Forgive. I got up at four this morning, it's been a long couple of months, and today was sandals weather, and I was in socks. Some days are like that. This is posted primarily to say: I no longer rent a saltbox on an unbridged island. I am a month into paying off a thirty year mortgage on a 100+ year old farm house on a bridged island. And when I say "I," I mean "we:" me, Dave, Janey, and Pepe. Though really, Janey and Pepe have done next to nothing to pay rent or contribute to the mortgage payments. Apparently the recession hit cats really hard, and work is nearly impossible to get. Janey has been considering grad school, but hasn't really been motivated enough to write the application essay.
We're hoping that a change of location will motivate them.
I am home alone (but for the cats) tonight, because I brought Dave in for surgery this morning- that'd be the four a.m. wake-up call. Back in January, he left Isle au Haut alone in Sure Thing in the dark of night with the wind screaming, and the thermometer below zero. Not because it seemed fun, or like a good idea, or an adventure, but because unbeknownst to him, one of his diverticuli perforated. Which hurt. A lot. Very suddenly. No luck getting a ride, or a companion. I was on Deer Isle, working. By the time the mailboat captain I'd roused got past the boats in Stonington harbor in the Mink, we could already the light from Dave's boat. We didn't know it at the time, but that evening was the last one he would spend as a resident on IAH. And it just about summed up every reason why we were ready to leave.
This week marks the beginning of the end of the tumult, we hope. We moved our earthly goods (most of 'em at least) off of IAH, we closed on the house, we managed to consolidate our lives under this one (rambling) roof, and I got through directing my second major community theater show. Now it's three days later, officially spring, and as of 11-ish this morning, the doctors had excised Dave's diverticuli demons. There goes about a foot of his sigmoid colon, and good riddance. Life on a low fiber diet is not a life worth living. Or living with.
In other news, I do believe temperature records were set today, and may be again tomorrow. It feels like June. Am itchy and restless to get outside. To burn the field, to dig in the ground, to get back on the boat. To have everything unpacked and in place. To see fireflies out back.
Happily, though the last few months will officially be known hereabouts as "the Winter that Wasn't" it was a winter for teaching patience. I would argue that I already had heaps of the stuff, but my better half has generally been defined by a lack of it. Never hurts to practice though. Everything in its turn, and there will be other springs, and never a dearth of projects. If the house isn't a showplace by our shared birthday, so be it.
Still, I think the boxes are watching me. And possibly multiplying when we aren't looking.
