Transformation

I have changed professions.

This week, I am a contractor. And a mover.
All this because yes, I am moving – just across the street, but it is a big deal just the same. The accumulation of years, etc. etc.
So, I am filling boxes with all sorts of things – CDs, books, photo albums, pillows, clothes. And I am moving those boxes, muscling them down two flights of stairs, shoving them around the back of the van or maneuvering them onto a hand truck and then unloading them elsewhere. During the hottest week of the year.

I am also tidying up the house I am leaving, for the next resident – which is where the contractor part comes in. I am painting a soothing “Swiss Coffee” color over the purple and lime green in my son’s room (bittersweet, but transformational). I am recaulking the tub where it had gotten grody. I am replacing drip pans under stove burners, and cleaning out the contacts so the one burner that wouldn’t light will work again. I am trimming hedges, untangling vines from the azalea, mowing the lawn, hauling brush to the curb.

I am sweaty. I wear paint-splattered shorts and dirty t-shirts, and when I am clearing thorn-studded brush I am wearing my father’s old pants, also paint-splattered, and recently mended where they split at the crotch.
This work is liberating. I feel as though I’ve dropped all pretense – and I didn’t think I had much to begin with. But I do like to think of myself as pulled together when I go out in public.
Not this week.
I go to the hardware store in the clothes I am wearing – which are typically the clothes I wore the day before. My shirt is inside out, to protect it from paint. And it is damp with the heat. I am dirty, smear of soil on my knee where I went out to pick tomatoes at lunch time, hair covered by a hat, or pulled back with a strip of fabric I tore from an old t-shirt that was waiting to be used as a rag. I run into people I know, and they don’t even notice – or at least they are too polite to say anything. It’s still me. Maybe that pulled together look isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
My eating habits have changed, too. I am hungry all the time but I don’t have time to stop and eat. Also, the house is bare bones, so I heat up whatever is not freezer-burned if I get hungry. Edamame. Raisin bread that’s been frozen for a year. Between that and the heat, I’ve lost seven pounds.
And I feel strong. Wiry. I look in the mirror, and I see my dad, a guy who was always outside trimming fruit trees or mowing the hay field or fertilizing the lawn, sweating and skinny in the Florida heat. I think of him when I pick up his old screwdriver to fasten a light switch plate, or when I’m cutting in painting trim, trying to make it look right – Dad was a perfectionist and, it turns out, I’ve inherited a bit of that myself. The “holidays” where wall paint makes an unintended spot appearance on the ceiling, must be fixed. The gutters must be replaced all around, not just in the spot where the oak limb fell last year.
The place is going to look great. It is being transformed.
And so am I.