Persnickety Lemon moves from a condo to a house

 

I bought a lemon tree this past spring and set it on my condo balcony where it grew taller and and blossomed. It wasn't thrilled when I brought it inside just before the first frost. I noticed it was beset with white fly, and so sprayed it with sulfur in my condo bathtub. Twice. It protested. 

Then I protested, deciding condo life was not for me for a myriad of reasons. My brother M. didn't seem surprised when I told him. "You need dirt," he said. My daughter C. said that I was one of those people who just need to be "in charge of my shit." Okay. 

So Persnickety Lemon and I moved. Moving is never fun. Moving during a pandemic is fraught with complications.

I stood on the balcony while the movers took everything away. I opened all the windows in the new house while the movers brought the things inside. Persnickety Lemon does not have a parka and was not happy about the open windows on moving day. Or the open windows the day the painters came.

I am not happy that my furniture is way too big for this little 1950s house and that the dining room table fills the whole main room and the only place for a couch is in the basement. But I'm going to make some changes. And Persnickety Lemon is going to get some new leaves.

There are many things to like here.

Like the sunrise in my picture window.

And my utterly charming backyard with its sturdy shed. I can see that red door from my bedroom window, and it looks like a beacon of possibility.

Happy 2021 to you. I wish you good health.

How I tried to enhance my life and failed

My latest suminagashi (Japanese paper marbling) practice--or how the word serpentine can also describe my day

Today was the day! I would get my Minnesota driver's license. Make this move official!--and why not get the enhanced driver's license while I as at it? I'm a day's drive from the Canadian border. I'm in love with Oaxaca, Mexico --wouldn't it be great to take off in either direction with just my enhanced driver's license and not worry about my passport?

I filled out the form online--guaranteed to shave 15 minutes off the venture. (This is particularly humorous if you've ever waited in line at an L.A. area DMV. Fifteen minutes is nothing.) I printed out my confirmation for the pre-filled form and gathered my documents. Or tried to.

This gathering of papers had its own drama. I got locked out of my Xcell Energy account trying to remember my password and had to call for assistance because one has to have a utility bill to prove that you reside at your address. And I had to have a 2nd proof of residence as well ( that seemed easy, but, in the end, was not.) I also needed my passport (cannot be expired) and my current driver's license from my previous state (also cannot be expired.) I needed my Social Security card (cannot be laminated or a mere photo copy.) Oh--and had I ever changed my name? Good god. I needed to show proof of that weary trail.

Moving creates this bizarre effect. When you go to find something, you can remember where it was in your previous abode, but you have no idea where it is now. Here. In this place. Where the fuck is this thing I'm hunting for? I had to find what I call the marriage box. I found it in the storage cage inside another box, and inside the marriage box I found my certificate of marriage (cannot be a photocopy) The marriage document, along with my certified decree of divorce (must be an official government agency document, not a photocopy) I thought would show my transition from the name I was born with to my married name to the made-up new name I decided to call myself post-marriage (it was a weird idea, but at least I chose my maternal grandmother's maiden name as my new surname and did not become Paris France or Bimbo Dumas, which were also in the running.)

Did I mention I spent the morning reading the 90-some page Minnesota driver's license manual? Recipe for anxiety attack. All the terrible things that can go wrong and how you can be fined and imprisoned for the worst of them-- if you somehow manage not to die.

So I stood in a very short line, went to another line where I was the only person in it, took the test, passed, got sent back to the first very short line where I thought my sheaf of documents would be stamped with approval. Turns out I needed my birth certificate which I have not seen since my pre-divorce life. And my 2nd proof of residence, a property tax payment stub with my full address, was not good enough. One must bring the whole page. (All of the information is the same--just larger.)

So I came home and ordered my birth certificate. Honest to god, who changes their middle name in addition to their last name? (which is itself a name just pulled out of the hat of family names?) The online form almost glitched. But it didn't. The new me ordered the birth certificate for the original me. It should be here in 5 days.

But I wonder how do people born in little villages in war torn countries who emigrate ever jump through these hoops? What if you change your name(s) and your gender? 

Not to mention that I do have a valid U.S. passport...why isn't that good enough? I also have my irises and my fingerprints on file with Clear.

