Roach House

One of my first memories of life came to me as a snippet--a vignette. I was lying in my crib after waking up from a nap. I was on my back, looking up at a window over the crib. There, on the window, was a cockroach. Nearby was some sort of lizard or salamander. It was very quiet and the three of us were very still. I remember being transfixed by these creatures unsure of what they were, but fascinated by the cockroach slowly moving along the glass and the salamander doing his little pushups on the glass.

I told my mother about this memory one day and asked her where she thought it took place. "Oh, it must have been the Roach House." She shuddered, "Horrible place!"

When I was about a year and a half old we moved to Mississippi where my father was to teach at a new boarding school. It was so new that all the faculty homes had not yet been completed. So we were put in an old house at the edge of the property until ours was finished. We called this transition house "The Roach House" for obvious reasons. It was an unpleasant, rustic kind of existence for two months or so. Then we moved into a cute new 60s bungalow on Faculty Row.

We currently live in a rental home, and the longer I live in it, the more certain I am that it is only a transitional housing solution. Whoever painted the bathroom its garish blue color didn't use painter's tape around fixtures, the shower, or mirror. It is hideously done. The hall and front door moldings are a medium taupe color and the walls are off-white. It leaves much to be desired. Someone spilled liquid vitamins in the cupboards and it smells awful. The mechanical whiz who plumbed in the water line to the icemaker for the refrigerator left a triangle cut out of the drywall, so one can see the studs in the wall if you move the fridge. You can see the light of day when you look under the sink where the water pipes come in. Every faucet either drips or leaks under the sink. Outside, there are potted banana palms next to a dying apple tree. The roots of an enormous maple tree broke up the patio concrete. Someone cut the roots of the tree and it lists to one side, menacingly over the roof. It is truly a disaster waiting to happen, and we will be very happy to leave here in another few months when we buy a home.

There are a number of situations in life that are temporary and that are less than optimal. Some things are good transitional items. A person takes a lower paying job at a good company in the hopes of moving her way up the administrative ladder. Graduate students take a class from a professor in hopes that he'll be noticed by someone he would like to serve on his dissertation committee. We go on dates with people whom we will not marry, but whose company keeps us from feeling in the dumps until we meet Mrs. Right. All of us have Roach Houses: temporary fixes that we chafe against until we get what we are ultimately waiting for. Perhaps we could say that life on this earth is only a waiting time until we will have eternal life and see God forever. It's not always pleasant, but it can be made liveable. So we make life the best we can for the time being, grateful that the Real Thing isn't like this, and that soon we will be in our heavenly homes that are being made ready for us.