MindSpinner

My children are close enough to grown up for me to begin thinking of what kind of house I’d like to live in after they are grown and gone. For now I live in a 1640 square-foot, story-and-a-half house at the back of a subdivision on the outskirts of a small town. The lot is a half acre - big enough for a bit of gardening, but not big enough, given zoning laws, for a couple of pygmy goats. But it’s also all I can take care of by myself and somewhat more, at least while there are still teenagers at home who make more messes than they clean and only sporadically help with mowing.

When the children are at their father’s house, much of the house is unused. I occupy my bedroom or the eat-in kitchen. The living room is a vaulted space I walk through to get from here to there. It would be attractive if I had the means to make it so. I might like it better if I had been able to afford an area rug to anchor the furniture and visually warm the room, or if the furniture weren’t the wrong pieces for the space, or if the cat had not shredded the corners of the couch and loveseat, but right now, with the shared family computer in one corner serving as a magnet for teen detritus, the space just doesn’t make me happy, and when I’m here alone, I zip through it, scarfing up the latest soda can or glass of juice on the way to the kitchen.

Even a year ago, I still hoped that I might not spend the rest of my life solo, but there’s now a feeling settling into my bones that solo I will likely be. So when I think of 1640 square feet in five years or seven, 800 or 900 of them seem superfluous, a burden to carry in the form of a mortgage. I’ve thought of downsizing to a different sort of house, a house that fits one person like a glove, an indoor/outdoor house that takes advantage of solar design and otherwise minimizes energy dependence. There would be a small sun room and a screened sleeping porch and a basement with an old-fashioned root cellar. The heart of the house would be a downstairs kitchen and living area in one open space and an upstairs devoted to a single bedroom, closet, laundry and bath.

On the other hand, in five or seven years, all the planting I’ve done here will be taking shape, and there really will be a little Eden flowering in the back yard (no doubt complete with generation upon generation of resident snakes and Japanese beetles in June). Currants, gooseberries, grapes, blackberries, blueberries, peaches and apples will grow there for the picking. A raised bed vegetable garden will supply a bounty of fresh food I don’t have to buy at the grocery store or the local co-op. Stonecrop and creeping thyme will have filled the spaces between the path stones in the kitchen garden, and I will be loath to leave this little world I’ve made, over-sized house aside. I’ve never lived any place long enough to plant a garden and see it grow. All I have to do to keep it is manage to meet the mortgage payments, whatever else I have to forgo. After all, I liked the house enough to buy it in the first place.

I’ve thought of house sharing as an expedient option, but can’t envision whom I’d like to share a house with by way of renters picked up out of newspaper ads. Practicality would dictate sharing it with somebody who is handy around the house, who shares an interest in gardening but not in telling me how to do it, likes to mow the grass, and cleans up after himself or herself in the kitchen.

Practicality, in and of itself, makes me shudder, and so does the idea of living with any someone who can pay rent. It might be different if my work did not involve navigating hundreds of human interactions daily, but, as is, I need sanctuary at the end of a day.

Living arrangements for the second half of life intrigue me. When you’ve been on your own for a while, you balance loneliness with an appreciation for your own autonomy. You like doing things to please yourself, and you know you couldn’t do, anymore, without a room of your own and time to yourself. At the same time, friendship, conversation, and intimacy are a goodness so deep you feel them in the marrow of your bones, and living without them makes life comparatively hollow. So what would a good arrangement for living be, if you could move heaven and earth to make it so and populate your life with the people you really like? Are friends or lovers or partners best as nearest neighbors, just a stone’s throw apart? Is my best proposition actually, won’t you be my neighbor?

This is entirely fantasy and speculation - a mapping of the psychological tension between independence and intimacy in the psyche of a middle-aged woman, not something that I have any real view toward achieving. But it seems to me now, at a few days short of 46, that life could be optimal if it could be partly shared and partly independently lived and that either one extreme or another is a diminishing of life’s potentialities. The first extreme is the psychological isolation I’m weathering now as a single parent of beloved but sometimes taxing teenagers who care mostly, at this stage, for the company of other teenagers. That isolation is complicated by the fact that I live far from those few adult souls with whom I find real resonance. The other extreme is that theoretical possibility I opted out of once - the tethering of the self I am independently becoming to accommodate a three-legged journey of togetherness in some direction I may or may not want to go. Deal is, the people I’ve found interesting and dear over the past few years are the sorts who, at midlife, can’t envision a three-legged journey of togetherness either. In truth, there’s lots of room between these extremes for people to work out happiness.

The flat-footed fact of the matter is that I cannot move heaven and earth, not by myself anyway, and so, for now, I think about whether to try to stay in this house or to resituate myself a few years from now in a much smaller one better suited to my means and ends. I’d just have to start that garden over again one more time.

I’m still processing the snake episode. For my children, killing the big snake was some sort of heroic adventure, like slaying a dragon. They’ve even been Sunday-Schooled into associating snakes with evil.

I was appalled at the size of the thing, at the three or four broken places along its length, at the smear of blood and mud on the blade of a machete I bought for whacking overgrown weeds. I can tolerate little snakes, but bigger ones unnerve me to a degree, and cobras, in particular, appall. (Can the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi really effect all this? Or the Habu - Mongoose fight in the sultry tent at the fair in Okinawa?) Whether by instinct or training or both, I have been programmed to fear and out of fear to want to quell the life that animates the snake, for it is not only the form of the snake that inspires fear but the way it moves.

