“Where did your mom go?”

Posted on May 25, 2012 by

empty dog bed

Yesterday afternoon, when my daughter came home from running some errands, she said to me:  “By the way, your mom asked me where you were earlier.”  She paused because she knew where I had been as she saw me (and four dogs) walking along the road when she left the house.  Now we were standing in my freshly mopped kitchen.

“I told her that I didn’t know but since all the dogs were gone, you probably went for a walk.”  Her tone implied that I should have told her that I was leaving.  But her bedroom door was closed and I like to respect her privacy.  I like to respect everyone’s privacy so I didn’t open the basement door and yell down there either.  My daughter continued:  “Then your mom said: “But she left all her stuff” and pointed to the vacuum and pail by the dining room.”

I shrugged.  That morning I had vacuumed and mopped the sunroom, the family room, the laundry room/bathroom/bar area and the dining room.  I had dusted the entire floor.  I still needed to vacuum and mop the kitchen and living room.  Looking at the time, I thought: “If I don’t go now, I won’t go for a walk.”  I then left my “stuff” and took the dogs.

My daughter continued:  “Left your stuff?  What did she think had happened?  The rapture came and took you and your dogs?”

stuff left out

“And left the rest of you behind.”  I laughed but I found myself resenting their encounter and our subsequent conversation.  My mom was slipping into mother attitude:  I didn’t finish my chores so I shouldn’t just take off.  And I should put my cleaning supplies away when I was done.  My daughter was being my daughter:  I shouldn’t just abandon her.  What if she needs me?    But I am an adult.  I don’t think I have to tell people where I am going.  (Admittedly I didn’t think I had to tell my mom where I was going when I was in high school and I kept my college life a mystery.)  Don’t I deserve a break from the house?

I suppose that there might be an emergency and they will need to contact me.  This is the primary reason I have a cell phone.  My husband gave me my first cell phone because I had returned to college for a California teaching credential and he wanted our three daughters to be able to reach me.  The number hasn’t changed in eighteen years.  I had the cell phone on(because sometimes I just leave it on silent all day) and with me (because sometimes I leave it at home).  No one called me while I was out.

Sometimes I just need to be alone.  Wednesday Mom and I came home from a luncheon and the cable guy’s truck is parked halfway down my driveway.  Cable guy is on a ladder checking a line so I park on the street and we walk down the driveway.  Later I go to move the car off the street and my daughter stops me:  “Where are you going?”  “To get the car off the street.”  “Then why do you need your purse?”

Good question.  I needed my purse because I was going to put the top down and drive away.  I didn’t have a destination.  I was just going to waste gas, driving around, looking at the trees, enjoying the day.  And so I did.

Posted in boomerang children, changes, dogs, everyday life, Family, housework, mothers and daughters, relationships | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stone Walls

Posted on May 21, 2012 by

Lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall” run through my mind as my dogs patrol the one stone wall in my yard.  The speaker ruminates: “’Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That wants it down.’  I could say ‘Elves’ to him” (35-36).  Who doesn’t love this wall? My dogs. The squirrels.  Unknown creatures.  Perhaps they are elves.  Although the winter was mild, no frozen earth disrupted it, this wall needs mending.

This could be an old stone wall, left behind by early settlers, for the First Company Governor’s Horse Guard, the oldest continuous cavalry in the United States, has stables near here and an historic easement along the edge of our property.  This was someone’s farm once. But this does not resemble an old wall.  One glimpses those old walls driving along the highways, thin lines of boulders wearily winding through the trees.   Once settlers tried to eek a living out of the stony ground, marked their farms with stone walls and then left for Ohio.  I once lived in Ohio, amid gentle green hills and vast corn fields.  In Ohio, mounds of impatiens bloomed by my doorstep.  Apartment dwellers, we envied those who could buy homes that needed riding lawn mowers.  Ohio is farm country.  Connecticut is a stony place, too harsh for fields of corn.  This wall is not a remnant of an old farm.  This wall runs along my basketball court, built in 2004 as a Father’s Day present for the former owner.  This wall is new.

Nor does this wall mark the property line.  I know my property extends beyond the wall.  My lot is a flag lot or a setback.  Our long narrow drive takes us behind three of our neighbors.  Woods separate us from the neighbors behind us.  We border seven properties, tucked behind the trees.  Two of the three neighbors in the front have wire fences enclosing their backyards.  These are fences to keep dogs in or deer out.  One has a fence in the back and a sign in front proclaiming the dog is restrained by an Invisible Fence.  Obviously the fences here are containment.  These fences are not the six foot wooden privacy fences that shielded me from my neighbors in Southern California.  The neighbors behind those fences would agree with the neighbor in Frost’s poem:  “Good fences make good neighbors” (25).   We repaired and replaced those fences together, working to protect our privacy and our property.  Here the woods give us privacy.

So what is the purpose of this wall?  What is it “walling in or walling out” (33)?  Certainly not the neighbors.  And not my dogs.  My dogs, so used to their California style privacy fence, have now adjusted to invisible boundaries that demarcate their yard.  Supposedly the house has an Invisible Fence, but we have never learned where the boundaries are.  It was our intention to call the company and have them show us but then we began to worry.  Our dogs already have field collars, what an acquaintance calls “an invisible leash”.  Most of the time, the page button reminds them that I gave a command; other times I have to use a stronger reminder.  So if one of the dogs ignores the initial jolt, what will bring him or her back?  I decided the boundaries of the yard were the grass area in the back and to one side.  After a few days, the dogs understood.  The lawn was fine; the woods were forbidden.  The squirrels caught on too.  Even the deer seem to know that the dogs are not to venture into the woods.

