A LONG GOODBYE - 12 October 2011
12th October, 2011
Was it the full moon last night? Well, yes, the moon was full last night, but I mean was it that that's partly responsible for how emotional I feel to day? Is it partly that Joel wants to know if we got the electric cake mixer from the house? Yes. And the celedon bowls? No. Is it that the letting go of that house seems interminable? Will it ever be done?
It was scheduled to close on 14th - tomorrow - then it was changed to 21st, now today we receive notice that the Buyers would like to close next Tuesday, 18th. You'd think we'd be overjoyed - an extra 3 days of liberty from debt. So why am I still dreaming of the house?
Last weekend, my daughter and her boyfriend made the herculean journey - in Columbus Day traffic - to truck up there and remove the items agreed upon. They're exhausted when they arrive, and have a flat tire, and they have to accomplish everything in one day. And spiders have taken over the house. The next day my daughter texts me halfway through the packing. She's just caught sight of my gardening hat on the hook by the door and burst into tears. I call her and we cry together. It's that beautiful and that hard.
The realtor emails yesterday: the fire inspector will be going in today to check the wiring and smoke detectors. I want to scream. How many tests do we have to keep passing? For God's sake I don't know where the frigging smoke detectors are. We hated the way they looked and probably bunged them in a cupboard. As for the list of what remains in the house, I'm done. Whatever we all took, back then in June when we walked out that gate for the last time, and whatever Isabel has been kind enough to retrieve, that's it. Done.
But nothing is really done until it is. Is that what keep me anxious, bordering on superstitious? I get the anxious, but the superstitious? What's with that? As soon as I receive notification of the new closing date I catch myself running the numerology of the date to see what hidden dangers lurk, but stop myself with a metaphoric slap across the face. For chrissakes, I don't believe in superstition.
My mother was full of it: don't put new shoes on the table, it will bring bad luck. If someone gives you a brooch or a wallet give them a penny or else it will either pierce or rob the friendship. Where do these things come from? I started walking under ladders before I was ten to rid myself of any lingering belief. So why, some 15 years later, when I broke a mirror did I immediately spit on it, hearing my mother's antidote for the 7 years bad luck it would bring, "Put it under running water!" Jeez.
Maybe it was mother's belief in the superstition that if you dropped a knife a man would come knocking on your door, or in the case of a fork, a woman. One evening shortly before dinner, Mother dropped a fork with a bent tine and just as she, Dad and I sat down to table the doorbell rang and there on the doorstep was a woman with her arm in a sling.
The truth is, it's all a distraction. Anything to not have to feel the pain of letting go.
This afternoon we stuffed a baguette with camembert, lettuce and tomato and took the stone stairs across the road up to a sunny perch, just below the church.
When we looked over the wall we saw a crazy quilt of gardens, all full to capacity with trees, vegetables, plants. Some in tidy rows, some randomly designed. They all spoke of a connection to the planet. I thought of all the years I'd spent with earth beneath my nails, the victory of weeding, the precision of dead-heading, the ripe aroma of root and soil as I pried a plant from its pot and placed it lovingly in the earth. The mix of manure and fertilizer, the sudden increase in the girth of the linden tree's trunk. The discovery of a new, perfumed, everblooming, climbing rose, the pinch of lavender in a cup of tea. The indescribable pleasure of picking salad and veggies in the evening and eating their succulent nutrition within minutes. The surge of perfume from the honeysuckle or sweet autumn clematis as the last of the day's sun hits them. Will the new people take care of the herbs? Will they take care not to mow the lawn to close in summer? Will they hose the trees after a salt-ladened wind? What about the wild dune that needs to be kept balanced in order to keep its wildness? Will they put dried blood down at the roots of the privet in spring, inspect the pines for disease? And who will be there in the spring when the crocii pierce the lawn, when the daffodils trumpet and the triangle of scarlet tulips blare their fanfare?
In spite of all the difficulties we experienced living amidst a dysfunctional summer community of renters, there was never a time, whether biking back from errands, or having driven the 5 hours up from the city, when we didn't look over the gate into that garden and the sea beyond and feel, for a few seconds, complete joy.
I will never look over that gate again. I will probably never have a garden again. And I tell you, I've been prepared to feel anxiety, anger, exhaustion, superstition, anything but the pain of loss.
It's 5-ish now, here in Provence. We've come down to Les Trois Source to sit in the sun in someone else's garden. It's nice. I quite like it. And when I walk out this gate I won't have to worry about whether to water or not. But...