Pertinent to my Interests

The last two days have been insane. You would think having so many students absent would make my job easier, but it does not. So many phone calls, all day long! Staff are dropping like flies! And this is not an easy week to get substitutes in the door.

I am drinking massive amounts of water when I’m home. I don’t know why. I guess I think that one is able to pee out germs? I don’t take any vitamins, I don’t have any Emergen-C supplements in the house. I have good intentions to use more hand sanitizer at work and then I continually fail to do so. I’m not enough of a germaphobe! I don’t have a lot going for me here!

I would be in good shape if the magic formula for health was coffee + cheese + going to bed at 9 PM.

Three more days…

Work is getting harder, but not in the way I expected.

As far as the actual workload and my flow, things are going pretty well. I am still learning (I think I will say that phrase every day until I retire), but things are running smoothly. Working at a school is so much easier when you actually know many of the students and families and staff! I recognize phone numbers and voices, and I can anticipate which teachers will need a gentle reminder to turn in their sub plans and which ones will not.

What’s getting harder is due –ironically–to the fact that I know these kids and I know these families and I know the staff.

We have a cadre of students whose families are scared to send them to school due to the immigration raids that are happening in our city. These kids aren’t just a name or a picture or a newspaper story. These kids are real kids with personalities and fun stories to share, and they are missed when they aren’t in school. I know many of their parents, have watched some of them learn an impressive amount of English in a short amount of time. I’ve talked to them about bussing issues and bullying issues and lost winter coats.

And for the most part these are kids who had great attendance before ICE showed up! These are kids who are good classroom citizens, and at a school with a lot of behavior issues, we need all the good citizens we can get.

Oh yes, the behavior issues. Staff are drowning in behavior calls. It’s bad. It’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s enraging.

And sometimes it’s just terrible. If I were to describe some of these incidents to you, you would be horrified. Even the most bleeding-hearted liberal among my friends would declare that prison school was clearly the only option for this child.

And yet…

I have seen these students during better times. I have seen that some of these students are actually quiet, sensitive. Or maybe they are exuberant and helpful on their good days. I have met many of these students’ parents, heard some of the background. I have an idea of the turbulence and chaos that may have occurred at home yesterday, last month, a year ago. A lot of these kids exist at the intersection of good intentions and generational trauma. I would scream racial epithets and destroy school supplies too if I had a parent who didn’t even care enough to get me to school more than once a week.

And then there’s the staff. I know who is going to look stricken on a bad day and who is going to do their best to hide their despair. I know who is drowning in family responsibilities and who is out of sick time, and I know who Just Can’t Anymore. It’s hard to see the kids suffering, but it’s also hard to see my colleagues suffering under the weight of societal and familial ills that we cannot fix at school.

This same stuff was all happening last year too, but it didn’t hit me quite the same as it does now, now that I know everyone. I practice piano in the afternoons and worry about a kid’s unfolding custody situation. I make dinner and I worry about my colleague who cried today after a particularly nasty incident with a student. I sit on the couch reading news reports about immigration raids and think of my favorite second grader missing library day again.

So yes, my job is getting easier in a lot of ways, but harder in so many other ways.

I try to not spend too much time on Facebook, but when I do make my way over there I am inevitably pulled in by the Reels.

Facebook Reels are terrible, but so interesting. I get a lot of cat content tossed at me (A+) and recently a lot of piano content (also A+, I just love piano nerds). I get some deaf culture content, a lot of Disney World stuff, and some teacher-specific reels.

But you know what I get served up the most? A lot of divorce content. And a lot of invisible labor content. You know what I’m talking about, right? The reels where moms share absolutely horrifying stories of how they asked their husbands to do exactly one thing to contribute to the household and their husband just doesn’t do it? And then argues with them and says that because he’s the one who blows the leaves every fall he really shouldn’t have to be responsible for loading the dishwasher every night. In his mind, this shit is already 50/50.

It’s great content because it’s all very enraging, and makes you think. As I was running up and down the stairs with laundry today I was definitely thinking about the wife who said she no longer does her husband’s laundry. And I frequently think about the woman who wondered what it must be like to be a married man and just always magically have toothpaste and soap at the ready.

