I want to believe
A couple of weekends ago I painted my back landing. When I bought my house in early 2001 almost every wall was a flat white – supposedly to attract buyers – and I’ve been meaning to remedy this ever since. But time does have a way of slipping into the future and over the ensuing years my interior has devolved from boring to shabby through the hard wear only a young family can deliver. I was finally motivated to start with the hall by the relatively narrow scope of the project, seven years of little handprints that would no longer wash off and the unexpected acquisition of a cute storage cabinet rescued from my neighbors’ curb.
In a fit of largesse, I also bought curtains, rugs and hanging shelves. Forty labor hours and a hundred bucks later I had the sweetest little entryway you can imagine – charming, really, in robin’s egg blue against dark wood, white and brushed stainless accessories showing off my vintage coffee pot collection to perfection.
Most people enter my home through the back door, so it’s a great first impression. But now when you walk through to the kitchen, its flaws are immediately evident. Ugly, faded wallpaper peels from more than one
corner, the cabinet bases are chipped, the ceiling fan is grotesque and the top of the fridge doubles as cereal box storage. The table and chairs are all wrong and there’s nowhere to put everything away. Frankly, the whole thing is a disaster and it’s making me crazy.
I feel stuck. I recently opened a home equity line of credit to have my roof fixed, and there’s still plenty left to borrow on, but I’m worried about the payments. I’m not as over-extended as some people, but my apple cart could certainly tip over with a stroke or two of severely bad luck. In other words, I’m just like you, your neighbor and just about everyone else: I’m anxious about what’s still to come and have no idea how bad it’s really going to get.
For now, at least, Milwaukee doesn’t have it as bad as many other cities. There’s little comfort there, I know, but at least the current 4.6% unemployment rate has been fairly consistent since 2001, and is lower than its five-year peak of 5.9% in 2003. And while housing foreclosures are up by about 40% over last year in Milwaukee County, Dane County is facing a 69% increase, which even blows away the national average of 53%. It’s not very shiny as far as silver linings go, but it’s what we’ve got.
To add to our trepidation, skyrocketing food and fuel prices are this season’s newest wild cards, with banks and speculators keeping the price of energy futures even higher than predictable factors would warrant. And while this might be more detail than you typically carry around in your head, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Recession or no recession, it’s nervous times. Even those lucky enough to have decent credit and a steady income are thinking twice before ponying up for stainless steel refrigerators. I’m trying to think ahead: if it comes down to a choice at some point between heat and a sweet kitchen, I’m banking my equity against a future gas bill.
In the meantime I think I really will clean my kitchen well and paint it a nice, soft yellow as I’ve been threatening to do for years. Maybe I’ll get my brother-in-law to build me a little white cupboard with a glass door to go above my stove and store my cereal, put a cloth on the table and be happy with what I’ve got. I’ll pray I don’t have to borrow against my house to pay the gas company and that this collective crisis spurs a larger awakening that ultimately leads to some of the really smart, innovative thinking that made the western world a powerhouse in the first place. I want to believe the Answer is out there, gathering dust at the Patent Office, waiting to revolutionize modern civilization. I also want to believe in ghosts, karma and guardian angels. No one can prove that the latter three don’t exist, so I’ll file “finding the Answer” with spirits and the Golden Rule. Maybe in a recipe card box in my yellow kitchen. VS
