My Life In the Season of Big Zucchini

It's been a big zucchini summer here at this household. Not big as in numerous zucchini, big as in BIG zucchini. The big fat green zeppelins that happen when you don't pick your vegetable patch on the regular, so that all the squash get seedy, tough, and outrageously over-sized. 

I like summer squash. I like the advantage of growing it in your own garden, so you can pick them when they are small, young, and tender. Sauteed in butter and herbs, they are a fast, easy, tasty side dish to all the grilling going on during the season. I like them on the grill too, and as a substitute for noodles in lasagna. 

But these giant squash? Yech. Don't tell me to shred and put them in cake or sweet bread, because zucchini is a savory food only for this girl. Desserts with green vegetables in them? No, thank you. Yes, I have tried them, and I think y'all have gone straight crazy. 

Up until this summer, I've considered it a sign of failure, a sign of even (Lutherans all gasp in judgement) laziness, that I keep missing, and then picking, these big green brutes instead of the tender little lovelies that we prefer to eat. I dutifully go out into the yard with my wire basket, peek under the giant umbrella leaves, and -- "Dang it. Again?!"

At the beginning of the summer I took all of this zucchini-picking failure quite seriously. If I'm going to go to the trouble and expense of gardening, I want to do it well. There is a small window (just shy of three months) where I can supply most of my family's fresh produce needs; I want to optimize that. Coming from a family that has experienced poverty, I hate wasting food. Large zucchini seemed to represent a lot of things to me: poor resource management, inattention, waste, and even ingratitude to the processes of Nature which provide for us. 

But zucchini is a distinct season of the summer. We watch it come along in expectation in early May, when the earth finally warms up enough in Iowa to germinate squash seeds, and in June, while the plants spread out their giant leaves and start to bloom. Come July and August, there are pyramids of squash crowding kitchen counters. The reason for all the jokes about summer squash stuffed in mailboxes, left on neighbors' doorsteps, piled on break-room tables at work is because we know that they are prolific. Sometimes too prolific. We balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. So, so much. And while we are grateful, we are also tasked with it. Peeling it, slicing it, sauteeing it, roasting it, pickling it, tossing it into omelettes, soups, quiches, pasta-- even if we love summer squash, we know it takes up space in our lives, requires work, and sometimes, is just too, too much. 

This summer, big zucchini do not represent laziness, or ingratitude, or even inept gardening. They do, however, still represent overabundance-- a distinct season in our lives. In the last several months our household has seen multiple major appliance failures, major house repair, a car vs. deer accident (property damage only, thank God), and storm damage. We've done several home improvement projects, and have several more that are needed or that we are considering. We have a grandchild we are over the moon for, and love to help care for him and nurture him. We have aging parents who sometimes need support. We are gone multiple weekends in a row, honoring milestones like a son's entrance into pharmacy school, or another son's move into his first home. We have welcomed home a son-in-law who was deployed in the National Guard. We have visited a sister in Georgia, paddled the Boundary Waters with a blended family of menfolk, gone fishing. We survived a school year complicated by the pandemic and are about to embark on a senior year of high school that is looking much the same. We are navigating menopause. We lost an extended family member unexpectedly. We're looking ahead at college enrollments, helping autism spectrum children find their way in the adult world, and empty nesting.

All of these things are piled up on our metaphorical kitchen counter, and we need to process all of it. Slice and dice, cut out the bad parts where we can, create our own recipe out of these ingredients we've been handed, simmer, chew, swallow, and digest. All that growing, celebrating, repairing, nurturing, grieving, planning, sharing of time with people we love, closing one chapter, opening others. A great deal of it is joyous work, and for that we are grateful. A great deal of it is work-work. Labor and grief and frustration and exhaustion and loss and expense and time. So, we balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. It is also so, so much. 

We are in a season of life where things are coming at us fast and thick, both the gifts and the trials. Big zucchini aren't our ideal, but can be expected when we'd rather take care of a grandbaby, or help an adult kid move boxes. They can be expected while we sort through trenching a new water main to our house. They can be expected when we neglect garden work in favor of ceremonies, milestones, funerals, jobs, and much needed rest. 