Dear Writers

I am a secret hoarder. You can be a secret hoarder when you have a big house with lots of closets and a garage. Your friends will think you are one of the tidiest and most organized people they know. They are wrong.

You cannot be a secret hoarder when you live in a condo, and you share a big underground garage with 500 other people where only cars, not stuff, are allowed. You cannot be a secret hoarder when your only storage area is a 4x8 cage. Still, my 4x8 cage is a tower of wonders--bins stacked on bins stacked on shelves, the walls lined with s-hooks hanging all the things I want to someday need but might not ever need.

I prepared for the great downsizing. I gave things away. I had an auction. I gave more things away. I sold things to friends. I sold probably half my furniture to the new owners of my big house. I gave still more things away. But still, I have dozens of pens. Dozens of markers, and document clips, and paper clips, and pencils, and rubber bands, and envelopes. And hundreds of post-its and boxes of staples. I have journals and more journals, both empty and full. I have index cards, and journals made of tear-out index cards. I have books and more books. I have so many books that I cried yesterday when I tried to fit them on my fabulous wall unit after it got installed. There wasn't enough room even though I made more space in my bedroom and in my closet. So, weeping while I worked, I boxed up four boxes of books to give away. And I lived.

Long live e-books. Long live my book-sized iPad mini. Long live the written word. Long live poetry, and novels, and memoir. Long live essay collections, and story collections, and anthologies and books about birds and whales. Long live books written by dear friends, and writers I'll never meet. Long live all those words that have mended all the broken places, filled the empty places, and emptied out the places full of sorrow and bitterness. Dear writers of those words, thank you.

Here in the Land of Lakes, not quakes

waiting for the fireworks

The barometer of my body says it's in a new and different place. My hair wants to part on the other side, and I'm still lost in this curvy city by the big river. But last night I connected the place where I went out for a glass of wine with the neighborhood I live in and the neighborhood where my St. Paul condo was. Three dots on a map of a zillion dots.

I'm afraid to drive here. Don't get into the bike lane when you turn, and watch out for the orange cones, orange cones, orange cones. There are giant potholes and trenches in the interstates (don't say freeway) from all the construction. And don't say the 94 or the 35W. Here you just take plain 94 or 35 W to wherever. And let's not talk about the W. Anxiety ramps up in the car like it did after the divorce when I marooned myself in my condo in South Pasadena, going to almost nothing. But I can walk or take the train. My new (to me) red Subaru has been christened Freiya, and I will drive her...eventually.

The sky is bigger and bluer here. Sky is distinctly separate from clouds. No grey linty what-is-what sky. Storm clouds barrel in every other night or so, and  lightning unzips the darkness. The 5th floor is a very satisfactory height from which to view the drama.

There is free yoga in the park before the farmer's market. Two seconds lying on the grass and I'm five years old because it smells like childhood. (That's me bottom right.)

The produce in the farmers' market cascades into more variety every week. First it was only asparagus and rhubarb and peonies. Then morels and bok choy. Now squash and lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, green beans, new kinds of spinach, gooseberries and red currants, and so much more.

A huge crowd came to fireworks along the river. Standing room only by the moment of showtime,and then bound in by rows and rows of people. It  sounds terrible, but it wasn't. The next morning it was all cleaned up even though they said 75,000 people came.

My living room still has its wall of boxes of books, and file boxes strewn with things I'm too lazy to file because it means bending down or lifting the box. And the TV is on a card table, but my bedroom is perfect with my favorite art hanging above the bed. And there's my desk where maybe the muse can find me if I ever sit down there.

Sometimes the morning light makes the view look like a painting. I see beauty everywhere, but I miss my friends. I wish they were here in the land of lakes instead of the land of quakes.

The Scottish Story

It's hard to focus on the  personal day-to-day in the midst of current political ass-hattedness and the resulting stream of heartbreaking news.  I feel single-minded and somewhat selfish as I go through these post-move days, shopping for picture hooks and towel bars and shifting things around from here to there and back. I'm not in the streets protesting anything these days. I'm not even in bed, protesting my own exhaustion--which is probably where I should be. Instead, I'm on a tear to get things done--to make yet another trip to Target, the hardware store, or to the recycling bin in the parking garage so I can deposit another load of cardboard.

