And then, wonder of wonders, those earrings end up the ones you always reach for on an evening when you want to feel like a glossy ad come to life; the chameleon garment transforms itself yet again to become your closest companion every night between October and March, because it alone warms you enough to sit up in bed and read.
So it was with the gift I’m still unwrapping; well, it is rather large.
One day in late July, a year and a half ago, my husband left, never to return. Eight months later, a real estate agent had staked a blue and white sign at the end of our driveway, and the unexpected sight of it was a punch right to the heart.
This house, which we had lived in (and worked to keep standing) for seven years, was my waking dream. It was the only home our son had ever known. Now someone else was to wake in it and go down to the kitchen to watch the morning mist hanging silent over the pond beyond the barn through the picture window; come fall, the wall of trees on the distant ridge draw a new chalk pastel every day as if for the occupants of this house alone. It seemed intolerable. As did the work, now undertaken alone, of packing, cleaning, and staging this regal old Victorian in order to appeal to someone who would, the broker hoped, buy it out from under us.
Appeal it did: a month on the market, and bang!—sold. We would be moving July 1.
Oh, and did I mention we had nowhere to go? I had looked and looked for a house to buy with my half of the proceeds, but nothing was right; nothing, in fact, except the house I never wanted to leave in the first place. The desperation mounted as I packed, sent off half our possessions to storage: where would we go, my son and my dog and me? It felt like nothing so much as preparing for a burial—I happen not to believe in an afterlife, alas—and then, two weeks before we had to leave (a kind friend had at last located a rental house we could take), I learned my ex had bought a new home and was throwing himself a housewarming party. The subject line of my hurt and perplexed e-mails to friends read, “Dancing on Our Grave.”
When everyone clapped me on the back then, and pronounced us “so lucky” to have sold the house in a dour market, it felt anything but lucky: cruel, sad, yes, but not lucky. And now we were to go to a rental: small, devoid of views, dog-unsafe, most of all not my own. “But it gives you time to learn where you really want to go,” friends said. “You really need to move on from your past; you will feel better when you have left that house of memories.”
I resisted, oh, how I resisted the truth of their words. But by winter I could not. I had to admit it was indeed an incredible stroke of luck that the house had sold just then: another couple of months and the demons of real estate would have held us captive. And then I would not be holding the gift I have in my hands: the bank book to fund a future dream in the form of the house whose price, I imagine, continues to descend into the precincts of my reach.
I do not know where it is, exactly. But darn if my friends weren’t right again: this temporary address has taught me that my new home will not be here, near the place I used to live. I find myself yearning for the mountains (and for a different school district). I no longer think endlessly about that house of the past, its charms, our parties, my gardens. That is because in my head I am now building the house of my future, an even lovelier place, filled with hope and surprise and new soil to turn; the one I would not get to have if I had not been so lucky. Or will be soon. Once I tear off the last of this paper and ribbon.
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