Home Sweet Home

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Well, things around here never seem to quite slow down. And lately, in particular, they've sped up into super speed! Steve accepted a new job position in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Oh, and we move next week! We are taking a ride on the crazy train and loving every minute of it. Well....almost every minute.

While I am thrilled for this new opportunity for our family and ready to start fresh together somewhere, I will be honest and say that initially, I was not ok with moving so far away. There are a lot of different things that factor into that, but one of the reasons is certainly because this place is home to me. I've lived in Michigan my entire life and this area in particular is where I went to college, it's where my children were born, it's where I've worked, it's where my friends are, it's where I discovered who I am.....it's where Jeremy is.

This is where he was and always will be. There will be no more moving for him. This place will always be associated with him. His memorial stone is here, his job and church is here, his friends are still here. And leaving this place sometimes feels a lot like leaving him.

I will say that I've been through enough transition over the past few years that I know this is not the case. I won't be leaving him behind. I will carry him with me wherever I go. It will be difficult to make new memories in a place where Jer will never step foot and to make new friends that will never know of my life "before" but I know I could never completely leave this place behind. I will be back often.

I have found so much peace about moving since that initial idea hit me...I don't know where it came from. I'd like to think some of it is Jeremy's blessing to keep moving forward with a life he always wanted for me. Either way, I am jumping into the great unknown leaving a piece of my heart here in this place, but looking forward to filling more spaces in my heart with new experiences and new people.

Lost

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I dreamed of him last night. For the first time in months and months, I dreamed about him and remembered it.

When I woke up I had the vague feeling that he'd made an appearance and then I couldn't quite remember actually seeing him in the dream. It was like he was there, but only as a presence, just outside of my peripheral vision.

Not a ghost. Not back from the dead. It wasn't a dream where I know he has died and I'm trying to figure out how it is that he's back.

It was a dream in which he was alive and with me, but I couldn't SEE him. Or I don't remember seeing him and this drives me insane. I want desperately to see him again, even it's only a dream Dave.

We were on a group tour of some sort of facility. Maybe a college campus building, I'm not sure. The building was like a maze and the deeper we were led into it the more lost I got, but I knew he'd help us find our way back out again or if not, at least we'd be lost together. Everything would be okay as long as we were together.

At some point, though, the tour disbanded and I suddenly realized Dave was gone, too. I had lost him in the maze and had no idea how to get back to our car or even how to get out of the building. I couldn't even remember where we were in relation to our home.

I was vaguely worried at first, and tried to text him and call him, but my phone was suddenly and inexplicably not my phone. All my contacts were gone, it wouldn't work properly, I didn't know what number to dial, it was malfunctioning and on and on and on, my concern and frustration growing. Hours passed and I could do nothing but continue to try to reach him but I made no progress. The overall feeling was that I would never find my way home again if I couldn't find him. I wasn't terrified so much as worried, lost and confused. At some point I realized that he was never coming back and that's when I woke up.

Later today, I remembered what proceeded that tour on which he disappeared. We'd moved into a little house on the ocean and it was more beautiful, peaceful and calming than I can describe. I was overjoyed to be starting a new life with him by the sea in our perfect little house all filled with light and views of the ocean.

It's not too tough to decode this one. Life is in order, beautiful, comforting and full of loveliness until I lose this man and then I'm lost. Can't find my way back home.

Externally, this isn't a true assessment of my life now. I'm finding my way, slowly but surely. I'm fighting to make a future for myself that both of us would be proud of. My life did not completely disintegrate when he died, it just changed completely and is now a life I never imagined for myself.

But internally, I feel the before and after so acutely, still. The sense that something right, and true and golden was taken away and its absence has left me lost and unmoored. That with him was taken my sense of peace and love and beauty...my home. He was my home.

Not that I don't ever feel or experience peace or beauty or love now, but they are on a much smaller scale than before and feel dulled by the pain of his absence. He loved me so much that it made me feel as though my life had a purpose and truly meant something. He has always been home for me. The home I searched for until I met him and then the home he embodied when he was alive.

