Water, Water Everywhere? Not Here!

December 9, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I happened to catch a part of the news yesterday where they were talking about the drought in California, and how some communities were limiting the amount of water a person could use. One man, determined to keep his foliage alive, showed the newscaster the fifty-gallon containers where he collected and stored rain water. I just glossed over that bit about his collecting rain water because I was thinking of myself and wondering about the wisdom of putting in grass during a drought year.

I’m not in California, and there are no restrictions here, at least not yet. The mountains are getting some snow, so there might not be any restrictions, but I’ve always been water conscious, so I do feel a bit guilty about the grass. Still, if a thousand square feet of lawn is my worst offense against conservation, then I’m doing pretty good. In fact, until recently, I have never in my entire life used even half the water I paid for every month, so I’m just sort of evening things out.

I didn’t think anything more about the fellow collecting rain water until the early morning hours when I suddenly awoke, wondering where he was getting so much rain water in a drought. I mean, here in my corner of the world, we haven’t had any moisture for months, not even a cupful let alone gallons.

I finally was able to put the rain-collection conundrum aside and fall back asleep, but apparently, I didn’t forget it because here I am talking about it.

It did seem odd to me, though, that someone could brag about collecting rain water. If people here were to collect rain water, they dare not mention it because it’s illegal to collect rain water in Colorado. (Colorado is the only state with a ban on rain barrels, and is only one of four states where rain harvesting is illegal.) I actually know someone who got cited for collecting rain water.

The theory behind the ban on collecting water is that any rain water you collect could affect the water rights of others and also could disrupt ecosystems because any water you collect won’t go into nearby streams, rivers, and other bodies of water. Seems specious to me. I mean, if I collect rain water to water my foliage, then all I am doing is collecting water from one part of my yard and directing it to another. I can’t see that it makes any difference what I do with the water that falls on my property — it’s still going to end up where it would have ended up anyway. Come to think of it, isn’t that what rain gutters do? Collect the rain that falls on the roof and direct it elsewhere? So why aren’t rain gutters illegal?

Despite the ban, some people do collect small pans of rainwater to water their indoor plants (making sure the pan isn’t visible from the street), but I don’t even do that small bit of collecting. It has nothing to do with illegality, and everything to do with laziness. It seems like a lot of work to me.

For the next few days, at least, I won’t have to feel guilty about wasting water on my lawn because it will be too cold to water, and in a day or two there is a vague chance of some precipitation. Hmm. Just thought of something. Why should I feel guilty at all? If it’s illegal to collect rain water because it prevents water from draining into rivers and ponds, then shouldn’t watering my lawn be a good thing since it’s putting the water back where it belongs?

That question, too, will probably wake me in the early morning hours. Oh, well. Who needs sleep?

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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A Day to Celebrate

November 25, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Despite the controversy surrounding Thanksgiving in the United States — people say that it celebrates colonialism, brutality, genocide, epidemics, and slavery — it’s still a day of celebration for most of us. We don’t celebrate the mythical origins of the holiday, we merely take the day as it is presented to us — a day of being thankful, of being grateful for the good in our lives.

And truly, that is a wonderful thing — people getting together to celebrate thankfulness.

Languages evolve over time, meanings evolve, holidays evolve. What a holiday once meant, it no longer does. (In fact, the word “holiday” no longer means what it once did; it’s come a long way from the original “holy day.”) Just look at Halloween. It means something different to everyone, from the most religious to the most profane, and yet, there it is.

Thanksgiving is turning out to be the same. For most of us, the story of the first Thanksgiving has no meaning. We are newcomers. (I am a second generation American. The woman I spent the day with is a naturalized citizen.) And so we create our own traditions layered upon the older traditions.

I had no intention of getting into all this even to the extent that I did, but I wanted to point out that despite its mythical and self-serving origins, Thanksgiving is still an important day. Though come to think of it, I don’t need to have a day set aside to remind me to give thanks. Every time I look around my house or meander the paths in my yard, I give thanks for what life has offered me.

