Category — Following Our Bliss

Rain, rain, rain all this spring. The parsley and zucchini flourish, but the cucumber and collard plants look a bit pale. No big garden plowed. Three tomato plants get leggier and leggier before being transplanted, and the hostas wait to be planted in a triangular shade garden. The rain beats down the geraniums, petunias, and lobelia to tatters.

I may just call the neighbor who volunteered to plow my garden and say, “Shall we build an ark, then?” One learns to wait when nothing else is possible. Some day soon a garden will make itself a reality.

In the meantime, [Read more →]

It was only since I returned that I understood my love for Palladian windows: the library, the courthouse, and the sheriff’s office. There’s nothing like reading in a recliner in a room full of books in front of the fireplace under tall, dignified windows.

It’s no longer the same, of course, but [Read more →]

Standing in the middle of a garden center early this spring, I was suddenly seized with a deep desire that seemed to come out of nowhere. I want a garden, a real garden, and I want it this year.

We have lovely little flower plantings, a raised herb bed, a little kitchen garden, and a wildflower garden that’s quickly becoming a weed patch, but no big garden.

Frank is puzzled. “Why do you need a big garden? Do you have time to take care of one? Where will you put it?” [Read more →]

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need,” wrote Cicero. My family had both.

Part of what I want to accomplish with this blog is to revisit the Edens of my childhood and remember the strengths, gifts, and trainings I received from my wonderful extended family, all of whom were dedicated gardeners, readers, and reciters of poetry.

On this Memorial Day here in the US, I think of all those who have died for our freedoms. May we never take them for granted. On this day, too, my mind takes me back [Read more →]

We did what we could. We needed to hire help for almost everything, since neither one of us had enough energy to do much of anything. People to clean, people to unpack, people to cut the grass, people to rearrange furniture, people to help us discover what lay in all those “Computer Room” boxes.

I always aspire to my family motto of “A place for everything and everything in its place.” It’s a good way to live (which I’d discovered by trial and error).

You remember that nagging feeling of “I must have forgotten something, but I don’t know what?” My sister and I had walked through the house fairly quickly, and Frank hadn’t laid eyes on it until we arrived, although I had made a rough drawing of the floor plan for him.

It finally hit us. It’s a much bigger house, but there’s almost no storage space. The few closets are tiny, and here we are with all this stuff, and 4x stuff at that.

Just a tiny problem that should be solved by serious triage and winnowing. A box or two a day once we’d found our immediate needs. At that rate, we should have a place for everything and everything in its place in, oh, a few thousand years. 

All too soon, the moving van struggled up the gravel road. Exhausted as we were, we posted ourselves in chairs in front of the garage door to direct the flow of furniture and boxes. It was a very long day.

It soon became evident that since there was a computer in several rooms of our “old” house, most of boxes were marked “Computer Room.” Many of the others were marked “Misc.”

Once the furniture was more or less placed, the six or eight strong men brought box after box in what could only be described as an onslaught. We were exhausted to begin with, and I quickly descended into “what the hell” mode, pointing the automatons in vague directions. Wherever.

When they finally left, we staggered into the house to find that the boxes had been placed with the labels facing the walls.

Laugh or cry? We couldn’t decide.

I hadn’t remembered that x amount of stuff when packed becomes 4x of stuff. And we had an unbelievable amount of stuff.

So there we were, walking sideways again. All I could was to invoke my famous coping phrase: “This day is over.”

And so it was.

Getting us and our possessions on the road was living proof of Murphy’s Law. From packing to shipping our car to motel reservations and plane tickets and Frank having to throw himself to the ground several times to dismantle my new electric scooter to get it in and out of cabs, it was a nightmare.

We set out early the next morning from New York, and between one glitch and another, didn’t arrive at our new house in the Missouri woods until late that night, exhausted and nerves frayed.

Frank wanted to go to a hotel for the first night, but I insisted on what I thought was a better plan. I swooped through the big-box store on my new wheels and grabbed air mattresses and bedding. A brilliant plan.

When we got back to the house, only then did I see the instructions on the air mattresses: “Must be charged for 12 hours before inflating.” So we slept on the floor, sung to sleep by hundreds of bullfrogs in the woods.

Who says you can’t go home again?  

