This morning we were halfway to work before B & I realized we were dressed almost identically. I wish I could say this was a rare occasion, but unfortunately, it happens with alarming regularity.
We'll have been married four years on Thursday. We've been dating for the last nine. I'm not making excuses, just sharing facts. It's disgusting, really. I keep waiting to be miserable like everyone suggests one becomes in marriage, but it just hasn't happened yet. It's probably just as well. It's much easier to live in a small house with five animals when everyone gets along.
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We officially have a loan approval to buy a house. Just knowing I was going to send over our personal information to the lender today made my sleep fitful. I woke up anxious till my much calmer, more reasonable half pointed out we don't HAVE to do anything. That's good, because as anyone who knows me knows, I just hate being told my business.
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Now that we're talking about moving, everything that I found insufficient or displeasing about our current home has been romanticized. For one thing, I never thought we had a very big yard till I started shopping for homes in the city. Turns out we've got a rather big lot. I've also been thinking about the pets, especially my elderly dogs. How will they adapt to a new home? How can I uproot them from the comfort and security of our cozy little den to the strangeness of a new neighborhood? And then I smack my forehead and remind myself that they're dogs. The only thing they care about is what time they're going to get dinner and how many treats they can scam out of me in the meantime.
But still, I know I will miss living here. I moved around a lot growing up, and this has been one of the most consistent places in my life. I have so many fond memories; climbing the sweet gum tree that used to be in the front yard, playing jacks on the front porch, my grandmother frying chicken, running around outside with my cousins, pulling grapes off the vines she used to grow, my brother telling ghost stories at bedtime, and sitting around the tiny kitchen with my family, the table set with iced tea and fresh sliced onions and tomatoes from her garden. There are even scents that occasionally still permeate the house and yard as they did decades earlier, and when they hit me, send me reeling into a dreamy state of nostalgia, for the family lost to age, illness and divorce and the time we spent together that seems altogether infinite and brief.
It's strange to think how seven years ago at 24, with the man I would eventually come to marry, I came abruptly and unexpectedly to live in this house as an adult; my grandmother buried only the year before. I remember turning onto the street in the middle of the night, utterly exhausted from hours of driving cross-country, wondering how the fuck I'd gotten myself into this mess. B was fresh out of college, and I wasn't much farther ahead. We were unemployed, broke and most likely clinically depressed. It took a few years before things really started to come together. We gradually cleaned up and redecorated the home, which had sat vacant for a year, my grandmother's furniture just as she'd left it, jackets and scarves still hung in closets, apples she'd canned herself still lining the pantry shelves. I can't quite express the mixture of joy and sadness I felt whenever I would open one of the jars to fry the apples, just as she had done for us so many times before. She was such a frugal woman, and it pleases me to think how delighted she would be that they didn't go to waste.
I have the sense that some of my cousins find it morbid or unsettling to be in her house since she passed, but I couldn't feel more different. She had nothing but love for her family, and I sense nothing but good vibrations in this little home that unbelievably housed two adults and four children for so many years, and somehow managed to accommodate all of us during so many Thanksgivings and Christmas' and Mother's Days. More than half a century ago, my grandfather, who died when my mother was just 17, arrived unannounced on the doorstep of this same house after being discharged at the end of World War II. He traveled by train from California and walked the few miles home, his Navy-issued metal suitcase in hand. Knocking on the front door so early in the morning, I can only imagine the shock and surprise when my grandmother opened the door and saw him standing there. And here I am, decades later, sitting on the same porch with my own husband.
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This is me carrying my grandfather's suitcase.I'm not sure what's going to become of it when we move. I don't think my mother, who is now the deed holder, has any intention of selling it. So it isn't like I won't be able to come back. And even if that day arrives, nothing can detract from the history of our experiences, which I find more valuable than anything tangible.
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