~ Sunday, April 29, 2001 ~

 

10:20 p.m. It has been so wonderful to have transmuted the last two days into semi-vacation days and I feel refreshed by it, and ready to write again. I probably should just skip days like those days ... days too square on the calendar or days when I feel too flat or too rushed to write, but ... no.

Scared. I am. I'm still afraid that if I give my inner first grader any leeway, any leeway at all, she will skip out for good, grinning in spite of a slobbery mouthful of blood redhots, never to be heard from again. So.

She's required to show up here every day. That's the rule, for now.

Today, for the first time in a very long time, we went out and looked at Open Houses. We planned ahead, got the newspaper, circled, got out the calculator, got out of the house in plenty of time, circled, and got out of the whole experience in one piece. Bruised, but not shattered.

These are uncertain times we live in. If you work independently, as we do, you can go ahead and square the root of your troubles and worries and come up with a sensible amount of worrying to keep you occupied all the time, any time, and not just these times. But these are especially trying times.

So, we went out looking. Will we have to sell this house we love and find something smaller? Maybe. Will we be able to stay here a little bit longer? Maybe. It's hard to know what the future holds. We only know that right now, for the near and foreseeable future, we have to be very very very careful.

And I may have to drag out the old ten-gallon paint bucket and climb back up on the clattering clanking finger eating metal ladder. Yeeha.

Are we on thin ice? Will we skate onto more solid ground or fall crashing through to deeper, colder climes? It's hard to say. Are we at the bottom of the Wheel of Fortune and will we merely feel a bit of scraping as the revolution continues and we rise back up? It's hard to tell. What will happen? What will happen? It's hard to know.

But it was good to look at other people's four-square-walls today. It was especially good because I didn't fall in love and that ... thing ... didn't happen. That thing that takes me out of myself and flings me wholly into someone else's dreamspace and it could be mine, I could become that person, have that life, live their life ... if only I could buy their house.

It happened once when I saw a huge golden Buddha sitting in a rocky bubbling fountain in a darkened entry space, spotlit and totally unexpected. Another time it was a view and Enya on the music system and I was transported out the window and over the hills as far as the eye could see and the spirit could soar. Another time a broken tile mosaic embedded in the guest bathroom floor captured my attention and fragmented my logic and by the time I got to the kitchen and saw the glass-fronted restaurant fridge with brown eggs nested in wicker baskets, I never wanted to leave.

We didn't buy any of those houses, but I've learned many things from my extreme infatuations. I've learned that anything is possible. Any life you can imagine can actually be yours if you can actually imagine it.

Someone's got to live those lives. Might as well be you. Or me.