her able hands

I’m up at 6 am, hoping the kids stay asleep for at least another hour. At this time of day the quiet is familiar, almost as quiet as the old house. Then again, at this time of day at the old house, the neighbor’s under-worked farm dogs are greeting the morning with their full-on yippy supplication, and I’m trying to ignore my twitching left eyelid. Oh, wait! It’s not twitching at the moment, and there are no dogs outside here yet. The only sound is the obnoxious whine of this old laptop and an occasional car going by down on the street.

Notice my use of the word street instead of road. We don’t live on a country road anymore, which is funny because the way this house is situated–up a hill and back behind the other houses on the street, with a long country style limestone gravel drive with a strip of grass growing in the middle of it—makes it feel more country and charming than our ranch set close to the road with the blacktop double driveway and the tractor parked behind the barn ever did.

Have I mentioned yet how much I love this house?

I love it. Even the things I don’t like about it, like the wallpaper and paint choices, or the styling of the wood cabinets, even those things I love—because they’re fixable (eventually.) And in the meantime, they’re livable, and well-cared for, and quality not crap. Real solid doors with panels, not hollow-core doors. Wood cabinet bottoms, instead of raw plywood. Oak trim, not that pine junk stained almost black. We have a laundry chute. I’ve always wanted one of those, and it’s a beautiful thing to end the day by taking off my dirty work clothes, and dropping them down the chute into the big box in the basement, rather than leaving them on the floor until the next trip down.

Speaking of laundry, it’s so amazing to do the wash, and not have the house fill with the stench of sulfur and iron (farts and blood, man.) The clothes are coming out clean! Not streaked with rust and Maude only knows what else. Oh! And there’s a sink next to the washer, one of those deep utility sinks that I’ve dreamed of having right along with the laundry chute.

So far I only have the kitchen completely unpacked (except for our fancy new fridge that we bought last year standing in the middle of the room—too big for the hole so some restructuring needed.) Tyler’s room is mostly done. Lila’s still sleeping with us and her room is full of piles of things needing a new home.

The house is wired for all kinds of surround sound and speaker systems, including the back deck, so we haven’t figured it out to hook up the teevee or stereo yet. That’s this weekend, I hope. Clearing out the dining room and setting up the table and chairs made me very happy indeed. We had Jerry to dinner last night, and it felt so good in this room, cozy and cheerful, contained. I hated having only a dinette on linoleum at the other place, so crowded and sticky feeling, and displaced. Temporary.

Have you ever lived in a house or apartment that would not accept your energy? Would not allow you to fully make it yours? That was the old house. Everything felt infused with this tincture of loneliness and want, a lacking of joy so profound that I wonder what the previous (and only other) owners’ lives were like. I smudged with sage regularly, I danced in the rooms, we made love in some of them, I did energy work into all of the corners and tried to get the chi flowing, I asked all of the negative energies to leave. I smiled. I breathed. I meditated. I arranged the furniture, and rearranged it, and rearranged it again. Nothing helped. The heaviness always came back, eventually so heavily that I could no longer take real action there.

Now when I pull in the driveway for another load and to take care of the animals, (one cat, eleven chickens, and a rabbit yet to go) I feel this apprehension about going in for the rest of the stuff. What if the energy has soaked into our belongings? What if we bring it into this new place and it’s stronger than the love we feel here? I sit there in the cool air conditioned truck, and for a moment I think about taking a match to it all. Or wish a tornado would strike in the middle of the night and tear it all down. Or that somebody would break in and take what’s left. Not really, but sort of.

Each visit this week, I should have stayed longer, dealt with more of the cleanup, finished packing up the loose things stuffed in closets, but I couldn’t. I had to just hit it and grab what I could, then get the hell out of there, or I would have sat down on the floor and cried. But yesterday I walked back to the garden to get some of the t-posts and saw that the potatoes have just gone hog-wild in the recent heat and after a few good rains. The garlic scapes are curling and I need to get back there to trim them (some of them—some I’ll let flower so I can eat those too and have some baby cloves to plant for green garlic immediately.) That grounded me a little bit, and reminded me that I have been able to correct some of the negatives of the property. With nature’s help, of course. That it hasn’t all been bad.

Forty minutes later, I pulled into our new driveway with another load of stuff, two more kitties, and a smile on my face. Have I mentioned how much I love this house?

photos soon…when I find the box with the camera…

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