I have a weird relationship with this content because of two competing feelings within me.

Feeling #1 – Because I was raised by a single mom, I am eternally grateful for every little thing my husband does. If he didn’t do it, I would have to!

Do you know who paid the bills when I was a kid? My mom. Do you know who shoveled the driveway? My mom. She worked, she bought us new clothes, she took out the trash, she sewed Halloween costumes and bought us books. She fixed broken blinds and broken furniture and broken doors. She signed us up to usher at church, she vacuumed, she went the parent-teacher conferences, she did laundry. She yelled “B is flat! B is flat!” from the kitchen when we were practicing piano while she made dinner.

She. Did. Everything.

In my household there is a husband who does a bunch of stuff. He does 99% of the snow shoveling. He sets up auto-pay for all the bills, manages our money, and deals with our taxes. He did all the research for our new winter tires. I was having trouble with a light switch in the den and he fixed it. He programs and troubleshoots the security system. Now that I am working, he gets the kids off to school every morning. He is currently researching new doorbells. I am so glad I don’t have to research new doorbells.

I am certain that I am still shouldering most of the day-to-day labor load of the household, but I am not doing everything. And I think I am much more satisfied with the status quo in this house because I was raised in a household where the expectation is that the mom does everything. So yeah, am I often grumpy about making dinner every single fucking night? Yes. But I’m also really grateful that I didn’t have to string lights on the Christmas tree, and I haven’t bought plane tickets or made car rental reservations in probably ten years.

I have another friend who was raised by a single mom as well, and I have noticed that she never complains about her husband’s contributions (or lack thereof) to the household.

Expectations and experiences really matter here.

Feeling #2 – I am actually very lazy, don’t really want to be the matriarch of a household, and would prefer to not take care of anyone else ever again.

I don’t want to do all the meal planning and grocery shopping and cooking. I don’t want to deal with summer camp signups and figuring out which camps allow you to wear Crocs and which do not. I am so jealous of my oldest kid who does his own laundry now because he is only doing his own laundry! One load, every Saturday, and he’s done! Meanwhile I am hauling three people’s laundry up and down the stairs twice a week.

I am constantly picking up the house, cleaning up the kitchen, making the bed. I am filled with despair when I picture doing this for the rest of my life. There is a reason I am already yearning for assisted living, and the sweet release of death.

It sometimes feels like to be a woman is to take care of everyone and everything. Is there any relationship in a woman’s life where she doesn’t have to take care of the other person? Whether it’s emotional care or physical care, or just making sure a person has clean underwear and doesn’t miss their bus. Even friends and neighbors require some level of emotional labor: checking in via text, planning get-togethers.

It is unending, and I think women in America are starting to see just how much they are doing and also understand just how much they don’t want to do it.

The problem is that we really can’t opt out of most of it. Someone has to make sure our kids have clean clothes every week and eat a vegetable every once in a while. And unfortunately–at least according to these Facebook Reels that I’m watching–most men are unwilling to step up and be in charge of buying new snowpants for their kids once a year.

I once read somewhere that when you delegate a task to someone else you have to let them take ownership of the whole thing, from beginning to end, and that includes the possibility of failure. How many women are okay putting their husbands in charge of dentist appointments, and then also going to be okay with it when the kids don’t make it to the dentist for several years at a time? How many women are going to be okay with their kids missing the field trip because that permission slip just didn’t get signed? Not many.

The stakes are too high, we cannot allow failure when it comes to our children. Therefore, we will never be able to successfully delegate.

I think this is a huge, legitimate reason why so many women my age and younger are opting out of childbearing. They are opting out from endless caregiving.

I myself am trying to opt out of what I can. I moved a bunch of people off of my gift list and onto my husband’s list. (Taking my own advice about delegation: most of the people on his gifting list are people that I don’t think we need to be giving gifts to anyway, so I don’t mind if he fails.) I announced to my extended family that I would not be cooking Christmas dinner this year and we need to find a place that sells premade Christmas meals. (But now my mom is the one volunteering to find a place that makes premade Christmas meals.)

