“Summer does not fade away in a day.”
–365 Tao, p. 215 (Decline), Deng-Ming Dao
I did a thing.
The timing couldn’t have been better, the circumstances fell right into place, and as of this past Wednesday, it’s official: I’m a first-time homeowner.
Heading into this new chapter, there’s sure to be challenges, but I also know I’m moving into a house with strong bones that has been filled with love and joy over the course of many years. It’s a structure my wonderful friend aka partner in crime aka emotional support human aka events manager Wende grew up in along with her brother Scott after their parents moved into the newly built home in 1964. I remember days talking baseball and basketball with Wende’s dad Norman in that house, and there’s even a picture or two of Lucy out there lounging around in the back yard.
So while it’s a truly happy and joyous moment, there’s also another side to this coin. While the timing is certainly right, the bid farewell isn’t an easy one as I’ve been running an emotional gamut the past few weeks.
Putting up the Christmas tree in the new home yesterday, I felt a bitter sting of guilt, as if I were cheating on a partner, engaged in some elicit affair.
Weird, huh?
The quote at the beginning of this blog opened chapter 14, Seasons Change, in Lucy’s Way: A Dog, A Drunk, and The Tao. The chapter opened with a really fun story about the early days of Lucy and Buddy the Cat’s co-habitation as siblings, and what I now understand was the opening of a window to life with Buddy as the window to life with Lucy was beginning to close.
It’s not the story that originally opened the chapter, and this chapter also originally fell much earlier in the book, as chapter 7, in the first draft. It was one of those chapters I needed to force myself to edit and restructure as part of my overhauled edit, one of those things I thought was perfect just as it was until I challenged myself to consider the possibility that change was essential. Just like its title suggests, this chapter went through seasonal changes as well, making it an even more poignant chapter carrying the slightest sting of irony.
The changes I was going through, the things I lived through and then wrote about in the Seasons Change chapter, when I was going through them they seemed massive even though they weren’t.
I’m feeling those same feels now, even though everything is exactly as it is supposed to be.
I’m bidding farewell to a neighborhood I’ve called home for the better part of half a century. The two houses I’ve lived in much of my life, as well as the streets and alleys and nearby park are documented in detail in Lucy’s Way.
When I was born, I came home to a house on the corner of First and Race Streets. A little over 18 years later, my parents moved to the adjacent house next door following my freshman year in college. I was in and out of these homes from the years of 1995-2008, but whenever I branched out, eventually, I found my way home again.
These two houses in this half block radius would be home to some of my darkest days, when the disease of addiction was pulling me so far down that I truly felt I could never claw out. These places were also where I spent some of my earliest, most wonderful days of sobriety.
As I started to move things to the new house recently, I found some of Buddy’s toys hidden in crevices and under furniture and with them the reminder that while he was the only living being to actually pass away in this apartment, I will always equate this place with many other farewells.
Buddy was the most recent loss in my life, coming less than two weeks before I officially published Lucy’s Way, on April 18 this year, Good Friday. But it’s also the home where I lived when my father passed away in 2011. Four years later, in 2015, I spent many nights weeping with Lucy curled up at my side after my mother passed away. And then, in 2020, when I lost Lucy, it became just me and Buddy.
Next door, a multitude of childhood memories are ingrained in the walls, enough to fill a book rather than a blog. Many of those moments were also chronicled in Lucy’s Way, but many, many more still wait to possibly find their way onto the page one day.
But a house is just a structure with walls and a roof, right?
I’ve been frustrated at times with the move. I don’t feel I need to go into details, but it’s mostly been the emotional goodbye. As I’ve grown agitated with a process taking too long or spending more money I didn’t feel I had to spend on some new cost that popped up, I thought about times both before and during my recovery when I would get angry and red in the face and yell and scream in private at no one, with only Lucy around. And every time, she’d hop up from wherever she was and leave the room, even though I wasn’t directing my hostility toward her. When I went to seek her out and apologize she’d always look at me in a questioning way as if to ask, “why do you get angry to begin with?”
It’s a great question, and one that just needs chalked up under the work in progress category. Because in the tenets of Taoism, there is certainly no room for anger.
Looking back, Seasons Change – both living it and writing it – was the build up to this glorious moment, the prelude of all the things that were to come, a reminder that the only constant in our lives is change – both joyous and painful change – and we have the choice to embrace it or fight it or land somewhere in between. And a reminder, now etched into the words of Lucy’s Way, that I could get through whatever change comes my way, changes that at the time seemed huge and insurmountable and now seem little more than a blip on the roadmap of life.
A window is closing, one that figuratively framed highs and lows of my life, and literally framed one of my favorite photos of Buddy and Lucy. I’m glad that so many of the memories are recorded in Lucy’s Way.
Knowing that I’m moving to a house that has a good history with a good family, that makes this parting much easier. Just as that beautiful park down the street where I spent so much time with Lucy was mostly razed for a splash pad makes this change easier. In the end, the only constant we can truly know is change.
Where I’m going, it’s already a home before I even fully move into this house. Just as the one I am leaving behind. Farewell, First Street.
I love reading your blogs. You have an art for writing, I feel as if I am in in a “dream” as I read and I feel the emotions with you. You are embarking on a new, beautiful, journey and I know you will prosper. Lucy would be proud! Congrats Mark