For that reason, I will make of big zucchini what I can. Some days, that will mean preparing, seasoning, and cooking those parts we like, and enjoying the results. Some times it will mean sharing our overabundance with others that can make better use of big squash than we can in the moment. Some days, it means I will send that big ol' squash sailing over the compost fence and into the pile, so that it can feed some vegetable garden of the future, in another season, where life will assuredly be different than it is now. 

Things I have been doing: 

Enjoying this, this, and this recipe as a way to use up those big zucchini. When I don't, you know, compost them out of sheer lack of time to do anything with them. 

Not reading. But looking at The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain sitting on my end table, and deciding it's a better book for cooler and cozier fall nights. 

Painting buckets of primer and paint on the walls of a basement craft room that we are working on. I'm looking forward to having a permanent home for my sewing machine. 

Acts of Rebellion

I grew up believing that acts of rebellion were large and spectacular and often involved young, extremely idealistic people who smelled like patchouli, belonged to "movements" and crowded public streets to chant and wave signs. I also knew that it often involved violence and destruction. The 1960s were just beginning to hit the history books when I was in high school, and those pages showed things like the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in Vietnam and U.S. cities that convulsed with rage during the "long hot summer of '67."

That, paired with my upbringing, which insisted that I be polite, quiet, cooperative, responsible, and well-behaved, meant that rebellion didn't fit my or anybody else's idea of who I was then.

Now at 51, I'm a whole lot less enchanted with cooperative and well-behaved, but I'm still mostly quiet. Patchouli is one of the worst smells in the world to me, and it's really not in my character to march about with signs and shout about injustice. To be clear, I'm not criticizing those things in other people (well, except for the patchouli. I'm going to criticize that no matter what.)

It's just that my introversion and quiet make me a bad bet for those loud, crowded, and strident demonstrations of resistance. On the other hand, doing nothing is not an option for me in these turbulent, frightening times. Pretending everything is okay is a luxury increasingly fewer people have. Pretending everything is okay is exhausting to an even half-aware soul. Pretending that everything is okay is giving away my own power in situations where what I really want is change.

I decided that my definition of rebellion needed some reframing.

Which is why the photo accompanying this blog post is of my kitchen compost bin. It's an old lidded enamel container that sits to the right of my kitchen sink, and it's where I throw all our plant- and paper-based refuse.

It was a new practice as of this year, to reduce the amount of food waste going to the landfill, to provide fertilizer for our small backyard vegetable garden, and to create a small but self-supporting environmental circle between our table and the soil.

So was buying cotton mesh produce bags for carrying home fresh produce from the grocery (we already use cloth grocery bags), and my switching to solid bar shampoo instead of using bottled, to reduce the amount of plastic our household consumes.

So was turning over a little extra territory in our yard this year, expanding what is already a Monarch Way Station, to continue providing habitat for pollinators-- not just monarchs but other butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps that are so vital to the production of the foods we eat.

So was continuing our experiment in vegetable growing this year, trying out carrots, collard greens, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus for the first time.

In the context of these times, I believe them to be acts of rebellion. Not the sign-waving, marching-down-the-street kind, but the kind that reflects upon one's own behavior, and quietly resolves to do things differently. Differently enough that it subverts the status quo.

Composting is a rebellion against waste.

Reducing my plastic use, even a little bit, is a rebellion against the kind of consumerism that encourages convenience at the expense of the environment.

Planting vegetables and eating what I grow is a rebellion against corporate agriculture, and returns control over the quality and kind of foods I eat to me.

Planting flowers instead of lawn is a rebellion against wide-spread use of the insecticides and herbicides that harm our ecosystems.

Is it perfect? Oh hell no. My zucchini crop failed spectacularly this summer, I still need to grocery shop, I can't avoid all plastic, and I'm not a big enough hippie to go into subsistence farming or veganism (or wear that danged patchouli). Is it enough? Also no. No one person is enough. Is it better than nothing? I think it is, especially if my acts of environmental rebellion, however quiet and small, are being repeated by others across my city, state, nation, and world. That's how the needle moves.

