Our Old House - first of many

Having moved eighteen months ago from a place we had lived in for 16 years I am still discovering new levels of displacement and dislocation. Downsizing is an amazing amount of work and even with a lot of help from friends it still took almost a year from start to finish. Like a mixed breeding of Pandora's Box and circus clown car every closet I opened generated an amazing amount of stuff about which decisions needed to be made. We moved to a place that's about half the size in footprint but without all the closets, full basement, etc of our old beautiful house. When I want something, or someone in my family asks where something is I start, but then have to stop because I know it's going to be where it used to be in our old house. Even if one's move is voluntary, which ours mostly was, it still feels like banishment. It is difficult to think of someone else enjoying all that work I did in making it ours. All the choices, decisions, and little details that made it so satisfying a project. A small consolation is that the man who bought it said as he was leaving the first time "This is my dream house". Everyone else found fault.

I think about the skylights in my sewing room, which was a temple, and remember the snow falling on them, the sound of rain beating on the peaked roof. Luckily I took lots of pictures which I look at sometime after my daughter has gone to bed and no one can catch me visiting our old life. Reminds of a Woody Allen skit from an early movie - I don't remember which - where the old Russian character takes our a plod of earth from his voluminous garment and says "Next year we will build a summer house." I assume Allen was making fun of Chekov but I totally identify. It's hard to leave such a big piece of oneself behind.

This is our second summer and I have been looking at the garden and thinking about trying to make it better. I got rid of all the 'serious' gardening stuff - composter, wheelbarrows, etc. which my friend Catherine questioned the wisdom of. "No, I'm done" I claimed, like I was rejecting a religious conversion or fad. I couldn't even think that I would want to have a garden again but I feel the stirrings.