Funeral for a Fantasy

I said goodbye to my house tonight.

Not my home, my house. 

What's the difference?

Well, my home is where I reside. And I know I am lucky to live there. My home is a gorgeous abode full of love and light, but my house is where I have weirdly longed to reside for the last 40 years. 

And 40 years, my friends, is a long damn time.

In some ways I am relieved to have made the break, said farewell, bid adieu. It feels like putting down a knapsack full of bricks, one for each passing year during which I quietly planned where to hang my birdfeeders, what sort of car to park in the driveway and how many pumpkins to pile on the steps at Halloween.

But saying goodbye to a long time wish also feels like someone is peeling off my exoskeleton and stomping it to crispy black slivers on the sidewalk while I observe; but, whatever. 

It's not the first time I have been crushed like a bug and survived. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Because it's not and never has been mine, I will now refer to my house as the house. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The house's owner, a big-hearted lady who is getting ready to downsize her own life into a smaller, quainter package of presently unknown decree, nicely asked me to dinner. She and I have mutual friends who were gathering, kindly and from out of town, at her house after dutifully marking the passing of their beloved patriarch. Over appetizers, in her beautiful farmhouse kitchen, the homeowner announced that her son, seated to my right and ten years my junior, was now the proud owner of said house, and that she was planning to move after having resided there for the last four decades. 

And 40 years of stories began being shared alongside clinking glasses of wine and demi plates of cheese. 

Swallowing hard on a sip of Sahara-dry merlot, I gripped the side of the table as my cerebrospinal fluid rushed downstream, 

like 

    a 

        lumbar 

                puncture. 

It was then that I realized, the send-off for the patriarch had also become the funeral for my fantasy. 

Oh, and did I want a tour to see what had been improved upon since the last time I'd laid eyes inside it?

Yes, (big gulp of vino) give me the tour.

But first, dear reader, I give you the backstory.

Here is how I came to love the house. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You see, my best friend lived in it! A lovely rambling ranch on the edge of the woods, I spent countless mornings, afternoons, evenings and overnights there during my childhood. Her parental units were 70's folk, you know, the kind who trusted us (and the world) enough to let us roam unattended through this thing called life. 

We danced to Fleetwood Mac in the living room wearing flared corduroys and matching friendship rings. We swam via moonlight, screeching when our toes hit the drowned plastic pool toys, suffocated and submerged by their lack of air and bobbing lazily in the inky blackness. We called every cute boy we knew, passing the yellow telephone receiver back and forth, supine on our backs and snapping gum while spinning the extra-long phone cord between our bare toes tracing invisible figure eights side by side up the dining room wall. 

On the cusp of adolescence, we soaked ourselves in Jean Nate splash cologne and shoved pillow-sized maxi pads down our shorts, parading around in the company of her brother and his friends asking if they'd noticed anything "new" about us. 

Sleepovers began with late night games of Monopoly and rating the skills of our classroom teacher on a scale of 1 to 10 and then evolved, years later, into late night questions posed to the Ouija board and rating Jason's, (who lived around the block) good looks on a scale of 1 to 10. 

We shopped the mall for identical training bras with our mothers and after playing softball in the same league, requested identical freeze pops at the snack bar. 

We poked at crawfish in the stream deep in the woods next to the skunk cabbage, never actually touching them but nudging them toward rocks and other hiding places, tiny mud-colored claws bravely raised in case we drew closer. 

It was the absolute best of times. 

But, things happen, and my friend's family, with all our precious memories stowed away in their hard-backed Samsonites, sold the house and moved a thousand miles away. At almost the exact same moment, one of my parents tapped out after fifteen years of marriage and cleaved our little family of three like an axe slicing a piece of dry firewood destined for an inferno. And then, on top of it all, my boyfriend, who had decreed we were getting married on the first Valentine's Day after college, got his romantic ass dragged into a U-Haul by his mom, along with his dog and his stepfather who drove a dozen states west via Interstate 40, to settle down in a beach town. 

California dreaming, as they were, on such a winter's day.

Deflated, dejected, and depressed, I became a girl without a country, but then an idea came to me. I could still ride my bike past the house! Or, I could just jog by the reminiscing, whoops, I mean reminding, umm, I mean rambling ranch on a day when I was hanging out in the nearby woods!

Yes, I would check on it...just making sure the newbies were treating it well. Wait, maybe someday I could even buy it! Oh my gosh! 

I went from lost and heartbroken, to lost and heartbroken on a mission. One day it'd surely be mine and all would be right with the world again. 

Now, fascinatingly, the family who bought the house was very tightly ensconced with my friend's parents who sold them the house. So, although I was not welcome to just pop in on the newbies, I was able to keep tabs on the house via my friend (and her personal connection with the home's owner) for decades. I'd randomly pepper conversations something like this: 

    "Is the bomb shelter still there?"  

