I Purchase a Country Estate and Lose My Mind

Gentle Reader!  When I reflect upon the last few days, all I can think of are the words of our former Vice President Dan Quayle, who somehow mangled that old public service announcement that "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" into:

"What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is."

How true, indeed.  (And who, for that matter, would know this better than Mr. Quayle?)

But to return to the loss of my own mind, which occurred directly upon the signing of the sales contract that rendered my husband and myself owners of a 4600 square foot house in Rockland County, NY.  I could feel it leaving my body - my mind, that it - and a most peculiar sensation it was, too.  You, Gentle Reader, are probably thinking that the mere fact that I was signing a contract on a house in Rockland County, rather than on a terribly smart little condo in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Manhattan that hasn't been gentrified out of the price range of anybody whose last name is not Jagger, is prima facie evidence that said mind had already gone kiting off into the stratosphere.  Unhappily, I am compelled to report that there don't seem to be any delightful under-priced residential gems to be snapped up by the savvy would-be Manhattan homeowner at the moment, and that by expanding our parameters northward on the other side of the river (what river? the river - the Hudson River!) we instead got something along the lines of Mr. Rochester's Thornfield Hall estate for two-thirds of the price we were contemplating paying for a rather minuscule two-bedroom co-op at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.

So - we have house.  And quite a lot of it, too.

The house itself is an interesting proposition.  Its former owner (and sole resident, until now) built it to suit herself, and it is best described as a Tudonial - meaning that it is built like a center hall Colonial, but with a Tudor facade and four huge mullioned bay windows.  I happen to like mutts, so the fact that our house is one is a plus, as far as I'm concerned.  In my family, we are all mutts, including the dog, so it is perfectly appropriate for us to be living in a mutt of a house, especially since this is a very big mutt of a house.

The former owner had soaring ambitions, but a limited bank account, and so a full quarter of the house was never actually finished.  There are two floors - ground level, and second floor; no basement; and an attic (I looked, but could find no trace of Bertha Rochester.) The owner lived on the second floor in somewhat dusty and dilapidated early-eighties grandeur.  There are enough floor-to-ceiling mirrors to furnish Versailles, or at least a large bordello, as well as a rather distressing pair of "arty" Lucite nudes, coyly looking away from one another on either side of the humongous mirror that forms the entire rear wall of the master bedroom.  Her Ladyship was a chain smoker who apparently liked to enjoy a post-coital cigarette, so the nude statuettes have turned yellow.

Speaking of yellow - when we went over to the house after the closing to meet with the contractor who will be doing the much-needed renovations, I opened the magnificent walk-in closet in the master bedroom (the closet is quite literally the size of my college dorm room) and was confronted with the saffron splendor of Her Ladyship's upper plate, as well a few assorted supplementary artificial teeth with wires sticking out of them, which had been left behind on the closet shelf in half a Chinese soup container of water.  It was a grisly sight, and put me unpleasantly in mind of the character known as the Tooth Fairy in the first of the Hannibal Lecter books, Red Dragon.  You know - the one who ate up a William Blake etching.

But getting back to the house itself -  the second floor could, in theory, be inhabited right now, assuming one is not overly fussy about the fact that nothing has been done to the place since it was built more than thirty years ago, and also assuming one is willing to live with thirty year old wall-to-wall smoke-infested carpeting and nicotine-stained wallpaper.  The rooms are large, and there is definitely grandeur - decayed grandeur, to be sure, but grandeur, nonetheless.  Naturally, I did not fail to point out to my husband that we are leaving an elevator building to move into what is, essentially, a walk-up - and nobody here is getting any younger.

Now, the first floor, unlike Caesar's Gaul, is divided into only two parts.  One side of the house is the "daughter" side, for the house is what is quaintly called a "mother-daughter," meaning that it is suitable for one of those dysfunctional families where Mother gets to live upstairs in the attractive, sprawling apartment that has a big kitchen and a fireplace, and Daughter, who presumably has no job, no prospects, no boyfriend, and no hope for any future of any kind, except helping Mother carry the groceries and the firewood upstairs to the nice quarters, gets the junior suite of rooms downstairs (the ones under the deck that don't get much sun) and what is known as a kitchenette, meaning that the zoning laws decree you can have anything down there except a stove with an actual oven, because that would make it an apartment and then your taxes would be higher.

This, of course, is where we're going to put my 18 year old son.  He hasn't figured out yet that he's not getting the best deal out of this move.  So don't you go and tell him.  He's perfectly happy that he'll have a fridge, a microwave, and unlimited frozen dinners from Trader Joe's, not to mention a big empty wall to hang the TV on and a nine-foot sofa Her Ladyship left behind, so he can have all his friends over to play XBox.

On the other side of the house is a huge, unfinished space with the insulation showing amid the rafters and wall studs and uprights.  That's right - no sheetrock.  No nothing.  Her Ladyship ran out of cash, shrugged her shoulders, and decided that she already had plenty of house and didn't need to do anything about the fact that half of her first floor resembled a barn that no self-respecting cow would consent to spend the winter in.

In short, what we have here is Room For Improvement.

Now there are two kinds of people who buy homes in this world.  There are people who like it when everything has already been done for them, and all they have to do is show up, move in, and start enjoying themselves.  They are probably the smart ones - but I, unfortunately, am not one of them.  Show me a reclamation project, and my eyes brighten, my ears perk up, and I start pulling on my heavy-duty gloves, the ones with the leather palms.  There must be  a DSM-V category for people who simply can't resist a fixer-upper; I'm sure it's a pathological condition.  We're the ones who like those Charlie Brown Christmas trees. We are that sub-species of perfectionists who simply loathe perfection, because if it's already perfect, then there's nothing left for us to do, which we find boring.

So, like a latter-day Scarlett O'Hara, I have spent much of the weekend jerking the curtain rods out from above the mullioned bay windows (Her Ladyship was kind enough to leave the custom-made crimson velvet poitiers, reluctantly acknowledging that she probably wouldn't be moving into a Florida condo that boasted four bay windows measuring nine feet apiece across) but then unlike Ms. O'Hara not turning them into a ballgown, but rather stuffing them (all the while gagging convulsively on the dust) into plastic bags, to be taken to the cleaner's for the first time in their lives.  I have discarded whimsical sepia-tinted framed pictures of bearded hillbillies scrubbing themselves in tin washtubs that once adorned the walls of the powder room off the kitchen, and have picked up the endless trail of used Q-tips and assorted headache, thyroid, and sleeping pills that were freely scattered about the master bedroom  - not to mention emptying out half a bottle of Smirnoff that didn't have its screw-top anymore.  I have sorted through the contents of the kitchen cabinets (why do so many people have so many never-used coffee mugs that say WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDMA ?) and have carted endless bags and boxes of Norman Rockwell crockery, electric knives and frying pans, men's suits from the 1980's, and decorative plates enameled with Mary Magdalens - all of whom seem to be wringing far more than their allotted share of ten fingers apiece - to the thrift shop.

I read once that John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, once said to a dog that had bitten him, "I wish you were married and living in the country," and I have to say, I can see what he meant.

I have quietly lost my mind, and it probably won't be coming back for quite a while.  If you should happen to see it, do tell it I said, "Please come home - nothing is forgiven."