The Most Shocking and Unexpected Opponent
While rotting my brain and doom scrolling, I saw a meme that said,
"As an adult, the most shocking and unexpected opponent in life is the person who owned your house before you."
This is one of those times where I say, I was not prepared for how seen I felt. After moving into our 100+ year old farm house, we realized the guy who owned it before us fancied himself very handy.
Spoiler: He wasn't.
Of course, when we moved in, we didn't know this. In one of our early conversations with our neighbor, he told us at one point, our house's previous owner had decided to AirBNB the house. The house is still in a very agricultural area. Our neighbor told us that the renters would party all night, keeping the neighbors awake. So then the neighbors would run all their farming equipment next to the fence... at dawn. Ultimately, the AirBNB thing didn't work out, so the former owner sold to us.
And when we got the house we realized the old owner had done a lot to make it look good in photos, but it was chintzy as shit. Also, he had a weird deal with floss picks. For the first two years we lived in house, we found floss picks everywhere. In the compost (he was using plastic floss picks), buried on the driveway, stuffed in the window frames, wedged in the baseboards. They were everywhere.
The former owner's name rhymed with potato, so we called him Potato. We would find a floss pick crammed into some bizarre location and we would raise our fists at the sky and yell, "Potatooooooo!"
My husband is the mechanically inclined half of our partnership. All of the home reno projects we do are planned and executed thanks to him. I have learned a lot from this. (Once I had a work meeting on the fourth floor of a building. I glanced at the roof across the street and said, "Ohh, water is pooling in that low spot. That's real bad." The woman I was meeting with looked at me and said, "You know about roofs?" And I realized, I don't. I just know the things that will make my husband go non-verbal with the exception of extremely emotive curses. That building's roof was one of those things.)
And most of what Potato did to our house causes my husband to go into a fugue state of curses and punctuated by intense silence. Over the years my husband has rebuilt massive parts of our house, and now he doesn't have to just say things like, "Fucking hell, what in the fuck." He can simply say, "Potato." Uttering Potato in the context of a home improvement project is far more intense and awful of a word than any common curse word.
We hate Potato.
A few years after moving into the farm house, a friend recommended I read One Man's Meat by E.B. White. This is the same E.B. White who wrote Charlotte's Web and The Element's of Style, which was a foundation of most of my childhood English classes.
One Man's Meat is a collection of essays that E.B. White wrote when he and his family moved from busy New York City to a farm in Maine. The essays span from the late 1930's into the 1940's.
The essays are charming, funny, poignant and still relevant all these decades later. Their timelessness shows us that the things that bothered E.B. White ninety years ago are basically the same things that bother us today. He talks on politics, war, religion, community, the price of every day goods, and finding meaning. Sound familiar?
One of his essays speaks on how every person who buys a farm house decides they need to renovate it. The essay is funny and self deprecating.
And when I saw that meme:
"As an adult, the most shocking and unexpected opponent in life is the person who owned your house before you."
I realized, I am the next generation's opponent. And she will be the next generation's opponent.
Will they rhyme our last names with root vegetables and shake their fists at the sky? We certainly aren't so amazing that whoever comes next will decide our home renovations are perfect. Everyone believes they are the person to improve something to perfection. We believe we are un-fucking Potato's bad decisions. And that means that whoever gets this house next will believe they are un-fucking our bad decisions.
Which I guess leaves me with one choice.
If every villain needs a weapon, the floss pick has already been chosen.
What will I choose?