Today, I decided I would find the perfect sideboard. I esty-ed. I e-bayed. No luck. In my mind's eye, I could see it. I just didn't know where to find it. Then, there it was on Facebook Marketplace in a town 50-something miles away that happens to be very near where I went to college decades ago. After exchanging messages with the seller, I drove off with a friend, hoping we'd measured correctly and the thing would fit in my car.

Turns out the sellers were selling because they're downsizing for a move to a traditional cottage in the Irish countryside. The sideboard belonged to his grandmother. The piece is Scottish, as she was. "I have thing for Scottish antiques" I told the wife.
"Me too," she said, without missing a beat as she elbowed her Scottish husband. I told them my heritage was half Scottish. And then, I don't know how it even came up, but it turns out the wife is on the faculty at the tiny college I attended all those years ago. Life is filled with weird luck sometimes.

I'm grateful for it. And for the blue skies here. And for peonies as big as dinner plates. And for the skyline that lights up my nights.

Mill ruins and stone arch bridge

Coral peonies from the farmer's market

How can it be?

Time just keeps blasting us forward. Dan Paik died 5 years ago today. Five. I spent only five years with him. Soon he will be gone from this earth longer than I knew him.

I live on the 5th floor now in a brand new building in a new city. I'm weary and disoriented. I have a different car and changed to a different purse. I can't find things. I have no sense of direction. I'm lost every time I go anywhere more than a few blocks away. But the dead loved ones are here. Dan. My mom, my aunt Millie. They are constants, easy to navigate to.

The Mississippi River curves through this city. Sometimes I'm on one side of it, sometimes the other. The river Styx divides the living from the dead. I'm still here, living.

How to make a long-distance move

I've made a long-distance move before. This isn't my first rodeo. Trouble is that when I made that move from Minnesota to California in the summer of '75, all my belongings fit into a '66 Dodge Coronet. I had boxes of books and a prized antique trunk that my favorite uncle had lined with cedar. I had house plants and clothes. I had a meager amount of kitchen gear that was ample enough to put a meal on the table. There was even a boyfriend and his stuff in that car. And camping gear. It all fit.

The trip wasn't easy. We worried that our old car might overheat. Two of the nights on the road we pitched our tent in places clearly marked as flash flood areas, and it began to rain. We fought bitterly about whether or not to break camp and drive into the night. In fact, the very first night on the road it rained so hard that we did pull up the tent and run, sopping, to the car. The trunk latch was stuck and we had to stand under the deluge until we got it open. That's how I ended up riding naked into the dawn, the car heater blasting my dripping clothes until we were somewhere in Colorado.

Oh--and on that trip, I ended up with a urinary tract infection because the boyfriend didn't believe I really needed to pee when I said I did. And there was a terrible night in a flea-bag hotel with someone  peering through the keyhole or listening at the door. And someone tried to break into the car.

That seems easy now.

Presently, I have a very nice house, stuffed with....stuff, and I'm moving back to Minnesota...into a place half this size. I'm happy about the downsizing. I'm happy about the move. It's the logistics that are making me wish for that younger, unencumbered me.

Long-distance movers present you with windows of time. There's a 3-day window for pick-up and a 9-day window for delivery. I must get to my new place the day before the movers in order to close escrow and have the key to the new place. And movers haul ass. My ass is not about to haul itself anywhere on some dark highway past cocktail hour and a good meal--except into bed. And on the off chance that the movers get slowed down by weather, or schedule glitches of their own, and their ass-hauling plans are derailed, I'll end up in an empty condo resting my old bones on a fold-up yoga mat, or in a hotel bar, muttering about windows.

By the time the movers get here, the belongings sold at auction need to be picked up by their lucky new owners. In order for the auction to take place, I must decide what stays and what goes and organize it into categories so it can be photographed and listed. By the time the movers get here, I must get rid of whatever didn't sell. By the time the movers get here, I must have the stuff I'm taking to Minnesota packed. Long before the movers get here, I must ascertain whether or not Mabel, the aging Prius, is up to making the trip because Mabel will have no margin for error, no time to wait by the roadside for a tow, no time to wait in some small town mechanic's shop for a new part because, you know, the window is either large or small, but I don't know which.

