DORIS
This is a photo of the rear of our house. Our house is cursed, or just very old. It was built in 1910, between the invention of the tea bag and the sinking of the Titanic. It was a family home, then a halfway house for recovering addicts, then it sat empty for years, then it was lightly renovated, and then we bought it. Everything is wrong with it. Rotten windows, cracked pipes, crumbling driveway. It has a spine, made of strong wood, that runs the middle of it beneath the floor of the first level. You can feel the spine beneath your feet, unyielding, when you stand in our bedroom doorway. The whole house rests on this spine and has settled accordingly. It's the continental divide, and if you were to pour marbles on it, they would rush away in either direction, following floors that fall away from it like ancient slopes. In this photo, I tried to capture some of the house's personality. How it's shy and slow to reveal itself. How it's plagued by issues that distract us from how essentially warm and lovely it is. Every time we fix one problem, another is revealed. This is the curse. As we fixed its rotten porch, a retaining wall collapsed. After we patched the roof, our pipes backed up: the sewer pipe had finally crumbled. We think that one day it'll be a good house, after we've seen to its traumas and given it the care it needs. But that will take years. It's hard not to resent something so needy, so expensive to maintain. We often consider moving. Our house's name is Doris after the daughter of the first family who lived here. We like to say that she's just trauma-dumping on us because we're the first people in decades who've shown her love. My wife speaks to Doris with respect and affection. She pats the walls and says, "Thank you for not falling apart on us today.”