I am waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder, tell me there has been a horrible mistake, and order me to go home. Someone else should be living in this house.For a start, there are the mountains. Proper jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring mountains just sitting there on the horizon, waiting to interrupt my unpacking by taking my breath away whenever I lift my eyes. Someone else - the person who should be living in this house - would know the routes through these mountains already. They'd be the kind of person who has climbing ropes, detailed maps, a kaleidoscopic knowledge of first aid, and calf muscles which never get tired. I have an old school bag of Maya's, packed with a tiny foil bivouac for emergencies (thanks to Sam), a miniature first aid kit, a water bottle and a spare dog leash. Each time I walk up the lane to the State Park I feel like I should apologize to the Park Rangers: my entire appearance screams amateur, and my knowledge of US State Parks owes more to Yogi Bear than it does to the Green Mountain Club.
Then there is the forest. Quite a lot of forest. Our forest to caretake and maintain. Now I can recognize the hemlocks and the sugar maples, the bracken and the bramble bushes... but the person who should live here would know every plant without having to take a book out of the local library (and the person who should live here would be able to find the local library without having to use their SatNav!)
We also have more than two acres of meadow and, I suspect, the person who should live here wouldn't let the grass grow into a mess of bright yellow dandelions and wild orange daisies. I have mown the area around the house 3 times since we moved in, but that is primarily due to a Sleeping-Beauty-esque fear that we will otherwise wake one morning to find our house has been swallowed by wild forest and thorny bushes. Perhaps I should be more diligent, but my enthusiasm tends to wane after the first two hours behind my little petrol-fuelled hand-push mower and it always seems that the grass I cut at the start of the day is as long as the uncut grass by the time I put the mower back in the shed.
Inside, there are definitely signs that this is a house for grown-ups, and I'm not sure I've reached that point in my life yet. There is a laundry in the cellar, complete with shiny white machine and shelves and washing lines strung up next to an extensive collection of boilers and pumps and radon extractors. There are built in closets and solid wood floors and the kind of American fridge-freezer that someone of Nathan's height could live within. I have piled the pamphlets about the various workings of the pumps and the systems and the shiny white goods next to my chair, but they already have several half-drunk mugs of cold coffee sitting on top of them. The person who should live here would have enjoyed reading them, and could have made sense of more than the first page of each.
But I'm not sure that the person I feel should live here could ever love this house in the way I do. They'd be too busy being grown-up to stare with wonder at the fireflies doing their torch semaphore to one another in the darkness, or to whoop at the large child-sized Barred Owl who watches us from the bottom of the garden. They wouldn't abandon the weeding to follow the common garter snake as he slithers along trying to find the 'just right' rock on which to sun himself, or to call the girls out from their bedrooms to admire the bright orange lizards. They would probably have known exactly what concoction of nectar attracts humming-birds to the feeders, but would, therefore, have had none of the fun of trying to find out. And they wouldn't unpack their books onto the floor because they want to reread them before putting them on the shelves.But, until the person who should be living here shows up, we'll continue wandering around with those big cheesy smiles you only tend to see on people at the start of a romance. Our preferred soundtrack for the past 10 days has been Oh Honey's Be Okay... bright, poppy and almost obnoxiously happy. And why ever not?
:o)
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