Today I did have a special reason to be thankful. A friend spent the day with me, and we feasted both on food and good conversation.

And that, too, is worth celebrating.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Settling In, Not Setting Out

November 18, 2021 — Pat Bertram

A blog I wrote the other day reminded me of one I’d written a long time ago called “The Importance of Being Important,” and I wanted to quote from that old post. I never did find the post; apparently, I had planned to write it, had written the title down on a list of blog topics that eventually got thrown away, and then I forgot all about it. I have no idea what I wanted to say about why we need to be important, but at one time, the idea must have been important to me.

I do think we humans have a need to feel important — to ourselves, if no one else. Importance could be tied in with a need for purpose, for being needed, for feeling that life does mean something, because feeling as if we aren’t important in the scheme of life is a crushing burden.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. In searching for that non-existent post in my archives, I came across essay after essay about my dreams for an epic adventure, plans for such an adventure, preparation for such an adventure, as well as actually setting out on various ventures. It struck me how different my life is now, and how different I am. Instead of setting out to experience more of the world, I am settling in to a world of my own making.

Even if it’s not actually a world I am making, it’s definitely a home — a place of refuge, a place where I belong, and most especially, a place that connects me to the rest of the world. In that respect, it is a way of experiencing more of the world, or at least experiencing the world in a different manner.

After Jeff died, I was afraid of settling down. Since I was well aware of my penchant for being a quasi-hermit (though it’s possible it’s more laziness than an actual penchant because sometimes it takes too much energy to be social), I feared that in settling, I would become a crazy cat lady (sans cats, of course, since I don’t want that much responsibility) and that when my expiration date came, weeks would go by before anyone would know I was gone. Luckily, I have neighbors who keep an eye out for me, and anyway, the role of crazy cat person in this neighborhood is already taken by a man who lives across the street.

[If I ever do write my small-town novel, there are certainly plenty of archetypes to choose from — the aforementioned crazy cat person; the hoarder who won’t let anyone in his house; the neighborhood talker; a generous and civic-minded man and his greedy slumlord brother; the tireless club woman who is active in just about every organization in town; the neighborhood drug dealer and thief. Except for the clubwoman, all the characters are men, which puts a bit of spin on the archetypes.]

Until the Bob issue, I did a good job of finding people to socialize with, but oddly, it’s my place itself that makes me feel as if I am settling in (which to me means taking an active interest in making a comfortable life for myself) rather than settling down (which to me connotes staidness and passively accepting the status quo).

The place seems almost like a presence in my life, as if it wraps itself around me in a comforting way. (I’m laughing here. That sounds almost like the premise of a horror story rather than a pleasant feeling, and perhaps, that’s how crazy old ladies living alone become crazy.)

It’s still early days, of course. I have been here less than three years, and I am just now beginning my journey into elderliness, so who knows how the experience of settling in will turn out. But so far, although I sometimes miss the excitement of setting out, settling in has been good for me.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in Adventure, dealing with old age, home, life. Tags: , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Righteous Exhaustion

November 9, 2021 — Pat Bertram

With all the work I’ve been doing to landscape my yard, as well as tracking in dirt into the house via my shoes (even though I leave them at the door, the dirt seems to spread throughout the house), I’d pretty much given up housework as a lost cause. Well, today, that cause ceased to be lost and instead became found. And ai yai yai, what a task!

I hadn’t actually planned to clean the house, but I have been in the habit of doing something physical in the mornings. It was too cold to go outside and sitting down to read so early in the day smacked of wanton idleness, so I decided to get rid of the worst of the dust. Well, one thing led to another, and two hours later, I was still working.

This is a small house, and I have various modern cleaning tools at my disposal, so it shouldn’t have taken me very long, but the place needed a thorough cleaning. Apparently, I stopped seeing the dust on the flat surfaces and building up in the corners. Or more to the point, I didn’t want to see because there was nothing I could do (or wanted to do) about it since I was exhausted from my outside activities.

