septic and antiseptic

My sister reminded me yesterday that when we around 11 and 12 years old, respectively, the septic drain field at our house rose up, turning the yard into a wretched marshy swamp. I believe I had blocked this memory but the smell of that time is undoubtedly the smell of this house we're supposed to be moving into next week. And that explains why my heart felt so heavy in my chest on Sunday watching J try to fix things. There is a very old wound there, a fear that no amount of effort by anyone will ever fix anything.

Septic tank disasters comprise one variety of disaster familiar from my childhood. There is no question that it was always something with us--clogged pipes, broken-down cars, holes in walls, children falling through attic ceilings. A steady stream of expensive damages we could never afford to address. My father had a gift for dramatic despair, a way of making each fresh challenge seem totally insurmountable. Oh my, how such an attitude sinks into a developing child's personality. Hopelessness is wired into my bones. Bless his heart, as they say, it was wired into my father's bones too.

J calls with an update from the landlady. She is of the hands-off variety; lives out of state and has ignored our communications about the septic system problem for three days straight. At last, a casual message advising us to put a bucket under the kitchen sink and re-direct the overflow from the washing machine into a drain we're building in the back for rainwater from the gutters. We like a project but this is infuriating advice. Unsanitary, illegal, and no kind of long term solution.

Just over a week ago, we saw this house and felt so happy, felt like we belonged there. It meant at last we had found our escape from town, a town that increasingly holds nothing for us. We want only a little piece of land to cultivate, to work hard all day and sit by a fire at night looking at stars. This is not poetry or fantasy. It's a simple, concrete, sincere wish. And it is the birthright of human beings. Some dignity. Some dignity.

Now, the familiar old septic smell permeates everything, tugging on the barbed wires of defeat laced through the joints of my body. These are old feelings, these are perhaps not even my feelings, but they live in me. They are me, it seems.

My mother has developed over the years an increasing need to sanitize her surroundings. She is a delightful person, with a warm bubbling laugh that infects everyone near her, and she applies this laughter to herself freely. Even as she reaches for the hand sanitizer for the twentieth time in an hour or insists on hitting the chair you are about to sit on with a quick spritz of Lysol, she laughs at herself. She knows this is absurd, but she can't help it.

I am sure my mother's mania for antiseptic spaces is a reaction to the messiness and chaos of her young womanhood and middle age--the childhood I remember of constant impending disaster, mess and wreckage. Insurmountable problems. And I wonder too if it is not some kind of expression of hope--of a belief that what is worthless or useless can in fact be wiped away. That we can give ourselves a new start a thousand times a day.

I am nervous about this move. How could I fail to be? Strange old echoes surfacing. My anxiety could overcome me, as it used to my father, but what would be the point? Bless his heart.

Bless mine.