Home Alone

“I don’t know why, but I love it when he’s out of the house,” she says with a sigh.

“And what do you do while he’s gone?” I ask.

“Nothing special. Nothing I wouldn’t do if he was around. I just enjoy having the house to myself,” she shrugs.

Ever since I reached a certain age, I’ve had some version of this conversation with a number of women friends. It often includes expressions of guilt (“I feel bad about wanting to be alone …”) accompanied by reassurances of the otherwise healthy status of the relationship (“It’s not as if we don’t get along...”).

I  haven’t questioned friends in same-sex relationships, or long-married heterosexual men, so I don’t know whether this sort of thing happens to them as well. But I suspect that women with male partners are the most acutely afflicted.

Usually the situation doesn’t arise until the couple retires, when, after years of spending the days in their respective workplaces, they suddenly find themselves sharing a living space 24/7. All kinds of revelations ensue. I, for instance, learned that my spouse liked to listen to NPR all day long. After intense negotiations, we arrived at an arrangement involving closed doors and earphones after Morning Edition goes off the air.

When couples downsize, space becomes an issue. Getting rid of things seems to come more easily to women than to men. “You wouldn’t believe all his stuff,” my friends complain. By stuff they mean aircraft carrier-sized desks covered in tilting piles of papers, outdated electronics in various states of disrepair, and slithering tangles of neckties that once enhanced his business attire.

And then there is Order and Neatness, another mostly female fixation. “When I used to come home from work,” one woman explains, “I was too tired to care if the newspaper was on the dining room table, or the closet doors were left open, but now…” Now the parka draped casually over a chair instead of hung in the closet, the rug left askew, and the imperfectly-shut dresser drawer become a major irritant, especially since the culprit is right there, all the time, doing nothing about it.  It’s possible that there are obsessively orderly men out there who suffer from their wives’ slatternly habits, but if so I wish they’d speak up.

Nevertheless, putting aside Noise, Stuff, and Neatness (too much of the first two, and not enough of the latter), there remains something about a male presence in the house that makes women long for regular doses of solitude. For one thing men, even less-than-king-sized ones, seem to occupy a lot of space. I first noticed this when I entered a co-ed high school. I couldn’t believe how much room boys took up, and how much noise they made. Whooping in voices that swooped unpredictably from bass to soprano, they loped through the halls, dropping books, slamming locker doors, jostling each other at the water fountain, stretching out their long legs under desks, and generally wreaking havoc.

True, by the time they reach their sunset years, most men have tamed that adolescent turbulence, but they still dash around more forcefully than women. In my half century of marriage, I have learned to keep well away from a closed door, in case my spouse should suddenly burst in. Even with gentle, slipper-wearing husbands who creep silently around the house, male energy has a peculiar quality that makes periodic breaks from it essential for the wife.

I suspect, however, that the need for conjugal respite has mostly to do with the heart’s propensity to grow fonder in absence. When the beloved’s presence adorns each day from dawn to dusk, it’s a necessary luxury to miss him for a while, in full knowledge that the pleasure of an empty house will soon be matched by that of hearing the key in the door, and the door shake in its hinges as the wanderer crashes in.

A Time To Cook--or Not

For everything, as we know, there is a season:  a time to plant, a time to reap;  a time to laugh, a time to weep.  A time to cook...and a time to refrain from cooking.

My time to cook began in the Summer of Love of 1967.  Now, as of our move to Wake Robin a month ago, the time to refrain from cooking has arrived.  And not a moment too soon.

I got married just before feminism made its second pass through the American consciousness, when it was not considered particularly attractive for young ladies to be in graduate school, which I was.  Cooking, on the other hand, we were told was a feminine adornment and essential to the health of a marriage, so I strove to broaden my repertory, which prior to the wedding had been limited to boiling eggs.

It wasn't easy to produce a salad, meat, two veg and dessert seven days a week on our grad student income, and things got more complicated when our daughters began to eat solid foods.  Now, in addition to finances, I had three people's tastes to consider, plus I was starting to become aware, along with the rest of America, of the effects of diet on health.

