Nine Songs from Home
The first1 song, an inability to sleep peacefully. Where, normally and for the most part, a person might expect to fall asleep swiftly, calmly, with some satisfaction for the day which has come before, we find none of the above. Instead, the body tries to fall asleep without the brain and intermittently twitches itself back to alertness, accompanied by a crawling sensation in the arms and legs—something is trying to get out, it seems. Light outside changes from the mid-blue of a cold, northern late spring to the deepest blue of stones left unturned and also stones found while digging in the garden—I don’t know what to do with either kind. It doesn’t appear other animals have such difficulty sleeping, I think, and the trouble-less rest of dormice and other such soft things can feel irksome.
The second song, that this building is bottom-to-top lead paint. When it was built, in the 1870s, people did not know things such as: lead will, if unchecked and inhaled, move from the blood to your bones and teeth, and cause serious neurological damage. There are reasonable ways to get the paint off, so long as you try to avoid creating dust, or heating the paint to high temperatures, and maybe a plan to remove it all—as opposed to sealing it in more aggressively—is inherently unreasonable. The problem is, the walls want to breathe out, and in, and they haven’t been able to do so for over a hundred years. Buildings hold their breath, and then get sad.