I'm not likely to rebel by protesting. I'm glad other people are out there who do a fantastic, loud, noticeable, sign-waving, yelling, First Amendment with a capital F and a capital A push-back to those who are doing harm. We need that volume right now, for the environment and a long list of other enormous concerns.

The rest of us need to bring our gifts, whatever they are, to an increasingly difficult situation. My gift is growing things, and I can use it to address the threats our environment is facing. For that, I consider myself a rebel.

I am back.

Or rather, I never left.

I've always been here, but for a while there life took me so swiftly down the road, both in good ways and hard ways, that it was difficult for me to stop and reflect, and blogging fell way down the priority list.

The blog became somewhat of a conundrum. I missed it terribly; but the more I missed it, the more I worried about starting again. Fearing what I want has always been a good way for me to prolong a decision to the point of agony (and that's why I'm such fun at parties).

So. I'm sliding back into blogging with this post. Just like that, no ta-DAH! Because I don't really have much ta-DAH! in me even on the best days. But leaving this blog for so long has meant ignoring some promises that I made to people in my life, and to myself, and it's time for me to own up on the scared part so I can just maybe have the what-I-want part.

Still, to mark the occasion, I've done a few things. I've made the blog a little cleaner looking, less cluttered, and in colors I like. I designed a new header, and it's a symbolic change. I've always mentally thought of the title of this blog "On the Doorstep" as meaning the front door. The entrance. The threshold.

But my priorities in life have shifted to being about the other doorstep-- the one at the back of the house, where we really live, where the people we really love come and go. So the photo is of my backyard patio and screen porch doorstep. A deliberately not-perfect photo-- there are cans of bug spray in the window and a stack of plastic plant pots that need to be put away. Because perfect is the enemy of good, and I'd really like to concentrate more on the good than the perfect here. Here the string lights work their twinkly magic over the table that Tom build for our family, and I over-indulge my taste for potted plants and random bits of old stuff.

I will have a number of wobbly posts until I have found my stride again. I haven't quite decided whether I will try to catch reader up in what I've been up to since my last post, or whether I'll just go on from here, or whether I'll leap around like a badly written TV series. I will undoubtedly have more amateurish photos, non-regular posting schedules, and ideas that don't quite hang together. But I hope it makes for good reading, just the same. It's good to be back.

Start Writing

When I worked for a newspaper, the editor-in-chief was a kind, bespectacled man, but with a sort of roll-up-your-shirtsleeves attitude toward writing. While he firmly believed good print journalism can be both literary art form and an act of service to society, he also had a small and sometimes unruly newsroom of reporters he had to herd toward a press deadline every day.

News journalism has a standard form they call the inverted pyramid; there's a lead (spelled "lede") sentence containing the most newsworthy priority piece of information. Then other important and supporting details come next. Then, background details that help flesh out a more complete picture.

My problem as a reporter was that my mind did not and does not work that way. It does a lot of sorting of small details first, and then builds a picture of an entire situation. I'm not looking at the time of day, I'm looking at the back of the clock, and noticing how all the gears turn. I'd often return to the paper after interviews, research, and events with such a disorganized swirl in my head that I'd pace the larger circle of the first floor, through the coatroom, through the front office, back through the newsroom and loop through the print shop, restlessly, trying to wrangle my lede into place mentally.

The ticking deadline clock usually caught up with me. "Start writing," Editor would say, more advice than command. And so I would know that regardless of the state of my thoughts, it was time to pour the coffee, get my ass in the chair, and get something to the copy editors before they became volatile.

While his words were primarily about meeting the demands of the news cycle, it also put a simple, two-word directive on the circular conundrum of my writing life. I want to write words that have order and meaning.  But I also depend on words to help me find order and meaning. I cannot seem to have both at once, so I'm both afraid to start (where is the meaning?), but afraid if I don't I will never find it or the right, beautiful, true words.

That conundrum has had me stuck in place for months, both professionally (I still write for a living, though not for a newspaper), and personally. I'm supposed to love this. This is supposed to be who I am. But for the longest time, writing has been an act of pacing the perimeter of the room. For the longest time, I forgot the wisdom of "start writing."

I'm trying to remember it now. I'm trying to put my finger down on a place in that circular conundrum, and write forward toward meaning, rather than trying to pluck all the right words from the swirl of chaos, both good and bad, that life presents to me.

