A little behind, but...

I've had some technological problems this weekend but am finally posting a few sections of something I'm working on--still feeling very unsure about it and would like to keep whittling away at it but I'm going to post it anyway. There are a few more sections that I'm going to work on a bit more before posting. Thanks!

HOUSES

My mother is telling me about a couple in her townhouse complex who have three big dogs. One of the dogs is a German Shepherd and the other two are Rottweilers. They used to be smaller dogs but now they are fully grown. She says she can't understand why someone would keep three large dogs in a townhouse. They used to walk all three of them together, but now they are so big they must walk them separately. It takes a half hour to walk each dog. Someone comes to walk them, she says. And they are supposed to "curb" the dogs, which means they relieve themselves on the curb, but they don't. Instead, they soil all over the grass. Phyllis, her neighbor, took pictures of my mother's patio with dog feces all over it while my mother was in Costa Rica for the winter. They totally took advantage of her being away, she said. And she said the other day, she was sitting on her porch trying to talk on the phone, while one of the dogs was barking and barking. She said she wasn't gonna let some dogs keep her from sitting on her porch, and that she was going to complain about it all to the homeowners association. While she was talking, sometimes I nodded my head up and down and sometimes I shook it back and forth.

My mother's boyfriend, Bob, moved into her townhouse temporarily before they went to Costa Rica, and then moved into it permanently after they came back from Costa Rica. They have been together for six months. She says he would like them to find their own, new place. This should not bother me, since I have never liked my mother's townhouse, which is five years old. And I didn't like the house she owned before, the house I grew up in. It was either a split ranch or a raised ranch. Once, in third grade, I made a model of my parents' house out of candy. It was mostly pink.

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According to the Dictionary of Etymology, the word house descended from Germanic and Old English words meaning dwelling and shelter. The root of the word may also be connected to the word hide. According to Wikipedia, house has a number of usages other than to designate a person's place of residence. It is one of the twleve divisions on an astrological chart, a dynasty (as in House of Windsor), a term used in chess and curling, a type of music, the inner workings of something (such as a clock), and "a children's game in which the players pretend to be members of a household" ( as in let's play house). Additionally, to house once meant "to drive to shelter," and "to deposit and cover, as in the grave." It still means, "to stow in a safe place."

According to i.word.com, the 14th century word stow means to house, to lodge, to "put away for future use," arrange, pack, put aside. It once meant crowd and "to lock up for safekeeping." There is no mention of whether or not the word stow is connected to the word stay. Or the word still.
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In the morning when I wake up in my house, I can still hear birds. But our house is surrrounded by trees. When I knew birds, we lived in the middle of a hayfield. In spring, Bobolinks came all the way from South America to nest in our hay. I discovered they were Bobolinks by Googling bird that sounds like R2D2. I also learned that the brown shorebirds that scuttled across the yard, landlocked and miles from any beach, were killdeer--birds that distract predators from their nests by pretending to be injured. When we left that house, I still did not know the name of the small, invisible bird that sometimes perched in the fenceline and sang long, drifting, downward intervals. I learned its name later, on the radio, while driving in another state. It was a meadow lark. That house was a difficult child. We never learned to navigate its failed well, its toxic water, its heat.  But once, I met a farrier who asked me if the house still had a wrought-iron pot-rack hanging in the kitchen. It did. He said, I think I built that.