I don’t have pictures of this event, as I felt it would be a little invasive to use the people involved as part of a public post, but this is a picture of our house. Let me tell you what went on here yesterday, because it was a very fitting final occasion. With a closing date looming just three weeks away, I don’t think we’ll be hosting any more parties here. (We hope to have our first party at the new place on Memorial Day.)
So . . . I’ll try to keep the background story as short as possible, but it’s quite remarkable and deserves some space.
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.)
Well, yesterday the “for sale” sign went up on our front lawn. We are selling our lovely, lovely house (note that I don’t use the word “home”). I can still remember the day that we pulled up in the driveway and opened the front door. My heart just about stopped as I saw the soaring living room. (The heart issue might also have come from the fact that we’d set off the burglar alarm.) Then I remember the months-long stretch when the bank couldn’t seem to make up its mind to go ahead and sell us the house.
day after Thanksgiving, at a kitchen table that still has dirty dishes on it, facing counters still piled with debris. Jim and I will launch a commando raid and get everything cleaned up later on. It would have been nice to get up to a clean kitchen this morning, but our guests stayed and stayed. Isn’t that great? The surest sign of a successful party is that people don’t want to leave. So I’m reminding myself as I sit here of the wonderful time we had last night sitting around this very table (and the one in the dining room, too, which is also still cluttered). How fast special events go by! Which is only another way of saying, how fast life goes by! Everyone left and I looked at Smoggy, our cantankerous cat and said, “Smoggy, Thanksgiving is all over for another year!”
My favorite movie of all time is Amadeus, the 1984 film adaptation of the play by Peter Shaffer. (Not the R-rated “Director’s Cut” version, please, but the PG-rated original release.) It’s not historically accurate in many ways, but so what? It is permeated with the glorious, glorious music of Mozart. And I have to believe that Tom Hulce’s portrayal of the this incredibly gifted but often troubled genius is very close to what the real man was like. So many great scenes.
In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi, HarperCollins, 2015.
I love tulips! And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage. If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food. You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.