…Into which you throw money— and that is a house, or so sayeth Dave Barry, who adapted the saying (or so I believe) from a famous witticism about yachts. There is something about owning your own private patch of paradise, it satisfies some deep and atavistic impulse, even though that private patch may be quite modest, not the stuff of which “House Beautiful” or “Country Life” photo features are made. A couple of Christmases ago, the staff Christmas party for my weekend job was at one of those houses that could, in fact, feature very nicely in one of those magazines. (I work at a public radio outlet on weekends. It’s single weekend shift, just to keep my hand in. The pay is a couple of bucks more an hour than minimum wage, and a couple of bucks less than the hourly rate for my Mon-Fri job.) The house was one of those lavish, sprawling jobs, on a hilltop north of town, with a spectacular view, a terrace and a pool, landscaped and manicured, marble kitchen countertops and tile floors, every top-o-the-line appliance, furniture, fitting and convenience. Fifty or so circulating guests barely filled up the adjoining sitting room, dining room and kitchen.

It was a lovely house, or what I saw of it was, at least. The owners lived in it alone, and their grown children and their grandchildren visited often, but I thought about how empty the place would seem with just the two of them in it, rattling around like two peas in a huge, empty gourd and the very thought gave me the heeby-jeebies. I’d been informed for years by all sorts of TV shows and home interior-decorating porn that I should want a house just like it, but I was ever so glad to get back to my cozy little book-lined living room, with it’s blue-striped curtains and blue and white pottery, and a cat asleep on practically every soft and horizontal surface. At least, if some perv were trying to break in, I should know it right away. I wouldn’t have to hike an 8th of a mile to the other end of the mansion to find out for sure. I didn’t envy the owners of that house in the least, in spite of every inducement from the surrounding culture to do so. It was a very nice house, a lovely house, with a splendid view, and I was everlastingly grateful that I was not the one expected to live in it. One woman’s dream-house is the next woman’s nightmare-house. As my mother so cogently observed, the larger it is, the more time it takes to clean.

It’s not like I was immune to the dream house— I built scale model houses and 1/12th scale interiors for years, and carted a collection of 1/12th scale furniture and accessories around the world for most of my time in the Air Force. This was always a marvel to my friends: tiny chairs and desks, printed wallpaper with the tiniest patterns, terra cotta floor tiles the size of a thumbnail, and copper pots, and wine glasses and all. The best of my miniature stuff is housed in a dollhouse built to look like a log cabin—the logs crafted out of a wooden crate I picked out of a neighbor’s trash when I lived in San Lamberto, outside Zaragoza AB. I spent hours at the workbench in whatever work area, in whatever house I lived in, making tiny furniture, fitting kitchen cabinets and flooring into scale interiors, gluing slips of shingles to the roof, and creating plates of realistic food (sometimes on the slips of plastic from the insides of soda bottles, which— in the miniature world, looked exactly like paper plates) out of fimo plastic clay, rosin and various clear or tintable latex media.

But all this hobby building went by the wayside when I had a real house to play with, a house of my own, which I could paint whatever color I liked, and replace full-size fixtures and fittings as the mood and my pocketbook allowed me. I have barely touched my miniature things, and haven’t built another 12th scale environment since I had a full-sized place of my own to play with. I wonder now, how much of that nesting impulse was just diverted to the miniature scale as an outlet, a portable outlet, one that I did not have to leave behind whenever the Air Force moved me on. Perhaps a lot of my disinclination to pack up and move on, yet again, as I was coming on to 20 years TAFMS, was due to the fact that I had a house of my own, a place where I had planted a garden and begin to fit out the place to suit myself, secure in the knowledge that I owned it, that whatever in the world came about, I could paint it whatever color I wished.

And over the next couple of weeks, Blondie and I are doing the outside: a sort of dusty peach color for the walls, with off-white trim, something that will match the color of the bricks. All the most successful color schemes in the neighborhood were those chosen by people who took a care for the color of the bricks. The garage door and the front and garage door will be a contrast, a pale mint-green. We’ll be doing the trim and the garage door this weekend, and the body of the house next… it really is not much a change from doing a miniature house; just that the stock and supplies are very much bigger, and the tools are heavier.