The dogs stand at the edge of the woods, staring out, guarding the yard from wildlife.  Yet when the dogs are in the house, for they are never out alone, the grey squirrels run merrily across the lawn, chattering, chattering so that the dogs, watching out the windows, know they are there.  We had squirrels in our yard in SO Cal, Eastern Fox squirrels.  They dashed up and down the palm tree next door, ran along the fence and teased the dogs.  Eventually the dogs would settle on patio furniture and watch the squirrels’ antics like children watching cartoons.  The gray squirrels they watch, but do not chase.  Something else has engaged them.

A few days ago, at the base of a tree in front of the wall, a small round hole appeared.  At first the dogs just sniffed the hole.  Then one dog began to rip the bark around the hole and then bark surrounding the hole dripped with dog salvia.  Rocks began to fall off the wall.  The dogs sniffed the base of the tree and then looked over the wall.  The next day, bark was torn from the tree trunk around the hole.  A rock had tumbled off the wall.  Repairs were needed.

I wish that Frost had spent more time on how to mend the wall.  The speaker says “some are loaves and some so nearly balls/We have to use a spell to make them balance.” (17-18).   So give us the spell, I think as I struggle to lift a rock back into place.  How does one make them balance?  The hole in the tree needs to be blocked so I walk into the edge of the woods to pick up some stones.  Chip, or maybe Dale, skims over the leaves in front of me.  It is his burrow that I wish to seal.  The first rock I lift has a universe of slimy creatures beneath.  A curled earthworm looks unusually rotund in the middle so I poke it with a stick.  Instantly four legs sprout and dig their way into the loamy soil.  I carefully return the rock.

I know there is a pile of rocks, beneath a pine beyond the wall.  Pieces of slate and granite, boulders and brownstone.  Construction debris, I think.  I have removed some of those rocks for other projects.  I get one now to cover the mysterious hole.  One is not enough.  An excited pointer moves it aside.  I add another. She moves the two of them.  How do I build a wall that a hunting dog cannot destroy?  The poem’s speaker says it is the “work of hunters”(5) in order to “to please the yelping dogs” (9). Has he ever seen a hunting dog in action?  Led by the little beagle, bird dogs jump the wall and paw the stones.  Their insistence has removed several large stones, causing smaller ones to cascade away from the wall.  My little cairn is easily destroyed in their obsession. I get another rock and then another.  I remove a large stone, almost thirty pounds and notice the teeth marks on the trunk.  I move another stone and realize that these stones hide another burrow, a larger animal’s burrow, worried by another dog.  I return the large stones and scour the woods instead. 

As I work, I think about boundaries.  Was the function of the wall to set a boundary for the owner’s dog?  Was it decorative?  Is it supposed to evoke an earlier time? Frost’s speaker describes the neighbor bringing rocks to the wall: “like an old-stone savage armed. /He moves in darkness as it seems to me” (40-41).  Is Frost, a poet who liked structures, suggesting some perimeters are not necessary?  Out dated?  I live in a household that spans four generations.  Once I thought this outdated, old fashioned; no one I knew had so many generations in one household. Yet not so long ago, this was the norm.  I thought my husband and I were supposed to grow old, together, alone in our nest.  Yet when both my daughter and my parents needed help, I filled my empty nest, all the while thinking: ‘this is not how it is supposed to be.’  What is the structure of a family in today’s world?

And in such a household, what are the boundaries? Do I give my daughter unsolicited parenting advice?  Do I tell my mom what to eat?  How much should I say to my siblings?  Should my mother tell me what she thinks I should say to my daughters?  How do I build the walls in our relationships? How do I balance the needs of a new mother and my own needy mother? My relationship with my mother has been steadily crumbling for forty years.  Is there a spell to erase the hurt so we can balance the remaining years?

I put the stones back into the stone wall.  Rebuilding relationships is not as easy as repairing the wall.  Every hurt rolls into the woods, leaving a void.  Some pieces have strange slimy creatures dwelling under them.  Some have been buried by leaves.  Sometimes words have left an implacable stoniness that doesn’t allow the rocks to be replaced.   Small repairs I can do myself.  To mend these walls would take two people, walking together, cooperating, piling emotions into a single edifice.  Part of the difficulty will be that we have different memories of the same event but to reconstruct the wall:  “To each the boulders that have fallen to each” (16).  Can we deal with the emotional boulders that we currently ignore?  Perhaps it is better to build a new structure with new boulders.  Perhaps the answer is in my nonfunctional wall.  Its original function is obscure but it serves a purpose—a hiding place for small wildlife, a border for my dogs.

Now in the mornings the dogs race to the wall.  Something has left a scent that excites them.  Perhaps it was the yipping fox I heard so early in the morning, checking the wall for the chipmunks that have burrowed below.

Almost a hundred years have passed since Frost wrote that poem, and we live south of Boston.  What are the boundaries in our lives?  Proximity can tear down our protective surfaces, bring us closer or drive us apart.  Is the wall a vestige of something primeval in us—a territorial defense– or a structure that keeps us rooted to family and community?  Most of us like structure, laws, and traditions.  These are the things that bind us to the community, that make individuals a part of the whole.  My dogs?  They too like boundaries and rules, but sometimes instinct gets in their way. 

