Can I Live Here

The ferry was pulling in when we arrived in the town. The lake was very blue, the mountains on the other side, gray green. A family strolled by, eating ice cream cones. I was thinking, Can I live here? A fair question to ask because my husband and I are on a house hunting trip, and this is the place where we are planning to live. It was a long drive up. 

We had to break it into two days. In the morning we went to the title company office and closed on the house where we have been living, in a city where we lived for nineteen years. It was a funny feeling driving away, knowing that for the moment we are floating around in a no-permanent-address limbo space. 

It’s like you’re on a flying trapeze, my friend Deb said. She’s a head of a school and is about to retire (another limbo-y space) but first she has to give a send-off to her graduating seniors. She said, This is exciting. You’re flying along, about to let go of one ring before you can grab onto the next. 

I hope there’s a net, I said, and we both laughed. 

Our son and daughter-in-law live in this town, and we all took a walk along the lake. There’s the library. There’s the post office, the ice cream place, the old inn. I’ve visited several times and already knew the layout, but now I was looking at it through a different lens. Resident vs tourist. Can I live here? I was thinking about the first time we bought a house, how young we were and how clueless, scrabbling together a down payment, but possibly in over our heads. 

The day of the closing, we drove up to the house to do a walk through and I burst into tears. The lawn was overgrown since we’d last seen it. And we didn’t own a lawn mower! Oh my God, now we would have to buy a lawn mower! The realtor couple we were working with were very nice. The wife said, Let’s go to the closing and not worry about this right now. 

When it was over and we had signed all the thousands of papers, I was sick to my stomach. How much money we owed and could we really afford the monthly payments and how were we going to pay for a lawn mower on top of it all? The realtor drove us back the house, our house now, and her husband was out there in his suit, just finishing up mowing the lawn. I started crying again. 

Cut to many years and two kids later and we were a few days into another new house. It was Thanksgiving and the day was bleak and cold. The big tree in our new front yard had shed all of its leaves at once. We had no guests for the holiday. It was only the four of us, the kids, my husband in his new job, me with no job, all of us trying to figure out our way in this new place. 

I was looking out the big picture window at the yard, a pit growing in my stomach. Had we even unpacked the rakes yet? A low hum, and into the picture window frame, came a neighbor on his riding lawn mower, scooping up all the leaves.  

People are kind is what I am saying, in every time, in every place. But it is jarring, this moment in flight, the moving van packed up, the house you loved empty, your heart still holding on, the new house whirling toward you, but for now, unknown, uncaught. 

We take another turn around the little town, the ferry pulling in again, the lake so bright you have to blink. 

We can live here. 

Goodbye, Strangers

I read something online about how just a few minutes each day interacting with strangers can uplift your mood and make your overall quality of life better. The key point seems to be that sure, you may have quite a few lovely relationships with family, with good friends, but those one-minute conversations with strangers remind you that most people are generally kind, that we are all part of one community, and the world is not always a scary dark place. 

I want to believe this. I should. It’s what I experience every day at the library. What they don’t tell you is that eventually these people start to feel like friends and what happens when you move away and have to say goodbye to everyone? Which got me thinking: maybe I’ll just tiptoe out the door and not tell anyone. 

But word got out. Some of the kids scribbled cards. One of the cards was signed by the two little kids in the family and a name I didn’t recognize. It took me a minute to realize it was the nanny. Here I had been chatting with her for years and never knew. She hugged me. She said, who will give me book recommendations now? 

Write to me, I said, and I shared with her a final rec, The Correspondent. Then I went home and slumped on the couch with the dog and tried to gear myself up to keep packing. I don’t want to poke fun of my husband, but the other day someone asked us how things were going along with the packing, and he said, in a confident tone, “We’re about 80 percent done.”

I almost fell out of my chair. 

He said, What? 

I said, You’re forgetting all the stuff in the closets and the drawers and weirdo room in the basement with the sump pump. Plus, all the pictures hanging on the walls and the lamps and the three sets of dishes we have. Why do we have three sets of dishes? It’s crazy. Also, we own approximately two thousand glass jars, because remember at our old house when we had the freaky moth infestation that originated in the box of brown rice and we vowed never to bring food boxes into our home ever again and from then on transferred all of our non-perishable food into glass jars with tightly fitting lids?

Oh right, he said.

I heaved off the couch and spun around the room, building boxes to fill, tearing up my fingertips on the $^#&%^ tape dispenser. Pro tip on the packing: you can use soft items, like towels, sheets and your floofy sweaters to wrap your breakable things. I imagine this will be a fun surprise on the other end when we find our old DVD player wrapped in a bathmat and the china cups stuffed inside our socks and nestled in my bathrobe.  

