I spent this morning in Bangor (for work), day dreaming about what the future will bring. It wasn't a sunny picture - I seem to have moved past sorrow to self-pity. Here I am, a woman with nowhere to live and no career to love, went my lament, which is patently absurd even to the most casual observer. After all, we have an apartment we can stay in on a month to month basis after the lease ends on September 30th, a fact I confirmed yesterday, and for now I'm still getting two paychecks for my two part-time jobs, both of which invoke my gratitude if not my love.
More to the point, I don't need a house to feel connected or loved or happy as Kanha reminded me through a little trinket she gave me a couple of weeks ago, acquired while shopping at Goodwill with her Massachusetts friends. I typically hate these little tchotkes, inexpensive, ugly, in the way on the rare moments I want to dust, but this one struck my soft spot so sharply that it has earned a prime spot in the bedroom under the fan. It's a micro-canvas painting, set on a doll-sized easel, with a flower and a bird and a yellow background and the words, "home is where your mom is" printed across it. No house or view could ever provide me more happiness or comfort than that little phrase handed to me by that little girl.
Speaking of a house with a view, it came back on the market yesterday -- same price, same description, same grammatical error in the ad. It's as if I never walked through their halls or their rooms or their lives. Which I suppose is right for them -- they need to move on, to find another taker with more pluck or resources or both, and I hope they do, mostly to extinguish my dream permanently, to put me out of my misery.
In the meantime, I need to try to move on myself, and as such, I've spent a little time on the New England Moves website (www.newenglandmoves.com, best info on buying a house in the northeast I've found) - I've turned up a few places for Nikki to check into including another house with a view (but nowhere near as good plus zero architectural appeal). Of course, I could go back to the red house with the unfinished third floor, microscopic kitchen, and entirely exposed front yard that I looked at a couple of months ago. But nothing is grabbing me. After all these years, these decades, I haven't "settled" for the wrong guy, should I settle for a house I can't love long enough?
Kanha and I went to visit my dad's grave on Labor Day Monday -- it's just over the bridge and down a few streets of rolling hills and well-zoned subdivisions from our apartment. I hadn't been since we moved back to Maine in July, and no one had visited perhaps all summer -- the day lilies' day for this year had long since passed; they were engulfed by stiff brown strands, and the grass had grown in all around Big Chip's headstone. Kanha picked up a rock from the drive that passes through the cemetery and placed it on the stone to mark our visit as she had done so many times as a toddler. I remembered that when he was alive, he had been the person most interested in me, in all the little details of my life, he gave me comfort, he provided my home. One of these days we'll find a house to envelop that incomparable feeling again.
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