Posted in boomerang children, changes, community, dogs, everyday life, Family, life, New England, poetry, relationships, transitions | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Lost Bracelet

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

The first dragon toy

Yesterday I lost my favorite bracelet.  This bracelet is a simple braided black leather band.  The clasp, however, is distinctive:  two silver dragon heads, each biting down on a silver circle that resembles the leather band.  My husband gave it to me the Christmas we went to Tahoe for Eldest daughter’s wedding and it quickly became a signature piece for me.  I like dragons.  Dragons capture our imagination, fueling our fears yet giving us power.  When I taught middle school, I taught a dragon unit to introduce research skills and teamwork.  Seventh graders like visuals, so I bought a dragon toy.  Dragons multiple mysteriously.  Soon I had a collection of toys, including a kite. I had a collection of dragon picture books and posters.  I had a dragon weather vane and a dragon sculpture for the garden, (neither was used in the classroom).  Dragons are mysterious, wise, powerful, yet primitive.  Dragons are forces of nature.  Wearing the bracelet signaled that I was the dragon lady, not to be underestimated.  If I wore black, I wore this bracelet.   I wore it often.

This is how I lost the bracelet.  Yesterday morning I was rushing my morning routine because I had agreed to go to the doctor’s with my daughter and grandson.  I knew my daughter wanted to leave and there I was, dillydallying at the jewelry box.  I put on my necklace and earrings, selected two bracelets and put them in my pocket so that I could put them on in the car.  When I got in the car, I forgot the bracelets were there.

I forgot because I was looking at my Blackberry.  Several times it had beeped that morning, but I could not look at it because I had to get chores done before I could get ready for the doctor’s visit.  This is my routine:  I get up, wash my face and dress in sweats.  I put electronic collars on the dogs, shut the doors to the rooms with cat boxes, make a pot of coffee, let the dogs out, walk up the driveway with the dogs to get the papers, clean up the dog messes, go back into the house to feed the dogs, clean the downstairs cat box, empty the dishwasher, make another pot of coffee, and finally eat breakfast, skimming the New York Times.  If I don’t empty the dishwasher first thing in the morning, I have a sink full of dishes by lunch.  Mother’s Day I had a break from this routine and the dogs emptied the downstairs cat box for me.  Monday morning lawn cleanup was interesting. So since my daughter was driving, I finally had a moment to look at FB, read a blog, read the NEA Morning Update, and relax.  I didn’t remember that I meant to slip the bracelets on in the car.

I didn’t remember the bracelets until my daughter took the baby out of the car seat to put him on the exam table and I leaned against the exam table to remove the car seat.  I could feel the one bracelet in my pocket. I pulled it out and remembered that I had two.  The dragon bracelet had fallen out.  Where?  The lobby?  The street?  The parking garage?  The car?  I looked everywhere.  It was nowhere.  And we had other errands.

Off we went to get a birth certificate for the baby, but the loss of the bracelet made me sad.  I texted my husband, mourning the loss.  As I walked the corridors of the Hartford City Hall, soothing my grandson, I tried to analyze why losing this bracelet made me feel so blue.  I admit that I overanalyze myself (and others) all the time but this is my theory:  Losing the bracelet was like losing part of myself.  I feel myself fading away each morning as the demands and chores increase like Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout’s garbage.   In December I woke up, put on my sweats, fed the dogs, ate a light breakfast, went for a run where I thought about the day’s lessons, and then got ready for work.  The dishwasher needed to be run just once a day.  The one cat box was in a spot where the dogs couldn’t get it.  My husband made the coffee or we used our Keurig.  I had routine.  I had purpose.  I had a job that required planning and creativity.  I had a job that required organization and concentration: believe me,  I had 156 papers to read every other week and 30 to read every week (true confession: I don’t miss this aspect of my career).  But I had a focus to my day that was not interrupted by others’ demands (admittedly there were administrator, parent and student demands but there was also a union to limit demands).  I came home and relaxed by fixing dinner for my husband and me.  Now cooking is becoming a dreaded chore rather than a hobby:  “I can’t eat this.”  “I don’t like that.”  “We shouldn’t have ____.”  “______ doesn’t like _____.”  “Can you make ___?”  Somehow I have become the personal chef, the housekeeper, the chauffer, the babysitter . . . Where is my time?  Where did my career go?

Where is my life?  Where is my energy?  My creative drive?  All my time seems to be sucked up by vacuuming, dusting, picking up after other adults, and chasing the cat out of the garage.   I didn’t know it would be like this.  I spent sixteen years home with my children, but that was different.  While those years were not all sunshine and rainbows, the smiles and laughter made any personal sacrifice worthwhile.  (And my husband and I fought constantly then about how little housework I got done.)  This is not the same.   I have no playgroups (which are really social events for moms).  I have no impromptu school parking lot visits with friends.  I have no sense that what I am doing is important or meaningful or even my responsibility.  Instead I am drained of energy by menial tasks.  I am drowning in others’ expectations.

I found the bracelet when I got home.  It was at the bottom of the stairs in the front hallway.  Now can I find myself?

