Tag: Home

On the Road

I awoke this morning enveloped in dead silence. Aaaah. So lovely.

I am in a hotel miles away from home in Osprey, Florida. At home, I realize, electronics run perpetually about me. The ceiling fan. The bathroom fan. The outdoor heater. The air purifier.

In this here hotel, there is none of that. My ears awoke this morning to nothing and I was struck by how different that is from my normal.

I am abed and luxuriating in this simple and peaceful environment. I am headed for a Christmas weekend adventure to stay in a houseboat overnight. Florida is unquestionably an odd state in the union.

Known for its weirdness and tackiness and Disney World. But Florida affords travelers unique water-based experiences that you would be unlikely to find, say, in Nebraska.

No doubt Nebraska has its own unique charms and surprises to discover. Houseboats on the ocean is definitely not one of them.

Isn’t odd how we end up living where we live? The possibilities are endless but eventually we must all decide on somewhere. Maybe we were born where we live. Most unusual these days but still, possible.

Or we transferred jobs or got a promotion. That planted us somewhere across the country to a place we have become deeply attached to and now call home. Or we retired, and deliberately sought out sun, sea and sand and zero personal income tax. Maybe John and Susan moved here first, talked it up, had you visit and now you live here, too.

I know people whose whole extended family has pulled up stakes and moved several thousand miles across the country to live around each other in retirement. I consider them lucky to have family relationships strong enough to merit that move.

So my intent this weekend is to see a little more of the surrounding countryside in the place I temporarily call home. Gathering me rosebuds while I may and all that.

There is something mentally refreshing about simply seeing different signage along the road or as you pass through small towns. Meandering down highways that are bordered by different landscapes than you are used to is visually interesting snd stimulating.

Last night, I ordered take-out from a Mexican food chain called Tomatillo’s that I had never heard of before. Mighty tasty steak tacos.

So soon I shall rise, eat a hearty breakfast and get back on the road. My chosen route is through a backcountry route where I hear alligators laze up on the side of the road. You can’t get a more extreme than that for a change of scenery.

What I like about travel is what awaits me when I go back home. I always see my home with fresh eyes after an outing, regardless if it is long or short.

We never travel any distance in reality in the long run. Wherever we go, there we are. But travel does stretch and educate us, if we’re lucky. I used to regard people with disdain who travelled in developing countries and spent little time outside their hotel and constantly complained and made disparaging comparisons to their living conditions at home. So why did they bother to leave home at all, I often wondered?

I have only another day of wandering around before I head back to my “permanent address” and pay my respects to the biggest day of the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, I am going to milk this day and tomorrow for all they are worth.

I hope to return home with a new perspective. And if I’m lucky, pictures and tales of alligators I encountered lying along the road.

Eventually we all come home again. To a physical one here on Earth or to our spiritual home. It’s just a matter of time. My responsibility on this planet is to suck as much of the marrow out of this earthly experience before I light off for a purely spiritual one.

At that point, I will live each timeless moment in all the silence I ever longed for.

Screaming Hypocrite

How calm and cool and reasonable was I in the face of the ravaged lot behind our house, I told myself last week? The destroyed view from our backyard. The disturbance of not only our solitude but our peace and quiet. And worse, the upending of our dream. That was the impression I wanted to convey to the world and to myself.

As the story and project have unfolded, the story is textbook irony. I had looked for a more suitable house for us for over a year. We must have looked at 20. Made an offer on a few. But there was always a dealbreaker.

The beautiful wood paneled walls of the three acre country estate with the many fruit trees but maintenance issues and the shredded birdcage around the pool. As we countered back and forth with the seller, I was slowly undone by the amount of work it would take to bring this beautiful property back to life and good health. And it was far too far to drive to amenities for my liking. Pass.

Then there was the country place that was called the “cow house” by our agent. Five acres and a massive, meandering house. Again in need of maintenance and much love. Too much of both were required for our taste. And there were no trees to speak of on the property. A definite dealbreaker.

There was the stunningly decorated “wow” house that t sat directly on a golf course. It had an adorable little lap pool. That deal fell apart over a misunderstanding about whether it was being sold “turnkey” or not. But we learned no furniture or decorations were included, as we initially thought. As tempting as it was, that deal fell through, too.

It is often said in real estate circles that buyers often know they have found “their” house within a few seconds after crossing the threshold. So it was with the house we recently chose. Perfection. For us. Until last week when trees began to fall.

When I wrote about my emotional evenhandedness in the face of lovely old oak trees coming down in front of our eyes and our old forest view being obliterated, I was kidding myself.

I now realize I was in shock. We had no forewarning of what was coming. I kept myself super busy on Friday just to get on the top of the situation and to quell my panic.

That denial fell away this morning when the dozers and chainsaws came back. When they were done, there was a huge hole in the view from our pool where there used to be lush greenery and old trees dripping with Spanish moss. And a pile of leveling dirt. The pain set in with a vengeance.

I am heartsick. And I realize that I am powerless. Except in how I react. And 72 hours later, I am reacting like a very sad and angry little girl. I am full of swear words and useless anger. So much for my great healing journey.

I know “this too shall pass.” Like other sudden losses and disappointments, this pain will lessen and change with time. We have talked to a landscaper to fill in the hole from our side with thick and fast-growing foliage.

So as much as I would like to experience all of life’s insults in a calm, beatific and philosophical evenhanded way, I have to accept I am only human.

It’s a sad and disappointing development. It is not the first time and will not be the last time that life throws me a curveball. I appreciate that it is also not the end of the story.

Best to shore up and fortify those emotional management skills now. Surprising to me is that short-term rage and anger appears to be one of them.

