Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

It goes against all that is house. So vulnerable and exposed. We trust our houses to keep out the elements. It is why we build them, why we think of them as haven. As the otherwise welcome rains fall in drought plagued Los Angeles, the house has leaks in its roof, small drippy breeches through which the water penetrates with slow destructive power. It soaks the cellulose insulation I had blown into the attic to keep us warm, old recycled newspaper fibres that sealed out the 1920’s drafts. Now the besotted weight will pull down the ceiling over where our bed used to sit. I picture a crew with shovels, loading yet another dumpster with the detritus of the fire.

It would be better, I think, to begin the demolition, the tearing out of the shards of clinging plaster and exposed untapped wallboard to expose the studs and rafters behind. At least that destruction has purpose, intention. It is destruction that is constructive, part of the journey to being once again a place to rest our heads, in dry, warm comfort. This slow, piecemeal and random destruction, the destruction of neglect and elements, feels, as Elicia suggested, like something from a Garcia-Marquez novel, time inexorably wearing down the best intentions and efforts of those that live, turning the inanimate back to the jungle from which it sprung. It is as if, uninhabited and scarred, the house has reunited with the forces of entropy, of disassembly and component-ness.

Is that what a house is? Components held together in a system of organization by the daily presence of humans who generally take it for granted? Does a house remain a house because of the million lightbulbs that get changed and floors that get mopped and pipes that get tightened or replaced. Is it the accumulation of small actions, unnoticed at the time of their completion, that accrete into the idea of house? Or is there some metaphysical force, a living energy, that by its very presence just keeps the parts related?

These are the two sides of my mind, of course, the concrete and practical and the imaginative dreamer. Today though, as the rain falls and the ceilings with it, I feel disabled and at a loss. I have no raincoat, nor umbrella to keep me dry. My hoodies, which I wear beneath a borrowed leather coat for warmth, become quickly saturated, and the chill the dripping rain leaves in the small of my back seems unending and inconsolable, no matter how much earl gray tea I drink. “The grieving feel chilled,” Joan Didion quotes, in The Year of Magical Thinking, from Emily Post’s etiquette manual of 1922, “they need soup.”

It is true, I suppose, if grieving is what this feeling I have is, for there are parts of my body, regions immune to warmth, relaxation, medication, massage, or any of the other traditionally healing things that integrate my easily shattered life. Matija’s grandmother promised me chicken soup this weekend .“You don’t make Chicken Soup in a pressure cooker,” she insisted, when I told her of the demise in the fire of my mothers, the 40 year old Presto in which our soup was always made. She seemed vaguely insulted, in that way that only a jewish mother can. Perhaps her soup, sans pressure, will be the cure I need.