Home Improvement

We have a fence.

It is amazing how something that would have mattered so terribly little to me fifteen years ago is such a source of joy today.

No longer must I stand outside on the deck, The Boy wrapped in a down lap duvet, yelling at the dogs to hurry up and pee already. No more days of leaving them trapped on the deck while the house is cleaned and I look out the window every few minutes to be sure Lilah hasn't escaped. Best of all, I look out at our fenced-in yard and I can see The Boy growing up, turning the tin-roofed tool shed into a fort, throwing a ball with Hubby or me or Audrey, imagining whole worlds in the corners where the bushes hide him from the house.

I think about being four years old and playing "Here Comes the Witch" with my best friend Julie and riding the huge flying birds that to my distressed mother were bushes not designed to carry imaginative little girls. And I feel very grown-up and a little bit scared and very in love with The Boy and our home.

We are in that stage of new home ownership when we magnanimously give ourselves permission to buy important bits of home improvement that we can't afford. Like the fence -- something we promised ourselves as soon as Hubby realized how much work it is to train dogs to respect an electric fence. Or the bench and shelf set for the front hall that Hubby picked off the Pottery Barn website, much to my surprise and delight. Or the lovely sleeper sofa we bought at Crate and Barrel in Charlotte.

We went to Charlotte on Tuesday, when Hubby took the day off as scant compensation for working Thanksgiving Day. Charlotte lies two hours away from Asheville by not very interesting highways and is the biggest city between Washington, DC, and Atlanta. Neither of these facts recommended it as a destination for our vacation day.

Charlotte is, however, home to Trader Joe's. This status has left me wildly impatient to make the trek.

I justified it by hunting down what advertised itself as a kids museum where The Boy could stretch his legs -- and arms, as crawling is his sole means of locomotion that does not involve Mommy or Daddy or some other adult he has decided to trust. Not the best reason to drive to Charlotte, Hubby sighed, but we're parents now.

Then he gave me a surprise even bigger than the Pottery Barn bench and shelf set. He suggested we go to Crate and Barrel to look at sleeper sofas while we were there.

This is not, you must understand, the way Hubby traditionally shops. He favors the local stores, where you might have to wade through a sea of cheap and ugly but can make it if you hold out the hope that there is a gem buried in the back. Crate and Barrel, where everything is stylish and tasteful and therefore expensive is simply too easy.

Over the three months that we have lived in Asheville we have roundly exhausted the supply of such local furniture stores. We have repeatedly visited Tysons in Black Mountain, an endless maze of room after room of wood furniture, wicker furniture, bamboo furniture, patio furniture, and probably more that I haven't seen because you need a map or a salesperson to find your way around. Their collection of sleeper sofas, however, failed to make the grade.

We visited Hafferty's, a pre-fab furniture warehouse, but backed off a decent looking couch because of our lurking suspicion that the quality might not be what we hoped. Our neighbor assured us as much with a story of a sadly decrepit coffee table purchased there.

We even made the rounds of Ethan Allan, where an "interior designer"/salesperson created questionable ensembles of upholstery and throw pillows on a computer screen before my very frightened eyes.

And now, to my delight, we were visiting Crate and Barrel.

Hubby sat and poked and unfolded and tested while I followed The Boy on his journey across a playground of furniture just made for pulling oneself up to standing. The salesperson showed remarkable restraint as The Boy reached for a collection of fragile-looking bamboo baskets and then banged the Kona coffee table with the plastic holder of its information. Other customers pretended not to mind as The Boy showed off his new skill of yelling with impressive force for such a small human being. I wiped so much drool off of tabletops and chair arms that my sleeves were damp until dinner.

And then we were paying for a couch. A lovely couch that will be delivered to our home sometime early next year and will force us to turn that room you never get around to decorating and use for all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere into a proper library. Surely, once we have a tasteful and sophisticated couch from Crate and Barrel the rest of our home will be perennially clean, warm, and sunny, just like their catalog.

From Crate and Barrel, we headed to Charlotte at Play, the advertised kids museum. I could hear Hubby's sharp intake of breath as the directions led us to a vast strip mall anchored by a Lowe's. I harbored the hope that his unguarded expression was merely disappointment that he didn't need anything from Lowe's and would have to hang out in Charlotte at Play.

In fact, he seemed to enjoy it almost as much as The Boy. He snapped pictures as The Boy played the child-sized Melissa and Doug piano that I now long to see under our Christmas tree. Plainly I do not know how much a child-sized Melissa and Doug piano costs. He slid with The Boy down the pirate ship slide. He sat in a corner of the speed raceway and let The Boy push cars into him. A fine time was had by all.

But whatever excitement and awe The Boy might have felt as he gazed upon the expanse of fun that was Charlotte at Play, it was nothing compared to the giddiness I experienced when we entered Trader Joe's. There was my brown rice pasta, my sundried tomato bruschetta, my beloved dried Tart Montgomery Cherries. We filled two shopping carts with booty and I knew that I would return one day, undaunted by the crushingly boring drive.

We had dinner downtown, where the plethora of cars reminded me of L.A., but the number of pedestrians out for the evening did not. I watched the bank trainees breaking for dinner in their starched shirts and suit pants and felt sad for them and for the person I was fifteen years ago. And as we left Charlotte, I looked forward to the uncongested streets of Asheville, even if they lack a Crate and Barrel.

We pulled up to our home at nine thirty. Our new fence glowed slightly in the darkness. It looked different from the house we bought, our definitive imprint on the neighborhood. It is more than a fence. It is a declaration that we are making a home here.

Now if only we could do something about those storm windows.