Crimping the Crust

This metaphor may be a stretch. However, I have lately started to compare my life to an apple pie. Not my absolute favorite pie but apple pie is among the top ten pies I love and easiest for most to identify with.

So let’s say our lives start out with your standard issue pie pan. Round and made out of glass or metal and in the case of one pan I have – cast iron. That one is a doozy.

The bottom crust is the environment you are poured into at birth: your family, your environment, the house you live in, whether you have or don’t have grandparents and extended family, and whether you have or don’t have money. All of these extraneous factors contribute to how you mature and grow.

Some elements are positive and support your growth. Like attentive grandparents or a kid-safe and friendly neighborhood with good schools and lots of activities to take part in. Your parents’ ability to pick and choose what you can experience is based on a lot of these things.

Other bottom crusts are not so nurturing. There not be enough money. The parents may have to work multiple jobs just to keep body and soul together. The kids’ needs get scanted or are simply not there. And add to that any afflictions: addiction, mental health issues, or a neighborhood awash in crime and violence.

Kids learn in this environment, too. But the lessons learned in this environment are usually more focused on survival and managing the negatives in their environment than striving for personal growth and maturity.

The filling is your life. As you get to adulthood, you begin to pick and choose what to put in your pie. Apples is an obvious choice. But you pick a career. A spouse. A home. A community. Your choices are more or less based on what the bottom crust of your life was.

People tend to stay in the same socio-economic group they were born into. Though the choices being made are shifting dramatically, people usually picked spouses from the same race or culture they came from and the opposite gender. That is all up for grabs and discussion these days. I am talking about a certain demographic.

As we mature and grow in our jobs, our marriages, and our communities, our choices may be challenged to conform more closely to who we are. Switching careers in mid-life. Choosing to end an unsatisfactory marriage. Maybe marriage to the wrong person and gender in line with who you really are.

As the filling is being made, there may be all kinds of additions and subtractions over the years like that which goes into any kind of baking or building. As we sift through life and get more certain about what stays and what goes, what works and what doesn’t – exclusively for us – our apple pie may be very different from someone else’s apple pie. Even though the basic ingredients are the same.

Eventually – if we’re lucky – we get to a point where we are comfortable putting on the upper crust and closing the pie to ready it for baking. We know who we are. The important choices have all been made. We allow into our lives who and what works for us. We kindly but firmly resist the intrusion of people, things, and experiences that we know will not serve us.

We get better at discriminating between what works and reinforces what is important to us and what doesn’t. Eventually, we learn we are satisfied enough and comfortable enough to stop striving and start fully enjoying our lives.

We crimp the crust of the pie – our lives – and contain what is important and reject what isn’t. Of course, this is not a perfect science. It is a crazy metaphor. The pie can fall and shatter. The crust might burn in spite of putting aluminum around the edges to protect it.

But lately, I have been thinking of it more and more about my life this way. I have put apples and raisins and walnuts and butter and brown sugar in the filling of my life. I am at the stage where I am ready to crimp the edges of the crust and enjoy the final product.

Crazy as the metaphor may be, I love apple pie. My mouth is watering at the thought. That suggests a life tolerably well-lived to me.

A Home of One’s Own

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S. Eliot, Originally published 1943

Think about home. How does that word feel for you? Warm? Cozy? Messy? Bright? Gargantuan? Fun? Dingy? Safe? It’s a trigger word for some. It’s definitely a trigger word for me. I have been looking for “home” my whole life.

I envy those who can look back on their childhood with warm and fuzzy feelings. I wish I could. As soon as I was able, I set out to find my dream home. In my ignorance and haste, I made boneheaded mistakes. It didn’t quite work out as I expected. To start, I needed to believe I was capable of achieving stability. I wasn’t there yet.

The home I so desperately wanted when I was younger had to be created by me and me alone. “Me” wasn’t ready. “Me” moved around a lot. It took ages for this penny to drop. “Wherever I go, there I am.” Years of international travel taught me that packed with your luggage is all of your other baggage. To be sure, I traveled widely for years to study, to learn, to explore, and simply for adventure.

Underneath those goals was the unexpressed hope that by being somewhere else, I might BE someone else. Someone I actually liked and admired. Someone I could love and support. Someone I wanted to spend time with. I still cringe at the memory of adopting a British accent in London one summer. My Queen’s English was passable enough to chattily converse with a traffic bobby without raising suspicion that I was not a fellow citizen. Perhaps he was just a proper English gentleman.

What I hadn’t factored in when I headed off for foreign shores was that I needed to get rid of the mess in my own foundation first. You can try to build a house on quicksand, but it is going to fail. Before a house can be built, the foundation must be prepared and made solid. When one’s childhood is emotionally unstable, it can be difficult to know what is needed to stabilize that internal foundation. In my case, I moved around a lot. Every six months or so. For years.

The reason – though I didn’t know this as clearly when I was younger – was that staying in one place for too long allowed unwelcome feelings to come up that I didn’t know how to deal with. Eventually, legions of counselors over many years helped me excavate the muck in my psychic basement. Then one day the pile of muck is outside. The rot is drying in the sunlight. It finally desiccates down to dust and the wind blows it away.

How did I know I was well on the way to healing? I could talk about difficult events in my childhood without panicking or plummeting. I had searched for years for ways to feel normal. I didn’t want to be constantly nervous, or anxious, or terrified, or overwhelmed. That state of mind finally arrived when I could see and separate feeling like a bad person from a person who had many bad things happen to her. Such is the fate of the unprotected child.

I believe I am a good person because I continued to seek answers for why I didn’t feel like one. What a ride – and a long one at that. All that external and internal traveling has seen me finally disembark at a happy place. That dream home? Sure, it would be nice. But acquiring it is much lower on my list of life priorities these days. I am the home I always craved and needed. Welcome to me.