The Lost Bracelet

Posted in boomerang children, changes, Family, houses, housework, life, relationships, transitions | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Part 10: Our New Nest

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

Home at lasst

How important is the place where one lives?  Is the building itself important?  Or is it the way one feels when one retreats to one’s abode?  Is home the heart?  The mind?  A fortress?  A retreat?  What makes a house a home and not a dwelling place?  We waited for this house because we wanted this house.  Everything about the house appealed to us—the long driveway, the sunroom, the office off the master bedroom.  The house whispered New England to us.  But we were Californians, was this really the nest for us?  As we waited in the limbo that is escrow, I had doubts.

Once we entered escrow, the owner living in the house became uncooperative.  He did not respond to inquiries regarding the electric dog fence.  He would not add chemicals to the well when the water test indicated bacteria.  He would not let us back in to measure a room.  All we had was a contract and photos.  I studied the photos to make decisions about where to put furniture.  My youngest daughter and I shopped for blankets and sheets for the nursery, ordered what she liked and then looked at paint and borders.  We had very little time between the closing date and her due date.  Waiting in a small hotel suite was difficult.  We tripped on each other and the cats.  Once we closed, we would need to move in immediately.  Our household was in storage.  Our dogs were in a kennel.  We felt an urgency to move right in and settle down.  Once there would I like the house as much?

My retreat

Home for my husband and me had been impermanent the first ten years of our marriage.  My husband and I lived in two apartments in Santa Barbara and a guest house in Montecito the first year we were married.  We lived in two different apartments in the three years we lived in Centerville, Ohio—mostly because the apartment managers gave us an incentive to move into a bigger apartment.  We spent nine months in a cramped one bedroom apartment in San Francisco.  Eldest daughter’s crib was in the dining nook.  My mother-in-law then generously let us move into a small cottage in Palo Alto that she owned even though it was a commute for my husband who was at UCSF.  As our family expanded, she leased us a three bedroom house.  Eventually we were ready to buy.

Our first house was in the East Bay: a three bedroom ranch with an expanded family room but a sixties kitchen on a good size lot.  The house had great potential but I had no idea how to unlock it.  I would wander around the house trying to envision the remodel and then climb up the slight hill in the back so I could sit on the deck and stare at Mt. Diablo.  We owned it for a year and managed not to lose money.  Our second house was our backup house.  The owners of the one we really wanted didn’t want to negotiate the price.  We moved down the list to our second choice.  It was only five years old.  I didn’t have to think of remodel (until the 1994 earthquake).  Our New England house had been built in the 1970s but remodeled—several times.  It seemed perfect.  Is any house really perfect?

The family room

We hoped that the house would work for us, our daughter, and my parents.  A house with four generations.  Would it be big enough?  Would it be comfortable?

The owner didn’t move out until the day before closing.  During our walk through an hour before closing, we were too excited to notice much.  Well, some things were a surprise.  Sometime in the past, someone had built on engine on the dining room floor judging from the oil stain.  The basement carpet was rank.  The refrigerator was empty but filthy.  Nothing to stop us from closing.  It was after closing that we noticed the bathroom mirrors were missing.  Another addition to the list to do.

The next day the movers brought our things.  We weren’t sure how our California possessions would look in the house.  The moving crew had problems reading the outside of the boxes.  Bedroom boxes went into the basement; Family room boxes went into bedrooms.  Everything else they tried to leave in the garage.  A piece that I thought should go into the dining room to use as storage wouldn’t fit and ended up in the living room.  An armoire that used to be in my bedroom went into the dining room instead.  The furniture went into place but boxes were everywhere.  I thought I would never get them all unpacked (and I haven’t yet.  I just put them in the garage.)

Unpacking isn’t easy.  If you take something from the box, you have to know where to put it.  Dishes were difficult; books were easy.  Only boxes of books that belonged in the family room were in the office and office books were in the garage.  For a week I was missing books by authors whose last names began Les through N.  Poetry books were in a bedroom.  A piece of art—a tree etched on sheet metal—had to be in a special crate.  The company that built the crate came to unpack it but couldn’t hang it—unless I paid more.  I recrated the piece until my husband could help me hang it in the living room.

the sun room

I would start unpacking in the morning, take a break for lunch and keep going.  I would think I was almost done with a room only to realize I was missing something, something that was in the garage or basement.  Up stairs.  Down stairs.  My husband would come home, kiss me and announce:  “I love this house.  It’s home.”  I didn’t feel like it was home.  I didn’t know where my stuff was.  I didn’t have my books.  I couldn’t find a casserole, a wine glass, a photo album.  I wanted this to be home, but I needed my nest to be just right.

Finally things had places.  Artwork was hung.  Boxes were gone from the house (to the garage).  We sat in the living room and admired our new home.  The furniture and art we had accumulated over 34 years of marriage were made for this house. We were home.

Posted in clutter, community, Family, houses, life, marriage, moving, relationships, transitions, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Part 9: Road Trip!

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

After the movers came and went, after we said our good byes to neighbors and friends, after we spent one last night in the house where we had lived for twenty-one years,  we put the dogs in the truck, secured the cat crates in the travel trailer, checked the brake lights and headed out, a modern wagon train east.

