When Barb and I got married in 1989, we made our home in the little house that I had bought three years before when I was single, 35, and thinking I might just stay that way till the end.
What need would I have for a big home when it was just me and a couple of bad-tempered cats rattling around the place?
But marriage changed things and it wasn’t long before the house seemed a bit small. So we eventually began renovating our totally unfinished basement. It took us a long time but with the help of friends and our friendly banker, things took shape.
A big long rec room took the place of concrete block walls and a hideous concrete floor. A nice, cozy bedroom bloomed in a corner that had once been so wet a lonely toad was living there when I moved in. Outside drainage work fixed the problem.
A small but functional laundry took shape and a decent-sized bathroom with a large shower emerged. The carpet was the final touch and when that was laid, the whole thing looked pretty spectacular, to us anyway.
I sometimes wondered why we would come home from work and then put in a few more hours covered in drywall dust and skinning our shins and knuckles. But it was fun and we really did work together well on it.
However, really, what was the point? We do not entertain much so we didn’t need a big place for that or a fully-stocked bar with a lot of stools. And once the whole thing was finished, the small house had actually become a pretty big place for two people.
We loved it, but maybe it was a little over the top for our needs.
So why did we do it? We never tried to keep up with the Joneses so that wasn’t it. We weren’t planning to take in boarders or parents or an aunt or uncle.
Something was driving us forward and I don’t think either one of us knew what it was. Humans don’t live by instincts like birds and animals do. We reason things out, make decisions based on a lot of factors.
But we don’t fly south for the winter or crawl into a den and sleep till spring.
However, in our case, I eventually came to realize that what my wife and I had been doing down in our basement for two years or so was pretty basic stuff. We were building a nest.
No different than robins hauling straw and twigs up to a tree to get ready for the eggs (though their construction costs are less). Do they know why they’re doing it?
When we started having children a few years after our renovations were done, it seemed clear to me that what we had been up to with all that sawing, hammering, sanding, nailing and painting. Because when the kids arrived, we needed every square inch of our little abode to fit them in.
Barb recently hung a nice plaque on the wall which reads, “Follow your heart. It knows where it is going.”
The robins don’t think it all through and we didn’t either. But when the young ones came, the nest was ready.
Funny how that works.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