Stay tuned. Because my ass is in the chair.

The 'Laundry Basket of Home Improvement Updates' Post

It's not that I've been holding back on my blog readers, exactly, but there's a point at which you're so busy you can't put down the paint brush/nailer/shovel to write about what you're doing. I suppose "too much to write about" is a good problem to have, but it does tend to pile up like baskets of clean laundry. Sooner or later you feel guilty that you haven't gotten around to folding it and putting it away. So this post is a folding and putting away of home improvement news, a big update with lots of things to offer, including sunflowers at the beginning and at the end. Ready?

There have been a lot of exterior home improvements checked off the list in the last few months and even more going back almost a year. I mean A LOT. As in punch-drunk with exhaustion and still juggling paint brushes, power tools, sunscreen, and wasp spray a lot.

Well, at least I am. The exhausted part, anyway. Boyfriend Tom is one of those cheerfully energetic people who can work their way through a long DIY to-do list with amazing speed. That's mostly awesome. But on the days where I think I might need a nap, or a beer, or some time for my anxiety-predisposed brain to hyper-analyze the situation, he keeps the table-saw running, and pretty soon I've got another paint project to follow up with.

Except for one thing: the roof. That we hired done. It was well overdue; it was past 20 years old and while I had not had any problems with it yet, I didn't want to wait until I did. Here's a before, from June of last year:

Not only was it looking pretty tired and worn out, it was a pale gray that didn't really "go" with the warm red/browns of the brick foundation and chimney So we picked out shingles that we hoped would pull the entire exterior together. Here's tear-off day. The house is old enough the roof was decked with boards rather than sheeting. Still sound, after all these years!

Here is the finished roof: 

Not shown is a new gutter and downspout system which went in a few days later, routed in a different direction to address some damp basement issues we'd been having. While it has been too dry of a summer to really say for certain that it solved the problem completely, our foundation stayed dry through the last two flash-flood level rains that we have had, which makes us hopeful.

It is embarrassing to admit how long exterior painting has gone on around here. Seasons. Years, even. Too long. That's totally on me, but I'm going to plead single parenthood. But guess what? It's done! (hugs herself, giggles maniacally)

Here's a "getting close" photo of the south (driveway) side of the house.

We had to borrow a longer ladder to get to the peaky-peak of the gable.

And here's the back of the house, a screen-porch, kitchen, attic bedroom shot:

But we are not done with exterior home improvement yet. Wait, there's more!

Tom, with help from me, and various of our boys at various times, built a fence across our back property line.

We "stole" the design from a fence in a neighborhood where we like to walk. Here's some during shots. We also had the yard all torn up, since we were not only digging post holes, but planning a garden bed.

Here it is finished. We plan to let it weather. I like the silvery gray of weathered wood with garden greenery and flowers. 

Here is what my backyard neighbor sees. I think she was as tired of the peeling pink paint as I was, and now we have our backside (ahem) all spanking new. 

But wait, there's more!

A vegetable bed!

This was my son Grant's gift of labor to me while he lived at home between college and the start of his new job. It was an enormous undertaking, and Tom is still hauling dirt for it, since it has settled some since we first filled it.

Here's what it looked like yesterday evening.

The bed was done in the last weeks of May. We got a late start on the actual gardening part, but we put in tomatoes, peppers,  and summer squash, and we've had a decent amount of produce considering the season was shortened on the front end. The tomatoes caught up pretty admirably.

And here's the fence row again, now in late August:

I got a packet of sunflower seeds that said it was mixed varieties 4-6 ft in height, to fill in some space quickly in a flower bed that was just getting started with new perennials.  Um, yeah. Right now we seem to be in the 5-8 ft. range with these babies, and no end in sight. There's a rose bush hidden in there somewhere, believe it or not. The rose will survive the shade in the short term and I don't plan to plant any annuals that are quite so large next year. But they're impressive, aren't they?

While Tom has taken the lead on the outside projects shared here, I've been working on the inside of the house this summer. I'll share some of those with readers soon. It's been a busy year!

A Floral Promise

Hello, blog friends!

