Real Kings Don’t Live in Castles

I have spent the last year and a half living in real houses. I mean houses with foundations, walls, roofs, plumbing, electricity and carpet that matches throughout the home. Eighteen hundred square feet of everything Americans are taught to dream about. I should be thrilled and satisfied. Instead I am conflicted, confused and frustrated.

I think of my poor husband who so valiantly provides me this nice home plus the ability to stay at home and write with out pay. I am a princess in many ways. He deserves a wife that would just soak up the decadence of an easy life. I am not that wife. I have become fidgety and irritable.

I have tried, oh I really have tried to fit into this life style. I have bought area rugs that match my throw pillows and bought throw pillows that match the art I have hung up in neat little rows on my walls. Everything right where you would expect it to be. I have started wearing clothes that look responsible and coherent. I have even chatted with my neighbors over my back yard fence, laughing when expected, faking interest.  My neighbor tells me about things like the five mile jog he took this morning with the labradoodle they rescued. Apparently the poor dog is allergic to carrots. It took them months to figure out what was wrong, and sure enough, carrots. Thanks to this conversation I now know that root vegetables make labradoodles gassy. I try to look concerned about the dog but honestly my neighbor lost me at ‘five mile jog’ anyways. I am sure I have looked very convincing in this role of Suburban complacency and acceptance. But, underneath my skin, my hillbilly blood has begun to boil.

I am told so often and in so many ways that this life is normal. Normal is living in a cookie cutter house on a cookie cutter street. Normal is paying thousands of dollars to have a house that looks like your neighbors house, looks in your neighbors house and apparently includes your neighbors giving their opinion about your house which they are also looking in.  This sharing of your life with your immediate community is apparently called HOA. I can only guess it stands for something like Help Others Assimilate?  I don’t know for sure, I could be wrong.

My struggle to feel comfortable in this ‘normal’ life has surprised me. I knew it would be a transition but I did not expect to feel so frustrated and at times, even angry. I tried to find the source of my irritation for months. It took my heater breaking during the first cold snap of this Winter to finally figure out why ‘living the dream’ is a nightmare for me.

We had only been in this new house for a couple months when it got really cold. I kept turning the heat up and it just kept pumping out a small amount of tepid air. After a few days of being cold I called the repair man and he came in and looked at the furnace. He told me the furnace needed to be cleaned. Well the landlord did not want to pay for that so instead he had them change the filters to see if that would work. We spent the night cold and woke up even colder. The next day the repair man was called again but he would not be able to get to us until the following day. I felt the fires of my bad temper sparking. My neck and jaw began to ache from walking around clenched  from the cold or anger, or maybe both.

I wasn’t really angry with anyone in particular. I was just super mad! And, that’s what I told my husband. With my hands balled up in fists and my jaw locked in place, I said through gritted teeth “I am cold and it is making me really angry!!”

My husband , who aggravates the living life out of me by thinking that I am cute when I am mad, said to me, “I thought you were a mountain woman who used to live in tents and washed your hair in frozen horse troughs. Not as tough as you used to be?” If you want to tick me off quick, tell me that I am not tough! Of course, since my greatest weakness in life is this man who I have adored for over sixteen years, I can only pretend to be mad at him. I shout “I am tough! But when you live in a stupid tent and you get cold, you burn wood and get warm! When it gets hot, then you go sit in the river! Now you (because as usual this is all his fault) put me in this castle house (see, I called it a castle house to insult his choice of home) where we have to pay thousands of dollars and when I get cold I have to call some guy and get permission to be warm! I can’t burn any wood to stay warm or install a fire place because your fancy castle house has an HOA (Houses Of Antarctica?) that doesn’t let us just burn things when we are cold!”

It hit me when I said this to him that I had just found what I was searching for. I found the reason for all of my frustration. While growing up I had lived in a centipede and rattlesnake infested shed, a 23 foot RV, a tent, another tent, a 400 square foot cabin infested with mice that had no bathroom, another RV, a house with no roof and then another RV. We didn’t always have showers, electricity, toilets, real beds, nice clothes or these grassy patches people call yards. What we did have was a certain sort of power.

When we were cold we built a fire. If there wasn’t wood we went and found some. If the wood needed to be chopped, we chopped it. If the fire wasn’t big enough we added more wood. If you sat in the tent freezing you did not call someone to fix it for you. All the power to be warm rested in our own hands. If you froze to death, you were an idiot.

As a kid, when I was dirty, I went and got clean. Sometimes this meant heating water on a stove, or filling old milk jugs and dumping them on myself. Other times it meant going to the river. One time I broke off the ice on the horse trough and washed my hair in it. I am not saying I did not dream of long luxurious hot showers. I am saying my ability to stay clean did not depend on a hot water heater and a complex set of water pipes. I had the power to stay clean. If I was dirty I had no one to blame but myself.

When I was fifteen, my Daddy did something totally not ‘normal’. He built his own ‘Jacuzzi’ in front of our cabin. He dug a hole, put a big round cow trough on top of the hole, filled the trough with water and then lit a fire in the hole underneath it. Instant hot tub! Ironically, we had a Coleman four person hot tub behind the house just sitting upside down waiting to be plugged in.  When I asked Daddy why he didn’t install the real Jacuzzi he shrugged and told me, “Didn’t feel like messin’ with all those wires.”

Yes, my Daddy was an ol’ Hillbilly for sure. But just imagine it, my Daddy was a King sitting in the middle of those mountains in his cow trough. He did not ask permission to install his hot tub. When the water got too cold he built a bigger fire underneath it. When the water got too hot he added cold water to cool it off. You know, come to think of it, my Daddy never had any trouble getting the chemicals right in his Hillbilly hot tub, he just emptied it when the water started looking a mite green. He never had trouble with the wiring or the jets. He never had to call a repairman once. Daddy had the power.

This “normal” life filled with rules, regulations, manicured yards, tasteful decorating, and a hundred and one appliances that need to run properly in order to keep us functioning is an illusion. It is the illusion that we have control. When the washing machine breaks, the toilet stops flushing, the water stops coming out of the faucet or the heat shuts off, we are powerless. We can’t collect wood because they paved over the Forrest. We can’t gather water from the stream because it is owned by the city. We can’t pee in the bushes because we will be arrested. We can’t wash our clothes by hand because women don’t know how anymore and even if you do, you can’t hang the clothes out to dry because the HOA (Hygeine Opposition Advocates?)  doesn’t allow it!

“The good life” is a mirage that sells itself as having less hassle and worry. It promises dignity and self esteem, but when you reach it, there is nothing but frustration. Nothing, but another mirage off in the distance with new promises. You could chase these illusions for your whole life.

I am not ungrateful for my pretty castle house. And I would rather have a washer and dryer than to not have them. I also appreciate the water that magically comes out of faucets in an array of temperatures that I control at whim. But, I am lost in this house, this neighborhood, and this city. I would feel different perhaps, if my childhood had been spent watching my Daddy barbecuing behind a privacy fence on a manicured square of grass instead of watching him trek up mountains to shoot an elk for dinner. Perhaps I would not struggle with tiny yards if I had not grown up believing those big ol’ mountains and every tree on them belonged to me. Maybe if back then I had lived in houses, real houses, with foundations, walls and roofs, maybe then I would feel at home now. But I didn’t. Daddy raised me on a mountain, where life is only as good as the work you put into it. A place where hard work doesn’t buy you stuff, hard work makes you King. A place where living in a hillbilly backwoods tent gives you power over your life. And that’s the kind of power that makes you more dignified than any ol’ castle house sittin’ on a patch of grass ever could.

G.R.