Christmas Eve, 4:00 am

 The Little House is dark. 

 Well, almost dark; the IKEA light under the shelves in the kitchen corner is on - because I made a pot of coffee about half and hour ago - and the phosphor glow of the laptop screen picks out one end of the table that makes the east half of the front room the "dining room".

Have I ever talked about this house?

It's almost a century old. Ninety-nine years old in just over a week; built in 1922, when this part of what's called the "Peninsula" - the triangle that narrows to the northwest as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers converge - had been Portland for barely seven years.

(Before that it hadn't been much of anything, lightly-built-over farmland between the little city of St. Johns to the northwest and Albina to the south - to the east was pretty much actual farmland all the way out east to the mouth of the Gorge. But that was then.)

The area was slowly filling in, but slowly. Here's the Corps of Engineers aerial photo from 1936. Nearly thirty years after incorporation, and over a decade after the Little House was built, and much of this section of what is now the "Portsmouth" neighborhood was open fields, including actual FARM fields.

This house and the house just to the east were built on the same plan, presumably by the same builder, and because of that probably on "spec"; that is, not to a waiting homeowner but by a developer who hoped to sell the new houses to random buyers.

It's...well, my Bride likes to describe our house as having "ugly bones", and it's true. The two houses were thrown up cheap and quick and small. The original design had a pair of rooms facing the street; a "parlor" and a "dining room" separated by a structural wall from the back of the house. The dining room opened onto the kitchen, the kitchen onto a hallway that ran the length of the house. In the back were two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. A detached garage sat out in the back facing the alley.

It looked like this:

Both this and the sister house next door have been extensively modified since they were built. Interestingly, the house to the east still retains the original separate parlor-and-dining-room arrangement, but at some point (probably after the fire that damaged the front of our house in the 1980s) the owners tore out the wall between the two front rooms to make a single large one.

They also punched a hole in the load-bearing wall that runs across the house, opening the hall to the front.

At some point they enclosed the back porch, making the weird "room of closets" we ripped apart fo make Missy's now-filthy-trashpile of a bedroom.

Here's the current floorplan:

The best part of the house are the wood floors. They're not hardwood - remember; cheap, quick, and small - but they're a clear, straight-grain fir. 

They were also painted, for some reason, and were repainted numerous times. The earliest coat was the most peculiar; when I stripped the floors in both the bedrooms the bulk of the paint came up in strips. Y'know, the way paint does when you strip it.

The bottom layer, a deep red color, turned into a sort of vile jelly. I suspect it probably had a crap-ton of lead in it, too, but the consistency was the worst part. You had to scrape it with a blade and then wipe the blade to clear it. It also stained hell out of anything it touched. I have no idea what it was, but it was truly nasty.

After all the paint a former owner laid down a then-standard cheap, nasty Seventies or early Eighties short-nap carpet. Pulling THAT shit out was pure pleasure.

Anyway...that's the house. The roof is getting there; it's easily twenty years old and small parts tend to turn up in the yard after a big storm, so that's on the list. The boards of the deck we had built outside the east wall ten years are getting a little shifty, as well, so those need to be replaced soon.

And...well, this seems mean when I just say it out loud, but...the house is getting smaller as I get older, and I'm ready for the kids to move out on their own so we can have it to ourselves.

I'm tired of the mess, and tired of the clutter, tired of having little or no privacy or quiet when everyone's home. They're good kids and I love them, but...I'm ready to start loving them from a bit more distance.

I suspect that makes me a bit of a bastard.

But as I think I've mentioned. I am a bit of a bastard. I've got some sort of deep-seated survival thing that makes me more than a little callous. I'd be the guy who walks out of the airplane-crash-in-the-Andes-where-the-survivors-resort-to-cannibalism having gained three pounds. It's not that I don't feel the griefs and regrets. It's just that I do, and then I go about my business.

So I don't want my kids out of my life; I just want them in it a bit further away.

And I want my life back.

I realize that things would have been difficult during a global pandemic regardless, but I'm quietly furious at Tubby Twatmite and his merry band of incompetent GOP grifters and stooges for fucking it up so badly that I have to sneak around like a weasel in a minefield. 

I miss all the little pleasures; the evenings out, the casual times with friends, the little small change of life.

And it's worse because that time is running out. I don't have thirty or forty years to make up for this lost time. I've got, if I'm lucky, another fifteen or twenty good years and then it's going to go to hell in a hurry. I'm not looking forward to my eighties, assuming I make it that far. 

So I rage at every day we're immured behind the high walls we need to keep the Mongols out, and that makes me resent even more every moment I'm losing to this fucking Plague, and that makes me even more pissed off at the goddamn nitwit and his slobbering cult.

And I'm tired of watching my country and my countrymen become smaller and meaner and stupider and angrier. 

I'm tired of the past four years where everything is transactional, all about the Art of the Deal, contingent on What's In It For Me. I want us to be better, and kinder, and smarter. 

I want a brighter day.

I want what Charlie Pierce wants and said sooner and better than I:

"...may you all have the rest and peace of this mid-winter holiday season. May all your whiskey be mellow and may all your lights shine. And may there always be a candle in the window, calling you home, calling you out of the storm, calling all of us home, together, and home."