It's been awhile. Too long, in fact.

I'll be getting back to (semi-) regular entries here soon. Because I need to. This blog is one of the few places in the world that is exclusively my creative space, and I've been neglecting that part of me (and this blog!) for a little too long to be comfortable with it.

So I'm working on some new material, some new photos, and some news to share. But in the meantime, here's some spring flowers from just outside our doorstep to enjoy. I'll be back here soon. I've missed this place!

A Short Note to Certain Women Concerned About the State of my Underpants

A short note to certain women concerned about the state of my underpants--

It's been brought to my attention often in recent months by women both near to me and from afar on the internets that I need to "just get over it, and put on your big girl panties."

I just wanted to let everyone know that yes, I do have big girl panties. Several pairs, as a matter of fact.

I got my very first pair of junior big girl panties (very like a training bra, I suppose) for having divorced parents and growing up in a low-income single-parent family.

I'd estimate that I graduated to my first full on, total ass-coverage big girl panties when I was still a teenager, paying my way through college one part-time job paycheck at a time in exchange for a full load of university classes.

Over my lifetime, I've collected quite a few big girl panties in the drawer, and at middle age I can claim I've been wearing many of them longer than some of you have even walked this earth. Paying bills and cleaning up the messes. Jobs with long hours, low pay, and bad bosses. Mortgage payments. Taxes. Motherhood. Babies who were born. Babies who died before they were born. C-section scars. Post-partum depression. Children with disabilities. Divorce. Deaths of people I loved with my whole heart. Stuff that isn't even anybody's business.

Some of those panties fell to the bottom of the drawer and I don't have to wear' em much anymore. That's a good thing. Some of them just keep coming to the top of the pile, because, well, sometimes you gotta wear 'em till you wear 'em out. Some of these old worn out knickers I'm even proud of, because I know they mean I survived something worthwhile.

So given the fact I have so many, how in the fruit of anyone's loom did anybody think I'd leave the house without any on?

I didn't.

Now, I'm not talking about my underwear in a public place like a blog post just to show off. And definitely not to complain. Because I believe my entire collection of big girl panties is nothing special. My point is that we as women, all women, have 'em, because nobody's ass escapes living a life. I'd guess that my collection of big girl panties looks a lot like many other women's, but I also know that a lot of women's big girl panty wardrobes are different. Some have a lot more pairs, for one thing, and some of those underpants are definitely a lot more uncomfortable or even painful to wear than what I've had to deal with. Some women have big girl panties we wouldn't even guess they own, but they've got 'em, shoved down in a corner of the drawer where they won't be seen if anyone goes snooping. Every woman has big girl panties they bought all on their own, on purpose or by mistake, and they've had a few (or many) given to them that they had to put on whether they liked it or not. Not a single one of us escapes having a drawer of big girl panties, whether they came to us by choice or by chance.

So when approximately a million or so women (and a whole lotta men too) all over the country take the trouble and time out of their busy underwear-folding schedule--WHATEVER kind of underwear that happens to be--to exercise their First Amendment rights "peaceably to assemble, and petition the government for redress of grievances" (That's the foundation garment called the Constitution, y'all), you're gonna tell them it's time to put their big girl panties on? Well bless your heart and thanks for caring. How in the hell did you think they all got dressed that morning? Same as I did. Same as you did. Same as we all did. Big girl panties first. Which is why labeling another woman's experience as childish, at that event or at any other time, just in order to feel validated about the contents of your own and different pile of personal laundry, is very little girl itself. Very grade school pee-pee pants, indeed.

It should go without saying that my big girl panties have been on, sturdy, and hitched way up, this whole time, before anyone decided to make it their business. Unless it's really hot outside, and I'm just out lounging on the back patio. Then I'm probably going commando and drinking bourbon. Which maybe some folks should try sometime, instead of being all uptight about the state of someone else's underwear drawer that they've never seen anyhow.

Good day, ladies.

A Note to the Republic, for which I Stand.

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.” 

― Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

I hardly know where to begin, even with Madeleine's very good quote considered. Because I've spent the last six weeks trying to decide if this blog should stand as a refuge from every ugly thing that's happened since the national election, or not. Refuge is a necessary thing when bad news seems to permeate an increasingly out-of-control world. We need to be able to get distance to think, gather strength, comfort ourselves with the familiar and the routine. When does it become escapism, willful ignoring, closing the door on those civic duties to which we are called, and to fellow citizens who need our voices? I do not know. I only know that increasingly, the answer to those questions may become very, very important. So while this blog has been a personal narrative about me and my home life, I couldn't pretend that the last months of our national discourse hasn't had me deeply worried. I would like this place to be as it always has, and if that's a refuge to me or others, that's a good thing. But I also don't want it to be a bubble. Because bubbles are fragile, and I refuse to be that. So here I am, struggling through this post as I've struggled through the last months of this politically grim year.

Right now, I am operating from these two positions.

1. I am repossessing patriot as a word that defines me, because I am. I am a patriot. I love my country, and I believe in the ideals towards which we have been imperfectly and at times violently struggling for well over two centuries. I believe that at all times, that means criticizing the hell out of it--where it's failed, where the people who claim to lead it have failed, when its citizens are failing to hold its government accountable. Everyone from Thomas Jefferson two hundred years ago down to the anonymous protester on the street corner yesterday has this right and responsibility. To the people who have said to me in the past months "if you don't like it, you can just leave....": Fuck no, I'm not leaving. My people have been in various ways always here (native peoples), since 1749 (Irish Protestants escaping religious violence in Belfast), or here since the 1880s (Germans living in the Ukraine, fleeing Russian oppression). My family members fought wars on this soil and abroad to defend this country's ideals. I am not going. I am not going to be quiet. 

2. I'm going to continue to love the people I love. Only I'm gonna do it louder. My circle of family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors includes people who don't think like me, believe like me, vote like me, or look like me. I think that's pretty well the whole point. This country has never, ever, in its entire history, been just one story about one kind of people who are exactly alike. That this republic is constructed of millions of individual stories, that they can encompass a broad range of human experience and thought, and still come together under one ideal, "We the People"-- is not just our struggle (and it has been) but it has also been our triumph when we get it right. And we do, often enough, get it right. That is worth fighting for. Right now, loving (in all the ways we define it) the people who are not just like me may not be only an act of love. It will be an act of solidarity. It will be an act of protection. It will be at times an act of civil protest. So I'm going to love. Out loud. Hard.

Stay and speak. Love loudly. That's what I have right now. I hope it is enough. I hope it is enough for all of us. 

Housiversary Five

It seems millennia ago that I signed the papers on this place. But on June 10, 2011, this house, which I like to call Ruth (after its first owner) became mine. And I suppose I became hers, too.

We needed each other. She'd suffered about 20 years of neglect from former owners,  and was about to be relegated to a rental property when I scooped her off the market. As for me, I was about a year and a half post-divorce, only just past the Crazy with Emotion, Anger, and Remorse Stage. It was time to move on. It was time to start a new life in earnest. My four boys and I moved in with a lot of second-hand furniture, cleaning and paint supplies, and carpet-cutters.

It's probably pretty telling that I'm writing this post a day later than the actual housiversary, I'm taking periodic breaks to help my love maneuver drywall sheets up the stairs to the attic bonus room we're working on, I've got to make a trip to the hardware store before it closes tonight, and I'm thinking I need to get a fresh paint brush for the next project.

Meaning, I'm still in the thick of it. It's not giving me much time for reflection, no matter how much I'd like to write a post pondering the significance of this place to me, how it's sheltered my children, worked itself into the very marrow of my bones, how it's even framed the course of my new relationship. It's all been very much about love, but also self-doubt, hard work, bills, and taking out the trash again and again. Somewhere in there a relationship happened, but instead of with a person it is with a home and garden that seem to mean more to me with each passing year, despite the struggle. That makes it sound like a marriage. It sort of is.

Because it's the five-year mark and we've had some real whopper projects lately, I've been taking some time to look back so that I can fully appreciate what we've accomplished. It's easy to feel lost in the incremental gains and forget that they add up to something.

Before:

After:

Before:

After: 

Before: 

After (but not done): 

Before (or during) : 

After:

Before:

After: 

2011: 

2016: 

2017? Beyond? I can't wait to see what happens.