First world problems, for sure. But if you're thinking of downsizing and moving in your senior years, find the window wherein you're young enough to generate the energy you need to put it all together--or wait until the window closes and someone has to do it for you.

How to Store Your Photos or The Incredible Lightness of Being Divorced

Our holiday dinner table one of the last years of marriage.
Things weren't nearly as perfect as they look here--but it's a very pretty photo.

I was thrown out of my life in 2007. He wanted the house, he said, so he could raise his new family there. So I left, blubbering something about how I was taking the photo albums. The picture below doesn't quite do the situation justice. I think I moved 41 albums to my new place. And when I moved again a couple of years later, I packed up those albums again.

When the second round of devatating fires here in Southern California coincided with the realization that I can no longer afford my current house due to a reduction in my alimony, I knew it was time to crack open the covers on the record of my seemingly perfect life. We don't take pictures of the terrible times, do we?-- the creeping doubt and desperation--and I suppose if we did, I'd have happily left those photo albums behind. Though I wasn't evacuated during the fires, I could see the flames from my windows. If I'd had to leave, would I have had time to pack up a hundred pounds of albums? Probably not.

the old albums (the salvageable ones) now empty

the new photo boxes with an album on top for size comparison

Marie Kondo says she prefers to store her photos in albums, but I'll bet she doesn't have 40 of them. Or 20. Or even 10. Why do we Americans have so much of everything? I think photo albums are cumbersome for sharing in a group. Everyone has to huddle around, crane their necks, and hope the photos don't slip out of the pages if you're passing the album from person to person. These books weigh a ton when filled with photos so you need two hands and have to put down your drink. It seems easier to me to just grab a stack of pictures and pass them.

These boxes hold over a thousand photos each and have index cards where you can write the year, the subject, the place, and even make special notes or comments. The company doesn't provide nearly enough cards, but I just made copies on card stock. I made two boxes for myself, incorporating my mom's old photos as well. And I made two boxes for each of my daughters, which I will hand deliver to them when I move to Minnesota in a few months. Meanwhile if a wall of flames races from the hills to the ocean, I can get these into the Prius in two trips.

Aren't you wondering what I did with the photos of The Someone and of us a couple? I put the nicest specimens in the daughters' boxes. And all the photos of his lovely family were put into a Christmas box and mailed to his office last month. His likeness does not make an appearance in my photo boxes, but he did take a lot of the pictures. I'm grateful for that. And I'm grateful for the experience of looking at the photos--of seeing those new babies, birthday parties, proms, graduations, family vacations, and friends with their heads thrown back in laughter. I think when we take pictures, or put them in a book or a box, we are recording love.

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

Bicycles and Sheep

Last night I met a woman. She asked where I was from and I told her California. “I’m loving my time here in Vermont,” I said.

“You should buy my house,” she said. “You’d love it.” She told me it sat on 40 acres. A studio to rent out that would cover the mortgage. A pond. She tore a strip of paper from her notebook and wrote down the address. “You could have sheep,” she said.

I had fantasies of becoming a weaver once.

She told me the house was on Zillow so I looked at the pictures online. It’s off the market, Zillow says. I think she told me this, but said it was going to go back on. The rooms in the house are painted the colors of the rooms in my house. There’s a bright red table.

I thought I might dream of sheep last night, or speaking French, or standing at the edge of the pond, marveling at how I’d made this new life on the Canadian border surrounded by sheep and sugar bush.

But I dreamed of a bicycle trip and training to ride in it. The training had been going on for months, but I was still learning to repair my bicycle, being drilled on how to take this and that apart and replace it. Parts were laid out on a grimy towel, and the instructor held a shiny metal thing-a-ma-jig in his hand. “This is the piece you want,” he said.” You’d have to pay me big bucks to go on a bike trip. I’d rather just step out in front of the roaring truck than have it hit me from behind. There have been two men in my life in the last decade who were rather taken with me, and these men were serious about biking. That wasn’t the only reason it wouldn’t have worked out, but if I’d made a list of pros and cons, biking would have been written in all caps on the con side. This bike trip in the dream was going to last months. Hundreds of miles. It was a bike trip in which we followed a soccer team, peddling from city to city. Soccer. Sure. I like soccer if I’m in a bar with a soccer fan, or if it’s the Women’s World Cup maybe, or I’m watching some little girl I love.

