PLACE
Holder
Inside Job A writer repaints his office space, for better or for worse / by George Singleton
Photograph by Rob McDonald; courtesy of Hub City Press
M Animal House: This essay “Writing in a Room That Once Displayed Jesus, Inside a Zoo, Inside a Botanical Garden” appears in Carolina Writers at Home, a collection of essays and photography published by Hub City Press, October 2015.
y better half Glenda agreed to let me take a job at Wofford College, after she’d retired from teaching. I thought, We need to find a compound of sorts. At the old house in Dacusville, in Pickens County, I looked out my writing room window and watched men and women push dogs out of their trucks and SUVs. I watched a man hit a deer, not kill it, then get out of his truck and shoot it in the head right there on my front lawn, then drive off. One morning we found a guy passed out in his truck, pulled right up to our cars in the driveway. “It’s only going to get worse,” I told Glenda. She agreed. So we found this corner-lot house that’s not even thirty-three years old since construction—with a chainlink fence covering the entire couple acres. On the outside of the fence are ten-foot-high tea olive bushes facing both roads. In the back there’s pine woods, and the inside of the fence holds azaleas, Elaeagnus, faux holly, real holly with red berries, Leyland cypresses, and so on. Hibiscus. Whoever owned the house before us must’ve had a thing for making nursery owners wealthy. Listen, I’m no zoologist, but all those plants—and
I’m not exactly a plant guy—attract lots of critters. In the past year I’ve sat on the back deck to see a fox zip by me, and crept down the driveway in order to get a better view of deer at four in the morning standing ten feet from me on the other side of the fence. Predawn I’ve listened to coyotes yipping not that far away. Using a Havahart trap, I’ve caught possums that, when released, just stood there beside me. I have a photo of me putting a leash on one possum and trying to take him for a walk. He didn’t oblige very well. Chipmunks and squirrels? Check. Hummingbirds? It’s like standing on a battleship with the F-14s coming home. Bluejays, crows, pileated woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, cardinals, bluebirds, mourning doves, hundreds of wild canaries at a time making a mess of the bird feeders. On the other side of the main road, there’s a cell tower that hosts a wake of black buzzards that I watch when the sun comes out. They’re staring at me as I write this, I bet. Okay, so the previous owners—a nice couple who install big-time kitchens, thus what sold the house to Glenda, seeing as these folks put in a couple gas Wolf stoves and a hood normally seen at a Waffle House—may have been color-blind. Downstairs, the rooms were painted a bright yellow. Then there was the lime-green living room. The laundry room was a shade of orange not known to sane people, the bedroom some kind of blue. If one took off the roof and looked down, it wouldn’t have looked that much different than four or five tubs of sherbet, or a bag of saltwater taffy. Maybe the previous owners had gone to the Caribbean on a second honeymoon and became enthralled with the color schemes of local bodegas. But here’s the best room, and it’s where I write now: They had hired out some local muralists to transform a perfectly normal room—probably once used as a child’s bedroom, or an office. Four normal walls became a jungle, the ceiling a sky with a bald eagle flying across. On the day after closing, I drove over to the new house, armed with whatever paint colors Lowe’s and Home Depot make up. Me, I call these paints “dark green” and “white,” but they have special names. NOVEMBER 2015 / 67