Illustration by Victoria Borges
I live in someone else’s house. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I’m homeless, I just live in someone else’s house — my wife’s. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a nice home, and it’s a whole lot nicer because it’s hers. She is the supreme potentate, the boss, the absolute final decider of all things regarding this place. I just live here. I’m happy about that, but again, let’s be clear: It is her house.
We love each other, most of the time. And because she is a good person, most of the time, and because she is human and cannot do the impossible — that is, make me into a neat, organized, buttoned-up guy — she has granted me a few spaces in her home that are conditionally mine.
We live in an old house; there are no closets. We heat with a woodstove in the kitchen, so most of our time indoors is spent there. It is the room you step into when you come home at the end of the day with the mail, the groceries, the firewood or the chainsaw you need to remember to take to be sharpened tomorrow. All those things have to go somewhere, and my allotted space is half of the top of a small chest of drawers. The other half is hers. Right now, my side has two flashlights, the contents of my pockets from the past week (a few dollar bills, some change, notes to myself, and some sort of nut that I found in the woods and hope to identify), plus some shirts that need to go to the dry cleaners and a couple of library books. Her side has nothing. I have a couple of other places that she has relinquished to me, but they are upstairs in our bedroom, where the public is not allowed.
I am allowed to make the furniture and move it around. I even get to sit in it.
The other day we met with an architect. We were thinking about doing something with the old barn on our property, making it a place we could move into in our old age. My wife said to her, “I need you to see something before we get started, and you should know that you are one of only a very few people who are allowed to see this.” She then took the architect upstairs to our bedroom and showed her the corner where my reading chair is, with my books and magazines, newspapers, notebooks, backpack, and several coffee cups in various stages of biological emergence. It’s heaven to me, everything within easy reach. It is hell to my wife. “OK,” the architect said. “Maybe we should be thinking about two houses.”
It’s not just that the house is neat and I’m not; it’s also the layout, the placement of furniture and the choice of fabrics. I have designed and built furniture for the past 45 years. A lot of people think I know a thing or two about it. Some people you’ve heard of have even sought my advice. But my wife is not one of them. I am allowed to make the furniture and move it around. I even get to sit in it. But deciding what is in, what is out, what goes where — not a chance. That said, for the most part, I like what she does, with one big exception. I want a La-Z-Boy. I really, really want one. I’ve even offered to put it outside on the front porch. Nope. Not happening.
So I come home every day to a house that is pretty much hers. But I’m happy. It doesn’t matter that much to me anyway, except maybe the La-Z-Boy. Because wherever she is, that’s home for me. My real home is her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harrison Higgins grew up in Richmond, and attended Collegiate, Woodberry Forest and Davidson College. He recently “retired” from his woodworking shop, now run by son Harrison Higgins V, but he still goes there most days. He’s also a deacon at Church of the Epiphany and an aspiring writer.