“I hope this isn’t one of those conversations that changes my destiny,” I told the woman with the house.

“It could be she,” said. There was something about her. Something about the whole idea, something about the dream of the bike race that made me think about how capable we are of changing everything.

Report from Pillville: The Final Days

Mom, let's talk about socks, I said. Mother, you like all these tank tops, right? Okay, now lets talk about pajamas. Sweaters. Pants. Shirts. Skirts. Shoes. All afternoon I went through my mom's closet while she sat at the dining room table eating cookies. We discussed the pros and cons of every article of clothing. How hard it was to put on or take off. The itchiness factor. Whether or not there were pockets. (Must have pockets!) What color rocks with the silver hair. Almost of  the keepers are in the giant roller bag--except for the outfit for my sister and her husband's 50th anniversary party--which will go on the very top--and what my mom's  wearing on the plane. I have a small load of laundry yet to do and then we'll be good to go. Thank god for my Delta mileage and my free checked bags.

How are you, the hospice nurse asked when she came by for her regular visit. She meant me. My mom's pulse ox and her blood pressure were fine. I see stress, she said, locking her blue eyelinered eyes with mine. I'll make it to the plane, I said.

Years ago when I was in college and home for the holidays, I went to my mom's company (John Deere)  Christmas party with her. We were a bit late and when we walked in the room some guy shouted out, "Hey! Ethel's here!" There was a chorus of Hi Ethel, Merry Christmas, Ethel, Can I get you a drink, Ethel? Let's dance, Ethel. I felt like a geeky wallflower.

So hey, party people, if you're a relative of mine and living in northeast Iowa my mom is coming to town. I don't know about asking her to dance, but please visit her. If it's allowed, mix her up a 2-ounce martini or buy one of those single serving bottles of wine and join her for dinner. If you're a relative or friend of mine/hers and reading this, can you please share this post on Facebook to the wall of every relative/friend we know? If you're a niece or a nephew or hers, she'll tell you stories about your parents. As far as I can tell, she loved all of her siblings. Ask her who came home from the war unable to hold a cup of coffee. Ask her who was her favorite (you might get different answers, depending on her mood.) Ask her who had PTSD after the war and what he learned to do because of it. Ask her about the bobsled ride and who her mother threw out and took back when he came back with a broken arm. Ask her who became a hobo and rode the rails. Ask her who was the most talented. Ask her about bloomers and who always made her mother cry. About the baby who was a preemie, small enough to fit in a shoebox, kept warm by the wood stove and survived against the odds. Ask her about the goats and the Italian family, and the crick with the colored clay, the den of wolves, the snakes in the basement, the bounty on rattlesnakes, and the dog who would let people into the yard but not out. Tell me what you find out because after more than three years of stories almost every night, I'm pretty sure I haven't heard them all.

Wishes and Coincidences

Like a lot of writers, I have a stash of journals. I've been combing through them lately. Revising stories, tearing out the stuff that stinks and the stuff I'm done with, trying to find some way of organizing all these notes that I jotted down before I hit upon those little notebooks of index cards that work so much better for me. In this effort, I stumbled upon my "divorce notebook." I have no idea what the central purpose of this book was. Some sense out of the chaos, I guess. I kept notes from interviewing attorneys, general questions. Financial stuff, therapy notes. There was this:

Okay. A short list. I might have been able to keep that in my head. But maybe not. I was fucking insane then.

And there was this:

Perhaps I was planning to send the Someone a bill for my moving boxes. I dunno.

And in my effort to visualize what I wanted my new place to look like, I clipped and pasted pictures from magazine and catalogues. 

Pretty, huh?

Okay. I moved. I got some new stuff. That was 2007. Flash forward. Forget that divorce notebook ever existed. Decide aged mother is moving in with me. Move again (it's 2012 now). And flash forward again to 2013. Get more new stuff to furnish extra bedrooms. Months later, find notebook. Walk down hall to guest room. See this.

I love a good coincidence. Who doesn't? But just to add a little weird frosting to the coincidence cake, I didn't choose the guest room bedding in the photo above. Daughter C did. 

