The Pleiades were rising above our house when we came up the long drive after dusk. The night air was cold and dark. Our house. Such a different feeling than the house we owned in Connecticut, in a jam-packed neighborhood with dogs yapping right next door, and dog poop in our flower beds. Here, the wide expanse of sky spreads out above like the dome of some great church, huge and indigo in the starlight. Here, the silence tucks itself around the corners of the house, wind rushing between the tall poplars and maples on the hill.
We began the process of removing the outdated cabinets, circa the 1970s, and were reminded again (we renovated our last house too) that every project takes twice as long. They used nails with screw-points to install the cabinets, leaving us no way to take them down gracefully. There we were, three of us with crow bars, trying to let our minds slip back in time to imagine what the workmen had thought of, nearly thirty years before. Like a puzzle, each cabinet connected to the next.
Tomorrow we’ll go back with better tools and leather gloves. Tomorrow maybe it will sink in: months of work before the place is home. But tonight in the driveway before piling into the car an hour before midnight, I couldn’t help but twirl a couple of times under the stars, my arms out-stretched. Across the valley the nearly full wedge of a waning moon was rising, like a white teacup, against the tablecloth of night.