The weight

It's a feather-weight anxiety and anticipation concerning whether we will in fact live in this house we wish to buy. As my friend Lesley referenced in a recent blog, it's an embarrassment of riches, not just the material kind, but for me, right now, it's also the wealth of time. I feel like an ordinary citizen who is suddenly wealthy after striking it big in Powerball. I've been handed an enormous (literally and value-wise) check and am now deep into spending my riches. What shall I do today? The sun is out, my belly is full from breakfast and the day stretches in front of me. Today I'll reach out to old friends to let them know how much I value their presence in my life. An exercise class to keep my body strong, a walk outside with the dog, a trip for provisions and gratitude that this is my life today.

The offer

We put an offer on a house! I know, you're asking where the hell have I been and now suddenly I'm writing about putting an offer on a house? Well yes, and it's really ok. This--this writing/not writing seems to be all part of the process for me right now. The house is really, really nice. Not "McMansion" nice, not pretentious, but just really nice. It's the kind of house you might look at every morning when you get up and think how did i get so lucky to be able to live here? The outside of the house belies the inside. The outside is big and dramatic, like its made to evoke a wow response from people. And then there's the power line that presides over the property, a crackling sentinel. You can't miss it as you approach the house. My research on the safety of living near lines reassured me. The house is on a Mesa and backs onto open space that will always be open. We'd have our own prairie dog Calvary. Inside it has a southwestern feel with thick walls and arched doorways. Lots of windows, lots of wood and lots & lots of room for out-of-town visitors. More to come as we know more.

Productivity continued.

My wired coffee shop turned out to be the Boulder library, second floor near the windows overlooking Boulder creek.  I suppose that you have to get here pretty early to claim a spot at the window, and my hunch is that once you have your spot you don't easily give it up.  As I was at the front desk turning my temporary library card into a permanent one (now that I have a piece of mail with my new Boulder address) I was helped by a man who was simultaneously trying to slough off the insistent complaints of a grubby, red-eyed bearded homeless guy, something about his card not working... The librarian seemed patient at first, stating politely that he was going to help me now, and would the complainer please wait a minute?  But then as the security guard came over he casually said to her, "can you get rid of him please?"  And she did, with quiet efficiency.  There are so many visible homeless people in this town, so many people on so many street corners with cardboard signs reading things like "I fell off the fiscal cliff" or "homeless and hungry."  Most signs say "anything will help." Sometimes they make eye contact with you as you wait for the light to turn green.  Sometimes I smile and once I gave a guy a buck.  Do the good, generous people of Boulder have a ready supply of ones that they hand out to whomever asks?  Or do most people become blind to these folks after a while?  I want to learn more about them, why they're here, what happened to them, where they sleep at night.  It's an uncomfortable juxtaposition to find a place for them in my mind and heart while I'm spending so much time pondering the enormous amount of money that we're thinking of dropping on a house of our own.  And because its uncomfortable I should stay there a while.

Speaking of uncomfortable, let me go back to the idea of productivity and what I am doing with these days in my life.  I'm nowhere near having a crisis, but as the days come and go I find myself struggling with the rhythm and flow of the hours.  I'm quite cognizant of my mandate: to allow myself to just be, without schedule, without appointments or commitments.  To nurture my long-
neglected parts and to become a whole, healthy person again.

And so, this is what I've been doing: I get up at 6am, have coffee, read email and news headlines, check Facebook and the weather, make Mark's lunch and maybe breakfast and help him get out the door by 7:30.  Enzo and I take a walk in the morning, usually from about 7:45 to 8:30.  Then I clean up the house a little and get ready for yoga if I'm going in the morning.  I leave for yoga at 9 and by the time I'm showered and ready to leave its 11:30.  Then....well, recently I've taken a number of exploratory trips to neighboring towns to see if we could live there.  And the answer is an emphatic "no" so far.  "Sprawling" is the most apt word.  Anyway, so then I come home by 2 or 3 and let Enzo out of his crate, play with him for a while, maybe read for a while and then start to get supper ready for when Mark gets home at 6 or 6:30.  Last night I got upset at him because he made a joke--an innocent joke--about something I was talking with him about.  That's when I realized that I needed to refocus my thoughts--recalibrate my compass--to remember just what's going on here.  I was feeling momentarily dependent on him for validation of my current existence.  Aarrgh.  And that's when I also realized the extent of the loss of my job at Odyssey and the proximity of my friends...the daily interactions and conversations with people who knew me well, who cared about me, who valued my contributions.  Which brings me back around to productivity--if I'm not working at a job, how am I being productive in the world, and do I even need to be productive, and does the business of taking good care of myself, my husband, dog and house count?  Ad the deeper question, the more honest question is, can I stand being quiet with myself for an extended albeit limited amount of time?