Not quite the luck of the Irish....

One of L.A.s classic taverns closed up shop recently. I spent an incredibly wired and loopy St. Patrick's night there thirty-ish years ago. Quite a few of the regular spots I frequented with the Someone are gone now. The superb croissant place that had the only decent French pastries I've ever had outside of France, the little cafe with the great gumbo, the place on the Sunset strip with the amazing organic burgers, the pizza place just off Hollywood Blvd., the pricey place where we developed a nasty habit of dropping a hundred bucks every Sunday in the last decade of our marriage. And while I certainly don't wish the restauranteurs ill, I practically need to be heimliched whenever I drive by the eateries where I spent a lot of time with the someone, so I'm glad these places have slipped into the past.

Getting out of L.A.--leaving the geography of my marriage--was one of the best things I've ever done for myself. As the post-marriage years tick by, I'm hoping there'll be fewer and fewer of the old haunts left. Just in case I ever give the City of Angels a second chance.

And meanwhile, may the wind be at your back, T.B.

Cat Gets Ticket but Avoids Jail

My 19-year-old cat, Piper, was caught in a door-to-door check by animal control on Saturday. I was  asked to produce her license and proof of a rabies vaccination, but managed to plead ignorance and insanity due to moving here recently. Lost papers, blah, blah....slipped her collar, blah...blah...busy taking care of my mother,  blah, blah. Of course, I managed to throw in that I was a Humane Society volunteer last year.

Piper does not go outside. Never has, really. The smallest hummingbird terrifies her. We've tried to coax her onto the patio, but it would probably require tranquilizers. She likes the couch. And her bed under the sink in the laundry room. Occasionally, she forgets the daughters have grown up and left home and she organizes herself into a hunt for them. This usually leaves her stranded on the stairs meowing like a maniac.

So today I took her to the vet for a rabies vaccine. She did well on her journey into the great wide world and appears to be suffering no adverse effects even though the chart the vet showed me translates her age into human years as 92. Next week sometime between my mom's trips to the gastroenterologist and Miracle Ear, I'll take the rabies certificate downtown and buy Piper a license. It would be great though if I could remember who the vet was that spayed her. She needs a certificate for that, too--or the price of the license will be doubled. This move to Margaritaville was Piper's fourth move, and she's had a hard time keeping track of her paperwork. Which makes me remember how many times I misplaced my final decree of divorce. I think at one point one of the daughters offered to attach it to a lanyard. Which makes me think that maybe divorce decrees could be turned into little tags and worn on collars--or maybe charm bracelets.

photo by Sam Kunz

I had already received the New Year's Eve email from The Someone informing me that, due to his declining income, my alimony would be less in 2013. Ooookay. Not much of a heads up, but I'm hardly a candidate for foodstamps, so while one part of my brain is Googling shit like, "how to find out if your ex-spouse has an off-shore bank account,"the other is telling me to deal with it. Still, I whittle away hours reading about asset protection trusts and law firm gossip, wondering if it really would be worth it to hire a forensic accountant. No? Yes? No. But then I check my bank balance and find that the auto deposit for my last big fat alimony check for 2012 is one cent. That's right. A penny. My bank account is a trampoline  now. I spend an afternoon on Trulia and Realtor.com house shopping in Dubuque, Iowa. I was born there, I reasoned. Why not die there? That bridge that terrified me as a child? Well.

I might have to move, I tell the man who loves me. Nope--60 miles wasn't far enough, now I'm contemplating two thousand. But it's okay, I continue. I might die. You might die. Anything can happen, I tell him.  I fantasize that he will come visit me, knowing that is nigh unto impossible. I fantasize that I will find a historic house with a view of the Mississippi at a tiny fraction of the cost of living in southern California, that I will reconnect will my long lost cousins, that my mom and I will never eat dinner again without someone else at the table, that daily zillions of  people are  struck by tragedy, and this probably doesn't qualify. But still, here I am in Margaritaville. The house. The birds. The ocean. The air. Space for the daughters to come visit and stay awhile. A kayak on the horizon. Well, there's nothing like the specter of loss to make you love what you've got.