The problem is this: what happens in twenty years when all the women of the world are opting out of caregiving and kinkeeping? What happens when nobody is willing to step up and plan the family trip to Yellowstone? When there are fewer and fewer children in the world and nobody is willing to helm the spring carnival at their school anyway? What happens when husbands and wives aren’t buying gifts for each other or anyone else?

This invisible labor that we so desperately want to opt out of is so crucial to our human culture. We are already so much more isolated than we used to be. When my grandparents were my age, they went to church on Sunday morning, went to a sibling or friend’s house for coffee in the afternoon, and returned to church for evening service. Someone had to volunteer to hand out bulletins, and someone had to volunteer to host coffee, and someone had to wrangle resentful children into the pews twice that day. It was a lot of work, but they spent the entire day engaged with their family and their community. I spent this Sunday doing laundry and wrapping gifts and watching a Christmas movie on Hulu. I didn’t even text any of my friends.

So when I picture a world where women are freed from their domestic and social labors, I don’t love what I see. I want so badly to opt out, but I hate the consequences. Despite their good intentions, I just don’t think men are going to step up and take on much of what we women drop. And our world will be poorer for it in so many ways.

But I so desperately want to quit meal planning!

We are four days into December and my de-Grinch-ification efforts are going well. Presents have been purchased, although not wrapped. We have a tree with ornaments. We have candles, Advent and non-Advent.

I signed up for the gift exchange at work. ME! The Grinch! Signing up for an extra gift purchase! Am I having a stroke?

It was my birthday on Monday. This is the fifth time in my life that my birthday has fallen on the Monday after Thanksgiving, but the first time since 2014. It has been a while!

I am actually a big fan of my birthday’s place on the calendar. December 1 is parked right up next to Thanksgiving, but I’ve never felt like that was a detriment. It’s very separate from Christmas, but still within the Christmas season, which I think makes it more special.

But the Monday after Thanksgiving is a terrible day for a birthday! As I kept saying at work that day, “this is a very Monday Monday.” I know everyone makes fun of that Office Space meme “looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays” but I truly do struggle on Mondays. Weekend Casey has to relearn what Work Casey does during the week, and working in a school means that shit comes at you hard and fast no matter what day it is. The Monday after the glorious four-day weekend was particularly tough.

But so it goes with adult birthdays, and I did not cook a single meal on my birthday and my family got me a puzzle and a new Nintendo game. No complaints!

It feels like winter here now, which I think is contributing to my general Christmas cheer. It is already time for mittens and hats! I don’t remember the last time we had so much snow and cold in December! It may or may not last, but it’s nice to feel like we might get a real winter this year.

Did I tell you I bought my kids Advent calendars? ME! The Grinch! Advent calendars! I don’t generally approve of Advent calendars. Who needs one more thing to remember to purchase every year? Who needs one more thing hanging around the house for a month? Who needs one more reason to add more candy to your diet in December?

But the kids seem to really like them, and the promise of a tiny piece of candy behind a little cardboard door has been surprisingly effective for getting my youngest out of bed on cold winter weekday mornings. (I only get out of bed during the week because of the promise of hot coffee in my favorite Yoshi mug, so I get it.)

Also we have a gas fireplace in this new house and wow that has been a nice addition to my lifestyle. I literally push a button on the remote control and suddenly have a lovely little fire going in the living room. I think this might be contributing to my Christmas cheer as well. Is it insane that we run the fire almost every day now? It is insane, right?

My blog is fixed! It was broken for weeks, and I could not bring myself to even begin investigating the situation. I have this blog because I want to write, not because I care about encryption protocols! A ten-minute chat with Bluehost tech support solved the issue. If only I had done this weeks ago.

Now I can write about my efforts to de-Grinch-ify myself this Christmas season.

I have been crabby about Christmas since approximately 2014. This was my second Christmas as a pregnant lady, and this time I was also a tired stay-at-home mom of a toddler as well. I was overwhelmed and anxious about adding a baby into the mix, and Christmas just felt like too much that year. My husband had been wanting to get a Christmas tree, and I was staunchly opposed to this. I could see into the future: me, leaking blood and milk everywhere, trying to put ornaments away while simultaneously holding a baby and yelling at the toddler not to touch anything.

