Hurricane Dean

It's a very strange thing, owning a house two countries away, especially when you can't go to it very often.

As I've said in this blog, Rob and I won't be able to live in our house for a little more than three years, when he retires. Until then, we can visit at the most twice each year, for two or three weeks each time. The house is rented for the most part in between.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the house. I decorate and redecorate, visualize myself in the kitchen and the garden, have imaginary conversations with the neighbours, and generally fantasize about our future life there. I make lists and lists of things we might do to renovate parts of it (the kitchen is my special project), and try and superimpose some of our things here onto walls and shelves down in Mexico. It's a fun pastime, and for the most part, a harmless one.

There's a down side, though, to imagining the house that can't be reached easily. When Hurricane Dean swept through Jamaica on a clear course to Mexico, I was on the weather channel almost constantly, tracking its destructive path, one which, in my mind, led right down our Avenida and directly into the courtyard of number 225. Now I'm well aware that few hurricanes make it into the Lake Chapala valley, but, in my vivid imagination, Dean was headed there, in full force, and had a particular grudge against our house.

I'm reading the local Chapala webboards today, as people prepare for the heavy rains that are the more benign consequence of Dean in our area. Even that doesn't appease me, as I imagine water coming under the front door and along our tiled foyer. It doesn't help that the house is empty until the end of the month, so there's no one there to help defend it against the floods that I see making their way up to the second floor.

It's silly, I know. The house has withstood many rainy seasons in its 15 year life, and a couple of days of heavy rain this year aren't going to make any difference. Except there is a difference this year, because the house is ours, and I don't want anything to happen to it while we're not there. I'm getting almost maternal, not just proprietal about it.

Is this because it's the only house I've ever owned? Or is it because I'm not in it? Perhaps people who own cabins or cottages feel this way off-season, when they hear of major snowstorms blasting against their shuttered summer homes, or perhaps, when you've owned a place for awhile you take these things in stride, recognizing that catastrophes don't lurk around every corner.

All I know is that I'd rather be thinking about countertops and herb gardens today.