Being followed by my own footsteps in Baja California.

So here it is, Friday, and though I've been back in Chicago five days, I'm only today beginning to feel okay about it and not so on-the-edge-of-wheepy as I have been all week long. S is basically out of communication. He's running missions all week. He'd hoped to call me today, but he's not yet so I assume something came up and made it impossible. I can't believe he'll be home in three weeks. I'm excited and nervous all at the same time. I want the place to be in tip-top shape. Since we moved in in 1999, we've wanted to redo the kitchen. We like to say we bought a "brand-new fixer-upper" -- though the place was a new gut rehab of an early twentieth century building, the workmanship in the kitchens and bathrooms was truly horrendous and needed replacement as soon as we moved in. In the master bath, the walls were lined in gorgeous marble tile, but then the cabinet was white composite crap (Home Depot special, no doubt) with cathedral doors, and horror upon horror, yellow formica on top. The cabinet was too small for the room, so it just sort of ended before the tub, and the doors were all crooked. Awful. Last summer we renovated that bathroom ourselves, tearing out the old cabinetry and installing new cherrywood with a matching marble top. In our other bathroom, which had the same white cabinet/yellow formica mess, we installed a pedestal sink. Halfway through that project we found out a pedestal sink installation is considered the "graduate school of do-it-yourselfers;" lucky us, S was in graduate school at the time, so we were all good!

And then there is the kitchen. We like to cook. Both of us. In fact we love to. So we need a kitchen that is cook-friendly. On the surface our kitchen looks great, even nice. Natural maple cabinetry, blue-black splattered with dusty rose dakota granite countertops. The problem? The cabinets were so poorly installed that they are cockeyed, and the countertop slopes down nearly 1/2 inch. We call it the Beetlejuice kitchen. It's skewed this way and that, and when you live with it, it drives you absolutely nuts. We took off all the doors and drawer faces and reattached them to give the appearance of being straight, but the cabinets themselves are so crooked that our tinkering did little good. To make matters worse, the builders stuck a massive white double-bowl sink in the corner (our kitchen is small) that eats up counterspace, making it impossible to actually prep meals without using the dining table surface too, and stares out at you like the Cyclops eye from the nightsky dark countertop. And the appliances are black. Ouch.

For the past couple of years, S and I talked about redoing the kitchen together this summer. We're a handy couple. Honest! In fact, last summer we were at the Crafty Beaver hardware store so much that the guys there started teasing us and said we should have our own Home Network show called "We Can Do That!" It might have taken us a week to do something a professional could do in a few hours, but hey, we did it and it looked great. We decided we could do the kitchen, too, since it was really just like the bathroom on a larger scale: more cabinets, larger undermount sink, a couple of additional outlets to deal with. Besides that, the same.

Well, obviously S is gone and though I consider myself "handy" I'm sure as hell not prepared to do a kitchen by myself. Imagine! I wouldn't have a kitchen to cook in for months. When I first got back to Chicago, after my week locked up in the house with my Sex and the City DVDs, I decided to get serious about what would come next. There was something about putting off everything we'd planned that left me feeling even more distraught. It was bad enough that we were to be separated for months and months (we didn't know yet how long), but then to just stop everything, act as if we had been locked in one moment in the vast time-space continuum, made me feel worse. I began to go to fertility specialists and inquire about our options (only to be completely cheated by one...but that's another story). And I started looking into redoing our kitchen.

I figured out how little money we could spend, got several quotes, and was lucky enough to meet a designer who I really like and who understands what I want to do with not very much. We can't afford new appliances, so we're keeping the black ones and putting in these gorgeous, somehwat decorative black cabinets on the bottom with a marble top, one that will patina with time, stain and change and look like a living thing, not preserved as "perfect" indefinitely. On one wall we're not having any cabinets at all so from the living room (it's an open floor plan) it will look like a piece of furniture, and on the other wall we're putting up these whitewash flat-paneled, completely unadorned cabinets that will blend in with the wall to be visually out of sight.

I'm thrilled with the design, but now I'm rushed. I want to have the kitchen done before S comes home, or wait and do it after he leaves, so that there is as little chaos around here as possible. He's already told me that he's more sensitive to noise than he was before. He's worried about living in the city. I'm hopeful, though, that he will be okay here in our neighborhood in Chicago, where it is significantly more quiet than our neighborhood was in New Orleans. Down there, we heard gun shots nearly every night; streams of cars came storming through at all hours. It was not "peaceful" in the slightest. I'd rather his visual space not be cluttered either, so I've been clearing out our house, moving things about and giving our miriad of tchotchkes to a local non-profit, the Brown Elephant. We've not lived here for a long stretch of time for several years; we rented the place out to friends (as "roommates" so we could stay here during the summers and holidays) and lived with a roommate in New Orleans, leaving much of our stuff up here in boxes or stuffed in closets. The cabinets are coming in just after labor day and I don't have a contractor yet that I can afford. My dear cousin, a union carpenter, has volunteered to come up from downstate and help me install them, but we're not sure when he can come and I'm not sure I can burden him with making such a long trip. We'll see. It's nice, actually, to be worried about something so frivolous for a change.

Throughout the summer I've kept S up-to-date about these kitchen plans. He's not been here to choose the cabinets or countertop with me, but I've sent him pictures and tried my best to describe the design. We rarely argue. Our only real sleep-on-the-couch disagreement came when we were first married and S applied to be a Chicago cop. He hated his job as a chemist, and had been taking graduate classes in computer science, but hated that too. He was desperate for something new. We knew a ton of cops at our gym, which made his choice seem inevitable but also disturbed me profoundly. I'd known them longer than S had. I'd heard their stories, many that made me question why I continued to train with them (and eventually I stopped because I just couldn't work out with people who had done such things) and I knew that if S joined their ranks he would be sucked up into their world, taken in, and perhaps have his spirit and goodness torn out of him. I couldn't bear the thought of our relationship shattered for a job, one that involved doing morally questionable things nearly every day (if he were to have worked with the crew we knew, at least), and one that had horrible hours that would have left us with little time together. We raised our voices, we didn't talk for days. In the end, he was offered the job, but he didn't take it. He chose me and our relationship, and eventually chose archaeology and anthropology, an actual true fit for him, one that leaves him intellectually engaged and excited about work.

Back in mid-July I sent him a detailed email with pictures about the kitchen plan. This was his reply:


The thing is, even though I have my dark moments and my nightmares, I know our relationship can make it through this. We trust each other and we love each other. And we know that no matter what sort of problems come up, graduate school-level or not, "we can do that."

I can't wait to see him.