Sure. All that in our new, ideal home, with a new ideal ME!
I exaggerate only a little, and----perhaps fortunately----not one person made a serious inquiry about our house here in town while we had it up for sale for six weeks before we decided, almost simultaneously, that we aren't going anywhere right now, that we're happy where we are, that we cannot afford a farm!
Yet as I dove in, I saw myself acting (again) as if life is merely a series of questions answered with confident finality and accompanying problems resolutely solved while ticking them off the checklist (as I brush my hands together afterward and let out a loud sigh of relief: "So glad that's taken care of!").
Home has been a kind of trigger point for me for many years (not to mention the concept of ideal), which has hurt me (nothing is ever perfect) and helped me (by giving me a wall to hit my head against; yes, my head is hard).
Considering what home has meant to me thus far allows me to see my propensity for living in my head, for dreaming my life away. . . for enjoying the thought of something more than its reality. I think that makes me somewhat of a voyeur. I like reading about people who climb mountains and work hard at being exotically independent, yet I seem not to have the energy or will to actually accomplish all of that myself because I also like to feel free and sometimes to travel at a moment's notice (and who would care for all those animals?).
Yes, I was told many times growing up that I like to have my cake and eat it, too. To continue the diving metaphor, just picture me face down in a cake (chocolate, preferably).
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| The photograph shows an embroidery project I completed while impatiently waiting for my only child to be born when I was 25 (1979) and imagining an ideal home, along with a decades-later mosaic glass version of the same scene, and a little needlework house that my grandmother sewed and gave to me. |