And now I’m exhausted from inside activities.

To be honest, I think all the digging and planting I’ve been doing were easier than cleaning house. Admittedly, everything is brighter now without dust dulling floors and furniture, but still, it was hard work. Now that most of the outside chores are done — only watering my newly sodded lawn and eventually sowing wildflower seeds remain — I should be able to go back to playing house more frequently rather than working at it as I did today.

Wait . . . I just thought of another outside chore I will have to begin doing as soon as the leaves on the neighbors’ trees are gone — blowing leaves off the ornamental rock around my house and garage. I’m not real anxious to attack that job because I have a feeling not all the leaves will blow off since they didn’t on a trial run, but all I can do is the best I (and my tools) can do. The leaf blower blows hard, so that’s not the problem. In fact, on the high setting, it’s enough to blow the rocks around, but some twigs and leaves still remain.

But that’s not a problem for today. Today I just want to bask in righteous exhaustion and the thought of a job well done.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Underestimating Gardening Tasks

November 5, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I am enjoying the unseasonably warm temperatures. The late mornings are still a bit chilly when I go out to work in my yard, so I don’t get the full benefit of the 70+ high temperature, but it’s still nice to be able to work without freezing my fingers and toes.

I have learned that when it comes to gardening, I always underestimate the time it takes to any task, and planting this last batch of bulbs is no different. I am placing them between the daylilies I planted a couple of months ago, so I figured the ground would be easy to work, but unfortunately, I let the prostrate bindweed take hold. I started out digging it up, but discovered that I was also digging up the newly planted daylilies, so I decided to wait until it was time to plant the tulips and do it all at once (weed and plant). And so I really have my work set out for me.

I also have to decide what to do with the lily trees I planted. The first twenty had a note on the package to plant 3” deep, which I did. A second batch from another company that I received ten days after the first batch said to plant 6” deep, which I also did. Concerned about the disparity of depths, I checked online, and the online instructions from the company where I bought the first twenty said to plant 10” deep. If I can figure out where the bulbs are (I raked the area flat, so it’s anyone’s guess), I might try to dig them up and replant them, but if the cooler weather comes too quickly or if my knees give out, I will have to wait until next fall and buy the bulbs again. Which I do not want to do because they are relatively expensive.

I am so not a gardener! Though I suppose, by the time I get my yard landscaped, I’ll at least know a bit more about what I am doing. It’s too bad about the lilies — I was really looking forward to an eventual lily tree forest of six-foot-tall plants. Apparently, the plants die back every winter, and every spring for three or four years, they come back taller than ever until they eventually grow to their full height. Planting new bulbs next fall would put the “forest” back another year so I wouldn’t see the full growth until the fourth year.

The good news is that if I decide to try to replant, and if I can find the bulbs, it should be an easy enough task since the ground was worked to at least a 6” depth.

But then, there is that comment I made earlier, that I always underestimate the time it takes to do any gardening task. Still, I can take comfort from knowing that at least the weather will be warm for a my bulb hunt.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Taking It Easy

November 3, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Laziness doesn’t pay, at least not for me. Although I’m supposed to water my new lawn every day, yesterday, I refrained — it was too cold and chilly for me to go out, and the high temperatures weren’t going to get very high. I figured when it warmed up today, I could give it a good soaking.

It was a good plan, but plans tend to be overthrown by other plans. As it turned out, I had to work a full day today, so I needed to water before I left. That early, it was much colder than it was yesterday, and all my digits about froze.

I don’t seem to be able to water, either by hand or by sprinkler, without getting soaked. I thought I was being smart by wearing nitrile gloves to keep my hands from getting wet, which did work for that purpose, but those gloves didn’t do anything to stave off the cold.

Luckily, we will have a respite from the cold for several days starting tomorrow. And since I gave the grass a good soaking today, if by any chance I have to miss tomorrow, I’ll be okay.

