“It’s stormy out there.”
We lived frugally in our first months on the coast. We bought materials and tools and set out to finish the house on our own. We were in deep debt and we needed to stop the hemorrhage. I drove to the hardware store, and then the woodshop. I bought screws and nails, hooks and wood. I measured the bare closets and borrowed a power saw and cut boards to fit. I became an expert at drill bits. You can figure out which is for wood and which is for cement when you’re getting nowhere with the hole even as sweat pours from your forehead. Or if smoke starts emerging from the hole. It happened. Several times.
We kept going. We swept and mopped. We moved boxes and crates from one end of the house to the other, making way for the furniture we’d moved in from Buenos Aires. We put a mattress on the floor for us. No bed yet.
And we put a couple of old beach chairs on the patio, still only a carpet of rough cement. It made a great view, tough. Pine trees dotted our land and beyond, and there were so few people around. We were living in a forest only a short walk from the beach. We opened a bottle of beer and put on some Bob Marley and started to chill out and watch the two kids and the dog run wild in the forest and in the sand that surrounded the house.
“Hey, watch this,” my eldest daughter shouted to us.
She jumped and disappeared.
Then she crawled out and did it again.
“Geronimo…”
There were five big holes on our lot that the workmen had dug for extra sand to build the house even though we’d bought enough to fill Santa Monica Bay.
Each hole must have been six feet deep.
Six feet deep, I thought.
It gave me an idea on how to get even with the tosspot foreman who’d pilfered his way to riches with our project.
My face brightened.
You know why they are smiling? I do.
The move the coast began, really, as a mistake, or more so, a financial blunder. Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, and the currency’s value shrank by nearly 70% compared with the dollar, a good thing for those with dollars, euros or pounds. We felt flush. So we bought land on a whim in Pinamar. Wise? Certainly. It was a bargain. The unwise thing was building a house without a budget and hiring a tosspot to manage the project. Money evaporated, the building pace slowed. We threw more money at the project, unaware of the filching of funds, labor and materials. “It’s raining,” the foreman told us. “We’ll put up the roof when it stops raining.” It rained for the entire winter – and well into spring. Nevertheless, our workers kept busy digging, hammering and mixing at other projects, not ours. We didn’t know. We were a four-hour drive away while the rats danced. We had to pinch on spending, deplete our savings and borrow to finish – and we still couldn’t. The only option, we decided, was to move into the unfinished house and work from there and live frugally and see if it worked out. Would it?
We once lived in a beach paradise. Now we don’t, and it fells almost like we never did.
We are back on the coast. Winter is approaching. It’s getting colder and the leaves are falling. We put our jackets on and light the fire and turn up the radiators to warm the house. It has been empty for weeks while we live in the big city. This makes me think. Did we really live here for two years and a bit? I drive into town and it all seems so foreign. Once I was plugged in. People said hello to me, waved and nodded. We had chats on the sidewalks, at the beach, in the supermarket. I was in. Now I’m out. The memories are still there. Is that enough?
Over the next few days I’ll jot down my best memories. I think they’ll be enjoyable. They’ll help me as a sort of therapy. I can’t let two glorious and hard years of living a different way of life fade away just like that.