    "Well, yes, but now it's a craft closet."

    "Did you know the shutters are blue?"

    "Well, yes, but that's ok, right?"

    "I drove by, and I have to tell you; the Christmas tree is in a new spot." 

    "Well, yes, but only because they're redoing the living room."

I've not kept my house obsession private. My friend, knowing I am overly attached to her old home, accepts this about me without hesitation. It also helps that she is a therapist, so she is used to dealing with people who are detached from reality. She treats me like a patient who is in love with someone she cannot possibly marry. 

She also knows I have a tendency to grasp by my fingernails the tiniest shreds of hope despite all evidence to the contrary.

I know. My thoughts and I can be exhausting. Bless her for hanging in with me all these years. 

Thankfully, she comes back to the area and visits often. She even goes and sees her old house and its happy multi-decade homeowner. I've been lucky enough to have been invited inside the house two times during her visits over the last 41 years. The house holds a captivating charm which beckons to me from yesteryears marked by carefree laughter, freckled summer skin, singalong Neil Diamond tunes, and endless bowls of Cap'n Crunch. It represents a time when life was good. Good and easy, in fact. 

I say "easy" because easy faded away when my sleeping bag eventually got unrolled on other floors, and the girls I became attached to after my friend moved away knew me, not as a forest exploring dance machine who was good at diving in the deep end for quarters, but, instead as a Wayfarer wearing jean-jacketed teen; an always sarcastic, sometimes shoplifter who flirted a little too often with the razor's edge. 

A girl who had nothing to lose, because she'd already lost so much.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At dinner this evening. I was quizzed good naturedly by the family because they know I have a true weakness and photographic memory for certain details regarding their lovable rambling ranch. The homeowner laughed at my "way back when" answers, then tilted her head, distracted for a short moment. She remarked about how 40 years can seem both long and so very short in the grand scheme of things. 

Nodding, I said, "I get that."

And I understood very clearly in that moment that the house absolutely will not happen for me. 

It just won't.

I can stop wishing on stars. 

I can stop blowing out birthday candles.

I can snap the wishbone straight from the breast and put in a request to the universe for things like world peace instead of dreaming of the chirpy whir of the pool house or the dappled shade of the screened side porch. 

I can suck the nitrous out of the dream balloon and exhale it at the heir apparent, with no hard feelings. Of course he's earned it. He has a good and gracious mother. And he lived here more than quadruple the number of years I spent roaming its halls. (Although, whether or not he had as grand a time as we did, I suppose I'll never know.)

However, this I do know. I know it's time for this fly to break out of her amber and find the joy in a future which, if I don't think too hard, seems remarkably, freakishly free. 

My 40-year mission is over, and the torch has been passed...just not to me. 

I find I have permission to live anywhere. 

And it's okay that 'anywhere' is not that house. 

 #mushroomtumbler

Dear Neil and Joni

Dear Neil and Joni,

You will always be in my heart. Your music has been a mellifluous and comfortable constant in my life since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

Cranky, late-arriving, Neil...your voice, along with David's and Stephen's and Graham's provided the smoky, harmonious, free-spirited backdrop for many of my most treasured high school moments. Emotionally naked and globally conscious Joni...your albums were what buoyed and strengthened me as a woman, despite feeling like a hopeless science experiment driving to the doctor's office during a few years of medical procedures. 

I want you to know how important you are to me. I toss off my shoes and release my long hair and I paint imaginary rainbows with my wineglass while your unusual voices fill me from stem to stern. A vessel for your counterculture anthems and for your throaty precociousness for the four and a half decades, you'd be relieved to learn that I have grown into a critical thinker. Not surprisingly, music has helped me to do so. From you, I learned that artistic greatness cannot be pigeonholed or bought off, and I learned that falling, hook, line and sinker, for the propaganda of the day, whatever day you find yourself standing in, was a pitfall to be avoided. These ideas are as natural as breathing, to me. 

I also gleaned, from Sugar Mountain and The Circle Game, that we can't be kids forever, but that growing older isn't necessarily anything to rush if we can, perhaps, linger just a bit longer with the barkers and the carousels.

Pulling yourself off of Spotify doesn't affect my ability to listen to you, whatsoever, for I am old school and I own all of my music, including yours. But, I'd like you to know that I wholeheartedly disagree with your stance because you taught me censorship is worth fighting against and listening to a few of your songs today, including Neil and Stephen's (Buffalo Springfield's) For What It's Worth inspired by the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots and and Joni's cover of Both Sides Now, I am empowered in my beliefs.

 

Paranoia strikes deep 

Into your life it will creep 

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 

It's time we stop.
Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?

