I’m a little behind on stories…the holidays take on their own timeline.  The refinishing of the floors, as scary as it seemed, is complete.  And I think I was being taken down to some original material as well.  So many things were colliding: holidays, family, relationships, the time issue of my sister coming to visit and us wanting to be able to stay there.  And the early holiday party for Julia, Malcolm’s daughter.  This all stirs, but it’s a nice stir.  I see me trying to get it all right, and how that drives me and those close to me nuts; so I stop.  I remember what’s really important; being together and seeing what happens.

Coffee has been renamed “liquid inspiration” as I try to get paint colors right for the back bedroom.  I go from a Caribbean green to several versions of orange to “Afterglow”, a color that is like inside sunshine and accents nicely the trees that you look on out those windows.  In the Fall, it would be breathtaking.  I go the chiropractor and he has to brush himself off after he adjusts me.  “Good thing your appointment is at the end of the day”, he says.  I talk to him about his reclaimed wood floors more than I do my spine.  I move my air mattress from room to room and spend a lot of time bent over, with a paint brush and rag on the floor.  I talk to my friend Peggi on the east coast for hours of it.  We talk about relationships and trying to see what we want, what works, what doesn’t and letting go of what doesn’t just because.   She makes me laugh.  She asks why it’s taken us so long to figure it out,  I say because it feels like it’s pretty new to look at things like we do.  Deeply and honestly.  Beliefs and self-concepts are the carnage that this process can cause and so it takes awhile to uproot such long-held ideas and practices.  For me, it’s like learning to write with my left hand.

I get dressed to go to the holiday party at the High Rock and I can barely keep my eyes open.  I’ve just put the final coat of polyurethane on the two bedrooms and that’s a big step closer to having a real bed and my sister and I sleeping in it when she comes up in a few days.  I run into my boss from last summer and he asks where I’m working now.  I say nowhere.  “I’m flipping a house.”  “You just never know with you,”  he says, “I’d love to have your life.”

I love having my life.  Even though everything is dusty, even though I sometimes have to get dressed in the garage, even though for awhile I had no toilet while the bathroom floor was being retiled, even through all the blood, sweat and tears I’ve put in.   I own appliances!  (Doralee just cracks up when I exclaim that)  I own a house.  I don’t pay anyone for it every month.  It’s mine (well, half mine) and the freedom and creative juice that allows for me feels amazing.  And I want to remember that.  I write to remember.

The other day I was driving to it and Melissa Etheridge came on the radio.  This woman was the constant companion of my early 20s.  She wrote anthems for my life, or so it seemed, and she was taking me back; to college, to boyfriends, fiances, various medical crises, my first nephew Gavin being born and me relocating back to Madison, my life coming together and falling apart in a constant dance.  I was winging it.  And as I came up to the house, all warmly lit from the inside as it was getting dark, I felt my own time warp of all that has happened in the 20 years in between.  What a life I’ve had, how I didn’t know all that was to come….and I hope to share it all with you, by writing and remembering.