But we’ll worry about that later. 

Meanwhile, I’ll keep saying goodbye to strangers. The mailman who jokes every afternoon about how much our dog loves him (this is a joke because the dog is barking like a maniac and the only thing keeping the mailman from certain death is a flimsy screen door and the fact that the dog is 90 years old in dog years). And the lady at the farmer’s market who each week sets aside a carrot cake flavored crescent roll for my husband (when we told her we were moving out of state, she wrote out the recipe for him). 

And the mom at the library who I met when the kids were four and two and newborn and now the older two are in school and the newborn is four and there’s another baby on the way. 

Friday the four-year old skipped up to my desk with a gift bag. Inside was a ceramic mug decorated with books, and I almost cried. 

How breakable this beautiful mug was and how carefully I’d need to pack it to carry it with me. 

Passing Through

We’re moving in four weeks but I planted lettuce. I planted lettuce because it’s spring and that’s what I do in spring and I need one thing to be normal. Also, I sowed spinach and weeded the flower beds and pruned the raspberry bushes. 

Listen, I want to tell the new owners, if you keep harvesting the lettuce and spinach, it’ll keep growing well into June. And just wait until all the raspberries start popping up. And I guess I should give them a word of advice about the toad that hangs out in the herb garden (he scares easily, so no sudden movements when you’re clipping back the oregano), and the multi-generational mourning dove family that nests on the back porch and frequents the bird bath. (They like that water to be clean, please.) 

I should make a list. How there’s a secret peony bush tucked behind the garage and a clover patch in the front yard where practically every other clover has four leaves. I’m not exaggerating. Look:

Meanwhile at the library where I work, I have been jotting down my daily tasks for the person who will take my place. When to clean the toys and tricks for hiding the scavenger hunt pieces and where the Youth Librarian keeps the special stash of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Oh, and the little seven-month-old who comes in every Monday with her grandparents? She will eye you suspiciously for five weeks but then suddenly, she will smile, and one day, when you’re across the room arranging a book display, she will give you a whole arm wave. 

Wait, said my husband. Why did you plant the lettuce, when we won’t be here to eat it? 

What can I say? Why prune the raspberry bushes or worry over the toad? Why do we do any of the things we do? Our last house we’d barely backed the moving truck out of the driveway and the new owners were hacking down the pine tree in the front yard. That tree held a hawks’ nest. You could see them sometimes, circling overhead, swooping and gliding, and who knows now where they’d land.  

But who am I to judge? When we bought our present house, we tore out the old owners’ koi pond. True, the filter was broken and the pond was mostly muck and rotting vegetation, but there were more koi than we realized darting around in the murk. I gave them away, but missed a few, scooped those into a bucket, and before I could find a home for them, they were gone. 

Snatched by a hawk, a birder friend said, when I confessed to her in tears. 

I left them out there like sitting ducks!

Hawks have to eat too, she reminded me. You gave them a gift. (This is the friend who I trust will always talk me down from a ledge.) 

Okay. But, but, but-- what if the new owners tear out the raspberries or forget to clean the bird bath or turf-grass over the four-leaf clover patch? 

(Jody. Meet ledge. Step down from it. Now.) 

My last Monday at the library, and I wave back at my little friend, and then it's home to a house I am just passing through, have always been passing through, 

on to plant something elsewhere, scattering seeds as I go. 

  

 

Moving

We’re moving. 

It was an idea my husband and I had for a while, and then it was a plan, and then, suddenly, it’s happening. We sold our house. 

Last weekend we put it on the market, and thought, maybe it will sell in a week, two weeks, a month. It took three days. So many people signed up to see it, we had to pack up the dog and flee the premises. We hid out in an Airbnb in German Village, which is a lovely neighborhood south of downtown Columbus. We’d visited a million times but never stayed there before. Why would we? It’s twelve minutes away from where we live.  

The Airbnb house was in an alley, and every time we stepped out, to walk the dog, to visit a café or poke around our favorite 32-room bookstore, we got turned around somehow and had to use the GPS on our phones to find our way back. The dog and I kept stumbling. The streets are made out of 150-year-old bricks and the sidewalk slabs are kicked up by tree roots. 

Also, it was non-stop with the phones pinging, the realtor giving us updates about our house showings, the potential buyer comments, a bidding war brewing. 

Is this really happening, we said to each other. Are we really doing this? 

