The Wheel of Infinite Thanksgiving Anxiety
My friend Polly’s parents' car has a passenger-side dash panel that is always covered in white contact paper. The paper converts the dashboard into a giant sticky note for ideas worth keeping while on a drive: Names and phone numbers you don't want to forget, directions that someone rattles off on the other end of the phone, excerpts from books or the radio. When I visit Polly and her family, I love to read what notes made the dashboard. A few years ago, someone had written “The Wheel of Infinite Thanksgiving Anxiety”—a string of words too juicy not to ask about. (Turns out, it’s all the lead-up headache to holiday gatherings—the cleaning and prepping and cooking and inviting—that can be partially alleviated by ordering a precooked Thanksgiving meal from a restaurant. Polly’s family heard about it on the Sporkful podcast.)
In January, I made my own giant sticky note out of a nine-foot length of thin plywood that someone had laid on our kitchen island. It started as a way to record the name and number of yet another utility employee who seemed to be dragging his feet on finishing a job at the house, but soon it collected punch lists, lumber measurements, and my name in cursive as I wrote it over and over while on the phone, middle school–style.
For two years I have kept notes like these to stay organized and motivated as we build our first house. I’ve kept notes on potential mortgage lenders, cost-saving measures, paint swatch names, furniture measurements, and books I have read since we bought land in Nashville (including Beautiful No-Mow Yards, A Pattern Language, and the aggressively titled Avoiding the Con in Construction: How to Plan For Hassle-Free Home Building). But it was the long sheet of plywood that ended up being my most important note. About a month ago, I started writing daily lists of jobs to complete on the plywood. Sometimes, the list was a moonshot; was I really going to “finish the handrail” by 8 PM if I didn’t even know how to finish it at 8 AM? Other days, a list item was blessedly complete before it even got started: Our builder Rick had asked me one day to install the flexible line from the gas hookup to the stove, but when I checked, someone had already done the job for me. And then on particularly difficult days, I wrote down tasks that I had completed earlier in the day just to feel the rush of accomplishment at marking it off. I always invited my dad to mark off the to-do items he completed himself, but I don’t think he ever took me up on it. Maybe list-based euphoria isn't an inherited trait.
And then, about a week ago, I realized that the to-do lists were done. Even the tasks that I never thought would get marked off—“attach bullnose,” “fill all nail holes”—got their strikethrough. I no longer needed the name and phone number of the gas company engineer, since he had finally shown up to install our gas line. Plus, I could mindlessly write my name on any old surface.
I picked up the plywood sheet and folded it in half until it cracked into two pieces. Then I folded each of those sheets, breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces until I had a boxful of jagged plywood squares the size of coasters. I set the box next to the fireplace so the scraps would sometime become kindling.
Yesterday, when I took up the protective paper flooring to clean before moving in this week, I realized that we have other notes in places I didn’t expect: Apparently, when we waxed the concrete floors, we didn’t buff out some of the chalk lines and pencil marks from the early days of framing the house. In our living room, you can see the red chalk lines of a wall from the original house plans that we ultimately scrapped. There are also pencil marks noting where door and window openings would be, and a few accidental footprints from the afternoon when the concrete guys slowly backed themselves off of the slab while smoothing out the surface.
When I saw these yesterday, I was reminded of all the steps it took to build the house that I got to personally witness. I was there when they snapped the chalk lines and marked out door and window openings. I was also there the day some bonehead used a permanent marker instead of a pencil on the finished concrete. Turns out, baking soda and hydrogen peroxide will erase that error.
Maybe the next person who lives in the Dog House won’t like these remnants of construction, but I do. I bet not everyone who rides in Polly’s parents' car wants to know what the Wheel of Infinite Thanksgiving Anxiety is, either. But if you’re curious about anything around our house when you visit, I can probably tell you what it is, why it’s there, and how it works. And if I can’t, I can probably look back through my notes and find the answer.