Some people just are. You know the type. They’re thick skinned and resilient. They’re no-nonsense survivors. They can look at any potentially sad or scary or negative situation and see a glass half full. I’m not of that ilk. Nor am I of the ilk that sees the glass as half empty. No, I’m the type of person who wonders about the glass’s “sense of place” and the “terrain of its emotional landscape.” What can I say? I was an English major.<\/p>\n
Tonight, the woman who’s buying our house stopped by my mother-in-law’s (where we are living amidst boxes and bags like derelict squatters) to go over some last-minute closing details. I opened my mouth and tried to find the words to tell her how hard this has been for me. To let her see how depressed I am about letting go of the cozy house where my water broke, where I paced the creaky wood floors with my sobbing daughter. To make her know how traumatic this has been. I began with, “I’ve been sobbing about leaving our house.” And she interrupted, “You go ahead and cry, honey. That’s just fine. You can come over and visit me and cry.” Now, those written words might sound reassuring, but I can assure you that they were not meant to be. In a rough translation, she was saying, “Oh, shut the hell up already, you whiny, self-indulgent, blithering baby!” Needless to say, she’s one of those tough old birds. And so is my husband.<\/p>\n
I know that everyone around me is losing patience with my weeping and my hand-wringing and my hair-pulling and my garment-rending about this move. Today, my boss said, “At least you’re not living in a refugee camp.” Point taken. But I’m not in my home. I’m left rattling around someone else’s house, muttering, “You can’t go home again” over and over, while thinking about other places to which I can never return. Places like my father’s boyhood home in Texas, sold to people who didn’t care that my Granddaddy built the modest house himself during the Depression, who would never know that my Grandmommy planted the beautiful red roses along the fence, who wouldn’t understand the way in which a warm poppyseed kolache filled up a little Iowa girl swinging her legs under her grandparents’ kitchen table.<\/p>\n
I guess this is my very long-winded way of saying that I don’t like change. I don’t cope well with change, though I know it’s a necessary–and vital–aspect of the human condition. And while part of me wishes that I could just pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on with it, another part of me is glad that I am the kind of person who cares about stories and memories . . . who wants to remember the person before me, planting the flowers . . . who believes that a house dwells in me, and I dwell in it. And maybe those things are their own kind of courage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some people just are. You know the type. They’re thick skinned and resilient. They’re no-nonsense survivors. They can look at any potentially sad or scary or negative situation and see a glass half full. I’m not of that ilk. Nor am I of the ilk that sees the glass as half empty. No, I’m the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-ef","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}