A Daydream While Painting the House

It has taken the two of us (but mostly the one of us - the other, taller one) weeks to paint the exterior of this house. It's a one-story house, but designed with 24-foot ceilings, so it has lots of stupid-ass empty space that looks awesome - awesome enough to make you buy it - but is stupid in all other respects.

Today, the umpteenth-straight day of painting on account of the unseasonably dry weather, which is due to vanish right on schedule for all the Halloween Cinderellas and zombies to be obscured under decidedly non-princesslike and/or non-undeadlike raincoats, I dreamed of having help. Of literally having help. A second child we could have had, which we could use mainly for house work and spare parts.

Of course, we would have had to train him to expect nothing more than food, lodging, and a pat on the head in return for lawn mowing, roofing, house painting, and the odd cornea or bone marrow.

"Mom, how come Dean gets his own room, and I have to stay in the laundry room?"

"Because, Dear, he is our Dean, and you are our Spare."

"But did you really have to name me Spare? I've always been partial to the name Shaquille."

Now that Dean has moved to Colorado Springs, I often think about how handy he could be to have around - when we leave for the weekend and he keeps an eye on the dogs, or when we need help tearing a roof off or moving something heavy. And it would only cost us all the food in the house. A small price to pay for some help you can count on.

Too bad I didn't have one more of those in reserve for when Dean left in Pursuit of Happiness and Red, White and Blue Glory.


The cat uses the laundry room now as her bathroom, so we might have had to move our Spare to the garage, but it would have been worth it if we had had a built-in handyman to paint the house for us this week.