Today the regular alimony amount appeared in my account. At this point, it's still "pending."But hey, it looks like I get to keep the extra penny. A found penny is good luck, right?

photo credit: voices.yahoo.com

HUGE

2012 was stuffed with big things. Sold a house. Bought a house. Left the haunted city of my marriage, but moved 60-some miles from the man who loves me. Applied to four grad programs. Got rejected from four grad programs. Gave up my volunteer job walking Human Society dogs. Gave up my volunteer job tutoring at the Downtown Women's Center. And took on my 88-year-old mother. I cook dinner every night. I walk on the beach every morning. I have a regular Tai Chi Chih practice and a regular yoga practice. I eat less salad. Juice less. Bake more. I see my daughter M almost every weekend. The drive between my son's house and my new place is at least 90 minutes longer. Daughter C now has a room in my new place after months of sleeping on my couch last year--but now doesn't live here. I still have my ancient cat. And I am thrilled by the birds we see here on the water.

While I sit here on the couch with my cat, I listen for the call of the blue heron. While the man who loves me plays a gig I can't attend, I listen to the sound of my mom coughing and the hiss of her oxygen machine. I'm another year out from the end of my marriage. My grandchildren are taller and stronger and smarter. My children continue to reveal new aspects of themselves to intrigue me. I've entered the decade of my 60s.

Some of last year's resolutions never got off the ground--pedometer, Joe's goals. But I have new ones. Kayaking. Homemade yogurt. Homemade sauerkraut and other fermented vegetables. This is how it goes. Failures. Successes. Trade-offs. New projects. Abandoned old ones.

What do I want now, I ask myself--because I am always wanting something. I want more than one night a week with the man who loves me. I want a lighter heart in my day-to-day dealings with my mother.

And then there is this escapist fantasy. But do I really want that? Not really. Not unless I could take everyone I love with me.

Feathering the Margaritaville Nest

The latest bit of cushy creature comfort has been installed on my balcony. It took an unbelievably long time for me to assemble the three Home Depot fake wicker chairs that I've aligned to form a sofa. I seem to be unable to complete a task these days without diversion. It's just too boring to keep screwing in the same bolts over and over again. So I do other little jobs in between. By the time I finished the balcony project, I had about two minutes to stretch out before it was time to start dinner.

I proclaim it insanely comfortable. A perfect place to watch the water turn to liquid gold.

Here I am

"Well, we've established a beachhead," the man who loves me said as we lay in bed last Sunday morning. He was referring to the fact that, since my move, he's ridden the train to see me every weekend. He arrives in the late afternoon and leaves the next morning shortly after breakfast. When we talk on the phone between visits, he likes to cheerily interject, "Hey, you should consider moving to L.A." I usually respond with somewhat less good humor that he should consider riding the train to see me on a weeknight once a week in addition to his weekend visit. He laughs.

What I find striking about this, is that we are both unhappy that we are seeing one another less often. Yet when I see him, I'm so overjoyed that for a few days I forget how unhappy I was about not seeing him.

The 18 hours we spend together might be a beachhead--or it might be that there will be no further advancement. Maybe perched on this foothold is where we will remain. To me, this feels both tenuous and comfortable. Both slight and substantial. Like I'm on a narrow ledge, but the weather is lovely and--though the ground is hard,I have  the softest of pillows. I'm not afraid of falling.

A Whale of a Week, A Whale of a Love Affair, A Whale of a Visit, A Whale of a Trip, and Just Plain Whales

The last excursion of the "granddaughter week" was a whale watching trip. "I can't promise you we'll see whales," I told the girl who's been to Sea World twice. Ha. We were mugged by Humpbacks, which is whale watching boat parlance for being so surrounded that the boat can't move. Take that, Sea World. We saw Blue Whales, too. It's not a small event---seeing the world's largest animal--but it was the breathing of the Humpbacks, so close to us, so like immense human sighs, that surprised me.

And the dolphins again--this time a nursery pod with babies, hundreds of them the size of footballs. I love the things the guides tell us on these boat rides. The Common Dolphin cannot survive in captivity, they said. Without their family group, they perish in five days, they said. They loose their ability to echolocate.

Location can be everything in a love affair. The Man Who Loves Me, who I thought for a few days might not weather my change of location, was at the train station when the kid and I got off the boat. Immense human sigh.