We left a little later than my husband had hoped, but there are apps for finding campgrounds and we were armed with all the modern conveniences that anyone could possibly need.  Riding shotgun did not have the same connotations as it did for the pioneers.  I wasn’t looking out for dangers, but for interesting sights as we made our way across the nation. I didn’t need a shotgun for dinner or marauders, just the Ipad with the nifty map app and a camera.  We left the LA area, heading out into the desert, following remnants of Route 66.  As we neared Needles, I realized that we were embarking on the route that my parents had driven when my family came to California.  The route that brought me into California in the mid-sixties would be the road that returned me to my New England roots. 

As we cruised along the highway, I thought how crazy it would be to have six children sprawled in the back.  The four dogs were enough.  At night, when we set up camp, we exercised the dogs, made an easy to prepare dinner and relaxed, reading on our Kindles or watching TV.  We had all the conveniences of home in our portable apartment.  We usually drove until dark, found a spot, left in the morning.  The dogs, used to trailer trips, knew the routine.  The cats came up with their own routine, hiding in the bathroom at night, taking over my bed in the morning.  In contrast, my parents wrangled six hyper, verbal children across the country, not once but twice.

Like our trip, their cross country odysseys depended on routine.  They had put six sleepy children in the back of station wagon, loaded two trunks on the top of the car (I still have one), drove at least an hour before finding a place to stop for breakfast.  This was before Starbucks or McDonalds.  They tried to stop by late afternoon, choosing someplace with a pool.  Six children needed exercise.  We ate at drive-ins and diners where the food came out in plastic baskets.  Soda was a treat.  They crossed the country twice.  The first time they went from Idaho Falls, Idaho to Charleston, South Carolina.  I was seven (I turned eight in Cheyenne Wyoming, and lost my present a few days later in St. Louis); sister number four was a baby.  Disposable diapers existed but they were expensive and not very good (according to mom).  No car seats but we did have seatbelts.  We were dressed alike so they could keep track of us.  A year later they embarked on the trail to California, both trips courtesy of the US Navy.

The second trip started in Charleston, then to North Carolina, Tennesse, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and then California.  We reversed their route, until Tennesse when we traveled north to go through West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York , finally ending in Connecticut.  What I remember about the trip to California:  the hotel in North Carolina had paneled walls; once we got to Texas, mom worried about having drinking water in the car; Dad worried about having water for the car’s radiator; we (the kids) wanted to get something at the Indian Trading Posts next to every gas station along the way.  There were dolls, bow and arrow sets, feather headdresses and beaded purses but all I got was a tiny piece of petrified rock.  I tell my husband this as we drive through Arizona and New Mexico.  Suddenly we are in the parking lot of a modern gift store, one that looks like it sprung up from the ones almost fifty years ago.  A few photos.  A few jokes.  We step in to buy me something to remember the trip by.  I leave with a polished slap of petrified wood.  Some things never change. 

Travel is a way to get to know someone better.  This is not our first journey cross country—we drove from Santa Barbara to Dayton, Ohio the first year we were married.  We didn’t have a dog then.  We had a cat in the back seat of our Toyota Corolla.  On the first day in Nevada, I worried that it was too hot to leave the cat in the car.  My husband told me that I was being overly cautious.  The cat would be fine.   We came back to the car and found the cat sprawled out on the seat, panting, an event that remains ammunition thirty-four years later.  We always grab a fast food lunch and hurry to the car to share it with the dogs.  If it is too hot, we take turns going in.  My husband will drive until there is nothing about fumes in the fuel tank; I would fill the tank every time it hits halfway.  As we climb the Rocky Mountains, the truck drinks fuel rapidly.  The light turns on, fifty miles.  Don’t worry says my husband as he watches the gauge drop in minutes.  He has one eye on the fuel gauge, the other on the road as gusty winds blow the truck and trailer. Out of nowhere, hail pounds us.   I look through the camera lens at the landscape as if that would change the situation, a different perspective.  We cruise into a truck stop on fumes.  We refuel more often the rest of the trip.  We now have an unspoken agreement.

Marriage is a series of compromises.  We married so young that we grew up together.  We weigh difficulties, desires and decisions together, but we don’t always agree on the weight.  I may find something more valuable than my husband; he may desire something I have no interest in.  While this road trip was the most expedient way of moving our livestock, it was a journey of assessment.   Six days on the road– over the Rockies, across the high plains, crossing the Mississippi, wandering through the Blue Ridge Mountains—gave us a chance to renew our friendship.  We drove through rain, hail, and sunshine.  We saw pronghorn grazing, watched deer running along some fields next to the Interstate, admired barns across the nation, but mostly we discovered how much we still had to say to each other.  The journey across the country led back to that September day we first committed to spend our lives together.

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Part 8: A Truly Empty Nest

Posted on April 14, 2012 by

An empty living room has no life . . .

A note:  I wrote this before we closed on the house but never got to posting it.  The next few posts should bring us up-to date.  Stay tuned.

Leaving home is what young people do.  Children become teenagers, dreaming of life away from mom and dad.  They go through several rites of passage such as driver’s licenses, proms, high school graduation, first jobs, and college applications.  One day child is leaving crayon marks on the wall; the next she is packing to leave home.  Do parents abandon the nest when they leave the house their children grew up in?

