Chandler The Robot

All I want is a little place to call home. I've got some money saved. Take it. Just give me a tiny plot of land close to my yoga studio and any place that knows how to put blueberries in their pancakes like little sunken craters in the moon. 

Salt Lake City, oh city of salt, don't you have enough room for me and Nick? We don't need a lot of space. He just needs a place to set up his drum kit, and I just need the square footage to be far enough not to hear it much of the time. 

Little house, even if you're old I'll still love you. Even if I need to take a paint brush to your bones, while taking breaks to sip hot chocolate and munch on macaroons, I'd do it. I swear. 

Even if the only place left for us is far away from the heart of the city where all of the people are laughing boisterously after they've finished their meals of oysters and salty martinis, I'll still have you. I don't mind listening to books on tape in my car during the drive or setting my phone on my lap with the "speaker" mode on while calling my sister away at college learning many smart things. (This way the man in blue won't be angry if he sees me driving down the road.)

All I want is a little place to call home. But the homes we have visited with hopeful eyes have frightening cracks in the foundation which could one day make the living room  floor sink while I'm dissecting a book on the couch, not one of those electric books, but the ones where you can feel real paper underneath your fingertips. 

                                                               Artwork by Anna Lisk 

The homes we've seen have been tortured by their previous owners, the paint oozing down the walls. Such hideous colors they have chosen: electric pink and devil red. Who wants to curl up inside those abominable colors? That is not a home. It is an insane asylum. 

The homes we've seen have dungeons underneath them, which I've learned are called "crawl spaces". The lady with mermaid green eyelids told me that as she carried around her clipboard and her heels clicked along the kitchen floor. I shudder to think what they could have been used for. Perhaps the old owners used to line cans of crushed tomatoes and refried beans along the dusty cement walls, but perhaps they did other things down there…

All I want is a little place to call home where me and my man can stand in an empty room together for the first time, gazing upon the walls of blank canvasses, and quarrel like playful artists about the hue that the orange ought to be. "Soft Marigold." I'd say matter-of-factly, "because it will match with the antique chairs my mother promised me when I become a woman." "I'd much prefer blood orange to match the color of the center of the earth deep down in the middle where the molten lava spews and sputters," Nick would say, to which I would reply, momentarily forgetting our spat, "Oh, is that what's at the center of the earth?" "Hell, if I know!" he'd say.

All I want is a little place to call home where I can finally let out my breath, open the door to my front porch each morning, and pick up the morning paper, just like the dads always do in the movies.

Honestly, Meg