Back in the groove

Lately I've been experiencing a certain cognitive dissonance from my life revolving around moving.  To some extent, it was unavoidable -- the house needed a major clean out and spruce up, including painting, scrubbing, sweeping and even scheduling and babysitting some contractors who came in to fix some tile and a slightly cracked window. 


There has been loan paperwork to fill out and realtor agreements to sign.  Silly things need to be done before we can show the house -- replacing all our energy efficient CFL bulbs with regular ones in our bathrooms because they look better, taking our clothesline down so the yard looks more "normal," and keeping the kitchen in a constant state of counters-cleared-and-spotless in order to make the house more appealing to the average buyer.  It's been necessary, but removing the soul of who you are from the place you live is not fun.


And living the pristine, clean, model-home life left me feeling ill-at-ease and restless.  And I couldn't figure out why, except that moving is stressful and I was a victim of the stress.  Then I realized all the preparing the house, plus driving west to look at properties had, to some extent, taken me away from the things I love most -- homesteading activities.

So this morning I hauled out the coconut oil, olive oil and lye and cooked up a big batch of soap, and I will make some more laundry soap a bit later on.  I will bake some cookies for the kids in the solar oven this afternoon.  These are the things that define who I am, wherever I happen to be living.  Take me away from them and I feel somehow un-rooted.  To some, they may seem pathetically simple, but living simply is how I define my happiness.


I also have to exercise patience, which is faith put into practice. I believe that not only is this move supposed to happen, but that God has his fingers in the details, which assures all will be well for me and my family.


So God is doing his job, but I need to get back to mine.  By keeping up with the things that define who I am and what's important to me helps me keep busy, which in turn helps keep me patient.  


Motto:  When all else fails, have some faith and make some soap.

Funny!

I am like this video in more ways than three.  Quite a few bleeped f-bombs, so if implied bad language offends you, feel free to skip. 

A kind of love or madness

I've discovered I don't like selling a house as much as buying a new one.  Buying is a fun outing; you go on a date with a house and check out the views, the land, the kitchen and imagine what life would be like if you were living there.  It's probably the only kind of first date where the meeting ends in either a proposal or a dumping.  But that's the real estate world.  We make the most expensive purchase we're ever going to make based on a 20 minute walk-through (or two or three) and some good inspection reports. Buy a car (easily 10 times cheaper than a house) and you peruse websites and go on test drives for months before making a decision.  It's silly, how quickly we choose our homes.  But I digress.

This won't sell....

If buying a house is a fun outing, then selling, on the other hand, is kind of a forced death march, even if you're anxious to sell it and move on with your life.  If you want your potential homebuyers to be able to envision themselves living in your home, it has to look not only immaculate, but also wiped fairly clean of your own family's individual tastes and quirks.  As "vanilla" as possible, is what I've heard.  

as well as this will.

Before putting the house on the market, for instance, I had to remove my totally awesome hot sauce collection from its space on a kitchen wall, take down numerous things off the plant shelves, and dis-assemble the clothesline outside.  I'll be honest; I hated doing it, because all those things represent me and my family in one way or another.  Yet I understand.  Last weekend we went to see a house where the owners had done absolutely nothing to get their home ready to show.  Papers were littered everywhere, the cat litter boxes were full, and there was dirty laundry strewn about.  I couldn't wait to get out of the house -- it could have been the Taj Mahal and it would have seemed unappetizing due to all the living that appeared to be going on in it.  It smelled of cat piss, too.  Just sayin'.


It's the kind of thing that puts a menopausal woman in the state of mind where she collapses into bed at 8 pm, exhausted, but wakes up at 3 am, thinking of ways to fix that house, or something that needs to be hidden away in this one to make the counters more sparse and therefore appealing.


No sleep, rollercoaster emotions, lots of primping and eyeballing the potential mate to see if they've got what it takes for the long haul.  Yup, it's an awful lot like dating.  


And as of today, we've proposed to one house and shown ours to several.  It's all up in the air at this point, and in my head The Late Zone of the pre-down hours of each new day.

Parallels

Taking a back seat to your man

I'm not much of a Whitney Houston fan, but the news of her death was troubling to me.  An woman artist with a true gift, gone too soon due to the excesses and indulgence that often comes from living a super-successful lifestyle, where you are admired, adored and emulated.  Oh, and there's the man in the mix, of course.  A man less talented but with a dominant personality.  Even more prone to the excesses which may or may not have led her into deterioration.  A source of competition and perhaps a font of envy and jealousy.