It’s funny to me that after my dad died, the last person I had any responsibility for, I eschewed every responsibility except for taking care of myself. I didn’t even want a houseplant — it overwhelmed me just thinking of having to care for it. And now here I am, with a house, plants (both indoor and out), a yard and grass. And a job helping to care for an older woman. That’s a lot of responsibility for a person who wants none. But surprisingly, it’s not a problem. I do what I need to do when I need to do it, and then take it easy the rest of the time.

So far so good.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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The Coming Seasons

October 26, 2021 — Pat Bertram

It’s been ten days since the grass was put in, and it’s still alive! Yay! Maybe my brown thumb is gradually turning green. I’ve still been watering the grass every day, but strong winds are bringing in cooler temperatures, so it won’t be long before I switch to every other day, and then gradually fade out as winter pushes its way into my world.

I’m not especially fond of winter, but I have a hunch this year I will appreciate it more than normal — no watering grass and plants, no digging, no landscaping. Except for the watering, I’m mostly done with the digging. My final two hundred bulbs should be here Friday, and after they are planted, all I have to do is watch the forecast for the first snowfall, then scatter my wildflower seeds and tramp them into the ground before the storm hits.

Then it’s all about waiting for spring. Or not. Too much of my life has been about waiting, so perhaps I should change my focus to something beyond my yard and garden. Playing house and cleaning all the corners that have been neglected during the past few months perhaps. Walking, probably. All too often, I was too tired from the gardening chores or my knees too incapacitated to walk this summer, so winter would be a good time to concentrate on mobility. Ooops. But snow! I don’t walk in the snow, so that might not be the best thing to concentrate on. Still, there are my knee exercises to do to make sure they are as strong as possible as I sink deeper into old age.

The only thing worse than waiting is planning, so I’ll be better off not planning what I will do when the yard chores are finished especially since there is a good chance they won’t be finished for a long time. After all, the neighbors on all sides have trees, and somehow most of the leaves end up in my yard. It will be good to have the leaves, but I don’t particularly relish raking them off the grass and blowing them off the rocks. Still, tools are always fun to use, so it will be just a different focus.

It is interesting the way having a yard and spending time in that yard every day makes one cognizant of the seasons in a way that merely staying inside and switching from heat to air-conditioning and back to heat does. Even walking didn’t make me as aware of the seasons, perhaps because I wasn’t as involved with my environs as I am with yardwork.

Next year should be interesting. I’ve dug up about all the weeded areas I could, and those I couldn’t will be sown with wildflower seeds. If my raised garden is built by then, I will have a garden to plant, but if not, I’ll mostly be taking care of what has already been planted. Though, come to think of it, the lure of bedding plants is strong, so I’m sure I’ll find some place for a few. Or even more than a few.

Last night I was thinking about age, brought on by a neighbor’s comment that I was too old to go tent camping, which I might be. But I do think in another decade, I will look back on this year, my first year of unarguable elderliness as a time of relative youth. I mean, look at all I’ve accomplished with the landscaping. Admittedly, I did not lay the sod, the ornamental rocks, or the crushed rock for the pathways, but I have been out there every day doing something to turn my property into a micro estate.

It has been a good experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing where all this takes me in the coming seasons.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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Hatching a New Book

October 25, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I just finished reading a book where a couple moved to an small town where the families of the inhabitants go back generations. As in most stories using this particular scenario, the couple had a hard time fitting in because they were outsiders.

A counterpart of this story is the Hallmark movie version where a big city success goes home to the small town where she was raised and suddenly, she finds everything she’s ever wanted.

Basically, these are the same story, just told from different points of view. The returnee, of course, is welcomed because she is one of them, and left unsaid is the part where if she had been a stranger, things would not have worked out as well for her.

There is a third version of this story, where a person is stranded and finds a home in the town. Bagdad Café and Doc Hollywood are two examples.

When I moved here, I expected the first version to hold true, especially since I’ve lived in small towns before and never found in them a home except what Jeff and I created between the two of us. In fact, when I left the area where Jeff and I had lived for two decades, only one grocery clerk and a librarian bothered to say good-bye. When we left the previous place, no one but our landlady noticed. And the place before that, not even the landlady cared.

