On Home

Writings from quarantine | Photos by Tania del Carmen

Our homes — be they apartments, first homes or retirement places — have all become leading characters in our personal COVID-19 stories. In this feature, we include two essays in which two mothers confront or rediscover spaces in their homes and share the impact those spaces have had on them and their families. We also include the winning poem and essay from the “Stories of Home” contest we ran with Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity in May.

It’s Easy to Miss a Single Nail

By Paula Peters Chambers

One of my favorite Mother Goose rhymes tells how a missing nail leads to the downfall of a kingdom. Without a nail, a horse loses its shoe. Without the shoe, the horse can’t carry its rider. Without the soldier, the battle is lost.

It’s a simple lesson about how something small, left unattended, can lead to something larger. It’s easy to miss a single nail. Just like it’s easy to miss a leak.

In the early spring, we had been told there was moisture in our crawl space. By the time our plumber discovered the leak under our dishwasher, we were in the midst of the pandemic, needing to purchase a new dishwasher and new flooring.

In the best of times, I don’t like making decorating decisions quickly. We were already navigating the return of our soon-to-be-college graduate, who was understandably unhappy about spending her final weeks of undergraduate life in her childhood home. We were trying to determine how/if to bring the freshman son home from his California college. Instruction and expectations for the high school sophomore seemed to change daily.

The pressure of selecting a new major appliance and floor felt enormous. Suddenly, I understood why purveyors of hardware, appliances, flooring and paint are “essential.” With four people eating three meals a day, every day, we were dirtying dishes at breakneck speed. The kitchen floor had to be replaced before the new dishwasher could be installed. Our original cabinets, which I painted a decade (or more) ago, were going to look even dingier with a new floor under them.

The month of April was devoted to the kitchen, from leak identification on March 31 to the hanging of the final repainted cabinet door on April 26. During that time, we lived with the refrigerator in the family room, and — for nearly a week — dodged a 4-by-6-foot opening to the dreaded crawl space, as we waited for the joists to dry.

We tried to live normally in a time that was anything but. Usually, our kitchen is the one room in the house that is orderly and reliable in its stability. But this project brought chaos to that space. The disruption we felt in the kitchen was, for me, an extension of the disruption I felt in every other aspect of my life: It was unexpected and unwelcome. But, as with the pandemic, we had no choice but to move forward.

Our target deadline for completion was April 28, so our college daughter could create a masterpiece of a birthday cake: seven layers in the colors of the rainbow. She wasn’t going to be celebrating her last day of classes with her friends, so she wanted a show-stopper cake. None of us wanted the kitchen to be a construction zone.

We made the deadline.

I am growing accustomed to the new floor, which is modern and sleek, and can’t believe how quiet the new dishwasher is. Once again, the cabinets look clean and crisp, and that’s my doing. I accomplished something, even though I didn’t want to.

‘We’ll Never Use That [insert expletive]-hole’

By Meridith Ingram

White paint can fix anything. Even a space unexpectedly overcrowded with college kids who, we reasoned when we bought our new house, “will never be home.”

See, a year ago, we downsized, after sending our twin boys to college. We took the opportunity to simplify while moving to a more fun, walkable neighborhood closer to our daughter’s high school. It made perfect sense … until it didn’t.

When we got word in March that the boys would be home from college indefinitely, we scoped out our space with new (panicked) eyes, searching for ways to use every inch. Bedroom for each: check. Enough bathrooms: check. What we’re short on is living space for five humans with different TV tastes, work schedules and ideas about what makes for good lockdown activity. But I’m a home and garden editor, for goodness’ sake — if anyone can creatively repurpose square footage, it should be me. And my husband, Dave, is a quick study in YouTube home improvement (I wish you could see my darling kitchen window seat!).

We turned to the one unclaimed space I had previously written off as too terrible for attention. Cue scary music: the unfinished basement. Just as the boys would “never be home,” I had said since day one that “we’ll never use that [insert expletive]-hole.” Exposed rafters and ductwork wrapped in crumbling insulation, stained cinder block walls, a massive built-in tool bench, and the best, most inexplicable part: an old toilet and disconnected sink in the corner of the room. Other than a new washer and dryer where I did an occasional load of laundry — so little is generated by only three people — the unfinished basement was a dumping ground for tools and other unidentifiable junk.

Thus began the frantic transformation of this space: purging, organizing, breaking down and building back up. It’s amazing what glossy white paint, a little drywall and a few hours from a plumber and an electrician can do. Add a futon and rug delivered from Wayfair (desperate times call for desperate measures), a smart TV and gaming systems that have made their way back from college, and voila: a fraternity house for two.

