(Note to readers…I am in yet another writing class. I don’t think I’ll ever stop taking them. I adore my instructors and love how they push me to write from the edge without falling over the cliff. For my blogging aspiring writers, I strongly recommend www.writers.com and any writing class taught by Laurie Wagner, Gretchen Clark, and Marc Olmsted)
I’m reading “Under The Tuscan Sun” (again) by Frances Mayes. I love the way she writes and when I need a trip back to Tuscany, next to plane tickets, she’s my first choice. But these words, “by remembering rooms in houses we’ve lived in, we learn to abide (nice word) within ourselves,” triggered something in me. I knew I had to start writing about my house, this house I bought in 2003, which was supposed to be temporary. But here I am…still living in it, abiding in it.
Because my book (or whatever it is) is turning out to be a collection of essays that reflect on divorce, post divorce life, finding love again, and blending two families, I thought a series of essays on my house, this place where I have finally found my center, is only too appropriate (thanks to Frances Mayes) This is the first one.
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Wherever I Go, There I Am, Part One (Or Scenes From a Life)
As I unpacked my kitchen, I thought I’d be relieved. I thought I’d feel happy. I thought the weight of all that had happened in the house before this house would evaporate as soon as I moved. I thought moving one town over and six miles down the road would make the hurt go away. I thought if I got rid of most everything we shared I could purge the last two years, the worst two years of our marriage, from my life. Instead, as I unwrapped my dinner plates and soup bowls, tears fell down my face. I might as well have been unpacking the heart break, the anger, and the bitterness of my divorce.
There’s this saying, “wherever you go, there you are.” I don’t know who said it. It sounds like something Winnie-the-Pooh would say to Piglet as they walked through the Hundred Acre Wood. But there I was, in a new house. A new house that I desperately was hoping would be my etch-a-sketch. I could simply shake it up and down, erase the past, and start with a clean slate.
But there was no clean slate. I packed up the toxic emotions, the bitterness from being cheated on, the out of breath feeling of watching my ex-husband walk out on me and our daughters along with the pots and pans.
Wherever I went, there I was. I couldn’t escape from myself.
Before I moved, I decided to sell or giveaway almost everything. I gave 300 science fiction and fantasy books to my brother, Michael. I gave a TV, VCR, and all my Disney movies on tape to my brother, Chris. I gave my bedroom furniture to my cousin’s son, Nate. He drove 175 miles from Burlington, VT to Hampstead, NH just to pick up stuff that I would have rather torched, demolished, and made splinters out of.
What I didn’t give away (or break), I sold. I sold my two over-sized faux leather reading chairs to my ex-husband. One hundred dollars, thank you very much. I sold my deck furniture to strangers. Even now, ten years later, I wish I would have kept the deck furniture. It held no tortured mangled memories. I sold off the knick knacks, junk from the garage, and other reminders of my marriage that crashed and burned beyond any salvation.
I only kept the things I didn’t attach my ex-husband to. The hutch I had made. The south western hand made bench I picked up in Albuquerque. The Polish pottery, (which is still my everyday plates, bowls, and mugs) I bought when I lived in Germany and traveled to Poland. I planned to keep my kitchen table, but it broke during the move. I kept a futton for my living room, but once my new furniture arrived, I gave it to my youngest step-brother so he could finish decking out his new attic pad.
The leather couch I loved was too big for my living room. My ex offered to take it so I gave it to him. When he loaded it into the back of his Chevy Blazer, his back windshield shattered. I made zero on the transaction but the $500 it cost it him to replace the windshield was priceless.
I resisted making my new house a home. I resisted making it permanent. I convinced myself it was a temporary resting place until my youngest daughter, Christina, graduated from high school. We moved in when she was a sophomore. I only needed to stick it out for three years.
My oldest daughter, Jessica, is an old soul. Either that or she’s just tapped into intuitive energy. No matter how much I tried to hide my heart, my unhappiness, or my resistance to establish roots, she dimed me out. “Mum,” she said, “this isn’t temporary. We live here. At least hang some pictures.”
So I did. And I bought new furniture – a kitchen table, a new bedroom set (French provincial, something the ex never in a million years would have allowed), new bookshelves, area rugs, and new pretty things.
Three months after my daughters and I moved into the three bedroom, two bath, 1,638 square foot cape style house, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Wherever I go, there I am. What else in God’s name was I supposed to learn?