 

 

 

Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange

 
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I've changed

 
Well something's lost, but something's gained

 
In living every day

 

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

 

 

 #mushroomtumbler

A Raven Funeral

Driving down a well-traveled road near my home, I saw two majestic birds.

They were ravens, much larger than I ever recall, though, honestly I don't really see a ton of ravens 'round these parts. 

Crows, yes. Crows hang out when I toss day old bread toward my favorite pine trees in the yard. They hop around suggestively crooning, clicking and calling, but these ravens were different, almost other-worldly. 

I haven't been sleeping well and the invisible line which cleaves reality from fantasy blurs at the edge when I am over tired, but I'm pretty certain these black birds stood a couple of feet tall. Saturnine with the slightest hint of royal midnight moonlight, their clever eyes met mine as I drove by their perch, the side of a trash-filled drainage ditch. 

Impressed by their herculean inkiness, I wanted to snap a photo but this stretch of road is notorious for impossibly fast drivers; the sort that thrust their hands out their sunroofs, cawing obscenities as I dare to take a safety-first ten mile per hour turn off the road, minding my own business, trying not to hit squirrels as they scamper recklessly in front of me. 

Although I usually abdicate and wave, underneath my benevolence I picture myself tying these Richard Petty wannabees to the bed Misery-style and, biting my lip in concentration, sledging their ankles together. Only once did I drive in an unsafe manner to catch the backwards-hat and cherry red vape moron who flipped me off and passed me on this road when I was singing along to the 70s station one warm summer evening; but when I pulled up and my words flew, spittle-tinged and nasty, my vehicular ballyhoo drew no reply. She just side-eyed me and my mint green plastic rosary swinging from the rearview and noiselessly pulled away.  

But...the ravens. When I arrived home, I lost the better part of an hour Googling raven symbolism, totems, spirit animals, and tattoos along with a totally fascinating yet mildly depressing article on crow funerals (also, it seems, dutifully arranged and attended by ravens).

Hoping these two were just siphoning a drink off the nearby water source, I drove by the 'raven ravine' the next day, slowed down, and peered in. To my profound dismay, I saw a dead bird. An askew assemblage of hematite feathers and talons, its face was plumb against the ground like one of those awful Halloween witches people hang on trees signifying a satisfying splat. 

Were the two ravens I saw the day before ministering to their dead comrade? Were they attempting to help? I wish I hadn't waited a day to return as I might have been able to intervene. How, I'm not sure, but when I jump in, as I routinely do, I usually don't have a plan other than to do something, anything, to relieve pain.

Yes, I know. Pain is unavoidable but I exhaust myself thwarting and reliving it. And then, when I have decanted and sucked and bled from those who needed amelioration, I, pregnant with heartache, deliver it onto the page. My most beloved writing hovers about the joyless and those carrying the biggest crosses, a bloated bird soaring endlessly over a dusty landscape of persistent woe. 

I have driven by twice more on my way to errands and matters most pressing. I now have a vision of myself with a shovel and thick, black, industrial sized garbage bag hoisting the carcass and placing it in my garden, both as a religious rite and for the fertilization of my most precious moonflowers. My husband, the practical to my mystical, will surely not comply and I really need a strong plus one for a raven burial. 

Invited to a friend's home last night, she served tea and we talked about our forty years of acquaintance. Our discussion, not unexpectedly, made its way to the recent and very sudden loss of her son, victim of both an overdose and suspected foul play. One of the themes which we recanted over and over was that he didn't need to die alone, face down on a cold floor. She was not permitted to see his body until the funeral home delivered him the day of his services and he was nearly unrecognizable, bruised from what was deemed a forward facing fall. The mortician didn't use the customary amount of putty and paint to pretty him up because it was going to be a closed casket so my friend, already so fragile, got the unvarnished view of his casualty, the polar opposite of her creation. This will haunt her for the remainder of her days. 

The raven from the ravine fluttered around and landed shadow-like on my shoulder during our chat and I let him perch, unbothered, though I had to continually adjust under his substantialness, changing chairs and gently cracking my neck, as to not disturb him. He reminded me that sunrise and sunset, birth and death, alpha and omega have to coexist. It just is. The more we accept that pain is part of us, the more we ourselves connect, mortal to divine.

I don't remember driving home. Depleted from a day of medical appointments and the sincere and solemn chat, I traversed the inky darkness alone, lost in my thoughts. Then, this morning, I received a heartfelt text from my friend with beautiful words about friendship and thanksgiving; God and a light in the darkness. 

Beauty out of sadness. 

Spring from winter. 

I might still go scoop that raven up. It's been cold enough where three days in the ditch probably hasn't led to decomposition. I would like to offer him a place in my flowerbed, among friends, so that he is not alone. 

#mushroomtumbler #ravenfuneral