Leaving the house where you raised your children is difficult.  We moved to this house when my daughters were nine, seven, and three.   My husband and I wanted to settle in a community where we would raise our children, allow them to develop roots, ties to the community.  We had rented a house for seven years in a Silicon Valley community where we could not afford to buy a house and then moved across the Bay to buy a house we could afford.  We were there less than a year when my husband was offered a job in downtown Los Angeles.  We chose to buy a house in our suburb, a newly incorporated city, because the schools were good and recreational activities were family oriented.  We chose our subdivision, in part, because we knew another family buying a house there.  They had three daughters the same ages as our three daughters.   We wanted to give our daughters stability and security. our home for twenty years

Although my family moved to southern California when I was nine, the same age Eldest Daughter was when we moved to our LA suburb, I didn’t feel tied to that community.  A Navy brat, by the time my family arrived in So Cal, I could claim to have lived in seven states.   While I lived in that house until I graduated from high school, I always felt like a move was imminent.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps I had the adolescent drive to leave home.   Perhaps I was just insecure.  Ironically, my parents lived in that house almost forty years.  Sister #4 lives there still.  As soon as I graduated from high school, I left for a job on the East Coast (as a camp counselor thanks to an uncle) and returned only intermittently during college breaks (a total of 24 weeks over three years, I kept count).   Yet I wanted my children to feel rooted in a community.

Our subdivision is a community in itself.  A planned urban development (PUD), we have an association, rules about the house’s appearance, and common areas including pools and tennis courts, and a tot lot.  Technically our house is a detached condominium.   When we moved in, the homes were only five years old and filled with young families.  Three teen girls on the street were available to babysit.  Adolescent boys played roller hockey at the end of the cul de sac in front of our house.  A family had Springer Spaniel puppies (we took one).  The older girls started school; I found a play group for the youngest.  We met mothers and children at the pool.  I became involved in PTA, volunteered to read in classrooms, had a Girl Scout troop.  After the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, a group of families started to meet every Sunday night for cocktails.  This evolved into a potluck.  Unless it’s raining, they will be sitting in a driveway on our street on Sunday evening.  Here is community.

First one decade passed, then another.  Some families moved.  One lost a child.  Two families lost their dads.  Some friends divorced.   People remodeled their homes.  The babysitters became parents and wheeled their children down the street.  Each of my daughters left for college.  We talked about a different house, a bigger house, a smaller house, closer to the freeway, closer to the school I taught at.  In the evening when I drove down my street, I was home.  Here was my house.  Here were my friends.  How could I move?

Here I was comfortable.  My daughters had left home but only one returned.  The other two were gone, living lives in other communities, making their own traditions, developing their own ties.  Here I had roots.  We went skiing at Mammoth with friends.  We went camping with friends.  I went to the farmer’s market with friends.  I took spin classes with friends.  What I wanted for my daughters I found for myself.

These were friendships that began with our children but were cemented by good will and camaraderie.  We had great times with our children but even better times without them.   Here’s to the friend whose daughter took her first ski lesson with my youngest.  As we sat on the ski resort deck, drinking our third hot chocolate, she looked around and leaned over to me and whispered:  “We better get off our butts and learn to ski.”  We’re still on the chairlifts together.  Here’s to the friends who convinced me to go camping over Thanksgiving.  I brought my cooked turkey wrapped in foil.  It was so cold that most of the mothers and children went to the movies to get warm.  Being a camping purist, I stayed behind, freezing in my tent.  Here’s to my fellow band parents who survived continual fundraising events, band camp, and almost comical drama with the band director, all with jokes and good spirit.  Here’s to the girls on the street who banded together after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.  I’ll miss our girls only road trips (especially to the outlet malls) and Sunday night cocktails.

In the hyperconnectivitiy of today,  I know that we will stay in touch.  In part this is why my daughters no longer need the security I so much wanted for them.  While I had problems staying in touch with my childhood friends, my daughters did not.  Eldest daughter was connected online to her first playgroup friend when they were in high school.

The hardest part about moving wasn’t packing (the moving company did that).  Nor was it throwing out the rubbish I had kept over the year.  The hardest part was saying good-bye.  Yes, I walked around the house, remembering the various birthdays, holidays, celebrations over the two decades, wondering if I had been a good parent, if I had made the right decisions, but these memories were not a reason to keep me from moving.  But these memories aren’t what tie me to the house.  Relationships tie me to the house.The cat is quite content to get on the road

The hardest part of moving was saying good-bye.  Good bye to the neighbors who went to Mammoth with us after Christmas.  Good-bye to the neighbor whose dog fur is in that bird’s nest.  Good-bye to the friend who brought me daffodils.  Good-bye to the couple who brought me a set of car keys after my car was picked up so I wouldn’t be without transportation.  Good bye to the student from my very first junior high class who stayed in touch all these years.  Good bye to the friend who brought me a glass of wine in the evening just in case I was stressed.  Good bye to the friend (and great  spin instructor) who brought me bagels in the morning.  Good bye to all my friends in California. 

Posted in community, Family, friends, moving, transitions | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

In a drawer of the handmade spice rack that Sis in Law gave us for a wedding present is a bird nest that my girls found almost twenty years after a Santa Ana (wind storm).  The nest had blown from a tree somewhere in our neighborhood.  Small, the nest is composed of pine needles, twigs and the fur from my friend’s dog, Sandy.  The girls had placed the nest in the drawer so it would be like a museum where you could open a drawer and find something interesting.  At the time the spice rack hung in the family room.  After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, I hung it in my bedroom.  I changed the knickknacks that I placed on the shelves, but I never opened the drawer.  Just before moving, I opened that drawer to see what was in it.  Suddenly the girls were ten, eight and four.  My middle daughter and my friend’s daughter, now a mother herself, eight year old whirlwinds, have brought me the nest.  “Look, it’s the fur from Sandy.  We should keep this.”  The girls are now women, with careers and families.  Sandy has been gone for many years yet her blond fur is woven in this nest and memories are crammed in this drawer.

