Or, Notes on the House I Was Supposed to Die In
My mother’s cherished azalea bush was actually a rhododendron. The trees that hugged three sides of the house, “keeping it cool”, were in fact shrubs that had never been trimmed, had been allowed to extend absurdly, like a rabid soccer announcer who elongated the word “goal” beyond any beneficial descriptive or transcendent purpose. Both misnamed but loved flora would have to be cut down before my parent’s house could be sold.
Home still feels like a place to return to, not to own. For the past ten years, I could only afford to live in a one or two room studio, functional only for sleeping, storing my collections: books and records, and the canned and dry food I would buy but never have the energy to cook. So, home could always remain the home I grew up in, where my father died, where my mother, recovering from a stroke with defiance and solitude, slowly let fall into disrepair. That home had to also function as a place I would eventually own, through a Will, since I never felt like I would be able to afford one of my own. It was as a safety net in times of concern over just how unable I would be to afford shelter. It needed to be there in case I failed.
My father died in the upstairs bedroom, which he had filled with his sleeping presence 22 hours a day toward the end. Did he enjoy that feeling of weightlessness supposedly common to schizophrenics? My old room, with no door, was across from his. It had long been a storage space for the books and records I couldn’t take with me to my one room places. I would visit, and rummage through my collection, wondering if I would ever have room to assemble it proper, listening to him breathe a few feet away.
The house was sold, for a sum that twice what it was worth, thanks to its purchase by a developer; it would never have passed inspections. With that my wife and I, along with my mother, were able to put down enough money to be able to afford a house that, even after living felt surreal to me in its size and accessories. We had a deck, a pool table, a small bar, a home office. Many of the things I would allow myself to dream about when I was feeling materialistic, I now had. I’d felt like I’d won something, not earned it. But I had earned it.
Eleven years later we slowly, painfully lost it, our life savings, retirement accounts, etc. My no longer being able to work and the numbing process of qualifying for disability ate up the dream. A miracle of a friend offered use of an open rental property, where we stayed until we slowly began to get back on our feet. When we moved out of there, I felt a loss too; I hadn’t earned that space, but I did receive a rare gift. We try to hold on to those too, even when it is obvious its time has passed.
I think now about my sense of place because I’ve learned that we have no choice but to come and go. Change robs and renews in ways far beyond that of housing. I am responsible for accepting that, and also for maintenance, for knowing how to maintain., those changes. We don’t earn our changes so much as face the choice of accepting or rejecting our lives as they present themselves. Some of those changes are unnerving, frightening, but not all the time. My wife and I learned new things, saw friends, laughed our asses off, even in the darkest times.
As a kid I was always comforted by snow during winter; I thought it protected me though it had no power to protect at all; it could only just announce or amplify danger in any approaching strange footsteps. But it could also create anxiety, false danger, in those eerie crunching sounds of movement. What felt like security to me carried the very seeds of what I feared. Attachment is normal, and comforting, in other words, but is its own kryptonite.
Like the way we try and reconstruct history through pottery shards, bones and signs of ritual, we also leave clues behind as to who we might have been, who we thought we were, as well as who we ended up being. That just IS. The beauty of the world is impermanent, because you will die and take the world (of your senses) with it. The world is permanent, as endless lives are being born every day that create the world anew. We are large enough to hold loss and Gratitude in the same handful of snow.