Point of View: Gilding the Lily

Mary’s been transforming our house lately, at least transforming it to the extent that it can be transformed. 

It has, I suppose, always been a shack, as my mother, who lived in a brick house with a slate roof, once said, though it’s been to our liking, and now, with Mary’s grace notes — a brightly painted basement with a Ping-Pong table for the ages, a dilatory outdoor shower, and attic rooms as well appointed as any — it has become a more and more habitable shack, from bottom to top.

In this way we struggle against entropy. When my late stepfather said that there seemed to be no end to things that needed repairing, I misunderstood his sigh at first to mean those demands were wearisome, rather than godsends. We struggle against entropy in different ways, but the thrust is — whether by shoring up, as he did, or by cheerily assenting to it while doing the crossword puzzle, as I, whom he once dubbed “a mechanical moron,” do — the same.

“The next thing’s on me,” I said to her, referring to the leaky master bedroom shower that’s not been used in the past half-dozen years. Another one on the first floor works, so we’ve been using that one, you see.

But then I realized that there appears to be little else left in the way of home-improving to do. How much gilding will the lily take? We must string these things out. We’re teardowns in the end, after all. 

So I’m doing what I’m quite good at — putting off the day of reckoning, by working out rather than out working in the garden. Everyone’s too busy now anyway, one can hardly think, and the ticks appall. 

More attention will be paid, I’ll warrant, when autumn leaves start to fall.