The New York Times-20080127-Domestic Insecurity

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Domestic Insecurity

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LEAVING my little house, I feel as though I am leaving a living thing. Goodbye, little house, I murmur as I trundle down the front walk dragging the wheeled duffel en route to the train station, having already checked the locked front door several times. These days, a combination of work and family obligations means that I am out of my house more than I am in it, so the ritual of leaving has me in its grip.

I used to live and work in a boarding school. Life there, at least in the mechanical sense, was easy, particularly going away, which I did regularly for the various vacations -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring and summer -- that punctuated the academic year. I could lock the door and leave, knowing that the campus was regularly patrolled and major catastrophic events were unlikely to go unnoticed. And if pipes froze or the roof leaked, repairs were not my problem or my expense.

Although I loved my school apartment, with its pillars and marble fireplaces, the huge Greek Revival-style house that contained it was a lofty acquaintance full of rooms I did not inhabit. In contrast, I know every corner of my cottage; it's a friend, a companion, the latest in a line of possessions that have given me freedom, from the bicycle I acquired at 11 through the Volkswagen I bought at 32. I polished and oiled the bicycle; I touched up the paint and patched the rust holes in the Volkswagen.

Now it is the house I look after. And closing it up gives free rein to anxieties I must quash to get through ordinary days. After all, a house and its contents are valuable; you are supposed to be careful when you close up a house and go away. Is there a line between cautious and crazy? If so, I think I'm right on it.

My attitude toward the house's major systems is certainly primitive. I have no real understanding of how they work, and I suspect a malevolent agenda. I turn down the heat; I turn the gas water heater to its lowest setting lest the pressure relief valve blow, as it once did while I was taking a bath. I turn off the water supply to the washing machine because, years ago, my mother had a hose break and flood the laundry. I unplug things: toasters, CD players, radios, the computer and anything with an old-fashioned-looking plug. Of course, I can claim that I am being green and saving electricity, but actually I'm afraid they will burst into flame or run amok like a scene from The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

I make lists with question marks. Have I turned off the stove? The iron? Never mind that I haven't used it for weeks and that I carefully bought one that would turn itself off anyway. Is the heat low enough to save energy but high enough to prevent the pipes in the crawl space from freezing? They did one bitter winter, before I wrapped the bulkhead door in heavy black plastic and filled all the cracks with more plastic and shards of brick. (In cold snaps I'm out there checking and restuffing.) And if the weather's very cold, I have to leave a trickle of water running in the kitchen sink, carefully calibrating hot and cold together, otherwise the pipes could still freeze.

This is where the illusion of control breaks down, of course. Winter or summer, I have no control over those blobs of color creeping across the radar maps. I tell myself that the house has stood for over a hundred years and through some pretty major storms. But I remember that one summer a big branch blew down, taking some wires with it and panicking my tenants. They were city people, completely unacquainted with trees or non-Con Edison wires. But at least they were there.

My kind and long-suffering neighbor is used to my calls for weather updates. He also gets calls for things like the packed lunch I thought I had left behind on the kitchen counter (a mouse risk). I must have left it on a bench at the station, because he never found it.

Precautions must also be taken against intruders, human and animal. Windows, doors and the garden gate must be locked, the outside lights and the upstairs light timer turned on -- a sequence that would be obvious to a regular watcher. I've given up on the cat that lives part time under the porch, but the mice require vigilance. They used to run rampant in the kitchen, occasionally falling on my head when I opened a cupboard door. They've been much less in evidence since some recent remodeling. It also helped that I caught the suspected ringleader and relocated it to some nice shrubbery outside a local church. Still, I'm not taking chances. I fire up the little machine that claims to make sounds very disturbing to mice.

Even with such manic preparation, my heart is in my mouth each time I return, as though the house might simply have dematerialized while I was gone. These winter days, I often come back from a journey after dark and curse myself as I stumble around plugging in lamps.

I thought all the damn fuses had blown, complained a friend who recently used the house in my absence and to whom I had not explained my eccentricities. The shower was cold, too. And what was that clicking thing in the kitchen?

I guess I am right on that line.

[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY MATT COLLINS)