The day before Easter, we began peopling this space. What an occupation it was..
We rented the U-haul and hired a kid from Brooklyn to drive. Stuff we hadn’t seen for a year started showing up. All kinds of props for living came from the storage. Furniture appeared from our 4th rental house, the fruit orchard arrived in pots from the rental before that.
The Cable Guy got the TV going and the wireless and soon there were movers coming and going, old Eugene friends and new Mac friends with name tags. Just try and keep the floors clean. We dare you. But it started to be lived in: a desk and rug here, a washer there, a rocker waiting for someone to rock.
Remember what the bedroom was before? It was turning into the real thing.
Remember when we had the porta-potty and one could still find an undisturbed place of solitude. Alas, all that has given away to progress.
Showering with friends is way more within reach now, even if not highly recommended.
And aliens invaded our kitchen and started cooking food as if they owned the place (actually, they sort of do). Mac’s friend Elwyn showed up to install the Murphy bed. Eugene’s friend Michael hung the bikes, while Mike shoved stuff into the garage attic and we had to put off our dream of having a garage where we could actually park a car. Oh well.
And then firsts began to happen. First time loading the dishwasher, first time eating in the new chair. Penny gets the prize for the first spill!
What’s that you say? You think we’re leaving out some other firsts? Well, let’s just put it this way: contrary to popular belief there are still small corners of our world where privacy, civility and respect are practiced. I know that we won’t tweet or instagram but, for God’s sake, get an imagination!
Every once in awhile, we did stop in the midst of the clutter and confusion to take it all in and for this and this and this:
When you’ve been here for it all, as we have, there’s a sense in which you know how we got to this place but there’s also the truth that we have no idea how this all happened. How did we get from this to that?
How did we get from there to this?
Is there a verb, a noun, a label, a name to describe how we are here? I wouldn’t dare say it for fear it would disappear in our hearing. This is all we know: we ate together, musicians and friends of our Eugene congregation with musicians and friends for our McMinnville Cooperative church. We communed. And when everyone else had cleared out for the day, what was left of family managed tired smiles around a smaller table and the next day we celebrated our first retired Easter in the new kitchen.
You’ve gotta love this picture of Nora working on the ancient crib that held Debbie’s father Eddie as a babe and rocked him to sleep in Brooklyn. Her Dad made it a set of shelves before he died when Debbie was 7. What do you call that and what does that mean?
There’s a young man in our neighborhood who lives in a different dimension of our Universe while he lives next door. He must walk 50 miles a day around this town, eyes straight ahead, not talking to anyone, moving right along, 50 miles a day. We don’t know his name or anything about him but this: the other day, he returned Debbie’s greeting with a reciprocal word, hello for hello. Not a big deal. Just hello.
Our cat, Bug, sits on the 13-inch windowsills fashioned just for her of reclaimed wood we saved from the house we deconstructed a year ago. Silhouetted against the early evening sky in a new window, she sees our neighbor passing by, perhaps heading home after another 50 mile day. She meows.
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