My first thought upon waking up ten minutes ago was “Holy crap, we own a house.” I suspect it’s going to be a long time before that feeling fades. Closing was last night, and we now own a house, and I am in total disbelief.

Someone I work with asked me the other day if this was a big scary relationship step for Len and me. It’s not. Moving in together felt like a big scary step two years ago. This just feels like the perfectly natural next thing to do in the life we’re building together. I told her that the house thing is still scary, though. Because I definitely don’t plan on ever getting married, and I will probably never have kids, so chances are this is the most grown-up thing I’m ever going to do. That’s a sobering thought.

I mentioned this to Len while we were at Home Depot last night, and he told me to cheer up, because I can still look forward to that glorious grown-up moment when I can sign up as a member of the AARP. Such a comfort, that man is.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

Indeed.

April is not an easy month for me. There was a long time when Aprils were the harbingers of big changes, most of them not good, some of them deeply painful. It has not been that way for the past many years, and sometimes I think I have forgotten, but something in me remembers. Sometime in April the weather turns a certain way and the flowers bloom and the air becomes heavy with promises of rain. Something in my heart becomes heavy too and I think Oh, yes — I remember this.

I am haunted, lately, by people from firmly closed chapters of my life. I think I hear a voice in a crowded store that once whispered secrets into my ears long after midnight, or I see someone sitting under a tree the spitting image of a long-lost friend and my heart forgets to beat for a minute.

When I am not visited by people I once knew, I am visited by shadows of myself. If there were Ghosts of Aprils Past, one would be tear-streaked and smell of vodka and the sound of broken glass would follow her everywhere like an accusation. Another would wear Pocahontas braids and a brown paisley shirt with the sleeves rolled down even in the spring warmth, hiding scars and lying like breathing. Another one would wake in the morning to a pill bottle on a bedside table, read the label every morning as if it might be different, hold the blue pills under her tongue and close her eyes and pretend she could feel them dissolving into her blood and saving her life.

There are no Ghosts of April Past. I know this is true as surely as I know that there is more than one truth.

We visit the new house nearly every day, now. I plan gardens. I watch the play of shadows and light and I dream of colors and scents and patterns. I have gardening gloves but I don’t always wear them; sometimes I just plunge my fingers deep into the soil to feel it crumble and re-form.

Seeds are planted; nothing is showing through the soil yet, but I know they are there, curled up underneath the surface gathering strength and dreaming of May. I am trying to think their cool green thoughts and let the spring rain wash over me, too.

This evening we:

• Demolished part of a wall to create a new doorway
• Demolished a third or so of the old kitchen cabinetry
• Hauled half a basement’s worth of drywall to our dumpster
• Ripped out a bunch of old wiring
• Planted tomatoes and basil to go with the already-planted spinach and snap peas

I now feel as if I have been so productive on Friday night that surely I can do nothing but relax all day Saturday and Sunday. Pity we still have the rest of the kitchen and basement to demolish, more vegetables to plant, laundry and dishes and lawnmowing to do at the house we’re still renting, plus I have homework for my accounting class and some work for my actual job. I would like at least twice as much weekend as I actually have, please.

On the bright side, I have decided that sledgehammers and chisels are fun. My shoulder muscles disagree with me strenuously (so I can only imagine how they’re going to feel tomorrow), and I did something dreadful to my wrist that is causing it to emit little stabs of pain whenever I bend it too far, but nonetheless, spending a Friday evening ripping a house apart turns out to be more fun than I had expected.

I may feel very differently by the end of the weekend, so let it be noted now before I forget: as of this evening, I was actually enjoying this whole demolition thing.

Ripping out large chunks of a house where the previous owners lived for fifty years, and then their son did a slapdash repair job on a few things before selling it, turns out to be highly entertaining. Old lottery tickets hiding behind cabinets, walls with “fuck you” scrawled on the cement block when you rip off the drywall. And then today, my current favorite - a piece of paper torn from what appears to be an Oxycontin-branded notepad, listing the “your head may fall off when you sneeze” sort of side effects with a big cheery Oxycontin logo, with “CHICKEN AND VEG” scrawled across the back in huge letters. I keep waiting to find a body hidding somewhere, but so far, no such luck.

However, upon ripping off the stone facade of the basement fireplace last night, we found a layer of brick, and then another layer of brick under that. So far we lack the fortitude to dig farther and find out how many layers of brick there are, but I have a “turtles, all the way down” sort of feeling about it. So if there is a body somewhere in the house, perhaps we will find it between infinite layers of brick.

Other than the recursive brick wall problem, demolition is proceeding apace at the new house. We finished ripping out the kitchen completely today, much to my relief. We decided to do the kitchen demolition ourselves to save some money, but fortunately now is the time when we get to hand over a house key to the brilliant and competent Contractor Ed, and say “make a new kitchen!” And then he will go off and do that with his crew, which I expect will be composed of wacky characters out of a sitcom based on the few we have met so far, and we will write checks, and one day I will just walk in and there will be a new kitchen and it will be lovely.

The studio has also nearly finished being demolished. There are the fireplace bricks, and a few other odds and ends, but by and large it’s now a big unfinished blank canvas of a space. Every muscle in my body hurts from the process, and I have band-aids on every finger and bruises on my shins, and a friend of ours broke a toe helping us last night so I think we now owe him all the free studio time in the world and possibly a case of beer by way of apology. But it’s getting there. I can see the bones of what it will become, and it’s really cool.

Cooler still, I feel as if I understand a lot more about how buildings are put together than I did a week ago. I’m not going to go off and build my own buildings anytime soon, but I understand better what’s going on inside the one we already have, and I’m pleased about that.

(Ahem. At this point in my attempt to write this journal entry, I was interrupted by a phone call from Len asking if I have any idea where he put his car keys. Oops. Good thing we have a sleeping bag at the new house already, I guess. I am now off to poke around and see if I can by any chance figure out where the spare car keys might be.)