Obviously, the second version can’t hold true because I am not coming back to my roots. I have no real roots. My parents left the east coast where they were raised, camped out in Denver to grow their family, then headed on to the west coast where they’d planned to go all along.

I’m also not stranded here accidentally, but it was accidental (perhaps) how it came about. Although I had never signed up with Zillow, they sent me an email one day saying, “This is your new house.” I looked at the photos, and I agreed. It was my house, the one I had been conjuring in my mind, and a person goes where their house is, regardless of what problems she might encounter once she moves in. (I never even saw the house in person before I moved in, which freaked out my real estate agent, but didn’t bother me because . . . well because it was my house.)

Luckily, my story is a happier version of the first example. Although most people who live here have generational roots, some going back to when the town was founded, some people seem more than willing to accept new people, especially if the new people are willing to get involved, such as writing mysteries for local events. There might be undercurrents I am unaware of, but it seems as if this is a town on the cusp of a new identity, no longer dependent solely on agriculture and ancestry, but not yet sure where it is going or where it can go. (Businesses seem reluctant to come here, except for marijuana businesses — those seem quite willing to move here, though some of them are having a hard time getting employees, and some are having a hard time finding housing for the employees they import. One problem with the area is that less than half of the houses are owner occupied, a transiency that makes businesses nervous.)

This changing identity might explain in part the willingness to accept strangers, but the willingness also comes from the long-time newcomers (those who have been here for a decade or more) and from the returned natives (those who left to find a different life, and then returned to look after aged parents).

Despite my acceptance from others, I do think that some of the small town clichés should find their way into my new book, the one that’s currently hatching in my brain. And there certainly should be examples of the way people around here talk: “She’s the sister of my nephew’s ex-wife.” “Her grandfather is my uncle.” “He is the son of my aunt’s sister-in-law’s mother.”

Some of these relationships boggle my mind. I can’t even imagine knowing so much of one’s family tree let alone other people’s. Oddly, despite all the knowledge of one another’s ancestry, no one seems to know anything about the people who lived in this house before 1965 or so. Not that it matters, I can make up my own history for the house, but I am curious about previous tenants. It seems so much an old woman’s house. The owner before me was a man, but he had to move out because it was my house, at least that’s what I jokingly tell him, but both owners before him were old women. One of those women had a relative who was able to help her get grants to upgrade the electricity, the heating, some windows, the plumbing, the roof, leaving the kitchen, the rest of the windows, and stucco work for the previous owner to take care of. But before those women? No one seems to know.

I don’t think I need to go back that far for my story to be as mysterious as I hope it to be. After all, there are other houses in the neighborhood where nefarious folk can live and have lived. (A murder took place in the house across the alley a few months before I moved here.)

And, if I want my story to have an elder-related sub story, then the people should be more contemporary to help emphasize the current issues of the very old. Which means, I have to create the characters and figure out how they fit into the story. Luckily, I have no deadline for finishing the book. I don’t even have a deadline for starting it.

All I know is that I somehow the unique smalltownishness of this place needs to be reflected in the story.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in home, house, life. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Grief and Finding “Home”

October 17, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Because of my writings on grief, I have met people from all over the world. One woman who contacted me after reading Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One, was from Holland. We became pen pals for a while, and in fact, she was the first to send me a card wishing me happiness in my new home.

Now she’s the one in a new home.

Like many who have lost their mates, she needed a new life, and to that end, she felt she needed to find a new place to live. Apparently, Holland is too crowded and too expensive for her now that she’s living on a single income, so the last I heard, she was looking for a place in the south of France. Today I got a postcard from her, from Aveyron in France.

It’s good to know she’s finally realized her dream — that new dream born from grief and loss.

I’d never heard of Aveyron in southwestern France, but that “department” looks fabulous! (From what I can tell, a department is a division of a region.) According to a guidebook, it is home to ten of the most beautiful villages in France, as well as gorges, castles, and gastronomic delights. Sounds like a wonderful place to live. I hope she’ll find herself at home in her new home.