Houses are for New Beginnings

Houses are constructed for new beginnings. We inhabit them physically. But houses, the really special ones, end up inhabiting us as well. They stand for things in our heart.

I believe this house was special from the beginning, before I knew it existed, before I was born. It was a wedding present in 1939 from a carpenter father named Hans to his newly married daughter Ruth. It became the gift-box that held her marriage and family life with three sons.

A few families and owners and decades later, the house became mine. 

Part of the reason I named my blog 'On the Doorstep' is because it represented that moment when a symbolic door swings open on a new life. I'd already spent a blurred and unhappy year in a downtown flat in the post-divorce recovery phase. This house was the beginning of the better and happily ever-after.

That's the beautiful part of the story. The reality part was a little more complicated.

It was a lot of damned hard work. With not a whole lot of money to do it with. 

In the nearly five years I've lived here, we've made a lot of progress-- torn up carpet, cleaned and painted, repaired windows and doors. But the list was tremendously long and the longer I lived here, the more I realized this was a project of years, not months.

As I mentioned in my New Year's eve post, 2015 was a year with some progress, but more things stalled out than got done. I felt bad about that.

Every weekend I was coming home and facing a full docket of the usual single parent things: dirty laundry, dirty bathrooms, errands and grocery shopping. I had a kid with special education needs who was having a pretty rotten year through no fault of his own, and he needed fully involved parenting. And then there were my three other kids, who also needed their mom. I won't try to put a pretty spin on last year. It was exhausting and anxiety-ridden, I felt overwhelmed and resentful, and I survived more than I conquered.

But to make sure that I am not turning this into some sort of victim saga, I also had plenty of things these last five years I enjoy, like sharing family meals and baking and travel and photography and writing. They were things that I wasn't willing to give up just so every spare second of my week could be dedicated to progress on the house. I wanted it, but not so bad that I wanted to give up those other parts of my life.

After a few years at this, I was beginning to spend some long hours thinking about exactly what I was getting out of this experience. It was hard to admit that while I still loved the house as much, or perhaps even more, than I ever did, I wasn't much loving the work it entailed. I was mad at myself for getting sold on the fairy tale of old house dreams and not being up to challenge of the reality. I couldn't figure out how to be true to my love for this house and still have room in my life for everything that had to fit into it.

It wasn't as though I already had a lot of these skills. Every last thing seemed like it was a new learning experience, often with the prospect of purchasing new (and expensive) tools I didn't already have. In an old house where routine repairs often quickly become complicated, this wasn't just an occasional thing, it was every damn thing I tried to do.

I'm not actually sure at this point whether I discovered I wasn't really as interested in teaching myself DIY as I thought I was, or whether I was just too overwhelmed by the steepness of the learning curve to cope, or just had too many things on my plate as a single mom to take this on. Probably a little of all of them? Anyway, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a failure.

And into this situation walked Tom, the man I started dating in October.

Tom is handy in many of the trades, and this house just so happens to need a lot of help in many of those trades. So being a both a guy handy in the trades and a profoundly good-hearted person, he offered his help.

And I balked. I was too territorial to accept.

That's totally not his fault.

I ended up picking the least emotionally fraught project I could think of to do while I sorted out the reasons why I sat down in the middle of the road on the idea of someone, an increasingly important someone, helping me.

So, we installed a garage entry door. It went well, regardless of my misgivings. 

In the meantime, I figured out the house had not only come to represent my new life, it also had come to represent my independence. I don't know when that happened, honestly. But it burned fierce in me for so long, I had equated being independent with being single.

That was the problem. Because, well, I'm not single anymore. I'm in the middle of "an experiment of we" for the foreseeable future.

I'm in the process of rethinking what independence means to me now-- being capable, open-hearted, resilient in a house full of people I care about-- and trying to leave behind what it no longer means--me, alone with this house, struggling. That rethinking is taking some time because, well, I'm me, and I think about that kind of stuff a lot. Considering the gifts of this relationship, I believe it's well worth doing.

Besides, it's just a new beginning. Again. Life is like that, isn't it? And this house has seen a few of them. I think it'll handle this one just fine.