But my visceral reaction to a sizable snake is disturbingly out of sync with how I want to see the world. If Friday’s snake was a rat snake, then there was no reason to see it dead. If it was, on the other hand, somebody’s escaped monocled cobra (a far-fetched possibility), then it was in entirely the wrong place, a neighborhood where children play.

Friday’s snake made two incontrovertible points. We live in a world with snakes, with that which we fear, sometimes reasonably and sometimes unreasonably, and we live in a world where our fears and our instinct to survive can nimbly overtake our judgment and effect destruction.

What is it that appalls me most about the snake - the snake itself or what it discovers in me and in my children? And does not the snake question apply whenever we act out of fear? Is it possible that what we have most to fear is not what frightens us in the first place but instead what we may allow ourselves to become when we feel threatened?

While I was at school finishing the very last yearbook spread, my children undertook a favor for me by planting my currants in the back yard. (I will have to redo this before they wake this morning - they hadn’t a clue and planted them without soil amendments about four inches below ground level. But they did remember to water.) An afternoon adventure found them in the form of a snake sunning itself on the sewer access, a concrete slab with a manhole cover near where they were planting. Catapult Kid slew it with a machete while Dark-Haired Daughter bonked it with a shovel until it was dead and deader than that. They threw its head out of the yard, across the fence and down by the railroad tracks, which is where I’ll have to go if I really want to find out what kind of snake it was. In fact, I do - I’m curious that way. They told me it was a cobra with a circle on its hood. Yeah, they’d tell me that. They haven’t watched Indiana Jones and Snakes on Plane for nothing. The remaining 4.5 feet of it I can’t identify - a solid brown back with whitish underbelly, no pronounced pattern. Maybe a rat snake?

After they’d shown me their conquest, Catapult Kid had a notion to burn it - heaven only knows why - some ritualistic sacrifice reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. And to that end, he brought it, draped over the end of the machete, up to the house and laid it on the deck. Next thing I knew he was preparing to fire up the sacrificial altar, our rusted Smoky Joe Grill, with the sacrificial fuel, MatchLight Charcoal.

Newly minted, nominal adults possessed of a bad idea and a sense of humor sometimes presume to overrule somewhat shrieky maternal vetoes along the lines of “You are not going to cook that damned snake on our grill!,” and so it came to pass that I picked up the snake on the end of the machete and tore out through the kitchen garden for the back fence, with Catapult Kid in pursuit and closing in fast. Remembering his considerable prowess in middle school football, I gauged my timing and swung the machete, slinging the snake in a graceful arc across the fence but, alas, not out of sight. It landed conspicuously in leaves at the base of a tree, white belly up.

“Oh,” he laughed. “That should be easy enough to find.” Suddenly an impromptu outing for dinner and a movie sounded like the best and most timely of ideas, and so we left the snake in the woods, the charcoal in the grill, and the currants only somewhat planted, hopped in the car, and managed to stay gone until well after dark. And now that it’s morning, I think I’ll just sneak out to the woods wearing a good pair of boots, find that snake, and bury it somewhere.

This day I will finish up the school yearbook, but for the final batch of proofs. Our last pages are quite late, and we don’t know whether the book will come back to us by the end of the school year. The bottleneck has been the fact that eleven students have had to share three computers to get the work done. The pages these days are laid out on the computer, not by hand, using proprietary software that is, while manageable, definitely subject to improvement. The old cropping tools come out of the cabinet only once in a while, when a parent or a patron supplies a print for an ad. We were OK with the smaller deadlines, but we could not muster pages fast enough for the biggest one. I have spent the better part of spring break completing spreads in hopes of getting the book out. This student and that one have come in to finish a page here and there.

School starts again on Monday, and before Monday, I have to spend several hours working on my classroom. A gutter backed up and flooded the corner where my desk and teaching materials are, substantially damaging the wall, soaking teaching materials and papers. The wall has been repaired and repainted, but stacks of papers, notebooks, and ripply books have been laid out on tables to dry and must be put away or discarded to make room for students. Nevermind all the other things I had put on my list to accomplish over spring break.

I sat down yesterday and talked with the principal about getting two more computers for yearbook and journalism. I’ve been saying all year that we needed more computers. Now I think the point has been made, though largely at my expense.

The daffodils in the yard opened on cue for the first day of spring. This year I will have to enjoy the season in short and measured breaths, as a swimmer takes in air midstroke. Tomorrow I’ve scheduled a generous gulp of sun and dirt and breezes - a day’s work in the garden mulching paths between the new beds and filling the new beds with soil. I won’t get everything done, but I will begin. Somewhere along the line, the notion of finishing slipped beyond the horizon. It will be enough, for now, to begin.

Just a post to say that I am not dead, only busy, and with tasks that do not inspire me to write about them. Nor do they leave me much time to write substantively about anything else. I am cross about this, of course, but the spring-like weather revives me, and thank heaven at least some of the tasks on my list have to be done outdoors. They are not the urgent ones, but I’m doing them, a little at a time anyway, because they make me happy.

As a rite of spring, I have ordered three plants - two red currants and a gooseberry from Starks. I haven’t the faintest idea what either currants or gooseberries taste like; growing them will be something of an adventure.