We GPS-ed our way out to pick up dinner. We sat at the bar to order something to go. The restaurant was busy with kids dressed up for prom and tourists in town for some important sports thing we hadn’t realized was going on. 

Let’s get a glass of wine while we wait for our food, we said. Let’s get an appetizer to share. The bartender was funny. Why don’t you just admit you’re going to eat here, he said. 

We ate there and talked about the past. Other times we moved, the search for houses and new schools for the kids. The time I had to find an OBGYN, fast, because I was four days away from having a baby. The night we spent on the floor in sleeping bags because the moving van hadn’t arrived yet with our furniture. We talked about the present. The packing up and the saying goodbye to friends. 

The future, and what comes next?  

All weekend I was reading a book. The story was about two families who lived in the same town in Ohio for forty years. It’s about other things too. Family secrets and betrayals. One person saying I’m sorry, and the other person saying, It’s easy to say you’re sorry, but it doesn’t change anything. 

But I was still stuck on the part where the families went on living in the same place for forty years. I don’t know what that feels like. The longest I’ve gone without moving is twelve years. Sometimes it was not my choice. But just as often, it was my idea. What makes us want to stay? What makes us itch to go?  

We didn’t use our phones on the way back to the Airbnb. The truth is you can’t get lost in German Village, even with all the zigzagging alleyways, the blur of brick and stone. Eventually, you always end up at the park or the sausage restaurant, and from there you can find your way anywhere. 

The realtor called and we accepted an offer and drove the twelve minutes home, to the house that in a few weeks will no longer be ours. 

This is scary, we said to each other. 

This is an adventure. 

Countdown

I am not a creative genius, but apparently 98 percent of the world’s five-year-olds are. I read this in a book. 

In the book it says they did a study. They tested the same five-year-olds a few years later and the creative-genius-ness had leaked out of half of them. By the time the group made it to adulthood, it was 2 percent. What happens during that time? Who knows. School and thinking you have to come up with the particular right answer? Social pressure and not wanting to stand out like a weirdo? Creative geniuses don’t care if they sound like weirdos. 

I was chatting about this with a preschool teacher who was visiting the library with her class of five-year-olds. The five-year-olds were skipping around shaking tambourines. They didn’t seem to care about coming up with the right answer or worrying if they looked like weirdos. The librarian had given me a tambourine to shake, and I shook it and felt like a weirdo. 

Why are so many five-year-olds creative geniuses? the preschool teacher asked me.  

They think outside of the box, I said. They don’t even know there is a box.

Meanwhile, I was feeling jittery. I can’t remember if I wrote about this, but my husband is making plans to retire. He has a countdown on his phone. The number at this moment is two months, 7 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes and 42 seconds. 

41 seconds. 38. 

35. 

Shh. Don’t tell anyone. He hasn’t told people at his work yet. Also, he might still change his mind. He is leaving his options open. 

I am keeping my options open too. It hit me that every decade of our lives, we have shaken things up. We moved to different states, tried out different houses and neighborhoods, had children, adopted pets. My husband has had a job with the same company for thirty-six years, but during that time, I’ve had multiple jobs. I was a high school English teacher, a PTA mom, a clerk at a children’s bookstore, an author who went on a book tour through California and spur of the moment, got a tattoo of a foot on my foot. 

I’ve never stayed at the same job for more than seven years. Unless you count motherhood and writing. Which, or course, I do. But listen, I have worked at my present library job for seven years. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. 

The end of another decade is looming. The world is nutty. Some people I loved have passed on. The jittery feeling is telling me it’s time to make a change. Think outside of the box. Or, forget the box. 

I am not a creative genius, and I am a light-years-away from being a five-year-old, but standing here shaking my tambourine, I have a sudden desire to skip.

     

 

  

Nettled

Today is the day I am picking the stinging nettles and eating them. 

I am writing this now, so you can hold me to it. Although, already, I can feel myself slipping. The truth is I am afraid of the stinging nettles. I can’t remember what I was thinking planting them. Something I read in one of my herb books about how they’re chock full of nutrients? And after a cold dreary winter they’re often the first shoot of green in the garden? And something something about medicinal tea and helping with arthritis? Or the kidneys? I can’t remember. 

Three years ago, four, I bought an adorable nettles seedling at the farmers market and planted it in a pot in the back of the herb garden, but I haven’t touched it since. Except one time, I did brush against it, briefly, on my way toward something else, and it was like I was shot with a stun gun. Not that I have ever been shot with a stun gun, but I can imagine. 

