I live in a house that looks small on the outside but is surprisingly abundant when you’re on the inside. It’s a Cape Cod style, which traditionally have small rooms and the attics are turned into second floor bedrooms. My house was once a rancher, but the previous owners added a “dormer” second floor, which acts today as the entire Master bedroom, large bathroom, walk-in closet and another small room off the closet for more storage.
It’s from this second floor that I often write from because it’s the quietest room. Even though there is a desktop PC, it’s hidden in an armoire wardrobe piece adapted into a computer desk. There is a small TV. And piles of books, which are like my babies. I’m lost without my books.
I come upstairs to escape the sounds of my house. Married to a computer geek who works in fields related to my own, the house is expertly networked with not only servers and shared drives, but there’s every imaginable game except for the Wii. The only reason a Wii isn’t in this house is the rooms are too small and I was afraid someone would get whacked in the jaw while playing.
Friends of ours have a much larger, roomy house. This couple and their kids are a lot like my family. We’re close in age, our kids are the same ages and our jobs are all somehow related. Their house is big enough for a “no tech zone” in their living room. This room has no computers and no TV. In my house, the living room has a large TV (not plasma) for the PS3, which is also set up as a computer monitor. From the living room I typically hear speeding cars, grenades going off, men screaming, shooting guns and every possible weird beep ever invented. On any given night, my husband is in a PS3 game trance while the youngest son is playing Playstation games on a hand-held device on the couch. The books on the coffee table are mine.
Our finished basement is large and broken up into sections. One of those sections is my office. It’s tidy and cozy. There are several book cases, my desktop, desk, filing cabinets and the wood stove, which keeps it warm because there’s no other heat source in the basement.
Another section is the family room equipped with a corner bar that stores bulk food from Costco and a pretty fish tank that gurgles. This is where “The Dudes” hang. Most weekends, from sun up to sun down, there is a group of teen age boys singing “American Woman” or “Spirit in the Sky” along with RockBand2. The visiting boys bring their RockBand guitars. In the evenings, after homework is done (because that’s the rule!), the house is filled with song after song from RockBand2. I never need a radio while making dinner anymore. All I need to do is leave the door open to the basement and I listen to the boys.
Living in the country, the sounds of my house change with the seasons. In the springtime, the birds start singing by the thousands as soon as the sun begins to rise. With the windows open in early fall nights I can hear the high school band playing during football games. Summer nights always bring sounds of cars from the distant highway. The road that goes in front of my house is annoying. We never should have bought a house so close to a road. I totally forgot that kids turn up the base in their cars, really loud.
I visited another friend this morning. Her house is sheer chaos all the time. She has more kids than I do. Our teenage boys are best friends. Her house has peeling paint, dents in the walls, clutter everywhere and is a rush of kids and pets all the time. Today when I see her, she’s flopped on a couch with her laptop, hair piled on her head, mascara smeared under her eyes and beaming with contentment as the sounds of RockBand2 ooze up from her basement.
As I walk out to my car, after fiddling with their broken front door handle and dodging toys in the hallway, I smile to myself. I feel a kinship with her. Our houses are our safe comfort zones. Our homes are always busy and filled with kids and our kids’ friends. She and I both taxi our kids to their sports games, band practices, and we typically travel with kids in tow and our dogs in our cars.
If it ever got quiet, we’d be bored out of our minds.
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