MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES...A WALK IN THE DARK...

This was a really bad day. I went by the house to pack up what I thought would be most of my stuff -- even two vans [I had borrowed one from my bean curd buddies] hardly managed to make a dent in the vast ocean of stuff which I will eventually have to get out of the house. It looks like many trips... And as of tomorrow, I don't have my eldest son to help me carry things upstairs in the Weird Little House I have rented.

A Weird Little House. Far from home. And not in the land of Civil Unions after all: I am following a job offer that may or may not go up in smoke to settle in the land of Legal Marriage [legal for now, but don't count on it, and watch out for the popular vote]. There is this... Weird Little House on an odd-ball lot. It's weird, it's small, and it reminds me of something... as my son said when he had been in and come out for another load of stuff, "It seems very... collegiate." Great. So now I am not only wrestling with the psychic power of my inner twelve-year old girl, but also returning to the life-style of myself as a twenty-year-old near- virgin. When I was, in fact, out and about. Just not particularly happy about it. [And, my son tells me, Big Brother is now saying that this entire episode involving the end of my life as I have known it is not just a mid-life crisis, but a passing phase and an attempt to regain my lost youth. I am really glad he hasn't had a chance to share this with me personally yet...]

The packing and unpacking went really well; my son is nothing if not a good sport, though he lets me get away with nothing, and in particular not with my fantasy that what is happening is not ALL my fault. But we shared a brew on the Weird Little Porch, and for a moment I had a feeling that maybe I could do this after all.

Things began to go south at dinner, when I made the mistake of asking him whether he thought there was anything else I could have done besides leave. That was a mistake. And then after he headed home in one van, I stopped off to drop off the borrowed one. As I wrestled the seats back into it, I realized that this delivery, even though I was going to drag it out by not renting a truck the proper size and doing it all at once, and bystaying to do a dump and recycling run on Wednesday to try to leave my little apartment clean and tidy, is really the beginning of the end. It really is over. The owners asked me in, and even asked me out for dinner before I leave, which shows either great generosity or a complete inability to work out who is at fault here...

Tomorrow I go back to load my bureau, a chair, and a bunch of art off the walls, as well as the last of my filing cabinets, because my son will be there to help me load, even if there will not be anyone to help me unload at the other end. Beggars can't be choosers, I'm told. I'm not sure how I will get the bureau up the very steep stairs. But I think I have a scheme that might work, involving a blanket and a lot of effort, and at least no one will be there to see me try it... Even that will not be the end of it. There is the studio, with all the tables and books and stuff.

I stopped off at what had been home to talk about what I might be taking tomorrow, and things slowly turned ugly. I was going to take some of the many kitchen utensils we share, and wanted to make sure that I was not committing the sin against the Holy Ghost by taking anything in particular, and that led to a rather icy conversation about what had to be out when, and a couple of pointed questions about why I wanted things. Was I planning to do a lot of baking? Oddly enough, that one almost undid me. Well, I almost held it together there, with our son watching the gloves begin to come off... Nobody's fault; just too many raw nerves and salted wounds all 'round.

Then I started the walk back to the apartment. I hadn't even made it out of the driveway before the sobs starting coming, but I was out of practice, and they shaded off into fits of coughing, and had to stop and regroup to get going again. They managed, though. I don't know how I did the first half-mile, or what the good burghers holed up in their cozy little homes thought of the lost soul on the road. Fortunately, it is cold enough in the evenings now that few people will have had their windows open. As it was, I felt bad for the neighbors, but there wasn't much I could do about it. It just swept over me. We are all miserable these days, if you come right down to it.

I got "home" in a complete funk, drained and dry-eyed. I decided to post something about today and how terrible it had been -- and it was terrible. But before I sat down to type, I visited some of my regular blogs, and followed Bea's link to the cat-herding commercial, and laughed out loud. As you know, laughing out loud is high on my list of life's glories, and once I had been through the silliness of cat-boys rolling balls of yarn and driving Persian longhairs through swollen Western rivers, I stopped off at the ten worst album covers of all time, and just lost it altogether.

So the long and the short of it is: it was a bitch of a day. But I got to laugh at the end, so this post is a lot less weepy than it would have been otherwise. This way it works out for everybody. I get to laugh, and you get to read something less depressing than what I would have written an hour ago...

God bless you all.
Your comments buoy me up and make me think there may be life on the other side of this after all, an idea which is sometimes hard to hold onto.

I take grace where I can find it.
I suggest you do the same.
Hang in there.