This Present Chaos

view from the living room window in St. Paul

Once upon a time I was married, and one Sunday afternoon the man I was married to told me the marriage was over and that he would be marrying someone else. Oh, and he and his new wife wanted the house so they could raise their new family there in the house where my husband and I had raised our daughters.

This blog was born out of the chaos that ensued, and in that time this blog had another name, which by a court order, I was required to change. I had another name then too. But my old self had plans in that time of chaos. I would leave California and live in a new place with my new name, and so I bought a condo in St. Paul, Minnesota not too terribly far from the little town in Iowa where I grew up.

Plans. Plans are good. But I fell in love with a man in Los Angeles. Love is better than plans. So I stayed in California, and first one daughter and then the other--and for a brief while both of the daughters and both their partners lived in the condo in St. Paul. Years have passed. The man I fell in love with after a first date on post-card blue sky day in Griffith Park got lung cancer and died four years ago. My mother died nine months later. Sometime in the next year I will leave the house I shared with my mother and where the man who loved me took his final breaths. My budget must shrink to fit my shrinking alimony.

Last week the daughters and their partners  moved into a house of their own. I'm not in my 50s anymore, and I do not want to live in the lovely condo on the 3rd floor of a historic building with no elevator. I am too historic to cross the icy alleyway to garage without falling down. Too historic to trudge up all those stairs with bags of groceries.

In this new chaos there will be painting, and floor sanding, and odd little fix-it tasks, and way too much cleaning. There will be too many books, and what do I keep and what do I sell, and what do I give away conversations inside my head that must eventually translate into some kind of action.

In some months, I'll start a new life somewhere else. I'm envisioning a tall building with an elevator and a view of the Mississippi River.

this present chaos