#77 💀 One can’t help but NOTICE the hand grenade on the wash house floor 💥

In brief 🩲

• Journal: Grenades in the wash house
• Practical: Gonna need glass elbows for this one
• Read: The devolution of typical niceties
• Art: Elegant mess

From the journal 📖

We sold our house and moved late last year, and the experience – trauma – still features in my dream themes.

Recently I had a dream where I unearth a hand grenade while packing up the wash house. Without giving it too much thought, I pull the pin and slide it under a pile of plastic bags, shoe polish–stained rags, and defunct skipping ropes.

Then I think better of it.

My daughter Ida (a toddler once more, in this dream) sits outside the wash house doorway. She gurgles a bit, and points at the junk pile with the grenade underneath it.

I scratch my head and wonder what kind of grenade this is: one which has a timer, or one which explodes on impact. Also: Do grenades even have such a typology? The grenade starts to beep like an egg timer, and I make a snap decision. I pick up Ida and hold her out around the corner from the doorframe, so that there’ll at least be a wall between her and the explosion.

(Is this a dream about the quality of my parenting?)

There’s a muted pop, and the plastic bags puff up off the ground, then float down inside a haze of hot air. A tendril of white smoke reaches into the room and dissolves.

I pull away the rubbish to reveal a tennis ball–sized hole through the kauri floorboards. The wood around the edges is charred, and hot to the touch. I can see down into the cellar beneath, dust swirling through a shaft of morning sunlight. Ida toddles over and puts her eye to the hole.

All I can think about is whether I’ll have to disclose this on the sale and purchase agreement, or whether I can patch it together quickly with putty, or wood, or whatever it is people who know how to do things repair wooden floors with.

The experience of selling house and moving – that gauntlet of open-home Sundays, tense battles in the margins of sale-and-purchase agreements over chattels and reasonable wear and hundreds of thousands of dollars – has left its mark on my subconscious. About the same size as a remarkably restrained dream grenade.