Work Maketh Man

On household tasks

The Floor Scrapers, Gustave Caillebotte, 1875

As I write this, there is a 70-foot black walnut tree that, for the last several weeks, has been raining down its fruit across my backyard. These walnuts are encased in a husk about the size and colour of a tennis ball. When they drop, they split, splattering a deep black tar over everything including but not limited to: my stone patio; the white bannister on my upstairs deck; whatever patio furniture I, in my profound arrogance, left out there; my dogs; me. Sometimes they are run through with maggots. They smell like lemongrass and decay. It is an unholy mess. 

For a few weeks, we rearrange our lives around the walnuts. I cannot let my dogs out in my backyard because they will step in the tar and bring it into the house (and also the wood, the leaves, and the walnuts themselves are toxic to them). The constant percussive knock against our roof and deck sends our dog Marlowe scampering for a place to hide. You have to pick them up everyday, but you can’t leave them in those paper yard waste bags longer than a few days, otherwise they start to ferment and seep black filth everywhere. They are also heavy. If you fill the bags up too much, the collection guys slap a sticker on them and refuse to take them, which means that the approximately 1,600 pounds of the stuff that you hauled out to the curb you now have to haul back to the murder scene that is your garage and wait another two weeks. God forbid the bags break. The only workable solution I’ve found so far has been to create a small mountain on my gravel driveway, then allocate about two hours of my day to bagging them immediately before collection.

My wife complained about the walnuts recently. She said — correctly — that they are disgusting. She has refused, on principal, to personally handle them beyond raking them into piles that I then consolidate and bag. I suspect that during walnut season she dreams of destroying the tree.

I understand why she might feel this way, but I don’t. The walnut tree is a special part of our home. It is probably over 100 years old. There is also something simple and mechanical about the walnut cleanup that I find satisfying. It’s become a ritual, like mowing the lawn or shovelling the driveway (I refuse to get a snowblower). I actually kind of like the smell.

What I’m saying is, I don’t mind doing it. 

*

If you were to ask people who know me, I would be described variously and occasionally pejoratively but never as "a guy who likes doing things around the house.” I made this obvious to my wife when we moved in by bitching on a consistent basis about the projects we had taken on: painting, redoing the kitchen counters, ripping out and then installing a new backsplash, wainscotting the office, wallpapering, re-finishing the upstairs bathroom, re-configuring the dining room (approx. 47 times), tearing out and replacing the wooden trim around our front door, re-sodding about 300 square feet of my backyard. At one point she decided to turn our two hallway closets into 3/4 closets with little cubby slash bedrooms for the dogs in the bottom of them. She custom made dog pillows and even wallpapered the inside. They're adorable.

All of the projects have made our home a much nicer place to live, and they have made me a more capable human being for having done them (read: helped her with them). Next, she wants to re-finish all the hardwood flooring on our main level, and while we’re at it, replace the popcorn ceiling in our family room and re-paint the walls and the trim, which again is all great but also (*petulant whining sound*). 

Like other men of limited capacity, I have had what you might characterize as breakdowns during many of these projects. One day earlier in the year, I spent approximately four hours trying to install a bidet that simply would not stop leaking. I initially budgeted about 30 minutes for this particular task, and two days later a plumber (which I had hired to do something else) walked in and fixed it in 45 seconds. If I had a therapist, this failure would have been top of the docket for a few sessions. I did not want to quit. In fact I had resolved not to quit, and probably would have spent much more time trying and failing if I did not have to move on. 

Worse than my tendency to become a miserable prick in these situations, my wife has learned to count on it. Gen made a comment about how much easier it was to work with her dad to hang up a small gallery wall at her family cottage because she knew he would not get so easily frustrated. I felt that. I know I should be more like that. There is no reason why I cannot be like that. Yet, I am not. 

*

The previous owners of this house talked about the walnuts like a great burden, but I find a sense of assurance in their inevitability. You cannot fail. You just have to do it. With those other projects, you might do something wrong. You might make a mistake. You might not be able to do it. You might do a bunch of work and fail. It's different.

The thing I have learned, but haven’t yet fully accepted, is that that’s bullshit. The two kinds of work are the same, which means there is a simple solution to this little personal dilemma I've presented: just do the fucking work. Stop fighting it. Stop being a child. The more comfortable you get with just doing things — and failing, and re-doing them, and then maybe failing one more time before you finally call a professional or your father-in-law, who’ll stand there examining your handiwork with a look that says “you should have called me two attempts ago, buddy” — the better equipped you are to walk that road. 

I remember when I was a young, wet-behind-the-ears writer. I used to get edits back on my first drafts and feel really set-back. I had worked hard, thought carefully, and someone else would take one look at it like "nope, try again." Now, I understand. None of it is unfair, most of it is necessary, and in this case, all of it is what makes this place special. I will probably never be the person that creates these projects for myself, but maybe I can be the kind of person who stops losing sight of their value.

Your home is yours, which means the time and effort you invest in taking care of it cannot be wasted.