i woke up this morning to a deafening crash and crunching sound.

it was not, actually, the cry of my beloved country falling down around my ears, though times are mad up here and unprecedented parliamentary nuttiness is most definitely afoot.  the clamour was, rather, the house across the street being flattened – chewed up and shredded by an enormous claw.  big chunks of roof and wall were being torn to pieces…family entertainment right at our window!  we pressed ourselves to the glass to watch.

Oscar peered out at the destruction and exclaimed, oooh!  a big mess!

(the parallels to our national political state are, admittedly, irresistable.)

house

i’ve never had a ringside seat for demolition before.  it’s violent, a little sickening.  fascinating, because the private is so suddenly exposed, made visible…but sad too.  the little house was a postwar relic.  when we moved in three+ years ago, the inhabitants had frequent ‘guests’ who stayed all of about five minutes and used the back door.  either dealers, we figured, or very popular people…but they never brought a casserole by so we never really got to know.  for the past year or more the place has been abandoned.  watching the linoleum layers clinging like rainbow skin to the detritus of the walls, i wondered about the hands that built the house, about the hopes that once must have been housed under its roof.

and i began to sing Tom Waits’ The House Where Nobody Lives, aloud, to Oscar.  i wanted to be very clear with him that the little house was somehow different from ours, that the big claw wasn’t coming for our walls anytime soon.

good thing he doesn’t follow politics.

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side note: the fact that i began above with the words “i woke up” means, in case you missed it, that i slept.  as did the bambino.  and the rest of the household.  thanks to you all for the hardcore love…i’m not sure if any of you managed to put a hex on colic or what’s going on, but i am in a better mental state today than i have been in awhile and i think a lot of it (beyond the blessed, blessed sleep) was the release of getting out that toxic stuff, knowing i’d been heard.

just for today – to steal outrageously from Mad and the other clever tweets out there – i’m okay if the Governor General doesn’t prorogue my life ’til January.  (and if you’re not in Canada and thus the word “prorogue” means no more to you than it did to me last week, see how edifying blog reading can be?)