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