Productivity

This won't be a long post; I just need to get something down to break through my resistance to go where I know my writing wants to bring me.  I feel like a 5-year old being dragged by the hand through a museum or on a winter walk, reluctant, resisting the possibility that this could be good, fun even.  The dearth of tangible stuff going on in my life is lately matched by the overflow, standing-room only show going on in my mind as I navigate through my days.

I learned how to write my blogposts on my iPad so I think I might go to a wired coffee shop and do some writing today.  Maybe the Laughing Goat on Pearl.  More later.

Dancing at the Dickens

Mark and I went out last night, no easy feat considering the post-game somnambulance having as much to do with beers and tortilla soup as with the double overtime ending in a loss for Peyton and the Broncos.  But out we went to the Dickens Opera House in Longmont to meet up at a Grey Wolves Meet Up (look for the balloons) with a couple dozen other over-40's.  Johnny O's power trio was on the stage, compelling a middle-aged frenzy of spastic, gleeful movements.  I love to watch people dance, especially the ones who don't take themselves too seriously.  My inspiration for how to dance comes from Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in All of Me, at the end of the movie when they're lost in a silly, joyful boogie on the black and white tiled floor.  Last night there was blue shirt guy who unabashedly whipped off his sweater 30 seconds into the first song, hawaiian shirt guy who sported the white man's overbite like a champ but who partnered his adoring girlfriend with drunken abandon, the older couple who moved like saplings bending toward each other in a warm breeze, always in harmony created over years of dancing together through breakfast dishes, children come and gone, hospital beds and whispered dreams in the dark.

The Opera House, the "best place music venue in Colorado" is a dark, high-ceiling-ed, red-walled historic behemoth with well-marked exits and not a few disco balls sending sparks of light through the fog machine haze.  And two yellow smiley-face balloons telling the Grey Wolves where to meet up.  We sat aside from the group at first, both of us a little shy about meeting new people.  During the break we sat down next to Sue from Lafayette and Steve from Jackson, up in the mountains.  Sue said it took her 3 years before she got her nerve up to attend a Grey Wolves outing.  Maybe all humans are essentially insecure, all looking for companionship, relationship, connections.

We ask everyone we meet about where they live and how they like it.  We've talked with native Longmonters, transplants from everywhere else, folks who love conservative suburban Broomfield, folks who love liberal hipster Boulder and folks who love the redneck freedom in the mountains.  For us it will all come down to where we can picture making a life, where we'll feel that we're home.  Even though the farm is a financial stretch we find ourselves circling back to thoughts of making that property our home.  We talk about the direction the sun will come in during the winter months and where we'll sit during different times of the day.  We talk about where we'll put our Christmas cactus and fig tree and where we'll find boards to make a dining room table to fit the space.  We talk about how we'll situate our grapevines on the land and whether we'll pay an electrician to wire the studio or whether we'll do it ourselves.  We talk about filling the house with the people we love and where they'll all sleep.  It's a beautiful, special home and if we can see a way to pay for it I believe we'll put an offer in.  There's so much waiting in real estate, so much being patient and holding the tension.  We could be doing all this dreaming and unbeknownst to us another offer is floated, this one without the constraints of a work-around mortgage and a down-payment scraped together from 5 different savings accounts and a truncated retirement fund.  But that's the game and that's the price to pay for the opportunity to call another place our home. We'll know more tomorrow when the bankers tell us about the possibilities or lack thereof.

It's 7 degrees this morning, chance of more snow showers.  A fire is taking hold in the stove, Enzo is on his first nap and pancakes are calling to be made.  The Patriots play at 2.  Today we nap, overtime or no overtime.  Sunday afternoon naps in January by the fire could very well be sacred.

Snow in the mountains

There's a line of clouds that you can clearly see about a third of the way up Bear Peak and I know that it's dumping snow up there.  Enzo and I just went out for a walk up to the trailhead just off of Shanahan Ridge but all we encountered were a few stray flakes.  It's cold, though and getting colder.  We had to go for a walk because if we didn't I fear that I might have killed him.  It's just that the lady next door was having her carpets steam-cleaned, or her basement pumped out, whatever endeavor requires a small truck and a large hose; a continuous whiny roar emanated from the truck in such as way as to alarm this small dog who then thought it his duty to alert me to the nefarious goings on.  No matter how I redirected, pleaded, threatened, attempted training strategies with Cheerios, looked deeply into his adorable black eyes to help him understand that we were not in danger, Enzo was fully connected to his instinct and would not be called off.  The only solution was another walk.  And so now, an hour later he's curled up in a contented white ball on the sofa while a fire crackles away in the stove and I sit here feeling foolish for becoming angry at a lovable little ball of instinct.

