Three little piggies

And their house of bricks

Once upon a time, there were three little piggies. Only one of them was actually little. The other two were quite grown up. In fact, the little piggy would have referred to the other two as Grumpy old pigs. Older than the hills. Older than time itself. They were born in the 1900s, after all, and that was a very long time ago. Probably there wasn’t even electricity in the 1900s. Maybe not even computers. Maybe not even TV.

Despite their years of experience, the two adult pigs were still somewhat innocent. They had done OK for themselves but were far from savvy. What wisdom they had acquired was balanced with equal amounts of jaded pessimism and naiveté. Being still young at heart, a small persistent flame burned inside each of them, each in its own place at the core of their being. This flame insisted that something better, something precious, something worthy awaited them. They spent many hours were contemplating what that might be, and how they might recognize it.

One night, on a lark, they looked at real estate listings in a far away country, and the two adult pigs, who were not only somewhat wise, jaded and naïve but also very crafty and inclined to fantasizing, cooked up a plan to buy a small and inexpensive house in that far away land. Everything about it was appealing, including the fact that it came fully furnished. The house was old and the décor was dated, but it had been around for 100 years and would likely be around for another 100. It was made of solid brick and it had a large property, perfect for growing vegetables and keeping animals (though no one dared mention the pig sty.)

They bought the house and daydreamed about what it would be like to spend long, leisurely vacations at the brick house in the warm country far away. Idyllic days of sunshine and carefree abundance. An Eden, you might say.

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The pig family had to overcome many odds and obstacles in acquiring the old house in the faraway country. But they persisted in pursuing their dream. Some family and friends were against the idea, thinking it risky and unwise. Others were awed or thought the pigs courageous.

Just as the purchase offer was accepted, a terrible illness

¹

swept the globe, shaking everything into disarray. Nothing worked anymore as it used to. The banks, the lawyers, the postal service. The world ground to a terrified halt and the pigs, longing for that small piece of somewhere else, feared their dream might slip away, that they might have just missed their only chance.

(They didn’t or I wouldn’t be writing this to you. We all hope the story ends well, but we can’t know that for now — or indeed until it ends, and we’re not sure that’s something to look forward to. On we progress, and on the plot thickens.)

That first year, the pigs planned to travel to their brick house overseas, and then planned not to go, and then finally, one of them went for six weeks to lead the forward expedition and undertake those in-person bureaucratic responsibilities that needed taking care of.

Pigs have short legs, and distances in the countryside are vast, so a car was acquired. Electricity and gas and ownership and residence papers were signed, and within short order, a small foothold was secured. The dream sprouted, unbidden, in the corner of one of the front rooms.

It had a name, but this has been lost to the annals of time.

Dreams are good and all, but a plan was hatched to remedy the situation.

---

Nearly a year later, the pig family seized the opportunity to go spend a few months in their brick house. There were some renovations to do, maybe a coat of paint, some emptying and cleaning. They were eager to make the house theirs.

I’ll save you the agonizing play-by-play.

In short, what Mrs. Pig hoped might be a quaint and fashionably old-fashioned home turned out to be a damp and neglected house hiding its rot behind distinctly un-charming communist-era furniture and under bright paint and cheap wainscoting, and housing an endless supply of ghost-like daddy-long-leg spiders, both alive and desiccated.

The pig family eyed the pig sty. They considered the outhouse. The balked at using the bathroom. There were moments of despair at the state of things. As they began to realize what would be involved in making the house acceptably livable, apprehension and discouragement settled into the corners of the rooms and the crevasses between the sagging floorboards where the sand seeped up through the subfloor in an endless supply of stinking silt.

The minor and inexpensive renovations the pigs had expected to take on morphed into a many headed-dragon, with one project generating three more, overlapping like miserable razor-sharp scales. Each one glittered in the light with promise — nicer, better, more solid and robust — that came at a cost. Each one required more investment, more demolition and reconstruction, more workers and filth and time.

They were practical pigs who understood the long-term value of making an investment. But in the pre-dawn morning and in the quiet evenings after the little pig was in bed, and at times throughout the day, they looked around with despair wondering what they had gotten themselves into and thinking that this wasn’t what they had signed up for, not at all.

Meanwhile, the terrible illness had continued its noxious spread. That faraway country where the pigs struggled with renovations during the day and held down jobs in the evening was less affected than their home country. Although they were homesick, life was easy, relaxed, normal. The pigs could almost believe there was nothing afoot in the world, no evil lurking, no barely disguised tyranny waiting to take center stage.

The pigs reimagined the brick house and focused on a new vision of what it would be and how much time they would spend there. They found joy and hope and comfort amid the sorrow for what they’d left behind.

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Everyone knows that you can’t blow down a brick house, no matter how hard you huff and puff, not even if you’re a big bad wolf.

The job of demolishing walls and carving out channels for electric wiring is a filthy, noisy affair. This is even more the case when the house is built with the solid bricks of old rather than the newfangled hollow ones. The dust gets into everything, into your lungs and your clothes and your soul, and it lingers long after the work is done as a vague rust-red hue.

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You’ve probably realized by now that this story isn’t really about three little pigs, although it is about a brick house and renovations. The walls are starting to come down, and holes are beginning to appear in narratives everywhere.

These walls have many holes where pipes and wires enter and exit the house, along with the cold and the damp and the spiders. They’re also, as Leonard Cohen sang, “how the light gets in.”

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One of the things I have been wondering is this: How many more walls must I tear down before my work here, in this life, in this world, will be done? Each time I expect it to be the last, believing that when the work is over, I will sit back and simply enjoy the new space I have created. Each time, a restlessness sets in, a need to change things up and move, to take on another challenge, another transformation.

Granted, I’m no longer wielding the sledgehammer but planning and overseeing the execution from a remove (usually the other room).

So what’s the next wall? How many more will there be?

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It turns out that things rarely happen the way we hope they will. It turns out that what we believe to be solid (plans, footing, structures) is often not, and that the work of breaking down barriers and building up new is damn hard, and in fact is never finished.

From a favorite songwriter:

You've traveled so far
The wind in your face
You're thinking you've found
The one special place
Where all your dreams
Will walk out in line
And follow the course
You've made in your mind

Hey, it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be, that way

…

You'll just have to live
And see what you find
And take it from there
And follow the signs

Yeah, you think you can live
And dream your own fate
You think you can wish
And walk through the gate

You can read the rest of the lyrics and listen to the song here.

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Today is my first day of being unemployed since practically forever. When it comes to income, I’m a firm believer in rock-solid sure-things and leaving nothing to chance. This time, I have nothing else lined up. This isn’t a maternity leave or the brief transitional lull between jobs. There’s only the gaping maw of the future and all its unknowns.

Yesterday at 5:01 p.m., I was unceremoniously booted out of all access to my employer’s computer system. The laptop screen lit up as a small dialog box appeared requesting that I enter my credentials. That was all, a brief light, a shrug of an exit.

I shutdown the laptop and sat down with husband and a glass of peated whiskey.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

(The Hollow Men, TS Eliot)

Read it here.

Perhaps it’s the first hole, the first crack in what I believed to be a supporting, load-bearing wall. Perhaps everything will come crashing down, but more likely, I will discover a new architecture to living.

I have some ideas and some contacts, some irons in the fire, and I have a lot of fear and apprehension and much personal work to do. I also have projects and dreams that perhaps I can build upon now.

A little chiseling, a little mortar, and slowly the space changes shape.

1. You may think I’m speaking of the well-known viral pandemic. I am not, though it arrived hand-in-hand.