I was recently asked, seemingly with some surprise, about my
slightly less than mainstream lifestyle. In fact the phrase “renowned and
brilliant engineer living in a barn” was used, follow immediately by “how the
hell did you get a woman to keep you company?!”, or something along those
lines.
OK, first off, if anything, infamous is probably a more
accurate word than renowned, and I doubt even that is the case. The reality is
more along the lines of “who?”. And
brilliant? That’s just wrong! Unless it was being said with a dripping dose of
sarcasm, as in “Oh, that’s just brilliant!”, while looking down at the results
of a dropped paint can that just exploded all over the place.
But OK, it’s true that I was, in a previous life, an
engineer and that I found a partner that, for the past 20 years has lived in a
barn with me.
More specifically, we have a 380 sq. ft. space that is split between a single multi-purpose room plus a bathroom
tucked in the corner of a 1500 sq. ft. barn.
This is where we cook, sleep, eat, and spend our evenings. (My sister calls it the transformer room.)
But that’s not the whole story.
The rest of the barn is my workshop where I spend a lot of time
and The Wife has a
separate 400 sq. ft. barn with a 16 x 8 foot deck that is her workspace, where
she also spends a lot of her time. And we also have 14 fenced, isolated,
rolling (three ridges and two valleys with no flat spots in-between), wooded
acres to wander as well. So it’s not like we’re “in” a single room all day.
So how did I get woman to keep me company in these
circumstances? Well it hasn’t always been easy! For either of us.
The Wife and I met at a dinner party in 1982. She thought I was really boring and wondered why I had been invited in the first place. I didn’t think much about her one way or the other, being more concerned with how uncomfortable I am at social events and wondering why I had agreed to come in the first place. But working different divisions of the same company we kept running into each other,
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| The Wife, The Daughter (mine), and me the day we made it official |
and four years later we shacked up, a year after that we made it official in the eyes of the IRS.
In many ways we make no sense together at all. I’m a fairly
active person and mildly aggressive about maintaining my physical conditioning,
she’s more sedentary and food-oriented. (When we travel together we don’t go
from here to there, we go from restaurant to restaurant until we eventually get
there!) In the morning I can’t wait to get up and out the door into the open
air where I pretty much stay until sunset regardless of the weather, she loves
her air-conditioning. I’ve hiked several thousand miles of wilderness trails,
some of them pretty hairy, requiring a certain sense of adventure and a degree
of nimble-footedness, her threshold for adventure is more along the lines of
buying a new brand of salad dressing, and she can break a leg stepping off the
sidewalk – something she’s done twice.
But there are ways we make sense together.
In slightly different ways both of us are, to put it mildly, uneasy around people. My particular form of autism (Not that we knew how to label ourselves until recently) makes it uncomfortable for me to be around and deal with people. I’m agitated while trying to deal with social norms I just don’t understand and therefore am really bad at. The Wife’s form of social atypical-ness is similar but slightly different. She can play the socializing game much better than me when she has to, but people scare the crap out of her. She is very distrustful of pretty much everyone and for her, being around people borders on terrifying. Either way, interaction with people is exhausting for both of us.
Even though we didn’t have names for what we were beck then, we knew early on that sharing these traits actually made us bad for each other, feeding off of each other’s social issues like a sound-system squealing out of control, and together we were, not only feeding off of each other’s social issues but also creating a codependency. And in case we missed the implications of this before, they were made clear on Halloween of 1984.
Pretending we were normal people we had spent a couple weeks
assembling our costumes for a party, and on the day got dressed up, drove to
the location, parked, shut the car off, watched a few people going into the
venue, started the car, and drove away to spend the evening on our own. But we
made the conscious decision that, despite this, us together, taking care of
each other and creating little sanctuaries for ourselves where possible in the
midst of the social chaos, was preferable to us going our separate ways and
trying to live full time in a world we didn’t quite fit into.
We also share a similar, muted, consumerist’s ethic. We
aren’t afraid to spend money when it makes sense. We both have rather high-end vehicles
with all the bells and whistles that make driving easier, more comfortable, and
safer. But on the other-hand, we built both barns, our atypical home, and the
well-house, by hand, on weekends, for cash (Which is a big reason I was able to retire at 58
and finally get away from people on a daily basis). I own two sets of footwear,
slippers for evenings on our raw concrete floor and a pair of hiking shoes for
everything else. The Wife never wears trousers and owns three skirts. When one
or another of those wears out to the point of indecency she gets the sewing
machine out and makes another one.
It hasn’t always been smooth. As is true for most everybody,
ours is not the well-groomed garden path of a Hallmark movie. Our road is
rutted and potholed, has sharp turns with no guardrails, exhausting uphill
slogs and terrifying descents, but somehow we’ve managed to make it work. For
40 some years and counting, together we’ve been crafting the complex and ever
changing choreography of a partnership.
She plans and preps most of our meals (in a kitchenette with
a hotplate, a countertop convection oven, no microwave, but an 18”
dishwasher!), I reset tripped breakers, sort the recycling, and take the
compost out. She keeps track of birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays and
ensures the appropriate cards, gifts, and notes get to where they’re supposed
to be, when they’re supposed to be, I keep an eye on the finances and ensure
the bills are paid. She gets on-line and places orders for groceries and
household goods for curbside pickup (so we don’t have to go in and mingle with
people), I drive. She assembles our evening snack while I shower. I convert our
space from livingroom to bedroom while she brushes her teeth. She changes out
the toilet paper roll, I change out the roll of paper towels.
We’ve had our ups and downs, our bad times, OK times, and great
times, and will very likely continue to have all of those, but we’ve been
around the block enough now to know that we are one hell of a lot better off
together than not.
I suspect that, no matter how much people, the social
animals that we (the collective we) are with our desperate, evolutionary need
to fit into the pack, would like to think otherwise, atypical is actually the
norm of the world. If that’s the case The Wife and I fit right in.