It makes me think back to when Laura was a tiny baby and I was an emerging young adult, inadequately prepared to handle the day in, day out demands of a 7 pound human being.  I remember thinking back then--I suppose I had the presence of mind to realize just how dire the circumstances could be--that I understood how parents could shake their babies to death out of terrifying, unadulterated frustration.  "Why won't you stop?!"  I held my daughter up one time in front of me, shouting at her little body to stop crying.  It was in the stairway, on the way up or down, it was probably during the daylight hours.  Nothing extraordinary had happened, it was a regular day in a regular week and I was simply reaching some limit in my ability to safely and lovingly care for my screaming infant.  Possessing a certain history of sanity and restraint I didn't shake her until her neck snapped.  I didn't have to call the police to report that there was something wrong with my baby and oh my god, she's not breathing.  We carried on and to this day no one has ever known how close I came to the edge.  I should have just put her harness on and taken her for a walk.

A house is a house for me

The first house I remember living in was in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  I was around 4 years old and lived there with my sister, mom and dad.  The smell of an autumn leaf pile will bring me right back there.  We had the most enormous leaf piles in the world.  I remember the sound that my grandmother's heavy clip-on earrings made when they clacked together from where they were clipped to my stuffed brown dog, Gog, who wore them happily.  Gog was a plain dog who liked to dress up when Grandma came to town from Boston where she lived.  I suppose that, being the soulful child I was that I named him partway between God and dog, which is a pretty good name for most any of the canine types.

After Ridgefield we moved to North Kingstown Rhode Island where I spent my early adolescence.  1970 to 1977.  It was an awkward fashion time for me, big glasses, big limbs, shiny braces.  I had cute friends and I wanted so badly to be cute but never quite attained that.  Marsha Matthews was cute.  She was the first girl I knew who spoke about french kissing behind the library stacks in our open-concept school.  Our house in Rhode Island was, from my memory, a huge center stairway colonial with a vast back yard suitable for rabbit hutches, gymnastics shows and, way up on the hill, my mother's vegetable garden.  I've driven by it since, and wasn't all that surprised to see that it's gotten significantly smaller over the years.  We lived nearby, but not in, the neighboring development that contained hundreds of houses.  My best friend lived in that development but we were always a little on the outside.  At the farthest border of the neighborhood I could still hear the supper bell that my mom embarrassingly rang for us when it was time to come home and get washed up.  It was required for us to respond to the bell, "coming" which we grudgingly did.

In November of 1977 we moved to Woodbury Connecticut so my dad could take a job with a friend of his. To this day, at age 51 I'm not sure what type of work he did there.  I do know that there were frozen veal cutlets involved because occasionally my dad would come home with a box of frozen cutlets, like a warrior returning to camp after battle with meat for the winter.  The job only lasted for 8 months.  8 months of my sophomore year.  I briefly dated a guy named Monty who reminded me of a character from Chariots of Fire, the lanky, laid-back, likely always a little under the influence of something blonde runner.  When I say we dated I mean that I think we kissed once and I rebuffed his attempts to get into my bra, the cups of which were audaciously and necessarily supplemented with cotton balls.  Our house in Woodbury was on top of Upper Grassy Hill and it was wrapped in aluminium siding.  The wind blew all the time up there and we ate a lot of frozen veal cutlets.

Woodbury led us to Tolland Connecticut where my dad got a good job as an executive in a wire manufacturing company and where I graduated from high school.  Tolland is where I started keeping journals, pages and pages of adolescent angst and passionate longing for a boyfriend to love, self-acceptance, true beauty, actual breasts and makeup kits from the back of magazines that were worth well over $50 but that you could buy for only $10.00.  We put a screened in porch on the back of our Tolland house, smaller than the one we had built on the back of our North Kingstown house, but adequate for our purposes.  I suppose that having a screened in porch was a small concession for my mom who stalwartly packed our things each time and unpacked our things in a different house, always making it our home.  My sister and future brother-in-law announced their engagement on that screened in porch.  My grandfather was living with us at the time and I'm not sure he really understood what was happening.  Too many people speaking all at once.

I'm going to have to pick up this thread of writing later because I don't want to be late for noon yoga.  I have a chill after my trail run this morning and am looking forward to the 106 degree studio.  Before I go, I'll list the rest of the places I've lived:

Mount Carmel Ave, Hamden, Connecticut, the basement apartment I rented in college
108 Riverside Drive, New York City
102 Whapley Road, Glastonbury, Connecticut
45 Hudson Street, Manchester, Connecticut
Buckland Hills Drive, Manchester, Connecticut, the apartments by the mall
Otis Street, Manchester, Connecticut, the apartment in the big old mansion near Main Street
Starkweather Street, Manchester, Connecticut, the little yellow dutch colonial I bought on my own
11 Treetop Lane, Broad Brook, Connecticut, Mark's and my first home together
17 Park Place Circle, West Hartford, Connecticut, our condo which we rented out as of yesterday
3640 Silver Plume Lane, Boulder, Colorado, our rented house on Table Mesa in South Boulder from where I write at present.

...all of which has been written down to allow me to explore our next move to our next house.