That’s one of the hardest things to find for us who are left behind after our mates die — a feeling of home. For many of us, our “homes” resided not in a place but in a being with that special person. And when they are gone, every place seems alien for way too many years. The lucky ones — relatively speaking — are those of us who finally find a place to call home. In my case, the area I settled on isn’t especially spectacular, certainly nothing like Ayeyron, though it does have its moments. Nor is the town picaresque, though that too has its moments. (It’s this lack of monumental scenery and mountain views that has prompted me to try to turn my yard into a vista worth looking at.) But it has given me a sense, first of coming home, and now of being home.

Back in my first days of grief, I felt as if I were totally unanchored, as if I were being blown willy-nilly by the winds of fate. It’s not until we find home in ourselves that we can find home in a place (or perhaps it’s the other way around), but it does seem as if we can’t stop feeling unreal and untethered until there is once again a sense of home, a sense of belonging somewhere. (For a long time, I took comfort from the idea that I belonged to and on the earth, but it helps even more to have anchored myself to a specific place on that earth.)

I wish my Holland friend — and all who have been left adrift by the death of the person intrinsic to their life — peace in her new home.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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My Changing Identity

October 16, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Before I bought my house, I rented a room in a house. There were three of us — the owner, another tenant, and me. Sounds so Judge Judyish, doesn’t it? Though truly, my only problem was the owner’s careworker who used up one of my favorite spice mixes. But that was minor. And none of this introduction has anything to do with what I plan to write about except to explain why I watched certain movies.

A television and basic programming came with the room rent, but I didn’t watch until the last few months when it occurred to me that I might never have television programming again. (I actually have two televisions, one hooked up to a DVD player and one hooked up to a VCR, but I don’t have programming and I don’t watch any of the movies I’ve stockpiled.) Anyway, that Christmas, I watched Hallmark movies galore. In fact, I watched so many, I was able to tell when the next twist would come. (For example, twenty minutes before the finish, the couple had a huge misunderstanding, and then, five minutes before the end, they finally found out the truth and made up.)

One of the big drivers of such movies is that because of the main character’s problems or her parent’s problems, she has to leave her power job and adopted big city behind and move back to her hometown.

It always seemed such a contrived plot, especially since once she was there, her values suddenly changed, going from a power player to a more laid-back lifestyle. I didn’t have that experience moving here because I’ve always been something of a small-town person even though I grew up in Denver. Back then, though, there wasn’t so much driving every which way — we all more or less lived in our parishes and congregations in our own discrete neighborhoods. Each move I made as an adult took me to smaller towns, except, of course, when I went to look after my father in California, and even that conglomerate of three linked towns had a small-town feel, mostly, I think, because again, I mostly lived in one particular neighborhood, the only one close to the desert.

What I am discovering, however, that despite my feeling at home in this small town, the movie scenario, while trite, it isn’t all that contrived. I noticed that when I moved into a place of my own — a very nice place, probably nicer than I had any right to expect — my sense of self began to change. I was no longer one step away from being homeless but instead was fully homed. My habits changed and I became more of a neatnik than I ever imagined. (Well, except for my office. I still have piles of paper on my desk, heaped blanket and pillows on my daybed, and an empty cup on the bedside table.) I also became houseproud — proud that this house belongs to me as well as being proud of the way it looks and the way I keep it up.

I’ve settled into that version of me — the houseproud one — and now it looks as if I will have to rethink who I am based on the looks of the grounds the house sits on. I’m more of a dirt and weeds with a few scraggly flowers kind of person. And now . . . well, now I’m not. I’m the proud owner of an — almost — landscaped property with reddish paths meandering through brilliant green grass and skirting around bushes that are still too small to be noticeable. But one day those bushes will grow up, the wildflower sections will bloom, and I will live in a showplace.

This all seems so . . . not me. And yet, obviously, it is.

I just need to get my head around that.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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