On the brink

The weekend came, the weekend went. We hauled a mattress. We hauled a washer. We hauled a sofa. There were cats waiting for us, in the windows, when we pulled into the driveway again each time. We savored scraps of front porch time (for quilting & picking), spliced between long stretches of boxes-unpacking and drawer-organizing and mowing and digging. Some rooms are starting to shape up. Some are not. The bed frame awaits a box spring. The dining room awaits a table. So it goes.

Slowly, we are finding new patterns. Over the winter, Sunday evenings revolved around long, dark drives back to Binghamton, and long hot soaks in the tub, and quick-and-easy dinners out at Denny's. Now, things are different. In place of the long drive and the quick-and-easy dinner out, there is dinner in and a long evening to savor together. I cooked-- correction, we cooked-- on a Sunday for the first time in forever last night. There was wine, and a guitar, and maybe a couple of mosquitoes, and it was absolutely perfect.

It's that "on the brink" feeling that's so intoxicating, I think. Slowly, our new life is taking shape inside. Each week we chip away a little bit at the outside-- digging a couple of saplings out from the foundation, planting a quick row of arugula, scraping paint on the porch-- and each week we find more things that make us happy to be where we are. Take this, for example: our neighbor jogging across the street Saturday morning, eager to trade me the empty pie tin in his hands for my (admittedly sagging) end of our queen-size mattress. (I had baked him a pie to thank him for tilling our garden, but I figure a homemade pie is probably enough to cover both the tilling and the mattress lifting, so I relented.) It's like that. We picked a good town.


Psst! Click here to subscribe to the feed!