway to where Craig formed the stretch of deck from the studio to the house, I stood exhausted, hands on my hips to catch my breath. Craig wiped the sweat from his face with the back of a rough, yellow work glove, his shirt front soaked.

"Honey," he said from across the board. "I think this is the last of our house projects." It seemed that we'd taken all of the available space at 41 McDade Street. We didn't. The house expanded up and out with our family's own expansion a couple of years later.

Rem follows Craig with his own tools, hammering the floor or the wall near where Craig works. He hides the tape measure and runs from the air compressor and nail gun. He climbs the ladder and calls us all to witness his bravery. One of us asks him where he's going and he shouts "Massachusetts" in his over-articulate, gravelly manner.