The weather has turned cool. The leaves are putting on a show. Our bags are open and we’re packing our things to go. An awful feeling comes over me when I think about closing down this house. Twenty three years of heating and cooking and building and repairing and maintaining and now it is all going to stop... There will be a cold, damp winter chill invading the depths of this house. I am not worried about the pipes freezing-I am confident that I can drain and protect them. It is the spirit of the house, an organic, breathing presence I feel in this house that is somehow being put at risk. It is like I have created a work of love, and art-no different from a painting or a sculpture-and I am putting it out into a field under a sheet of plastic and the snow and the wind will have at it all winter.
In the spring when we get back it will be different. I remember the cabin up in Mountaindale. I would “winterize” it each fall and in the spring when we returned it would be cold and damp and it had a different smell. I hated that smell. It never completely goes away no matter how you air it out with the warm air of summer. Something sinks down into the wooden skeleton of the structure and does not want to leave. It is the combined smell of humidity and cold and sometimes death. Bugs die and mice die and freeze and thaw. A winter’s worth of dust settles on the heating convectors and when the system re-starts it burns off with the odor of dry bones. I don’t want that smell in this house.
Out in the garage my toys will sit for six months. Batteries to the car and motorcycle will be hooked up to chargers and they will look like patients on life-support. My tools are all hung in their places. All of our food, the cosmetics, the cleaning solutions, paint, anything that might freeze will sit sharing the tool room with the tools for the same six months protected by a tiny heater. The heater is fixed to a thermostat that will maintain 35 to 45 degrees. The cast iron furnace that has not had a day off in twenty-three years will get a six month nap and in April Julio-the boiler guy-will clean it and “kick” it back into service. I fear that, like an old person waking from a nap, the furnace will never be quite the same. It will creak back grudgingly and find excuses to stop from time to time, and rest. Other appliances might take the cue and hobble along. The web of our daily lives is woven around a loom of conveniences we take for granted. Pumps in dishwashers and clothes washers and tubes to ice makers and the condensate traps in A/C units up in the attic, all full of water. Toilet tanks, and sink traps, hoses, and hose-cocks...and after I lock the front door and set the car on a path for Florida all that water will want to start freezing. I have to empty all those pipes and appliances, disconnect all those hoses, all those traps. I’ll blow everything out with a compressor. I’ll dump some anti-freeze into the pipes to seek the low spots where water I’ve missed might be laying, waiting for the cold.
Electricity will still flow in the cold so I unplug everything. Used to be that something was either “off” or “on”. If you turned the dial on the TV to “off” that was that, no more electrons flowed. Now there is “off” and “on” and “standby”. There are vampire chargers that continue to suck juice so long as they are plugged in whether or not they are charging anything. TVs and microwaves stand at a low level attention twenty four hours a day so that we will not be inconvenienced even one moment waiting for them to warm up so we can thaw our bagel or watch Good Evening America. All of these little creatures must be disconnected. All the batteries taken from the remotes so they will not liquefy and rot the metal guts of our “clickers”. And still the job goes on.
Screw shut windows. Double lock doors. Secure the garage door and unplug the operator. One last look back as I pull the trailer down the drive. I will leave a light on a timer so that if I come home and it is already night I will see a light shining in the upstairs window.