It's a tale as old as time, yet no less tragic each time it happens.  I have such a tale in my own family history.  It's my great-aunt Zelda (biologically a cousin, but always referred to as an aunt by my family) and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald.


Zelda Sayre's talent as a writer was unmistakeable, and her penchant for outrageousness was well-known, even before she met Scott.  After they met, they created a perfect storm of chaos, destructive to both.  Not many people know that my Aunt Zelda was an incredible writer herself, and that many of Scott's novels had sections lifted almost verbatim from Zelda's journals.  When she tried to get published, he often stood in her way, and when she did publish, it was often on the condition that she include her husband's name in her byline, as it was simply too difficult to think that two brilliant writers could exist in a marriage.  Publishers were convinced he must be ghost-writing for her, and ironically often it was the other way around.


Eventually, Zelda's excesses (as well as the pressures of always being known as the writer's wife and never the writer and artist she was in her own right) led to numerous breakdowns and an early demise.  I've always wondered how well Aunt Zelda would have fared on her own, unmarried, or perhaps married to a non-writer, publishing and existing as an artist on her own, much the way Gertrude Stein did in the same era.


And I wonder if Whitney Houston would have done better without Bobby Brown, if perhaps some of the roads they traveled down were due to his jealousy of her tremendous gift, just as Scott envied the liquid, stream-of-consciousness prose that was Zelda's hallmark.


Two brilliant women, gone to soon, with massive potential left un-lived.  A true marriage between artists is difficult and fraught with the potential for disaster.  Perhaps the artist or writer is better suited to marriage with someone not in the same business. Perhaps writers and artists need  spouses in more hands-on, methodical professions to keep them balanced and sane. 


I married a farmer, and I'm very happy about that.  I think Aunt Zelda might have been happier with a farmer, too -- less legendary, perhaps, but happier.

Signs

So the For Sale sign is now up in the front yard, and we're looking in earnest at other houses with signs in front of them -- ones in the city we're moving to. We're also looking for other signs; indications things will work out in the intricate dance of selling and buying.  After all, if you buy a new home too fast, you could end up paying two mortgages.  If you sell your current home too fast, you could end up homeless with no place to live.  What are all the signs pointing to?  Unknown right now, except for change.  A sign pointing to change is not necessarily a bad thing; it's just a difficult thing to wait on. Someday soon there will be a sign pointing home, and we'll follow it in and close the door behind us. Until then, there are only signs to get ready, travel light and hang on while it all works its way through.

Happy Valentine's Day

Hope there's a heart-shaped something in your plans this evening, even if it's just a mini-meatloaf.

Standing

In my former life in Los Angeles, I was a public relations executive. It was the Era of The Yuppie, and I was pretty much the quintessential yuppie.  I took my job terrifically seriously, and was one of those PR types who wakes up at 3 am and jots down ideas, sketches out campaigns, and creates events to help increase their clients' positive profiles.  I attending meetings, mixers, networking and community events until late in the evening many nights, and there was rarely a Saturday I didn't go into work for at least a few hours.


In short, I was obsessively dedicated.  And I'm finding that trait, which served me so well in my professional life, is somewhat problematic in my personal one.  Take our house hunt, for instance. Did you know that if you check the MLS listings 50 times a day, it does not actually change much?  Who knew? Did you know that it's a pretty useless use of energy to wake up at 3 am jotting down ideas about a house you only made a backup offer on, which won't even be considered for at least 60 days? And lastly, that all those things interfere with your faith?


Yes, sometimes we are simply called to stand.  We are called on to trust in The Lord and let him bring our destiny to us in good time.  Yes, you have to stay awake and aware so as not to miss what He may bring you, but to obsess on the issue is actually the opposite of having faith, and leads you away from the peace and joy that is in the present.  You also have to replace all the energy you'd put into obsessively worrying and instead stay in His word and stand on the promises you find there.  Just stand.


So every day, I now remind myself that I need to rest in hope, peace and joy, knowing that God knows my needs and will supply them abundantly.  My obsessive dedication may be a plus in certain situations, but it's simply not needed here.  I could ramrod a future down everyone's throat and then discover that if I'd only trusted a little bit more, God would have delivered the perfect future in his own time and season.