Wow. A little over a year has passed since my last blog post. In this past year, I have wondered if I was done with it. Perhaps it was time to move on and create something new. I lost interest and convinced myself that nobody really cared one way or another if I ever wrote another word. Why spill my thoughts onto a page for the world to read, or not read, or enjoy, or criticize? What would it matter in fifty years, or a hundred? It won't. However, what I have come to realize is I didn't really write to entertain others as much as I wrote for myself as a way of sorting things out in my own mind.
I've missed it. So here I am today, sitting in between homes. An era came to an end last week when we closed the sale on our little house in Australia. One of our beloved twenty-nines. It's not ours anymore. Someone else is chopping veggies while glancing out the kitchen window at the Kookaburras in the only brand new kitchen I have ever owned. I loved that kitchen. It was small but mighty. I could turn out dinner for two or a feast for many. It was like a finely oiled machine. I knew where everything was, and God help anyone who got in my way while I was churning out our daily meals.
You may be wondering what I meant by "beloved twenty-nines". When Mick and I first met in Spain in 1977, we exchanged addresses. At the time I had been living with my parents before setting off on that adventure and their address was number 29. Our first address in Australia was a number 29. Our second address in Australia was a 29. Then we bought our place in Canada and it is a number 29. By now we are convinced it is not a coincidence and that 29 has some sort of magic and mystery to it and don't try to poo poo our possibly naive attachment to the number. I won't have it. Now I can't help thinking that we have taken the first step toward surrendering twenty-nines. There is a wee voice in my head that says maybe we will find another 29 one day but one must be realistic on the cusp of 65 and not hold one's breath. Although we are not quite at the "don't buy green bananas" stage, we are running out of steam a little for buying and selling houses.
The sale of our house here has taken a toll on both of us. All the staging and perfecting and impossibly high standards of tidy leading up to the close was harder than we had bargained for and now that it is over, we are relieved and trying to re-charge here in a lovely little Air B'b near the beach. Still, it's a weird kind of limbo. Oddly, we are in unit 2. A partial 29, and that is exactly how it feels. Like something is missing. We hear strange noises in the night, we wake up and realize we are not in our old bed, I try to cook but I have to open 6 drawers before I find what I am looking for, Mick misses "his chair", I miss "my bathtub". Our bodies are here, but our hearts are still there.
We loved our little house. Yeah, yeah, I know it is just bricks and mortar. I get that. But I think part of our spirits went into that house and they didn't want to leave with us. They are still there - in Mick's ultra cool fence, in my carefully tended gardens, lingering ever so peacefully on the pool steps on a starry night. There are two ghosts there breezing through the little daily routines, watering the plants, taking out the rubbish, locking the gate at dusk, closing the blinds before bed, like a sort of ethereal stardust memory that will eventually be replaced by the new owners and their routines.
Maybe our ghosts don't like limbo. Maybe they are waiting for us to get back to our 29 in Canada before they rejoin us. We have a whole different set of routines there. Different favourite chairs and a deeper bathtub and a lake instead of a pool. We are so fortunate to have this other 29 where we will feel like we are at home again.
This limbo is nice, but there's no place like home.
Just ask Dorothy.
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