No, thank you. Giving birth is enough for one month. I cannot possibly get Christmas put up and then put away as well.

But then my mom came to visit, and added to the chorus of tree requests and we ended up with a beautiful, live Christmas tree in our living room. I am still–almost eleven years later–resentful of this.

Christmas for the last decade has only represented obligation and unobtainable standards for me as a parent, as a wife, as a daughter, in all ways. It is a massive time suck, and causes stress for the entire month of December. It has made me resentful of my children and my spouse and my extended families and friends.

After years of loving Christmas, I just hated it.

And then two things happened last Christmas:

1. A coworker who I like but am not particularly close to gave me a small gift. It was just a candy tin with a little bow and my name on it. She gave them to many people in the school. But the candy was delicious, the tin was adorable, and the gift was entirely unexpected. I felt appreciated. I felt surprised. I felt seen. I felt… the Christmas spirit?
2. We went to a Christmas display in the next neighborhood over. A local man has saved some old Christmas window displays from a long-gone department store. He is slowly refurbishing them and exhibits them at his home during the Christmas season. I am not from around here, I have no emotional connection to these window displays, but we went to see them and let me tell you I have never felt the Christmas spirit so strongly as I did that night. The air was electric with joy, nostalgia, delight, appreciation. This man is bringing so much joy to so many people, just because. I felt… moved?

I don’t want to be the Grinch on the hill, angry about Christmas and other people’s happiness. I want to be Ebenezer Scrooge singing and twirling my way down a cobblestone street with a small parade of Muppets behind me and a Christmas turkey for the Cratchits under my arm.

So I am making some changes to our Christmas programming this year. There is so much that I do love about Christmas (the lights! baking cookies! doing puzzles! Christmas music! Christmas movies!) and really only one thing that I hate about Christmas. It seems over the years I have allowed that one thing I passionately hate to contaminate the things I do like.

I hate buying gifts. I hate it so much. It takes a massive amount of time and money. I am never satisfied with what I’ve purchased, and always feel that I have disappointed everyone with my lackluster gift-giving. The list of people to buy for grows every year, unending. And while I do not consider myself the moral police on this matter, I do think we all just have way too much stuff. All of us. And we get too much stuff every Christmas. I know it’s terrible, but I think I am opposed to the idea of gift-giving at its very core.

(An aside: I do realize it’s ridiculous for me to be so opposed to gift-giving when I listed the receiving of an unexpected consumable gift as a moment of Christmas spirit above. But I think the key for me is in the two adjectives: unexpected and consumable.)

This year I am doing the minimum of gift shopping. I sat down yesterday and made a list of people I want to buy gifts for and ended up with thirteen names. I have to ask my youngest if he wants to get a gift for his classroom teacher, so that will bring us up to fourteen if he does. But those fourteen names are it, the end. Some of those names have children attached to them and in theory I should be getting gifts for those generations as well. But you know what? Just because I have been buying a gift for your mom for the last twenty years doesn’t mean that I am obligated to give you one too. Let the more generous among us enjoy that strategy, it is not for me.

So here I go, hopefully embarking on a Christmas season with a little more joy and a little less stress, and better memories for my kids in which I am a Muppet delight to be around and not a fucking monster.

I am still luxuriating in all the space we suddenly have here in this new house.

Do you know how many times I used to have to clear the dining room table at our last house? When the kids were home full-time I remember clearing art projects in the morning for lunch, and then clearing art projects again right before dinner.

Do you know what I have now? I have two tables. Two. Separate. Tables. Right now there is nothing on the kitchen table, and the dining room table has my grandmother’s flatware–which I recently inherited–laid out for organization. And a chess board.

The chess board has been set up for a couple weeks now and we’ve actually been playing chess much more regularly because of it.

