Over two months ago, I bought a house. Within the first ten minutes of holding the keys in my hand, I ripped up the shag carpeting whose musky scent of stale lives lingered for days long after I swept up the particle board. I pulled up nails, tacks and ripped out trim and that was just in the entry way. For the first two weeks of home ownership, I slept at my apartment and would drive boxes of my belongings over early in the morning, unpack, scrub, clean, disinfect and then return to my apartment to shower and get ready for work. I did this everyday for two weeks. I lived in some kind of episode of Ground Hog day--a continual state of repetition. And yet each morning, I would wake excited like I was in some kind of new relationship. And I was. The summer of 2013 will be the love affair with Defoe. 628 Defoe to be exact. My new potential home.
What I can honestly tell you is that I never dreamed of owning my own home. As I said to my father, an architect and confidant, "My ego isn't driven to buy a house, it just doesn't need that kind of ownership." But really in my mind or rather my heart, I didn't want to consider the idea of buying a home, alone. Homes were places for families, married people or for investments. The only thing I had remotely of any value was a small budding sense of integrity and I certainly didn't need a home for that to grow.
The decision to buy a house was not made quickly or impulsively. Thankfully, our economy has tanked to the point that most people cannot buy homes like a new tent for a trip. Thankfully, I took time to come to this decision and most importantly, I didn't tell anyone I was even considering it. You see the power with potential doesn't just lie in saying what you are going to do, the power in potential is also finding out what you aren't going to accept.
Let me explain. This past January I found myself wanting to be single and wanting to leave Missoula. I had been here for over five years and it had been hard--my husband broke his neck two months after we had married, we lost a good friend in an avalanche and then divorce. Needless to say, Missoula has been a brutally humbling time in my life. I felt like I was ready to seek the potential of another phase, to create another view of myself. To leave this valley behind me.
And so I decided to take an adventure every month under the guise of getting out, exploring towns I had always wanted to visit or re-visit and most importantly connecting with friends I missed--and only in my mind was I keenly searching for a new home. This route I took for five months included Bozeman, Santa Fe, Bend and with hints of Seattle and San Francisco. Now the concept of moving someplace new is a lot more comforting to me than staying put. I would go so far as to say, I am really good at seeking the solace in potential. Since we are being honest, I would admit I have a lot more experience in only thinking about the future than I do in committing to the present. I am a pro at reinvention.
Every new town I would visit, I would immediately visualize my potential new life--riding my bike to an office at a college under the sun of Santa Fe, skiing volcanos in Oregon, drinking cups of coffee in Seattle with a great new haircut, going out to dinner with all my new hip friends in San Francisco and the easiest to imagine was hanging out in Bend with my bestie sipping tea and talking, finally again in the same town. But these were all just dreams, potential dreams.
And when the airplane would land back in Missoula and I would gather my bag, text my mom that I had made it and call to the friend I had just left that I missed them, I would find myself in a valleyed shadow of Missoula. Hearing I-90 again as I stood outside the air port terminal, I would look up at the hills and ask myself Home? Here? As if in that brief moment when you are not in time or place thanks to modern travel, when your soul hasn't caught up with you, you just have your ego to ask. Which I'm pretty confident isn't the right person for important questions.
Not too long after my trip to Bend for my 39th birthday I was riding my bike to work, missing my friend Emmy and all the ease of being together, was when I asked myself what is it that I am really searching for? What am I wanting from a potential new place? Maybe I should just move back to Michigan to family where I can be Emily Walter only and only that again. And sure enough, it finally occurred to me while pedaling to the rhythm of a three syllable word. I wanted security. I just wanted to feel placed with a purpose. The potential security of what I thought a marriage would hold, a home shared and of course a future based on a commitment. And given that I am not married anymore, I simply said, so what if I did this for myself. What if, I gave security to me.
Now don't get me wrong, I have heard of ceremonies where people marry themselves, but I wasn't about to be that literal. Remember, I am a poet behind all this prose. And the idea of seeking security in a new place was something I learned in my twenties from all my travels. I knew I didn't want to start again in a new town when I already had a good job, I pedaled under Missoula sun to a new office, hell, I even had a great new haircut. So I basically decided to do what most Americans do with abstract desires such as love, security and safety--they buy it. And so I bought house. I bought security. Or so I thought.
It's really too soon to know exactly what I have done, but this is what I know today. I decided to take all that wanting to be something else, somewhere else and to just be, here. I decided to say no to potential. I decided to believe that saying no to someplace else, could be a yes. A yes to myself. And to be here, here in the reality of old windows, asbestos in the attic, particle board under shag carpeting and the still lingered scent of lives lived past, is ugly. The scent of it all can be down right overwhelming and no pun intended, a potential disaster.
But for one of the first times in my life, I can say, I am not dreaming of what could be or could be different. I am not focused on the asbestos. I am simply putting on work clothes, painting trim, grateful for the videos off of You Tube on grouting windows and starting with what is here. And here's what the particle board has become. Here's my new sense of potential materialized. Here's my home.
I look forward to writing poems here. I look forward to committing to what I have been wanting to be ever since I can recall the concept of wanting, which is to be a poet. To be present enough to what I can create here and not to dream of someplace else, the potential of someplace better. Life is not elsewhere. But maybe, just maybe I can accept life is good, here.