At around this time I fell under the spell of The Mother Earth News, and became persuaded that the only way to keep my family from an early grave was to put on the table food that I had personally grown:  broccoli from my garden, apples from my trees, eggs from my hens, milk from my goats, and bread baked with my own two hands (though the flour came from the store).

This had a lot of charm, but it was a ton of work.  Once they'd eaten their first home-grown omelette and drunk their first miraculous glasses of goat's milk, home-grown food became the norm and my family gradually ceased to exclaim about the wonderfulness of my efforts.  And, children being what they are, the girls turned up their snub little noses at my hard-won broccoli, and pined for McDonald's.

Nevertheless, I persevered.  I still got pleasure from the garden and the goats, but cooking became a chore.  I've known people, all of them male, who say they come home from a day's work and look forward to making a creative dinner--they say it relaxes them.  I was not born to be one of these people.  I was born to marry one.
But I hadn't.  My husband declared himself willing to help, but on his terms:  TV dinners, soups by Campbell's, and green beans from the garden of the Jolly Green Giant.  Convinced that on such a diet we'd all be dead within the year, I shooed him out of the kitchen, gritted my teeth, and cooked on.

Years passed.  We moved from country to city to country again.  The city interludes were less arduous, because at least I wasn't producing the food, but I still had to shop for it.   I knew, as I opened my eyes every morning, that unless I caved and we ordered pizza, before I went to my rest that night I was going to have to do something about dinner. 

And for almost fifty years, I did.

Now that's behind me.  Our monthly fees include lunch or dinner, in the informal cafe or the  formalish (this being Vermont) dining room.  The food is, almost without exception, lovely, and of astounding variety.  I eat more vegetables here than I ever did before. Wake Robin is an important presence in the local farm-to-table movement, so the food is pretty much guilt-free.

Is there nothing I miss of my own cooking?  Certainly:  garlic sauteed in olive oil;  salads consisting entirely of arugula;  bread with, again, olive oil.  But our cottage kitchen is the most modern I've ever had, and its cupboards contain my old cast iron pans and well-worn wooden spoons.  There's a bottle of olive oil in the pantry, and a paper bag with the remains of last summer's garlic crop.  There's no reason I can't whip up a little Mediterranean dish anytime I really feel the urge.  I've even given some hazy consideration to getting deeply into bread making again.  And maybe I will--in the winter perhaps...

But for now, every day I rejoice in the knowledge that the season to refrain from cooking has arrived.

The Dog of Thresholds

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a class of gods, called liminal deities, who specialized in thresholds.  These gods kept watch over people as they went in and out of rooms, moved house, or set off on ships into the unknown.

In our cottage, instead of a god of thresholds, we have a dog of thresholds.  Whenever I go from the den into the living room, from the living room into the porch, or from the dining area into the kitchen, my black German Shepherd Wolfie is there, sprawled across the threshold, protecting it. 

In the course of defending our various thresholds, Wolfie may well cause an accident.  He is quite a long dog, and there is no way for us to squeeze past his recumbent form, so we have to step over him, which is fine unless we're in a hurry or carrying something or not paying attention.  But he is so devoted to guarding thresholds that I have to believe that he knows what he's doing, and we need to accept the risk of stumbling over him. 

If the Greeks and Romans considered liminal deities essential, why should we assume that we have outgrown our need for them?  Can it be mere coincidence that Wolfie has taken to threshold sprawling just as we have moved to a new house and embarked on a new way of life at Wake Robin?

There is a second deity in the house:  Bisou, the goddess of sofas and cozy chairs, whose function is to keep the spot from which I have just gotten up from getting cold.  True to her Cavalier genes, she is also the goddess of laps, preventing me from floating upwards like a balloon and banging my head against the ceiling.  She is as uncompromising about this as Wolfie is about lying across thresholds, so again I have to believe that Bisou is on a divinely ordained mission to keep me grounded in the most literal sense.

The life change we have just been through--downsizing and embarking on what some call "a cruise on the river Styx"--has been a transition to boggle most minds.  But anchored to my reading chair by a snoozing Bisou, and with Wolfie guarding the nearest threshold, there's little for me to complain about.