I steered clear after that, but then, a couple of years ago, I actually ate a nettle salad at a farm my husband and I visited with our son and daughter-in-law way up in up-up-up state New York. The nettle salad was tasty, and I gushed about it to the farmer-host. But also, I had to ask the guy, How did you pick these without feeling like you were being shot with a stun gun?

I can’t remember what he said. Okay, I looked it up. You’re supposed to wear heavy gloves. You dunk the nettles in boiling water for one to two minutes. You immediately plunge them in ice cold water. Supposedly, this removes the sting. 

(nettles)

I am really going to do this now. 

But first, I am going to fortify myself with a second cup of coffee. While I’m drinking it, I want to tell you a story about how the other day a stranger came to the door wanting to give me a magazine. The magazine had something to do with aviation. I have seen this magazine before, stuffed inside my Little Free Library. Every few months, a new issue. I’d let it sit out there and after a while, I’d toss it in the recycle bin. How many pilots live in this neighborhood, is what I was thinking. 

Anyway, as it turns out, it isn’t a magazine for airline pilots. It’s a magazine for pilots of model airplanes. What the guy wanted to tell me was that he subscribed to the magazine and he loved it and he wanted to pass his joy on to other potential model aviation enthusiasts, so he’d been putting it in my Little Free Library and whenever he checked, the old issues had been snapped up. 

He was so excited, he wrote to the magazine, and they featured my little free library. Here, he said, and he gave me a copy to thank me for being a part of our neighborhood’s fledgling model aviation community. 

Did you tell him? My husband said, after I relayed the conversation. Meaning, did I tell the guy that there likely wasn’t another model aviation enthusiast in the neighborhood. It was just me, recycling the magazines without a glance. 

Oh my God no, I said, and a wave of guilt due to my callous disregard for other people’s passions crashed over me. 

I did it. 

I donned a long sleeve shirt and went outside with the gloves, and I glovingly grabbed the nettles. 

I dunked them in the boiling water for two minutes. I plunged them in ice cold water. My husband tossed them into our seafood gumbo dinner bowl, and we ate them.  

They were tasty, and now that I am chock full of nutrients, here’s something else I promise to do: The next time my neighbor leaves a copy of Model Aviation in my Little Free Library, I’ll leave it there. 

 

This Spring

A few nights ago, the dog was sick and I let her outside. She didn’t come back in, so I went out to look for her. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was in my bathrobe and roaming around the backyard until I found her. She was lying on her side in the grass. It was raining. She hates the rain. This is it, I thought. But it wasn’t it. 

I took her to the vet the next day, and after paying approximately ten million dollars, she was better. I sat with her on the couch and she did this thing where she lowers her head and pushes it against me and I kiss her ears and tell her I love her. Then she curled up next to me, and I read the book I was reading. 

The book is about two sisters who stop speaking to each other at the funeral of a third sister. The disagreement has something to do with a cake. For the rest of the book the sisters continue to not speak to each other. Each chapter is a story about a different family member, the sisters’ children and grandchildren. Story after story, and you know a little bit about everyone in the family, and you forget what happened at the beginning. Why did the sisters stop speaking to each other?  

I was savoring this book. The writing was lovely and funny and smart. I loved all of the people, even as annoying and ridiculous as they sometimes were. When I got to the end, I went back to the beginning and read the first chapter again—the funeral, the cake. 

I remembered why the sisters stopped speaking to each other, and I understood. Some things are unforgiveable, and even if you could forgive them, how do you forget? 

I took the dog for a slow walk where I let her sniff to her heart’s content while I searched for signs of trouble. Her back legs wobbling? Her poops a little smushier than normal? But there was nothing. It was like that terrible night in the rain had never happened. 

Except it did happen. 

When I was sitting with her in the vet’s office, she paced and cried and panted. We don’t always know with an old dog, the vet said. There are things we can try. Tests. Procedures. It’s up to you, she added. 

I knew what she was saying. How far was I willing to go to deny reality. 

All the way, I would’ve told you once, but I am no longer that person. Sometimes bad things happen that aren’t fixable. Sick pets. Families that splinter apart. Still, I paid the approximately ten million dollars and we did the tests and one small procedure. 

Back home and the dog is happy and the trees in our front yard have turned pink, turned white, turned green. The lettuce I planted weeks ago didn’t come up and didn’t come up and didn’t come up, but now suddenly, it's here. I don't know why I doubted it.  

In spring, spring comes. It’s one of the few things I know for sure. But today, that feels like a miracle.