The Paper House

It is a paper house. Paper walls with paper paint, paper fixtures, a paper pellet stove, paper stairs, paper porch, paper floor, paper toilet, and paper cabinets. Paper planting pots I fill with paper soil, paper water and paper seeds. Paper windows. Paper shingles on a paper roof. Paper doors. A paper house surrounded by paper trees, paper dirt paths, and reached by paper feet or paper tires down a narrow paper road.

I have already stood in a store, building my paper home out of paper paint swatches, mostly warm blues and earthy olive greens. I have a book of paper pages on hold at the library about growing a vegetable and herb garden in a small space (my paper porch with paper pots, soil and seeds). And I have already drawn pencil pictures on paper of the bookshelves I want to build.

It isn’t our home. It isn’t even our bank’s house. It is still the seller’s brick, wood, iron, glass and plaster. We are just potential paper buyers, paying invisible paper money to keep the other potential paper buyers away. Dibs is all we really have.

Monday morning, the inspector’s screwdriver goes through the ceiling of the laundry room and sticks there. Below it, a bucket sits on the floor, empty but no less suspicious. It is an old bathroom leak, we are told. It was resolved last year, or rather, thought to have been resolved last year. Now the plaster is soft and the wood might be rot. A plumber and a carpenter are called. We shall see what they say.

I imagine standing in the shower as it cracks away from the walls and breaks through the floor like a detached elevator, landing in the laundry room with a hard, wet thud. This could mean a new bathroom with a claw foot porcelain tub! Though, this could also mean that we tear up this paper house and the paper dreams we have drawn with it and we keep searching these paper towns for a place to call home.