Life Flashes

They say that when you're drowning, your entire life flashes by.  But that's not the only time this happens.  It also happens while you're downsizing.

A dozen times every day I disinter some long-ignored object that brings up a whole chunk of my life, and I have to ask myself, does this picture I painted, this article I wrote deserve to be kept, or thrown out?  You can see that  downsizing is a lot like drowning, only worse, because you have to pass judgment on every bit.

The books--forty-eight boxfuls--were the first to go .  As I parted with my beloved parasitology textbook I asked myself, what have I retained about the life-cycle of the tapeworm, the loa-loa worm, the blood fluke?  Little more than the ability to predict, when I found Wolfie and Bisou snacking on a dead rabbit, that they would get a case of Taenia, which they did.

And what about the stacks of French novels and plays and essays that I not only read but taught?  I can barely remember who wrote Madame Bovary.  Surely the tide of text that washed over my brain year in and year out left some residue--a starfish or a striped shell or a piece of sea glass?  Some days all I can find are old plastic shopping bags.  Other days the sand is bare.

The art paraphernalia took me some time to sort through.  The dried-out paint tubes, the half-filled sketch books, the dusty mallets and chisels. The framed pictures that fill my closet.  The stone heads that adorn my woods. Now it's almost all gone.  Whew!

At the moment, I'm working on the mountain of implements left behind by the other great fantasy that ruled my life, the earth mother myth.  There's the goat milking stand that my husband made;  the cheese press (ditto);  the heat lamp for the day-old chicks. All those morning chores, those barn cleanings, those births and deaths--where did they go?

This all sounds a little melancholy, but I am not in the least bitter or disappointed. I would say that I am mostly surprised.  Surprised that all that effort and striving, those years and years of cramming and pushing should have led up to...this:  me, getting ready to move with my spouse and my dogs to a retirement community, with one small truckload of worldly goods.

It seems disproportionate somehow, the work and the strain.  It's as if I'd spent my entire life preparing, and now I'm having some kind of graduation and I'm not even sure what I majored in, let alone what kind of work I'm fit for.

"Leap!" a yoga teacher once told me, "And a net will appear."  I have always liked a good leap.  Now, as the waves crash around me and the taste of salt is in my mouth, I trust that the net is on its way.

How I Learned to Travel Light

A single small suitcase, my violin, and a doll that I clutched to my flat chest--that is how I left Spain almost sixty years ago.  My parents carried one suitcase each, plus my father's violin and viola.  We were going on a great adventure to the heart of darkness.  And we were going to cross the Atlantic to New York, and then south all the way to Ecuador, by plane. 

My mother had a special suit made for the flight, and bought a new hat.  My father got a haircut.  My aunts tied freshly-ironed red ribbons around my pony tails.  PanAmerican Airlines treated us royally and issued us elegant blue-and-white flight bags, but they were adamant on luggage limits.  Hence the single suitcase, and the single doll.
 In my suitcase were a couple of dresses, some socks and underwear.  But the rest of my family of dolls, the little terracotta Madonna that stood at the head of my bed, and the Spanish translations of Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Tom Sawyer were all left behind--along with my aunts and uncles and my four grandparents, not to mention the German nuns and the girls who had made fun of my glasses in school.

We were going, but only for a year.  In retrospect, remembering the look in my grandmothers' eyes, I think they must have known that we would never return to live in Barcelona.  But we, or at least I, didn't know that.  We were only leaving for a year.  We'd be back.

So when we arrived in Quito, and rented a house and unpacked our suitcases, we sort of camped out.  Since we were only staying for a year, and all furniture had to be hand-made to order, my parents got the bare minimum.  I remember a contemporary-looking but uncomfortable spindle-backed sofa.  And I especially remember the kitchen table, made by a less renowned artisan out of improperly-dried wood, which promptly curled up at the edges.

When the Ecuadorian government, to my parents' surprise and dismay, ran out of money to honor my father's contract, they nevertheless kept promising payment "any day now."  Before we knew it almost four years had elapsed, and we were still making do with the curly table and a couple of dented cooking pots.

