The Urban Idyll

Last week my wife, kids, and I had a holiday of sorts. We didn’t go anywhere. In fact it’s where we didn't go that made the week a change of scene. Some Baton Rouge friends were going out of town and asked if we wanted to house-sit while they were away. Since we live fifty miles from our Baton Rouge office, and since our kids are spending most of their summer enrolled in Baton Rouge-area day camps, the simple prospect of five days without driving a hundred miles with two overstimulated children in the backseat was enough to make us leap at the chance.

Then there was the house. A gracefully contemporary structure of concrete, glass, steel, and honey-colored wood, our friends’ home stands at a cool remove from the prim Colonial-style cottages and Arts and Crafts bungalows that are its neighbors. Outside, a matte metal skin intersected by walls of floor-to-ceiling windows soars to meet the live oaks. Stands of bamboo whisper above Asian-inspired landscape elements and a surprisingly sophisticated composting operation. Inside, the living area is a study in hermetically-sealed elegance, glowing with warm color; shelves of books about philosophy and vegetarian cooking; and sculptural, Scandinavian-looking furniture not chosen with eight-year-old boys in mind. Airy, sleek, and irreproachably efficient, the house reflects an artful blend of pragmatism and sensitive design that embodies the spirits of the urbane, environmentally conscious empty-nesters who live there. While staying we spent a refreshingly low-mileage week behaving like city people—eating out, going to movies, composting, and gliding about in front of the uncurtained windows cooking vegetarian food on gleaming stainless-steel kitchen appliances.

In other words, we spent the week having the opposite residential experience to our own. As has been mentioned before, we live in a hundred-year-old farmhouse that has been home to several generations of my wife’s family. To describe it as “ramshackle” seems unkind; but “lived-in” would be an understatement. Like all century-old things, our house has its share of creaks, quirks and idiosyncrasies, many of them exacerbated by the generations of staple-gun- and duct-tape-wielding do-it-yourselfers who have called it home. It creaks and leaks, groans and shifts and rattles. Things fall off and rot through and short out. Throughout winter the wind whistles around the loose-fitting wooden windows and doors, which then swell with summer’s humidity until they’re jammed closed so tight it takes two hands (and sometimes a foot) to open them. Tendrils of wisteria infiltrate the corners of the living room, where they provide a welcome home-away-from-home for the little green lizards that stalk flies along the windowpanes in summertime. A couple of weeks ago we were startled by a brick falling into the fireplace. I haven’t built up the resolve to go up on the roof and see where it came from yet, for fear of what it will add to my to-do list. Mercifully for this latest in the long line of do-it-yourselfers though, the relatively simple dogtrot design makes our house easy to work on. A bit like an old car, you can look under the hood and figure out what does what, so long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. Sometimes the “to-do” list of things to fix gets long and starts feeling like a weight on the shoulders. But there’s also something satisfying about knowing exactly where you need to whack the wall to get the ceiling fan to stop buzzing.

Because the desire to fix things has always been hardwired into male DNA. There’s something about stopping a leak or changing a fuse or shoring up a sagging sill that makes a man walk taller. Truth be told, staying at our friends’ house made me walk differently, too. But that was mostly because in front of those floor-to-ceiling windows my every move took place in full view of the neighbors.

If the definition of a vacation is to effect a departure from the terms of everyday existence, this was a vacation in every sense of the word. The fact that there was nothing to fix certainly made for a nice change, but after a few days I began to wonder how long it would be before the novelty of the urban idyll wore thin. How would I remain relevant? Would a house full of perfectly working kitchen appliances leave me pining for a toaster oven malfunction? In the absence of anything to repair would I have to find new hobbies? Take up welding or interpretive dance? The possibilities seemed briefly endless, then were replaced by a generalized anxiety about what had probably broken at home while we’d been away. Certainly there was time to ponder the ways we choose to use our so-called “leisure time” and the rewards derived from those choices. So if you’ll excuse me, I just need to get up on the roof and find out where that brick came from.