This Sho’ Is a Happy Day!

Hope you recognize the quotation in the title as being from Gone With the Wind. Mammy says it when Scarlet has her baby, although I can’t remember if it was baby #1 (Wade) or #2 (Bonnie). Bonnie’s the one who ends up being killed in a horse-riding accident. (Spoiler alert, and not that Bonnie has a thing to do with the subject of this post. Also, Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film, was looked upon by some as giving in to the racism of the novel by agreeing to play that part. And then she won the first Oscar ever by a black actor and couldn’t sit with the rest of the cast at the awards ceremony! Well, all that is a subject for another day.)

Anyway, why is this a happy day for us? Because our house is under contract. As I talked about in an earlier post, moving involves lots of drudgery, even this one.(We’re only moving across town, and we’re getting rid of a lot of furniture by

giving it to a guy who helps refugees, so in the end we won’t have a whole lot. At least, that’s what I think now.) But it’s a great step forward in our lives. We’ve used and enjoyed this house well, and now it’s time to pass it on to someone else, someone who will probably gut the kitchen. How glad I am that we didn’t pour thousands of dollars into doing that, by the way. We would never have recovered our money. Someone else can figure out how to get plants to grow in the bed around the huge cottonwood tree. Someone else can cut down that tree in ten years or so. Someone else can mow that enormous back yard, and vacuum all the carpet, and dust all the blinds. Someone else.

Meanwhile, plans are moving forward apace over at the in-laws’. (Or is it “in-laws.’”?) We’ve passed the rough inspections except for the insulation and the kitchen cabinets are being delivered Friday. We’ve decided to go ahead and get the carpet installed, since the inspection process is taking so long. So we won’t have to do the move-the-furniture-in-and-then-move-it-out-onto-the-patio-and-then-move-it-back-in-again do-si-do that we were dreading. We’ll just put down tarps and plastic and hope for the best about finishing the kitchen after the new carpet is in place.

I love new beginnings! When I taught school I (almost) always looked forward to the new year and started out with great intentions. Not all of them ever got carried through, and not every great expectation I have now will come to pass. But the blank slate beckons. This sharing-a-house endeavor will be uncharted territory for us and for Jan & Lowell. (Lots of hyphens in this post, for some reason.)

So we’ve had 7 ½ years here, having closed on the house in November 2009. Gideon finished high school here, and stayed here to attend UCD. We were living here when he developed his cancer, and I’d get up every morning during that horrible stretch in the spring of 2014 wondering where he’d be, as he found it so difficult to sleep that he’d move all over the house looking for a comfortable spot. Most mornings he’d be on the living-room couch. Those stairs leading from the second floor are the ones he had to navigate, yelling in pain but gamely persisting, the day we took him in to the oncologist. And this is the house we brought him home to, cane, back brace, bald head and all, to make his figure eights around the living room and dining room as he built up his strength. This is the house where we’ve had dinner parties, and birthday parties, and open houses, and small group meetings. The basement is where we’ve had a UCD student, a newly-single guy from our church, and a young family from the Navajo reservation whose two-year-old son was undergoing cancer treatment. Lots of memories, good and bad. Lots of people coming through the door. Lots of good times and blessings, in spite of difficulties.

Are you moving on in your own life? I’m reminded as I finish writing this rather self-indulgent post of the saying by the ancient Greek Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” (I’d love to be able to take credit for having read Heraclitus, perhaps even in the original Greek, but in reality I got the quotation from a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.) I won’t belabor the point! As I sit here at the kitchen table typing away I feel the river of time rushing past me. How about you?