When, out of the jungle mists, the opportunity arose to come to the United States, I packed my
suitcase and my violin and, leaving the doll behind, followed my parents to Birmingham, Alabama.  There again we camped out for the first few years, for how did we know whether things would work out?

I remember going to Sears with my  mother to buy some china, a couple of beds, and an upholstered sofa, less artisanal but more comfortable than the Ecuadorian one.  Even though there were no more financial disasters like the one that had befallen us in Quito, it took us a long time to settle.  When I needed a desk I bought a piece of plywood and screwed four legs into it.  It shook and wobbled with every stroke of my pen--and that is how I felt too, kind of wobbly and provisional.

The ponderous bookcases and dining room suite, the four-poster bed and the marble-topped dresser that had been handed down to my parents on their marriage, their crystal, china, paintings and silverware, not to mention all our books, remained in the apartment in Barcelona.  Eventually my mother had the bed and the dresser and the dining room suite shipped to the U.S., but by then I had once again packed my suitcase and my violin and gone off to get married.

Over the following decades I did accumulate a houseful of belongings, and though I never felt tied to a particular place, I did drag everything that could be moved from house to house and state to state.  But now I've come full circle, and am almost back to the single-suitcase, one-doll stage.  I have so far given away thirty-eight boxes of books.  I have taken two carloads of pots and pans, including my beloved stainless steel milking pail, to the auction with nary a tear.

But I'm not nearly done.  And as I close the flaps on one more box of stuff that seems to hold my past, it occurs to me that the exercise I went through as a ten-year-old, picking out which one of all my dolls I would take with me to the New World, prepared me well for choosing which objects will accompany me to the continent I am about to enter.

Thank Heavens for the Downstairs Guest Room

I can barely stand to be in my house these days, and given that winter is still raging outdoors and I have a lifetime's worth of worldly goods to sort through indoors, sometimes I feel on the verge of hysteria.

There are two reasons that being home makes me crazy.  The first is that every single object that my eyes light on--a picture on the wall, a rug on the floor, a plate on the table, a nutpick in the drawer--requires a decision:  to keep or not to keep, and if the latter, to a) throw away;  b) give away (and if so, to whom?); or c) sell (and if so, where?).

The second reason is that, having started the paring process with the bookcases that occupy almost every room, and having actually made some progress, those rooms are now defaced by stacks of book-filled liquor-store boxes that threaten to topple and squash Bisou.  And then there are those poor denuded book shelves, littered by the few volumes that have escaped my ruthless hand and showing, behind where the books used to be, a nine-year accumulation of dust and ashes.  If you are in need of rest and serenity, those rooms are the last place you want to be.

I know only too well that this--the dismantling, the decisions, the packing and the mess--is going to grow steadily worse over the next three  months before the halcyon date of June 2, when we will say farewell to this good house forever.  Three months of difficult decisions in the midst of chaos would normally unhinge me, but there is a chance that I won't lose my mind completely, thanks to the Downstairs Guest Room.

This blessed space has a sofa bed, a little table, an old pine chest, a once-glorious, now-faded rug, some pictures on the wall, a mirror, a good reading lamp, and no bookcase.  I have already decided that everything in this room, except for the pictures on the wall, is going to come with us.  Hence, until the last moment, it can remain in its present orderly state:  no empty boxes waiting to be filled;  no full ones waiting to be taken away, no choices, no angst. 

Every afternoon, when the sun begins to sink at the horizon and my spirits--weary from a day of deciding what to do with my long-abandoned stone carving tools or talking myself out of keeping a particularly soulful piece of pottery--start to plunge, I repair to the Downstairs Guest Room.  I turn on the lamp, dive into my Kindle, and proceed to knit the raveled sleeve of the day's care.

Need I mention that there's also Bisou snoozing on a cozy blanket on my right, and a glass of wine on the little table at my left?  Periodically, as I reach the end of a chapter, I look around and thank the universe for the Downstairs Guest Room, a sanctum where I can rest my eyes from the chaos, and my mind and my heart from the endless task of letting go, letting go, letting go.