the view from up here

We're tearing down walls. Real walls. Old walls of lath and plaster underneath panelling. I know I was alive during the "panelling is great" epoch. It covered, as my pentecostal mother would say, "a multitude of sin." I remember my sisters in law begging for ash colored panelling, black and grey, very mod. Mod. This stuff is utilitarian at most. There is too much underneath it all (as is true of so much), and I think we'll do a Dr. Phil remodel, not the deep Freudian fix. We'll put the past behind us, and behind new wall covering. We will not ask why --rather what's next? And it will fester there, the past, as things will if unexamined and popped like zits. We wondered together at the art of lath and plaster, the difficulty of making walls pre-drywall -- suddenly a marvelous invention. So, I'm off to Home Depot, to fix this new home of mine... ours. My dining room chairs sit around the kitchen table now and this morning I drank coffee on our porch. I am home. Nicole won't speak to me. I'm finally part of the family.