Thinking, I guess

Ah yes, Friday. Rainy, drippy, overcast, gray gray gray Friday.

As I drove through Seattle today, I composed letters in my head while Cora kicked at the back of my seat with her rubber boots. "Dear Summer," I'd begin. "You tricked me." Writing letters to summer seemed so...cliche, desperate, sad. I'd stop, fiddle with the music, stare at taillights in front of me. And then I'd let loose. "You lead me to believe I lived somewhere else. You made me believe in the integrity of parks and beaches and meadows, in running and playing and walking outside whenever I wanted to. You made me think it was easy to get strong and sturdy in the sun. You inspired me to wake early. Now it is different. I see six months of this unfurling itself before me in its gray splendor and I am not amused."

Blah.

Also, I'm just really tired these days, sleepy dopey tired. All I want to do is sleep in and roll out of bed for a cup of tea or a giant mug of milky coffee. Getting up at 5 with a pot of tea is more complicated than it was a few weeks ago. I feel angry with Autumn for making all the trees look so gorgeous but then putting on such a torrential drippy show that I am not that interested in going out to walk.

So there you go. How's that for negative negatron thinking.

Of course, I know something. I know it's all linked. I'm not getting up early, so I'm not writing. I'm not writing, so I'm irritable. I'm irritable, which makes me depressed. I want to take a nap instead of doing anything productive, but instead of doing either I look at email and facebook and the news and while away the 120 minutes of me time that could be used to pen my opus. (Obviously, I like to say "pen my opus," because of the tongue-in-cheek nature of it. The work to get there, to finish this draft, feels daunting to say the least.)

Also, I spent the first few days of this week stressing out about our refinance, mainly just because I seem to have a knack for anxiety over such things. To add to that nervousness, our agent called last Friday and convinced me to let some people look at our house a second time. Somehow I thought that being open to the possibility of people looking at it would help her feel less resentful towards us for taking it off the market. I wagered that since we'd had it on the market for 40+ days without a written offer, we wouldn't get one out of these people. So after a really long discussion, I told her they could look, but she should tell them it wasn't a sure thing. Of course she didn't say that. I think she said something like, "You can look at the home before 11 or after 4." She didn't explain to the agent that I was having the house appraised at Noon and that we were moving forward with our refinance.

Anyway, they looked. They were a younger couple and they were talking about where they'd put the TV, and how Cora's room would be the office/den, and they reminded me of Brian and me when we first looked at this place, but I didn't give it too much thought until the next morning when the agent called to set up a final showing because his clients probably wanted to buy our house. And I explained that we had the wrong house for his clients, that we had decided not to sell it and we shouldn't have let them look at it again, that we'd spent the week being homeowners, not sellers, and we couldn't switch back, and that we wouldn't accept anything less than a full-price offer anyway so they should look elsewhere, blah blah blah. He continued to explain that they probably wanted to buy our house and they would likely write us an offer that day. I said I'm sorry, and got off the phone shaking. Something about the offer staring at me in the face undid me a bit. And now our agent is peeved and rather sour with us, which isn't our fault in the end because it's our house--something that was surprisingly easy to forget when it was on the market.

I still like our house. Yep. I do. I even love it. So here we are, in our house. When we opened the door after walking in the rain, I was actually just thankful for a dry, warm place. It's amazing what rain will do to simplify things. I'm writing in our office. Cora is sleeping in her room. I made a quiche for a friend this morning in our kitchen while Cora ran around the house and entertained herself with her toys and her music and her growing imagination. I actually often stand in our kitchen and feel grateful all the way down to my toes.

At lunch, Cora presented me with one of her teddy bears. I asked his name and she said "Warren Tomtin." I shook his paw and she busied herself with feeding him some quesadilla and soy milk. Warren seemed pleased.

So this rain. It's still out there. I just pulled opened the shades and confirmed its presence. Yep. Even though Cora and I splashed through the puddles today in an arguably cute presentation of the super fabulousity of being a Seattle child, I am still not convinced. I mean, a man just walked by with an umbrella and a little dog. The little dog was dressed in a bright blue rain suit. It had two belts and red trim, and the sleeves went all the way down to his paws. I mean, really, right?

Choice and contentment

Sigh.

You know when everything in life is going at a mad pace--frenetic, confused, a bit disconnected, but nevertheless productive--and then you make a decision? You turn your life from one direction down another, and the first thing you notice is it's more quiet there? You're walking down this new path and you start to notice things, like it's breezy and there's room to sit on a mossy rock and observe the ants. It's a sort of drawing in, a simplification.

That's what this week has been like. After weeks of indecision, this Monday morning we called our agent and took our house off the market, and we're refinancing into another 30-year fixed at a lower rate. Cora and I drove up to our place this morning and the sign was gone. I heaved a sigh of relief. I felt so grateful. It was actually, if you can believe it, like buying our house all over again. Only this time after what feels like years of searching we found a house pre-packaged with memories of our first nights sleeping here, of months of landscaping the yard, refinishing the basement, painting every wall ourselves while eating take-out from restaurants in our new neighborhood, re-grouting the bathroom floor, conceiving a child, working from home, sewing curtains while 8-months pregnant, going into labor, bringing Cora home from the hospital and introducing her to each room....

(I'm getting choked up remembering it...yep, my eyes are swimming with that memory. Tiny 5 pound 8 ounce Cora wrapped up in our arms, little newborn eyes opening briefly to look at our kitchen, at the living room, at the bedroom we had taken such pains to decorate for her, while our hearts brimmed over because we were able to tell our daughter that this was her house, her cupboards of food, her clothes, her little bed. It wasn't the fact of the house, it was the fact that she was here, that we could explain to her that she would be alright, that we were going to do everything in our power for the rest of our lives to take care of her. The kitchen, the house painstakingly cleaned by her aunties, and all the bouquets of flowers from friends and family heralded the start of her life.)

I feel a great deal of relief to be able to say that right now I don't want to live on an island and I don't want to move out of my house--not yet anyway. We want to continue making improvements, finishing other spaces in the basement, and enjoying our cozy Northeast Seattle neighborhood. Even if it means sitting here in a depreciating market, or realizing that someday, indeed, our desire for more space (indoor and outdoor) will become bigger than our little house, still, we're fine right now. The present is more apparent to me right now than the future, and the past feels like it's rolled out behind me with an odd feeling of pattern and plan.

I am reminded, too, of how I made the decision to quit my job last year. It took signing the offer letter and spending the weekend in that new life to realize it wasn't the life I wanted. Maybe I'm just one of those people. I need to live some of it a little bit to know if it's for me. Maybe I needed to give our house away to everyone who walked in the door before I realized I didn't want to.

And also, of course, it is nice to live in a house that is relatively ordered, clean, slightly more updated, exactly how I thought someone else would want a charming old 1942 house to be.

And so I have to pause for a moment and consider, full circle, the story here. Gratitude for what you have. Not because you have to work hard to be grateful, but because it fits, and it works, and it is nice. Quiet. Contented. Sitting still and honing in on other things, like thoughts and friends and family, and weeding the yard and going on local outings. Taking care of the details that get shoved away when everything else is made distracting by the desire to be somewhere else, doing something else. Digging in. It fits with winter and as we enter these colder days, I am happy to settle in to our warm and happy home.