Instead of driving halfway to Phoenix to hand off the granddaughter, her mom and her auntie came with the other kids to stay for three days and then take her home. They were good sports and did their own thing while I hung out waiting for plumbers and contractors to do this or that in my final push to finish up jobs at the house before I bring my mom to live with me.

Who am I when I'm with you? Are all of us changing our spots, doing the chameleon thing? The little girl/deep thinking budding psychologist turned into a less-than-charming martinet once the little brother and sister were back on the scene. Ah, well. Little human sigh. This just reinforces my plan to take those kids one at a time.

And so, with barely time to pack, I was back in the arms of The Man Who Loves Me. Echolocation working fine, thank you. Then onto a plane 12 hours later, and into a rental car, and driving for five hours, and then into my home town, which cannot be visited without a plunge into the past. See other blog, and peruse while thinking about the Common Dolphin. And imagine these steeples rising above the cornfields, rising above everything, visible from five miles or so away as you drive down the highway. And weird, how the photo won't load properly. But there it is--the fractured picture of a particular church that I thought might crumple and crush me, like Samson in the temple in the movie "The Ten Commandments," as I sat through dozens of masses as a secretly pregnant 16/17-year-old.

And so here I am, struggling a bit with my echolocation, in my hometown. But my mother is here, and next week, after a thirty-hour drive spread over an as yet undetermined number of days, I will return with her  to the land of the whales where I will listen for their sighs.

The State of the State of Margaritaville

I've seen a tern snatch a silver fish out of silver water. 
I've seen the bustle of Main Street in the next town up the coast where it seems to be fashionable to sell art and socks, books and journals, soap and scoops of French lavender, coffee, furniture, and antiques all under one chic roof.
I've seen a dog people there call "Care Bear" who trots the streets with a stuffed animal in his mouth, a free spirit seemingly belonging to no one and everyone. 
I've seen myself looking at beach beauties with envy.
I've seen people crawling through a hole in the fence by the cordoned off sand dunes and asked if they've ever been "prosecuted under the full extent of the law." No, they said. They just go to look at the great horned owls who nest in the trees. There are five, they said. I went for a look, myself. But I turned back when the third lizard raced across my sandaled feet.

I've seen beautiful historic buildings bearing earthquake bolts in their facades. My friend Ken, who used to be a building inspector, says that even after being seismically retrofitted, the buildings are still only strong enough to withstand a 5.5. I feel that I've been shored up to the same inadequate standard. 

I've seen a little boy, five or six, clutching a boogie board like a shield while barreling across dry sand until he is ankle deep in the surf and then running back. The board never touches the water.

This is Margaritaville. This is the time of my loneliness. I am the dog, the boy, the future crumpled building, and, I hope, the fish holding its silver treasure. I am not the beach beauty. I'm not sure about the owls or the lizards. Maybe I'm them, too. Hiding. Nesting. Startled and on the run.
"You're walking to the beach today if it kills you," I said aloud to my bowl of yogurt at breakfast. So I did. I broke free from my inner Stepford wife who has no husband but a zillion little chores, and I walked back to my least favorite restaurant for lunch, simply because I can get there by strolling on the sand. I sat at the bar, and I ordered a Caesar's salad and a glass of Chardonnay. Do you know the most popular cocktail that people order at a hotel bar on the beach? Yup. People are so literal. And hopeful, I suppose.


Sex on the Beach
1 1/2 oz vodka
1/2 oz peach schnapps
2 oz cranberry juice
2 oz orange juice

Seems like it should have sand on the rim of the glass, doesn't it? But no one would want it then. 


I have a beach ball-sized empty jar. I don't know why I keep moving this thing from place to place, I said to Ken as I put it on my patio. Because someone made it by hand? he said, knowing he was telling me what I already know. 


I have a book about Vermeer and his paintings, and this one called Allegory of Faith

made me think of that jar. The text says that the suspended  glass globe symbolizes man's capacity to believe in God.
I don't know anything about God, but I want to fill my jar with the shells, rocks, sticks, and plastic toys I find on the sand. Today I picked up a smooth gray rock, a rock with pink flecks, a small piece of driftwood and a blue plastic shovel. Tomorrow, if I can make myself leave the house, I have faith that I'll find more.