I'm missing my home.

It falls on me to provide that for myself now, but that is a task I'm still not convinced I can do without him. His particular love for me isn't something I can ever find a replacement for and don't want to.

What the future brings, I don't know. I have hope and look forward to many things, yes. But my true home is gone. That's a big loss to process, much less heal from. I can imagine that I might one day feel a new sense of home, but it's hard to imagine now.

I don't have a choice though. I have to keep going, hoping that time (and more so, my own hard work) will bring me the healing I so long for. Hoping that I will one day feel at home again, somehow.

If he could, he'd beg me to find the courage to keep hoping for that day. That's enough to keep me going. I want to do right by him. But more than anything I miss feeling the way I did when he was by my side and I haven't wanted to admit it lately, but I still feel lost because he's not.

Crocodiles and other absurdities

Photo from here....

I live in our little house physically alone aside from my two young children and our pets. All the belongings in this home are ours and paint a vivid and accurate picture of who is housed within these walls. But if you were to dig deep enough within cupboards and closets, you would items and articles that seemed at odds with these inhabitants and their actions. It would almost seem as if someone was hiding another person's things. Things that don't match. Things that come from another time or place. Random odd articles. Misplaced and mismatched items.

Buried deep in my deep freeze is a package of crocodile....er, maybe alligator meat. I never plan to eat it and never set out to eat it from the moment it entered said freezer.

It was Jeff's. He had bought it to feed our daughter. He was determined to have his children not be picky eaters. I remember he and three-year-old Liv sharing a chair in the kitchen together eating from a jar of pickled herring or dining on a dinner of rattlesnake meat.

As with most things, he didn't face the issues of childhood sustenance halfway. Instead of insisting that our daughter dine on asparagus or cauliflower, he would thrust something at her that was barely food in my eyes. But she trusted him and she ate it.

So many of these odd and mismatched things that line the backs of closets, shoes boxes and freezers mark who Jeff was and what he stood for. His beliefs. His idiosyncrasies.

I have thought about giving the freezer-burnt crocodile/alligator meat to the dog. But I have refrained. It is a reminder of a man who was funny, loving and passionate about his little family. As all the remaining small and possibly seemingly insignificant items he left behind, they hint at who he was and how strongly he loved his little ones.

Although I have donated many of his clothes or shared some of his more memorable belongings with his family; it is these small items wedged in the corners that speak of him most and remind me while I dig for dinner at the bottom of the freezer of who he was and how much he is missed.

My House

My House

The moment I stepped foot in this place, I knew it was my house and would be my home.

Now that my circumstances have changed so dramatically, I'm beginning to understand that for my own good, I will need to let go of this beautiful place.

It's isolated and it's full of memories that sometimes make it hard to move forward.

I look at the downstairs closet door and remember how Dave had to kick that door open from the inside to save us.

All the doors in this place have a very old-fashioned latch instead of knobs. The closet door has a latch on the outside only. If you go into the closet and somehow the door closes and latches on the outside, you're locked in. Now, this would theoretically never happen, because

1. Most likely you'd never go into the closet and then want to close the door behind you.

2. Even if you wanted to try that move, it's difficult to close a door that has no knob or handle of any sort on that side.

Theory and reality. Two different things.

The trap door to the crawlspace is located in that closet. Dave had to go into the crawlspace to do something and enlisted my help. I was to keep the cat out of the closet while he worked. Rosco wanted nothing more than to explore that crawlspace and would try to push his way into the closet while I barred his entrance. I was facing the door, keeping the door open just enough to keep it from latching from the outside while not enough to admit the curious cat by putting my fingertips under the bottom of the door to control it.  Dave was standing with his torso sticking out of the trap door. Rosco stuck his  white paws under the door to play with my fingertips and I giggled and called out "Look at Rosco playing with my fingers!" Dave replied (Mr. Practical) "Don't let the door latch shut. We'll be locked in here," to which I replied "I won't do that, SHEESH, whattya think I am, stupid?". And that was when I accidentally shut and latched the door. There was a flurry of "I TOLD YOU!" and "I KNOW BUT I DIDN'T THINK IT'D ACTUALLY LATCH THAT EASILY!" and "OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE IN HERE! WHAT DO WE DO NOW? NO ONE KNOWS WE'RE IN HERE!"