The detritus of our lives is in perception.  What do we need to keep?  What should we discard?  The answer to these questions is really another question:  what is important to us?   Discarding is easy when we are not emotionally detached.  When I left a job teaching middle school English, I purged my materials.  I gave all my students a book from my classroom library, 160 books found new homes but I still had three more boxes.  One went to my nephew, the other two went to new junior high teachers, one was a former student and one had been a member of my Girl Scout troop.  Files went into trash bags; supplies were given to other teachers.  I kept more boxes of lesson plan materials than I should have, but six months later I was in the classroom next door to mine.  That spring I threw the rest away.  Cleaning out my classroom was easy.  Some of my high school teacher colleagues learned I was leaving last December when I brought them a poster they had admired.  This time I tossed even more, leaving supplies in the cupboards and posters on the walls.  Jettisoning the excess from my teaching supplies was easy.  I knew I could create more handouts and buy more posters.  Curriculum changes; heroes change.  House is going off the air; who needs a Hugh Laurie ALA Read poster?  Yet I did keep my collection of bears from different colleges.  Each has a different story behind it, a reminder of one of my daughters, a student, a colleague or a friend.  Jettisoning personal effects is not so easy.

Time helps one detach from objects.  What was a favorite piece of furniture begins to look shabby or no longer fits the house.  I had purged my home last year.  Furniture that we no longer used was taken to Goodwill (and then replaced).  Furniture was not the problem.  The problem was clutter.

I was good at purging the clutter from the living room and family room (except for the magazines that I placed in a large basket in the family room, hoping that no one would notice.  Any one of my dogs could have slept in that basket).  I tried to keep the kitchen counters neat, but lurking in the pantry were stale crackers and expired granola bars.  Tucked in plastic bags and jumbled in a container were half empty packages of rice.  I had three bags of hard brown sugar.  I had eight different types of green tea.  Hanging above the doorway of the pantry was sister #1’s wedding bouquet, caught by my daughter.  I always meant to do something artistic with it but instead it disappeared into the pantry where it languished.  Unfortunately it fell apart after being removed from the rarified air of its pantry tomb.  My freezer was almost as bad.  To be truthful, I had two refrigerators so I had twice the number of freezer burn items that a normal person would have thrown out.  The kitchen, even the magazine basket, was an easy purge. (All right, I admit it, my son-in-law had to purge the freezer or I might have put more of it in an ice chest and moved it to Connecticut.)  The real problems were elsewhere.

I never meant for the clutter to take over the office.  A few years ago I spent my winter break buying storage containers and organizing both the office and bedroom that had become a library/wrapping/hobby room.  The latter stayed organized but papers grew in piles all over the office.  Part of the problem may have been that the file cabinets were upstairs, but really the problem was a lack of communication between my husband and me.  I would put mail in a bin to be looked at by both of us; he would remove the item from the bin, pay the bills and stack the rest.  I would never look at the stack until I was cleaning during a school break.  This was not the only clutter.  I also had piles of coupons and gift cards.  Books crammed the shelves.  In several places they were double stacked.   Dog leashes spilled out of a basket.  The week before the movers came, I dealt with the latest incarnation of office clutter.  I even managed to save the files we would need for our month long hotel stay.  I was efficient because I knew the real clutter was hidden away in a storage unit.

Ten years ago, while renovating the kitchen and painting the house, I purged the house.  All my excess kitchen items, all the girls’ stuffed animals, the Beyer horses, the Pleasant Company dolls and accessories—were packed into boxes and stored in a 5 X 10 storage unit.  Anything I didn’t use but didn’t know what to do with went into this unit.  When the girls came home from college, their stuff went into this unit.  Not everything went back with them.  It was a closet of excess.  All of the things in this unit needed to be brought back to the house to be either discarded or moved to Connecticut.

We had brought some things back since we made the decision to move.  Or rather we did not return boxes.  The Halloween and Thanksgiving boxes had joined the mess in the garage.  The twenty red and green Christmas ornament boxes and a small artificial Christmas tree lined the wall of a guest room.  The twelve foot fake Christmas tree found a new home since we would soon have eight foot ceilings.  In the beginning of January before my husband began his new job, we had brought back some things: a chest bound for Goodwill, old golf clubs, bank statements and tax files from the 1980s.  I shredded.  My husband made a dump run and a Goodwill visit.  But boxes and boxes, piled to the ceiling, remained in the unit.  And youngest daughter also had a storage unit for dishes and furniture left from her apartment.  Some things she gave to friends.  The rest went into the space left by the boxes already brought back to our house.  The unit was still crammed with the remains of our youth.   Now my husband was in Connecticut and I had to tackle this myself. 

