Slant

My house is out of kilter.

I say this not as hyperbole or metaphor, whichever it might be, but as an accurate description of my house. It is out of kilter.

I’ve known this for some time. That my house is off-balance, askew, misaligned is old news. But I was reminded today while removing a haunted house caliber cobweb from my front window. How did this giant cobweb form, I asked myself. What do passers-by think when they look in the window and see the strands draping the stained glass? They think old people who don’t notice things, who are themselves encased in cobwebs live here, watching episodes of Perry Mason from the sixties and adjusting their elastic bandages.

But it’s not about the cobwebs or the passers-by. It’s about my home’s state of kilter.

So, while removing the horrible cobweb with my rainbow colored feather duster on a long stick, I noticed that the old wooden top of the window sags on the right so that if it was pushed flush with the window frame there would be a gap big enough to stuff newspaper into in the winter.

There is more. The top of the ancient window is itself wider on one side than the other which I am regarding as essentially a birth defect because, trust me, no one has replaced or done anything to these windows since 1911.

What this means is that the folks who’ve lived here – us for 38 years – have just made peace with the house being out of kilter. (The window isn’t the only place. The kitchen ceiling slants east, the bathroom floor east by southeast.) People just accept stuff. It’s amazing.

There could be a longer essay here. I could riff about my life being out of kilter, how my husband and I and our four kids had fits and starts of happiness and disharmony, how sometimes the weight of my cooking made a hollow in the dining room, how the rain made everything worse, how we had a dirt basement until twenty years ago, how one living room window, once unlocked in the morning, pulls itself up on its ancient ropes in the morning giving off a screech that is beloved and dear.

But no. It’s just this. My house is out of kilter.