After resolutely declaring that we'd just die in that closet and someone would find our corpses and those of the cat when no one came looking for us soon enough, Dave calmly hoisted himself out of the crawlspace, moved me out of the way, and karate-kicked the door right where the latch would be on the other side, cracking the frame a little, but unlatching the latch and saving us before I could finish my sentence on how embarrassing it would be to die because I trapped us in our closet.

I can still see the tiny crack in the door frame.

I look at the staircase and remember the time I picked up a mouse on the landing.

A terrible high pitched squeaking almost too high pitched to hear woke us up one night. We found Rosco playing with a mouse in the stairwell. There is something about hearing a mouse squeak for its life while watching a cat play with it that makes me lose my mind, because after watching for a few seconds, I made up (lost) my mind. I ran past the cat and mouse on the landing to the first floor, grabbed some gardening gloves lying near the door and ran back to the landing. When the cat had that mouse cornered, I grabbed the terrified rodent by the tail, ran back down the stairs and tossed it outside, all before I realized what I'd just managed to do. I think Dave's jaw made a small thump when it hit the ground. I don't think he'd moved the entire time. I calmly removed the gloves and climbed back in bed while Dave still remained frozen and silent. I'm not sure he was even able to remark on that moment that night. I think he was literally speechless. I, on the other hand, managed to say something like "Did you SEE that?" while he just stared at me like he'd never seen me before and had no idea who I was.

I look at the dining area by the wood stove and think of the time Rosco projectile vomited the liquid from cooking corn onto the dining room table, chairs and floor.

He'd gotten onto the counter when we weren't looking and lapped up ALL the liquid the corn had been cooking in, jumped off the counter and jumped onto the dining room table. From the living room, we heard the sound all cat owners dread. It's the sound that alerts us to move the cat to a surface that is not carpeted or upholstered. We both couldn't get to the kitchen in time to make sure Rosco was barfing over a paper towel or something but instead got to witness him vomit all that liquid out like a firehouse. It forcefully sprayed out of his mouth, across the table, into the chair nearby, down the chair and onto the floor. It must have a been a full 20 seconds we stood there, mouths open in surprise, listening to the musical sound of the puke dripping from the table and chair. "I have no words," I finally whispered. "You don't see that everyday" he finally deadpanned. And I went to get the paper towels.

This house is so full of memories like that. Memories that feel just as close and as current as the moment I'm living in now even though some of them are up to 11 years old.

There is some sort of disconcerting mismatch between the reality of my situation and the memories this house traps inside it. The mismatch makes me feel stuck in the past.

I can also picture a family filling this house with love and noise and life. It's a house for a family, not a single 35 year old woman. At least not THIS 35 year old single woman.

I wish I were in a position to better pick the family that moves in when this place eventually sells. I definitely feel like they're adoptive parents more than potential home buyers. I want to make them go through an application process to prove they're worthy.

They'd have to be willing to feed my hummingbirds who come back every March. There would be a stipulation that they'd HAVE to have the feeders out no later than the first week of March or the hummies might come back early and search for their feeder. This would NOT be acceptable.

They'd have to promise to never harass or hurt the deer, even when they eat the shrubs. And they will.

They'd need to promise to grow veggies in the massive veggie garden Dave and I labored over for years and to use the greenhouse we built ourselves. 

They'd have to promise to look at the sky on a clear night and note that the milky way is visible out here in the middle of nowhere.

They'd need to promise to never fill this house with ugliness or violence. It's a house of peace and quiet and love and always should be.

They'd need to promise to love this house as much as I've loved it for the past 11 years.

I can't imagine that's possible, but it would be nice.