You can go now.

Yes, I would be fooling you if I gave you the impression that my house had not already seemed, from the beginning, to have other demons. I recall how the woman who'd sold us the house confided in me -- as she led me back to the sidewalk after having just given me, for the first time, a glimpse inside the run-down townhouse (what a fancy word for such a dilapidated mess)-- about her own divorce. 

“See this gate?” she'd said to me, holding open the heavy black iron one by the doorknob on it. “My ex-husband put up this fence. Last thing he did, the good-for nothing. I said to him, 'thank you very much. You cheated on me; you were no good. Now leave.' ”

And wouldn't you know that that gate was the first thing to fall off its hinges the moment my ex-husband and I moved in to this house -- still so full of dusty toys and broken down appliances and an old couch? The contract of sale had of course said the place had to be “broom clean” when we took possession of it, but after it took eight months to close, due to ten percent of the house belonging to some mysterious man in a faraway country – the ex-husband, I would gather – my own at-the-time husband's thoughts on this had been, also, “Thank you very much, but no; please don't bother to clean up after yourselves. Just go.  Just please leave.”

At the time, of course, I'd thought he was crazy. It would cost us money and time to clear the place of all the belongings that had been left behind. But then I'd never been inclined toward homeownership to begin with, so what did I know. I didn't have the know-how that he had, having grown up duct-taping and re-duct-taping his hoarder-family's house -- so full of things that it came to be known in my mind as the world's smallest 17-room house – constantly together. I hadn't yet realized that when it came to owning and fixing up a house, there would occasionally come a point when either time, money, or patience became the thing you had the least of – when you would, in exchange, expend almost any amount of one or more of the other items just to save you the one. 

And so it wasn't for another seven years that I would come to this point, to this realization, myself. In my case I would have paid almost any amount of money. And my thoughts were just that, simply, “I would pay anything. Just get out of my life.”