First I had to clean the garage.  The storage unit items had to fit in the garage, but the garage was full of sports equipment (skis, snowboards, golf  clubs, kayaks, bicycles, fishing poles, duck decoys), camping equipment that I might want to use at the house (a portable grill, a wagon, generators, duck decoys for the dogs), tools, things displaced by the Christmas trees and never returned to the house, a crib, a rocking chair (presents for the baby) and what remained of my classroom.   (And to think, we parked a car in the garage until the middle of December.)  This all had to be arranged neatly so that things hanging from the ceilings and clutter on shelves could be packed. Some items like the bicycles and kayaks were hanging out of the way and really not part of the equation.  Cleaning the garage was not that difficult.  I even got rid of five more boxes of teaching stuff (three boxes of lesson plans by units went to a neighbor subbing at my old high school; the other two went into the trash).  I found more things for the dump.  I made room but I wasn’t sure how all the things in the storage unit were going to fit in the garage.

I was able to get everything into the garage by putting furniture in the house.  A beautiful full length mirror handmade for Sis in Law by some guy I don’t remember went upstairs.  A futon chair that belonged to Middle Daughter (given to us in exchange for the piano) went in the piano’s former spot.  A bookcase given to Youngest Daughter by Sister # 3 went into a corner.   It looked good there but I had to wonder: did I need it?  These were things that others had discarded.  Why did I have them now?

The storage unit held surprises.  I knew I had some cookie jars, toys, a doll house, an easel, and a paint sprayer.  A few boxes held cute projects the girls had done in preschool and elementary school.  After that, I had no idea. And I had no concept of how I was going to manage all those boxes.

Even though I drive a huge diesel truck, I wasn’t looking forward to hauling all this home alone.   Youngest Daughter’s Ex-Boyfriend (yes, the guy I kicked out of the house) volunteered to help me empty the storage unit.  I didn’t say no.  The Ex-Boyfriend had moved my daughter home from college; he had moved my teaching materials from one high school to my garage to another high school; he had helped move my parents.  He was good at maneuvering my truck and loading boxes.  He could get more in the bed of the truck than I could.  And carry more to the truck.  It took us four trips over four hours.  It would have taken me much longer without him—three times as long.  Maybe four.  I was thankful for his help.

We had mystery boxes.  Some were clearly labeled.  I had bank statements from the 1970s.  I had credit card bills from the 1990s.  I had thirty years of tax files.  Who needed this stuff?  Out came the shredder.  I had hours of shows recorded on our DVR.  I turned the volume up and watched every one of them, annoyed that I was spending time on material that should have been destroyed years ago.  This made me remember that much of what was in our file cabinets upstairs could be shredded as well.

I began to open boxes.  Some were notebooks from high school left behind by our eldest daughter.  Since she was the first to leave the nest and her sister wanted her room, I boxed everything, everything, evaluating none of it.  At least her name was on the boxes.  Some things I kept; some things I discarded; a few little things I took over to her house.  Middle Daughter somehow had added to the storage unit a large collection of Winnie the Poohs and Tiggers that she did not have in high school.  Toss or keep?  It’s easy to keep the small purple dragon that my eldest kept on her bed, the floppy cat the middle daughter liked to take to naptime at her preschool, the brown and white dog—Molly—that the youngest got when she was in the hospital.  But who owned the Ernie doll?  Should I care about the collection of gorillas collected from Planet Hollywoods if the child who collected them no longer cared?  Was I supposed to decide this on my own?  Indecision paralyzed me.

I found I couldn’t just toss boxes.  When I was shredding financial documents, a photo of my eldest daughter, a good friend’s son and their elementary school principal fell out of a bank envelope.  What if I threw out something that I wanted?  (Of course, the logical question is: would I know that I threw it out?)

I did manage to fill up the bed of the truck with more flotsam and jetsam for the Ex-Boyfriend to take to the dump.  But I suspect I should have discarded more.  Two decrepit boxes were labeled apartment 204.  We lived in Apt 204 in San Francisco thirty years ago.  These boxes were filled with papers from graduate school and hadn’t been opened since then.  I opened one, saw that I had support materials for graduate applications and then set the entire box aside because if I wanted to teach in Connecticut, I needed to produce SAT or GRE scores.  They might be in the box, and I couldn’t sort through it now.  I was running out of time.  These boxes made it on the truck along with a box of sample shampoos from under my bathroom sink that I meant to discard, financial papers from the last decade, a three foot shelf of classic vinyl, and boxes of hard drives that I should have smashed with a hammer and then taken to an electronic waste day somewhere.  My trash can was full.  I arranged for six bags of excess garbage to be picked up on trash day but still filled the trash can as soon as it was empty.

Every spring home magazines publish articles on how to reduce clutter, how to live a simple life, how to discard.  I read; I purge the surface areas; I organize papers but I never dig deeply into the places where I regulate the things I don’t want to think about.  Decluttering your life takes time.  So does grading essays, writing lesson plans, grocery shopping, and spending time with your family.  It is easy to discard the small things.  It’s harder to remember that you have to go back and toss the things you no longer need (old tax files).   You have to let go of the clutter in your life.  Letting go of objects is like letting go of a relationship.  You have nothing left in common but memories.  But the memories make you feel like you have to hold on.  Like relationships, dealing with things you no longer need can be painful.  I know that I am hoarding toys and rubbish from the girls’ lives.  Much of this should go.  I have to steel myself to remember and let go.  I have to sort and discard.  I’ll be going to the dump with bags of papers I no longer need and to Good Will with the toys that someone might want after I unpack next month.

If you are wondering about the bird’s nest in the first paragraph, the nest is still in the drawer.  I have a grandson on the way.  Don’t little boys like looking at cool things like a bird’s nest?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by | Leave a comment