By day, the space “we’ll never use” is also the temporary headquarters of Dave’s technology recruiting company, at a desk squeezed next to the washing machine. There’s also a little corner art studio where I’m learning to paint, mostly while the college boys are in bed until well past noon. When I paint, the inner chatter that is another symptom of this pandemic — the chatter of regret and anger that comes with the what-ifs and should-have-beens that many are feeling right now — goes away for a while, mostly because painting is hard. The focus and finesse required to mix colors, to master brushstrokes, quiets all other noise.

When I emerge from the basement upstairs into our tiny kitchen, where I’m likely to find all 6-plus feet of a boy digging through the fridge, I remind myself how lucky I am to witness and support the resilience of these big, hungry, sleepy, angsty people. We pass in the kitchen, when they are on their way downstairs, where I hope they, too, can quiet the chatter.

“STORIES OF HOME” CONTEST WINNERS

The importance of having safe, stable shelter has taken on even more meaning since March, and through the “Stories of Home” essay and poetry contest, co-sponsored by Richmond magazine’s R•Home and Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity, we asked entrants what they had discovered or rediscovered about a space in their homes since sheltering in place began.

Three members of River City Poets, led by founder Joanna Lee, chose the winning poem by Eliza Lamb. Judge Derek Kannemeyer wrote: “I love how deftly the poet establishes a bond of equals between the speaker and the speaker’s world. In a few short lines, the poem both describes a morning ritual of ‘prayers in search of gratitude’ and becomes such a prayer; the simple ritual act of preparing and drinking tea anchors the poem in the everyday, even as its ordinariness is transcended.”

I wake before the rest of the house

By Eliza Lamb

I wake before the rest of the house.

I breathe in the quiet and search within my own walls.

I check in on the trees, and they check in on me.

I greet the morning light that joins me through

the kitchen window and I thank it for its warmth.

I say my morning prayers in search of gratitude,

wisdom,

and support.

I boil my water. I add a little sweetness. I stir my tea. Holding on to small familiarities — I let go and enter

a new day.

• • •

The winning essay by Jodie Vieira was selected by Richmond magazine contributing columnist and Share More Stories founder James Warren, author and speaker Nancy Wright Beasley, and Richmond magazine Associate Publisher and Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity board member Susan Winiecki. Beasley commented: “Jodie Vieira’s description of the long wait through a Ugandan adoption brought me to tears. She painted word pictures of two worlds that were almost palpable, connecting long-distance love and dedication to family. After reading it, I imagined myself visiting that outdoor play kitchen, being served a cup of imaginary coffee by one of Vieira’s children.”

Home ... It Means Everything!

By Jodie Vieira

We were matched to our son on May 6, 2016. Our daughter, Melbee, was 2 then. Two years before we had moved from Dallas (and, for me, back) to Richmond, where we found our home in Woodland Heights. We love everything about our city, our neighborhood, our home.

In October 2016, we traveled to Uganda to meet Pavine for the first time. Nineteen months old and perfect. His story is long, but in the end he needed a family, and we so much wanted to be that family. A few weeks before we left for our trip, I found out I was pregnant. Everything was exciting! Ensi was born in April 2017.

Forward to May 2018, and our family moved to Uganda to be with Pavine until our adoption was complete and we could bring him home. Adriano, my husband, helped set up our temporary life, with the plan to travel back and forth between Nsambya and Richmond so that he could continue working (he had done that trip many times to visit Pavine after our initial October 2016 visit).

We thought we’d be away maybe three months. It ended up being almost 16! The journey of adoption is never easy.

It’s endless, hard. The separation. We dreamed of home. Even “Pav,” who had no idea, longed so much for home. Our days in Uganda were spent outside. Every day from wake to night, the kids created newness, rain or shine.

Back home in Richmond, Adriano poured his lonely days into building the sweetest outdoor play kitchen in our backyard. Two summers passed before the kids were able to see that kitchen. But we’re home, for almost nine months now! And it means everything!

This pandemic has been a force of something good for us. Those months apart, our most difficult challenge so far, yet we returned home and fell back into a busy, hurried life. And it felt crazy. But now, with nowhere else to be but home, we’ve asked each other, “how do we want to do this life?” So we followed our kids into the backyard, planting ourselves there with them, creating gardens, campfires, movie nights and camp-outs, watching birds and their sprinkler jumps, and playing in that kitchen made with such love. Our backyard is how we want to do life! We’re so grateful for this sheltering, in this sacred place, our backyard, our family of five!