I’m sitting in the office/schoolroom drinking coffee at 6 am, listening to the sounds of the city coming alive on a summer Saturday. The birds are chirping on the wires across the street. The neighbor’s HUGE pink crepe myrtle is starting to bloom and when I see the newspaper man drive down the alley, it hits me:
I really do love living in this city and this neighborhood.
I’ve lived here before, in fact this house is the third house I’ve lived in in this neighborhood, and there is something about this geography that says to me “This is your place.”
It’s funny. For the five years after we married we had a place with 12 acres, chickens, a big garden, energy efficient design and many things that I think well of, yet it never fully fit. We were 20 minutes from the downtown of a good sized town, I could see the neighbor’s houses through the woods and I felt isolated. Don’t get me wrong, I think there was work there for us to do, personal work and work within the community we were part of, but somehow I never fully resonated with that place.
Coming here was a coming home for me in many ways and not just because I know a lot of the people here. Walking these streets has always been, not restful exactly, but something that fills up a missing piece. I go out my front door and there are people and places that fit.
I come into the house and I see a remaking of the world in house and yard that is manageable for me. That may well be part of it (I am thinking this out as I write).? Our old place was simply too big, for me to really feel as if I even kept up with the maintenance let alone brought order from chaos, and beauty from entropy.? Here the spaces are smaller, yet to me they have so much more potential.? There I could plant rows of garden plants and their impact was swallowed up in the grass, and the bushes and trees. Here the placing of one plant effects the growth and aesthetic of the whole.
That’s part of the reason I am constantly organizing and reorganizing the rooms in this house. The layout and our use of it means that there is nowhere? things can be safely stacked up and not effect the feel and look of the place. At our old place this was not true, things could accumulate (and did) in the basement and the sheds.
All this to say, I’m not sure if I’m really a city girl, but I do know that for this time, this place is surely the place that I fit.
“The lines for me have fallen in pleasant places.”