Little chores, big jobs.

Living in a house that's over one hundred years old teaches you a lot of things. Patience comes to mind at the top of that list. The little chores that you think won't take much time at all turn into major jobs that last for a day or two. Or three.

Thankfully, we have W, the wonderful handyman. He does the high-up-on-the-ladder things for my husband, as well as the lie-flat-on-the-roof trick so the underside of the cottage trim can be painted. W doesn't seem to mind the heat. The temperature today will be between 105 and 109, and as long as he has iced tea or cold water, W doesn't seem to mind. He's young, and he's a Texas boy, so nothing seems to matter.

The garage is filling up with all sorts of tools. Saws and wrenches, spray-bottles, scrapers, and ladders of all sizes, brushes and screw-drivers, hammers, strange metal things, and work-gloves. My husband wears a pair of torn shorts and a Clorox-spattered shirt when they're cleaning the siding. The employees at both Home Depot and Lowe's know my husband by name.

All of the above tools, and then some, for a man who hardly picked up a pair of pliers in the other house unless his computer modem needed attention. I mentioned that to our young Miss C one day, as I told her about the summer chores we've been doing these last couple of months. C had an answer in a heartbeat, as to why Mr. G had immersed himself in all of this work: "Well, this house is different. It's not all brand new and it doesn't look like any other house in Texas. It's old. It's special, and it's history."

History. Indeed, it is. This house had been moved to this hill from a larger town about forty minutes away from here. In this house's infancy, it stood on a street across from the local church, and we think this was the home of the church's minister. That might be the reason for the intricate wood floors downstairs, and the two fireplaces, and the staircase tucked into the corner of the kitchen. The church was impressive, for a town that size, so the minister's home would have been just as note-worthy, back in the day.

I like to think that this house knows that it's being taken care of in a thoughtful way. Each piece of furniture was placed in the spot where it would look like it had stood for a good many years. Nothing brand new has been added to this house... there isn't an item in these rooms that came from a furniture store which churns out hundreds, if not thousands, of cookie-cutter creations. Years of collecting estate-sale treasures, put together with furniture from my husband's parents and from my grandmother's house.... everything has come together in this house and has magically been transformed into exactly what it should look like, and probably did look like, back in the day.

C is right. This house is special. This property itself is special. We aren't just living in it, we're taking care of a little bit of the history of this state. When little chores grow into big jobs, I still look around the corners and see if Hop Sing (from Bonanza) is anywhere in sight.

Hop Sing isn't here. But we carry on anyway, with the help of W, and a to-do list that grew from a small piece of scrap paper, to a page in a notebook, to a file in my husband's computer.