My dad taught me how to play chess when I was little and I always enjoyed it. His chess pieces lived in one of those weird cookie tins that everyone seemed to have in the 90s. We also had a little electronic chess game: it was a physical chess board with little moveable pieces. You had to press the square the piece started on and then the square where the piece was going to show the computer your move. The squares had little red lights on them and the computer would light the square under the piece it wanted to move and then light up the square the piece was moving to. I played with that thing a lot.

I never beat the computer, and I never beat my dad.

I also never beat my husband until last week when I chased him all the way through the endgame and into checkmate. I was so proud of myself.

One of my main hopes for my children was that at least one of them would be a chess prodigy. This has not happened. Also neither of them is a piano prodigy and I don’t know what the point of kids is if they can’t fulfill all my own unfulfilled goals.

It’s lovely to be able to keep the chess board out and ready to go and I hope we keep this up.

For most of my life, home was my mom’s house in my hometown. We moved there right after I turned four. My sister and I spent the next several years building elaborate My Little Pony villages in the basement playroom. I spent hours on my pogo stick in the driveway where my dad parked until my parents divorced and he moved out and nobody parked there. Eight years later I parked my own car in that driveway and would wake up extra early on winter mornings to shovel myself out. First the television was upstairs, then it was downstairs. First my mom’s bedroom was downstairs, then it was upstairs. I lived through the before and after of both badly-needed bathroom renovations.

After I moved away to college, home was still home. It’s not like my cinder block dorm room was every really going to be home. I remember flying back for Christmas getting excited as we would drive over the last hill and down into the valley and I would see the lake again for the first time in months. I would walk through the front door into the kitchen and release a psychic sigh.

I am home.

You know where this is going. That feeling of home started gradually shifting, I think sometime during the second half of our time in New York City. Not that New York City was home either–I never quite settled in there. But our little apartment felt like home in some ways that my family home no longer did. A weird liminal time. And at some point after that my mom’s house became not home, just a place I visited.

We have not yet been in this new house two months and already it is feeling like home. Not completely. We’re still missing a LOT of furniture and desperately need to hang some things on the walls and I still have three boxes of books sitting in the living room waiting for a bookshelf to magically appear. But it feels like home.

I am even starting to love the exterior of this house. I’ll be honest: I fell in love with the interior and was willing to accept the exterior. But now I walk up the steps to the front door and feel a great fondness for the weird look and the less-than-functional mailbox and the overgrown bushes.

I don’t wake up confused about which house I’m in anymore. I drive by my old house on my way to work and feel a twinge of sentimental curiosity, but not the ravaging grief that I had expected.

I’m disturbed by how quickly I’ve switched allegiances this time. It took years of unraveling for my mom’s house to no longer feel like home. This took less than two months. And I was OBSESSED with my old house. I mean come on, I met all the previous owners and wrote a freaking history book about it. I loved every corner of that house. I have given a great deal of thought to exactly which part of that house I’m going to haunt when I die.*

And yet, here I am lovingly running my fingers across the brick on this new house. Getting excited every time I go up the narrow attic stairs. Drinking my coffee and admiring the way the old glass in the French windows changes the shape of the world outside.

I remember about a year ago when we were just starting to take the house hunt seriously and I told a friend of mine how distraught I was at the thought of leaving our old house which we loved. They had done the same thing, selling a too-small home and buying a new just-right home years before us. She too had loved her too-small home. How did she manage to make the leap?

“I did love that house,” she told me. “And now I love this house.”

And that’s it, a disturbing reality. You can love one thing and then your love comes to a natural conclusion, and you start loving another thing. As someone who is happily married and in it for the long haul, I find this entire concept disturbing. If I can stop loving my old house, can I stop loving my husband too? My kids? My stupid-ass cats?

But the story underneath the reality is different. I spent probably a full year gently, intentionally untangling myself emotionally from our old house. Moving on from my mom’s house took at least seven years, and was a very natural milestone on the way to adulthood. I would have to try very hard and tell myself lots of fake stories about how terrible they all are in order to fall out of love with my husband or my kids or my stupid-ass cats (although the cats are admittedly quite terrible).

This reminds me of another quote from another friend that I think about a lot. She works with elderly people in the hospital.