Burying the Lede (Or How I Started Dating Again)

In journalism, "burying the lede" is not putting the most important point of the news in the first sentence of a story.

So. Fine. I won't bury the lede. I'll just get it out there right in front: I started dating someone. I think he's awesome. He's a ginger with a handsome beard. We are still in the giddy stage. We are probably nauseating when we're together. Just ask our children.

There.

I didn't (and don't, literally as I'm writing this) know how to tell the blog world.

Except for a handful of posts about parenting or family life, I haven't been really big on sharing personal stuff on the blog.

I'd like to say that's because I'm all noble and sensitive and other people's lives are involved and I have to respect their privacy and (insert the ethics of that whole ball of wax here). Sometimes that's very true, but in this case it's highly fragrant horse shit. Probably. I think I'm just a big chicken. I'd rather talk about garage door replacements than (gulp) feelings. Gross.

Feelings about a boy? Even grosser.

I'll just look down at my own feet and blush while I talk. 

I hadn't dated for close to two and a half years. That was partly a conscious decision and partly easy-as-falling-off-a-log, because when you're a woman in your late forties and have a family to raise, the dating world doesn't exactly feel the tragic loss of you and come begging for you back.

If you're my age and the only free time you have is spent at the grocery store and in the school pick-up drive, one is not running into a ton of eligible dudes. Or any. If I had any additional free time, I didn't want an awkward coffee with a total stranger. I wanted a nap. Secondly, I knew myself well enough to realize my self-esteem, however sturdy, wasn't sturdy enough for the creepy and harsh evaluations that happen on dating websites.

Between not having anyone ask me out (see? Nobody's interested) and feeling just fine without anyone in my life (see? I don't need anybody), it seemed easy enough to just kick the idea of dating again on down the road. Indefinitely.

But being single and totally independent was beginning to be not so much a status as it was becoming an identity. An entrenched one. Maybe even a permanent one.

Why? I don't have a good answer. Maybe I felt like I had something to prove, that I was a Tough Girl, and could Handle My Life. That was the glossy magazine version. But maybe it was also part of keeping my hands so tightly on the steering wheel of my life that no new directions--meaning risky, uncontrollable, unforeseeable directions-- were possible. I'd decided this was how my life was going to be. It was predictable and safe. Deep down, I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that.

Somewhere in the middle of all that emotional toughness/caution and October a guy named Tom asked me out. Without really thinking about it much one way or the other, I said yes.

I surprised myself more than I can really explain. Now, three months later, I am still dating the cute red-haired boy from homeroom class.

We've known each other a long time. Thirty-six years. Because our school assigned students to the same homeroom for the entirety of junior high, Tom and I spent time together every single day for three years beginning when we were twelve and thirteen years old.

It would make for a ridiculously adorable story if we held hands under the desks back then, or had a crush on each other, or something. But nope. We did not. We were homeroom classmates, friendly and good-natured ones. That was it.

In high school we had separate circles of friends and never had class together; we lost touch completely after graduation, only connecting again decades later on Facebook. Even then it remained platonic for many years, until now.

My memory of him from our youth is one of kindness, dependability, and personal integrity-- all the things that didn't seem to hold much interest when I was in high school and dating boys who were mainly about cigarettes, rusted-out Camaros, the Scorpions, and rebellion.

It was profoundly reassuring to rediscover those better traits in the grown man so many years later. Instead of a single awkward coffee with a total stranger, it has been one date after another where laughter and holding hands seem completely natural.

Just don't think for a minute this is a fairy tale, though. He's red-haired, and I'm Irish. We are passionate. About things like how much dishwasher soap is enough, apparently.

The relationship is clearly already in crisis. Or it's Wednesday. 

Perhaps the more realistic photo from that first selfie session is this one. I don't remember exactly what he'd just said, but it was equal parts funny.....and exasperating. I'm not sure whether I'm going to slug him in the arm but either way I have to stop laughing first, and he's obviously quite pleased with himself no matter what I decide.

In that respect, maybe it isn't so much different than junior high. It just took us 36 years to notice each other. But in the end that part doesn't matter so much. It has been worth the wait.