Where to?

For the past year or so I've been working on our house here in Davis, turning it from a musty and nondescript ranch house into something more congenial. The first time the realtor opened the front door to the place I nearly turned and fled, for it reminded me of the tract houses from which I picked up a number of unfortunate dates in high school. I could all but see the coiled father seated in his armchair, the anxious mother peeking in from the kitchen, the sullen brothers hovering around the door to the garage, and my date for the evening emerging unrecognizable in full mufti from the hall. 


The house had been occupied for forty years by the same, the original owners: an ailing emeritus and his second wife. A large ranch house to which had been added a mother-in-law apartment in back, it had a stifling, congested atmosphere and a back yard that had been almost entirely paved over, and I immediately crossed it off my list. 


But that was when I still held out hope that a house of some architectural character might come on the market: even a 1920s California cottage with tapering porch columns would have sufficed. Every other town in the Central Valley was replete with foreclosed homes for sale, but not Davis, where the university has kept the local economy afloat and tenure limits the number of homes that come on the market. 


So I returned with my wife to the old professor's house, underwhelming and overpriced though it was, and, beaten down, perhaps, by the run of available houses available in Davis, which but for its core barely dates back to the 1960s, I began to see the house as a kind of tabula rasa, the concrete backyard as a potential pool site, the porch with its 4X4 posts as an Asian verandah similar to ones I had recently chanced upon in Thailand. 


After paring down the price and selling the house we had left in Seattle, I spent many long, hot months installing a pool, reaming out the living room,  knocking out walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms, and installing throughout the house 4 inch wide black trim to try to give the place a Japanese teahouse quality commensurate with the tora gate the previous owner had installed in the front yard. 


I completed the interior some months ago, went to work on the verandah, and finally, last month, painted the exterior: a kind of deep marine green with red beams and yellow rafters and, as elsewhere, black trim.  


But now what? I feel as though I have created a set for a play I've yet to write. About an orientalist, perhaps, or some transplanted old Asia hand. It seems sometimes to say, "Davis? Please, God. Anywhere but Davis." But it's hard to complain about anything or anyone but myself, seeing as how I have, for instance, accomplished a lifelong dream of owning a pool. A small pool, certainly: too small to accommodate much more than a wallow. But a pool nonetheless. And I have planted citrus tree along two sides: dwarf citrus trees but nonetheless fruitful, or so they tell me. And I have a grandchild to look forward to, due in October and destined to frolic, or at least urinate, in the pool in another year or so. 


Maybe out of sheer restlessness I have begun to explore switching the house to solar power, and there are a few maintenance items I have yet to attend to, as there always are in the wonderful world of home owning. But even though I have three plays making the rounds of various theatre companies and a book or two in the offing, I haven't written anything in months, and it's time I climbed back on the literary horse or put him out to pasture; time I made up my mind what road to follow.