Like Buying a House

As we discussed our new living situation, this acquisition of a house, the ethical questions we had not been asking became clearer.

(The lamp provides no illumination without apparatus or bulb,
without electricity. With faulty wiring, the lamp becomes an empty
shell.)

What did it mean to “buy a house” on land that does not belong to us, but to other nations, at least one described as “extinct” on the Internet?

(In the land acknowledgement, a friend mentions that the Internet is
also a colonized space.)

Our great-grandparents, whom we think of once in a while, spoke German, arrived from Germany.

(On the other side of the family tree, my other great-grandmother
teaching English in a one-room schoolhouse in Utica and described
as a “stickler.”)

We were talking about tokenism as we stared at a white moving box with black letters reading RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS in English.

(The only language we know, by heart and by rote, is English.)

We didn’t want to fund landlords through paying rent anymore, but we hadn’t crafted a clear plan for diverting our mortgage from the banks that make pipelines.

When I entered my thirties, my complicity became clearer or stronger or both.

(I plug in the lamp and switch it on, writing by its light.)

Our new house is made of wood and was built in the 1920s.

(This is a riddle I shouldn’t have too hard a time figuring out.)

My friend Ben is spending his summer protesting. I am spending the summer writing about the things I am not doing.

I am spending the summer “fixing up” this century-old house, attempting to grow vegetables for my own consumption in an empty lot behind Wal-Mart.

(This is the easiest gardening in the world, I think. Everything’s been
arranged—water, tools, compost—and I just show up.)

Buying the house, we’d already heard stories about colleagues who left this small college town due to its hostility.

On the phone, I say to my mom, everyone’s been so friendly to us!

The community garden manager is a soil science professor. I say the words soil science silently whenever I see him, the consonant S against all those vowels. Soil science. I know nothing about the science of soil, nearly nothing about the soil here except that it has less clay than where I grew up.

We saw so many flooded basements as we selected the home we would offer to buy.

Are we the caretakers of this little plot of land, or are we just under the illusion?

(Remember the Gameboy version of Space Invaders? You moved your
space gun across the bottom of the screen to shoot anyone coming at
you. Or maybe you were the one moving. It was unclear. You were
presented with only two dimensions.)

Once you approach the answer, you must do something.