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Betwixt and Between

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So here I am. Sitting at my desk on the second floor at Brookwood Court, watching the leaves fluttering outside the window as dusk settles over the rose colored sky.

We’re slowly getting our bearings in this new space, working out the traffic patterns for getting dressed in the morning, exercising the gray matter every time we need a coffee cup, an aspirin, a pair of socks. (Which cupboard? What drawer?) Not only is our house different, but so is most of our furniture because we used the pieces that were in our home in Florida. And while we’re familiar with them, we didn’t live with them for long periods of time.

There is a difference.

One of the things I was hungry for when I moved was the opportunity to change my routine. I felt stagnant, so mired in the same way of doing things. When you live one place for 37 years, your patterns become like cement. I thought moving would be a good way to shake them up.

Boy, was I right about that. And it’s exciting to have this clean slate to work with.

I won’t kid you - I sometimes long for my other house, my old familiar life. Especially in the evening when darkness starts to fall and I start getting tired. Time to go home, I find myself thinking. Time to put the dogs out in the yard for one last potty stop, time to close the blinds in the living room. Time to pour a glass of wine and curl up in my reading chair. Time to  settle on the couch in the breezeway to watch TV.

It will take time before this really feels like home. I know that. Clearly I am still betwixt and between, my body learning to live in and love Brookwood Court, my heart still yearning a little for the familiarity of MacArthur Street and all the memories there.

So I shed a few tears and move on. Take the dogs for a walk around the block. Climb the stairs to my writing desk between the two corner windows. Retract the awning over the deck and lock up the doorwall. Pour a glass of wine and settle on the couch in the den to watch TV.

These are the things I do over and over until one day it will be home.

 

The Sunday Salon: Reading and Rambling Along

The Sunday Salon.com Nothing stops me from reading.

You all know that.

No matter how many boxes need packing, how much stuff needs sorting, how much laundry needs doing, when my heart feels tugged toward my book my body soon follows it to the comfy chair in the corner of my writing room where I can curl up and escape into a different world.

Throughout my entire life, I’ve found books my most tried and true companions. When I’m happy, I love to celebrate it with reading. When I’m hurting, losing myself in the words and ideas of others soothes my soul for a while.

For the books I’ve loved the most, I’m always curious to know more about their authors. So often, reading a book sends me down a virtual pathway to that writers door. I research biographies, collections of letters, published versions of their journals. If you were to search my shelves, you’d find little villages where an author “lives” in the printed word, surrounded by her own books like she would be children.  Madeleine L’Engle has a large amount of real estate in this neighborhood. So do Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. As does Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Anna Quindlen is there - her novels and her memoirs. Gail Godwin’s novels have been joined recently by her two volumes of memoir.

Over the years, there has been criticism devoted to people who try and place authors too squarely in their work, who try and figure out what it was in the writer’s personal life that led them to write a certain character or develop a certain theme.

It shouldn’t matter, they’ve said. The writer’s personal life does not affect our interpretation of her work.

But how can it not? I think. And why wouldn’t I want it to? For me, it adds that extra bit of seasoning when I realize how an author’s own personality or life experience has shaped their work. It’s a gift, an extra layer in the cake that makes up our shared human experience.

It’s also one of the things that I’ve loved about “book blogging.” It has allowed me to meet so many writers through their blogs and on their Facebook and Twitter. It does not at all detract from the “mystery” of their writing. On the contrary, it adds a deeper dimension to my reading of their books.

Reading is the whole package for me - it’s The Story, but it’s also about the Creator of The Story. I love getting to know both of them.

One Week to Go

This is probably the last weekend we’ll be living in this house. I can qualify that by saying living "full time” in this house, since it will probably be several months before we’re ready to put it on the market.

But beginning next Friday, our everyday living at Brookwood Court begins.

Yikes.

I ran into one of my mother’s friends at the grocery today, and she gave me a warm, motherly type hug. “You have been through so much this year!” she said.

Well, I suppose you could consider selling one house, buying another, moving into the new house, and then getting yet another house ready to sell a lot.

Yes, I suppose you could.

Especially for folks like us who have never really moved before.

I don’t know whether I’ve become a more sanguine personality in my old age, or whether I’m in some sort of real estate shock, but I’m not extremely perturbed about the situation. Maybe I’m just burying my head in the sand, and come next Friday I’ll have a complete emotional collapse.

But I don’t think so.

One thing I’ve noticed about being my age - stuff just doesn’t carry the magnitude it once did. I’m talking about the stuff of life, the stuff that used to make me crazy and keep me up nights just thinking about it. Now the really big stuff- aging, and illness, and death - that stuff worries me. And I have been through a lot of that in the past three years.

Compared to that, everything else seems so manageable.

Still, this moving thing is Pretty Big Stuff.

I wander through the little hallways in my house, comparing the number of footsteps it takes to get from my bed to the coffeemaker here (9) with the new house (21 and 15 of them are stairs).

I open the backdoor and let the dogs out at 10 pm and realize that starting next week, I’ll have to go out with them. (no fences)

But then I look at the leaves on the 57 trees scattered around this 1/2 acre lot and realize I’ll never have to rake leaves again. I can scorn the snowblower when I walk by in the garage, plan on giving it to Goodwill, because whenever there is more than one inch of snow it will be shoveled for me.

Mostly, I look at a neighborhood that served this family well for 60 years, but one that is undergoing a major sea change, a metamorphosis that moves beyond anything we can do to change it or make it work for us into the rest of our lives.

The next week will be busy and exciting and sad and frightening all rolled into one.

It will be an experience I never forget.

One week to go.