“The biggest mistake that people make as they age is being too attached to their living situation,” she told me. And that has stuck with me. So in twenty or thirty years when it’s time to make a change and move on from this house I hope I can remember that my heart’s home has changed before, several times, and I can change it again. But only if I want to.

*Probably the kitchen, but it would also be awesome to be a ghost woman playing a ghost piano in the living room so I’m considering that as well.

I feel like I am moving in slow motion when it comes to house projects.

An example. One of the things that most excited us about the new house was the finished attic space. There is a legitimate bedroom up there, and right next to it there’s a funky, finished room with a skylight. We knew immediately that this second attic room would be the new Lego room.

My oldest had an elaborate Minecraft Lego world displayed on an old coffee table in the basement of the old house. He’s been wanting to expand it for years, and now that we have the space I told him I would get him a nice low activity table–the kind that teachers have in their classrooms–so he could continue to build out his little masterpiece.

At the beginning of August, right after we moved in, I started hunting for an activity table to become the new Lego table. Turns out they’re very expensive, so I spent some time searching on Facebook Marketplace, and even asked the custodian at my school if he had anything in storage I could bring home. I struck out in both these arenas.

I finally put in an order to Lakeshore Learning on September 2. It was delivered on September 9.

Now, I am absolutely the type of wife who will not wait for her husband to help her lift the heavy stuff. In fact, I am the kind of wife who will ask for help but then just go do it myself if it turns out I have to wait more than five minutes for his assistance. However, I make an exception for six-foot-long tables that weigh eighty pounds. That is not something I could safely push up two twisty flights of stairs by myself.

So the table sat in the box in our living room until this past weekend, when we finally carried it upstairs. I rearranged the Lego room to make space for this new centerpiece, but then had to turn my attention to all the other regular Sunday afternoon tasks that must be completed before the week starts.

Yesterday was Wednesday and I finally climbed the attic stairs again, this time with mallet and screwdriver in hand, to attach the table legs and finally shove it into its place of honor, ready for Legos.

I installed three table legs. One of the legs they sent is bent in a way that makes it impossible to install.

So now I have to go back and contact customer service and wait for the new piece. I’ve been working on this project since the first week in August, and here we are almost seven weeks later and I’m still working on it.

A similar issue is the ice maker and water dispenser on this refrigerator. We have never been rich people who enjoy water dispensed from a fridge, so we were pretty excited about it, but when we turned on the water about a week before we moved, we discovered that water was spilling out onto the kitchen floor and into the laundry room below, rather than into the glass hopefully pressed against the dispenser button.

Okay, fine. Put it on the list for the plumber. We had a couple other small plumbing issues that needed to be addressed anyway, and after letting the list build up for a couple weeks I finally called and got on the plumber’s schedule.

The plumber came last week to get a start on the list. He worked on the valve below the fridge, told me to keep an eye on it for a week and see if it was still wet. He came back yesterday and replaced the valve (yes, it was still leaking) and the water line to the fridge which was also leaking.

We turned on the water, attempted to dispense water and… water is still coming out the bottom of the refrigerator. (At least it’s not leaking in the laundry room anymore!)

So now I have to call the appliance guy. I have a great appliance guy, but it’s always a week or two before he can come out, he diagnoses the problem, and then it’s another week or two waiting for parts before he returns to triumphantly fix the problem.

Meanwhile, my oldest has been dutifully filling an emptying the ice cube trays daily. He’s the only reason anyone has ice around here because God knows I’m never going to fill an ice tray. I prefer my water tepid, never use ice, and have reached the point in my life where I am creating a lengthy list of household tasks that I refuse to do. (Replacing Kleenex boxes is also on this list. Why was this even my job in the first place? The person who uses the last tissue should be the one to replace the box.)

I am feeling a little defeated about a lot of little things lately, and this is definitely adding to my mental miasma. But really, it’s okay if we don’t have a Lego table until October and a working ice maker until November. Right? RIGHT?