“College girl seeks summer nanny position.” I called Diana’s number and asked her if she’d like to be a nanny to a middle-aged woman, or perhaps an assistant, whatever she’d prefer to be called.

We connected instantly, and she was hired to do the things I couldn’t, with the understanding that she could always say no. She was tall, strong, and brilliant, a junior at Vassar, and as she worked, she discussed “matters of importance” with both Frank and me. She borrowed arms-full of books from each of our libraries. As a women’s studies major, she had landed in “ground central.”

She cleaned, brought me imaginative meals on a tray, ferried me to doctors’ appointments, picked up prescriptions from the pharmacy, emptied the freezer to take to the local food pantry, packed heirlooms, and as we worked, the conversations continued.

I couldn’t do much except give instructions, delegate, point, and teach an ongoing teleclass propped up in bed. About all Frank could do was walk about the house with his hands on his head muttering, “Maelstrom, maelstrom, maelstrom.”

All too soon, the moving van pulled into the driveway. Exhausted, overwhelmed, and in pain, I dived under the covers and told Frank I couldn’t deal with anything more at that point; he and Diana would have to take over.

Thank goodness for those now-visible hands.

I crawled home to Frank, making the painful navigations through the airport and into the car as he picked me up. Straight to bed, and there I stayed. Nothing on my mind but pain and fatigue and pain. 

My knees seemed permanently bent, and I couldn’t straighten them out. The medications didn’t even touch the pain, and I couldn’t get comfortable anywhere.

Frank was worried. The doctor seemed non-committal, and I was beginning to wonder if I was dealing with something chronic.

Just getting from bed to bathroom was a horrendous affair with the walker and Frank steadying me. He was kind to bring me everything I needed, but how would I ever sort, toss, pack, and get ready for the move?

I hoped the nightmare was temporary, but we were both beginning to wonder. Maybe by the time the movers arrived I’d be up and pain free. In the meanwhile, all I could do was make phone calls from bed, read, and nap.

We kept reminding ourselves what Joseph Campbell had said: If you follow your bliss, there will be those invisible hands opening doors for you that you never knew existed. 

Sunshine, a ringing phone, and Bobbi on the line. “Somebody made a completed contract last night. Your house was not to be, so shall we set out again today?”

Of course. Coffee and pancakes. A lot of coffee. A dull ache of disappointment where I had promised myself there would be none. I had fallen in love with a home and had been rejected. So what?

In my head, I believe that rejection is a wonderful and necessary thing, that it gives us valuable feedback, saving us time. “Not here,” it says, “Not now, not this.” But I found it hard to erase the dreams I had for the white fence, the wild flowers, the baby rabbits, and the bees in the peach orchard.

Once again we three set off, joking about being jilted, about my broken-heartedness, and how life brings us what we need, but not necessarily what we want. Easy for me to banter, but a little pang of grief remained.

Our second day of searching was much like the first. Charla would do the walk-throughs as I nursed my aching knees in the car. Many more houses. So many for sale as we criss-crossed the countryside.

Late in the day, Bobbi said, “Now this house may not be what you’re looking for, but it’s on the way, and it won’t hurt to look.” She handed me the page of pictures and statistics.

Unappealing, but it was on the way, so we might as well check it out.

I decided to hobble through this one. The owner swept the red door open with a flourish as we staggered through our fatigue into the entrance hall. A turn to the right, and we were in the living room, mostly empty except for the late-afternoon sun and the butter-colored carpet, tinkly new-age and native American music, and the scent of baking bread and cinnamon candles throughout the house.

In a daze, we ploughed through.

Finally, Charla and I stood in the sun room and looked down into the woods. The house had “good bones,” clean lines, essentially a long rectangular box built to capture every possible ray of sunshine in every room. Only the living room faced west, and the other rooms faced East. I’m a morning person and crave morning sun. It was beautiful, simple, good enough.

I turned to Charla. “Should we?”

“Of course. No question.”

“No objections? No second thoughts?”

“None whatsoever.”

We talked briefly to the owners about maintenance costs and other things we should know.

Bobbi drove out the driveway. “Now our next stop is…”

I interrupted her. “No, our next stop is your kitchen table where we make out a contract for this house tonight.

“Well, all right.” And she turned the car around in the middle of the road.