Today, we are working again at the small family camp. This morning, I got quite a shock. In the back kitchen, I pulled on the door to the kitchen and stood, open-mouthed, as the door swung free.
That door has stuck on the concrete floor for ten years. Part of learning to be there is learning at what point on the door's arc to lift up so you can open the door all the way. But today, it opened all the way to the shelving on the wall behind it. No scraping. No sticking. Not even any creaking.
It's a little thing, but it's a welcome sign. Starting early Sunday afternoon, we altered our M.O. for fixing the smaller camp. We moved from the inside floor to the outside walls of the bathroom. The bathroom is a semi-separate structure added to the main house in the late 1960s. The bathroom has been falling backwards away from the rest of the house for at least the past decade. Roy figured out that because all the various roof sections are connected across the entire house, and because some of the walls are standing mostly because they're attached to the roof (the flooring beams and joists are rotten in a large area), we have to fix the bathroom sooner rather than later.
Once the bathroom structure is upright and stable, we can then go back to the beams inside the house and get them upright and stable. The walls, too.
Eventually, when we're done tinkering around with the foundations and solidity of the place, we can put that new roof on, which is what I've been wanting for a good five years anyway. When the roof no longer leaks, then the inside won't deteriorate further and we can paint walls and floors. Then it will be easier to enjoy being there--currently, it's tough to overlook all the projects that need to be done and have a simple vacation.
Meanwhile, the little bit of work we've done on the bathroom is invisible when you're standing inside the main structure. The walls are still skew-gee. The back kitchen still sinks toward the spot where the piano was. Still, the work has yielded visible results: the door opens easily. Progress. We are making a difference.
What Archimedes said was true: give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world. He was right in the metaphoric sense, too--given a little success, my imagination can conjure the end state. We're not there yet, but we can see it from here.
