This Old House

My father is a contractor. For the last 20 something years of my life, my father has built houses, fixed houses, bought houses, bought land, sold houses, and we have moved… to where ever he told us we were going. (All within the same general area though, so we weren’t changing schools Thank God) He would build a house and then put the one we were living in up for sale as well… which ever one didn’t sell… that was where we lived. It never occurred to me that this moving every year and a half was not normal. It was just the way things were living with my Dad.

The first house I ever bought was a dump that Dad took as partial payment for a house he was building. (No one else wanted the house so he took it in trade) Then he convinced my ex husband and I that it was a good deal and we should buy it. The house had velvet wallpaper in the living room and about 4 layers of different kinds of wallpaper in the bedrooms. It had gold Berber carpet in the bedrooms… you know, the kind that was popular back in the 70s. When we got a windstorm, the yard would fill up with pieces of our roof and siding that had blown off the house. Anyways, sparing the details of how messed up this house looked when we moved in, and the fact that the gold Berber carpet was not redone until after I moved out… because lets face it, when you are have that much stuff crammed into a little house, the last thing on your mind to do is to move it all to change the carpet so the kids can grind their gum bits and fun tack into new carpet instead of ancient stuff. I lived there for 11 years. We moved in when my first child was 2 weeks old and I had a husband, and moved out when my third child was 6 weeks old, and I had no husband anymore. There was an awful lot more stuff to move the second time around.

I’m in the process of selling that house right now… and in the meantime I have moved into an old house that is scheduled to be demolished whenever I can find another house to buy. Talk about idiosyncrasies, this house is a comedy act all on its own. While we were moving stuff in, I had already realized that the electrical was a bit… strange. We have the kind of light switches from the 50s that glow in the dark, and come on huge long panels just in case you want to turn on the bathroom light from the front hallway. I still haven’t figured out why anyone thought that would be a good idea… I mean, let’s face it, it’s bad enough that the younger siblings know how to use a knife to unlock the bathroom door, but having control of the lights from outside the washroom? Now that is asking for a screaming match. In any case, we were moving stuff in one day and I had innocently turned on the kitchen light, unpacked the boxes into the cupboards, loaded up the kids and the boxes back into the car to go back for another load, went to turn off the kitchen light and didn’t realize that I was expecting too much out of this old house. I mean, isn’t it logical to assume that the switch that turned the light on, would also turn the light off? Isn’t the purpose of indoor electricity that the lights go on and off when you want them to? Here I stand, in the front hallway of my house, kids screaming at each other in the car, and I can’t figure out how to turn off the bloody light in the kitchen. I stood there for 10 minutes, I turned on and off every light in the house, and finally, I found a switch that would turn the light off. For about 3 seconds. Then the light went back on. Ok… now I am not a woman prone to swearing. But… I started to feel like I was having an argument with a ghost. I’d turn the switch off, the ghost turns it back on. I held the switch down for several seconds, hoping it would stay off. The light actually turned back on while I still had my finger on the switch. I decided that sometimes you just have to walk away from the problem in order to figure it out… so the light stayed on. I came back the next day with a new found determination to conquer the kitchen light. I put my finger on that switch and the light went off. Ok… now I’m going crazy. What the heck was the problem? Yesterday every time I pushed on that switch the light would bounce back on… Today all I have to do is push the switch once and the light decides it can go off? Did the ghost decide finally that I am worthy of being able to turn lights on and off in this house?

Now I’ve lived here for a couple of months; I know the lights a bit better. We had company come over the other day though, and unknowingly, she turned on my kitchen light. That night I did the same little routine, ran around to all the light switches, couldn’t find one to turn off the kitchen light. Finally I decided that it wasn’t worth the frustration, and I would just go to bed with the light on. It stayed on for two days while I ran around pushing light switches every chance I got, trying to turn it off. After the second night of the light being on all night, my daughter walks up to the panel, pushes in the light switch and the light goes off. We don’t turn on the kitchen light anymore.

I still haven't figured out what God is trying to teach me with the kitchen light... I'm sure it is a metaphor for something... so far avoiding the problem seems to be working though...