Dispatch from Ednor Gardens/Lakeside, Baltimore

Sweeping fifteen years of one family’s lives out of the old house, I laughed at the irony that I’m buying a much older house with many more years of other families’ lives in its walls and floors. And now, three and a half weeks later, here I sit, at my new dining room table with my parents’ old beaten Marcel Breuer Cesca chairs stacked around me, waiting for their seat covers to be repaired.

From the week of the move itself: the move is finished. And not finished. My mind and my new house are both cluttered with the junk and detritus of my old life, a life i shared with Scot. A life i chose, daily, until i didnt. There is loss in that, and also a quiet clarity. I don’t miss the old house at all. The junk, the things I paid movers a small fortune to carry in here, can go.  I can begin to see how i will live here, the neighbors i will see regularly, the ones who smoke delicious smelling meat on their deck in July, and the ones who step on to their porches to tell me to be sure to get that one bag of trash out of my yard and into the bin so the rats don’t come. The one who silently walks his tiny ancient dog along the block, tucked under one arm, perhaps because it is the same route that dog used to be capable of walking on its four legs, and now no longer is. These are all acts of love, and im grateful to be old enough and observant enough to recognize them as such.

I have a balcony now. Before, i had a deck, and i sometimes stood or leaned or sat or lay in the hammock on it in summer and watched the sun setting through the trees and recovered from the day. My new balcony faces the east, and the sunrise. I havent had my morning coffee out there yet. It is bare concrete and wrought iron, it requires plants and a couple of comfortable chairs. But I can look up directly at the sky and at the rooftops across the alley and hear fireworks in the near distance and the windchimes next door, and see thunderclouds gathering in the distance. Maybe that far out to the east, those clouds are even over the water. I’m not sure.

I have more grey hairs from having come through this process; it was rough, without a doubt. We left money on the table because of the deferred maintenance and neglect of the old house, and the buyers played hardball on all of it. We leaned too hard on the people whose job it was to help us through this; I have a keen sense of owing more than mere gratitude to them for their big hearts and kind souls. That’s to say nothing of the alternating waves of relief and needlestick jabs to the heart that I felt as the marriage separation became final, irreversible, real.

Like any moment of transition for a family, the move was shot through with moments of lightness: my youngest child played his new guitars through the entire thing so the soundtrack to the move was a steady beat of 1980s rock hooks like Sweet Child O Mine and Iron Man; my eldest got invited on a fantastic beach trip with her best friends, who hype each other up and pour love into each other in admirable ways; my youngest is getting loved on by all his friends and their families. I received help and love from friends and dear ones all the way through, and got to laugh with all of them. (Note to K in Lauraville: I still want to go axe throwing with you!)

……..

It is a week later, I took a break from writing this in order to be off work and spend time focusing on the house and *redacted*. Getting furniture, cleaning, organizing, unpacking, painting, buying plants. Doing all of the things. I am uncomfortable sharing direct and immediate autobiographical things but I can share that I am entering this new phase with a sense of being held in love and light. And some of that love and light is coming from you, dear reader, from your willingness to lend some of your precious attention to me and my journey out of one family configuration and into another. Thank you for holding me.

I’ve been thinking some about what I wish to welcome into this next phase of my life; what energies and emotions, what skills do I invite myself to hone, what nutrients belong in the soil of this garden? I am humbled to remember that I have allowed previous chapters of my life to be governed primarily by anxiety, by fear, by a tight gripping-on to the decayed end of a branch of the tree of a relationship, one I knew could never sustain me anyway. And decades ago, I have welcomed a form of acceptance of things as they were, using Buddhist practice as an excuse to allow myself to remain in a depressed state, to disagree with therapists who wanted me to go on meds, to date people who were wrong for me because they wanted my attention, not because I liked them.

Now, though. Now I want to welcome nourishment. Joy. Love. Growth. Learning. Return. Health and healing (as separate from wellness, which i find conceptually perplexing to define). Green things and artwork and poetry and music. Small, tiny movements. Silence. Awe. Water. Staring into space, out the window. My own cussedness and obstinacy. Dream work. Vision work. Crafts.

All of this still feels unfinished and oceanic and intense! Thank you, dear reader, for coming along on this journey of uncertainty and risk. My first mortgage payment as a solo homeowner is due in a week. Contrary to the messages that we women and girls receive throughout our lives, I want to become larger now, large enough and strong enough and weighty enough to absorb and contain all of these things that I want to welcome now. I want to find the resilience and adaptability inside me to be able to say the magic words of change:

Bring.

It.

On.

In Solidarity,

Mariya