I started piano lessons this week. I’ve been wanting to get back to lessons for several years but have hesitated for various reasons. One reason is that for the past several years I’ve also been applying for jobs, and it’s hard to commit to lessons when you have no idea what your life is going to look like in a month.

But if I’m being honest, the main reason I avoided going back to lessons for so long is that I felt I didn’t deserve to spend $175 on my silly little hobby every month when I didn’t even have a real job.

I know that’s a dumb way to approach one’s life.

My first lesson wasn’t really a lesson–more of a “getting to know you while one of us sits at the piano and plays some old pieces” sort of thing. My teacher is the same one who used to teach my kids. She’s wonderful, and patient, and we’ve known each other for years now, but the parent/teacher relationship is very different from the student/teacher relationship, so we have to work that out together.

“I didn’t know you were so advanced!” she said to me. “And you play so beautifully with so much feeling.” All those years of piano, and I can only think of one other moment that made me shine with pride like those words did.

Now I just have to live up to her higher expectations by actually practicing!

We sold our old house this week. I drove by it on the way to work on Thursday morning–staring at the orange door, knowing it was no longer mine to unlock.

I know that house will start showing up in my dreams soon. And it will probably make me dream-cry. Does anyone else cry in their dreams? I cry in my dreams sometimes and it’s this desperate, howling cry because my dream self is messy and doesn’t know how to shove her emotions back down inside.

I dream about my dad’s house sometimes–that one doesn’t make me cry. We sold it after he died, and I was happy to see it go. I drive by it sometimes when I’m visiting my hometown and feel only a sense of satisfaction that someone else is in there now and I never have to walk through that door again. That house could be an entire blog post on its own. I’ll summarize it for now by saying that all the good years with my dad were in other homes, and most of my good memories of him take place around a campfire or on a boat.

I dream about my grandparents’ house a lot too. The house that I still think of as “the new house” as opposed to “the old house” where they lived for forty years and my mother grew up. I remember the old house but apparently have no emotional attachment to it; I can’t recall a single dream I’ve had about it. I could draw you a floorplan of the old house but wouldn’t have many memories to affix to any rooms.

But their new house is full of stories and memories. The pull-out couch in the sewing room where my sister and I always slept, and the strange selection of Christian books that I didn’t even realize were Christian until years later when I had read them all seven times. The tiny shower in the guest room always well-stocked with Pert Plus and vintage towels. The hallway closet that had games and puzzles in it but the one you were looking for was never there for some reason. And my grandparents, always sitting at the table in the dining room with their newspapers spread out around them.

I could go on about that house for an entire blog post too. And the fields around it, and the driveway, and the garage. Even the drawers in that kitchen are stuffed full of memories for me. So when I do dream about that house I tend to get overwhelmed. I wander around weeping, especially when I round the corner of the living room to search for them in the dining room and all I can find is a small stack of yesterday’s newspaper and a deck of cards. And then the dream starts to fade and I grasp at it thinking if I could just stay a little longer…

Place ties me to memory, whether I like it or not. Here I am visiting my grandparents in 2012, sitting in the same spot on the uncomfortable couch and looking at the same issue of Reminisce magazine from 1995 that I have read probably ten times now. No time has passed, and my childhood plays out forever right here in this living room in the Yakima Valley.

But what does that mean when I won’t ever see that couch again, or that issue of Reminisce magazine? I used to be able to reach out and touch the past, or at least graze it with my fingertips. Now there’s nothing left to touch.

My emotions around selling our first home haven’t settled into place yet, but I am predicting the weepy kind of dreams. Some of the best and worst years of my life happened in that house. I am not exaggerating when I say that every floorboard and doorknob and lightbulb in that house has a memory attached to it. A lot of those memories are going to fade away now.

The day before we closed the sale I stood in the front yard and looked up. The branches of the river birch are touching the window in the little bedroom again. We had them trimmed about ten years ago, and they are due for another trim. I used to sit inside, in the glider by that window, trying to get my oldest to sleep when he was baby, staring at the leaves pressed against the window while I hummed Peace Like a River over and over and over again. I had forgotten, until I saw those leaves on the window again. Someone else will have them trimmed now.

And I will forget over and over and over again.