Someone to Call

January 2, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Apparently the tarot cards are right. This year is starting off with failure and defeat. Actually, that’s not anywhere near the truth. Failure and defeat are sometimes simply in the mind of cursed — a mishap that is a defeat for one person can be one of life’s negligible challenges to take in stride for another, and that is the case here.

I hope you know that my talk of the tarot and its prognostications is more or less me being facetious and playful. Whatever the cards say is not something I take personally. If anything, they seem to reflect my state of mind, and I think that’s because I interpret the cards through whatever my mood is at that particular time.

That being said, I started off the day with a frozen hot water pipe in my kitchen. I had cold water in the kitchen and both hot and cold in the bathroom. To be honest, I didn’t know a hot-water pipe could freeze, at least not more so than a cold-water pipe.

I texted my contractor for help, and he suggested putting a space heater under the sink, and if that didn’t work, he’d come out and unfreeze the pipe for me. So I opened the hot water spigot (to relieve the pressure), put my little electric space heater under the sink, and in the hopes that the hot water in nearby pipes would help, I also took a shower. Not the smartest thing, perhaps, to leave a heater alone in a semi-enclosed space, but this heater is so small and uses so little electricity, that I wasn’t worried.

Whether it was the shower or the heater, I don’t know, but the hot water soon came gushing out of the faucet.

So, not exactly a disaster.

Even if my efforts hadn’t helped, the contractor would have come out or sent one of his workers as he did last year when the entire pipe (both hot and cold) to the kitchen froze. He’ll be replacing the water lines someday, and when he does, I’m going to ask him what all the pipe are, how they connect up, and where they go. I can see some of the water lines, but I’m not sure which are hot and which are cold and where they meet up. (Last year, I guessed wrong about which was the frozen pipe and heated one that wasn’t a problem.)

As long as we’re even and I’m not too far ahead of the contractor with my payments, I’m fine with however long it takes him to do my work because he always responds to my texts, so it’s like having a contractor on retainer. (I must admit I do get worried when the payments get too far ahead for too long because if something happens to him, I’m out the money. I am certainly not going to dun a widow and her fatherless children, and I can’t afford to just write it off.)

It’s not supposed to get down below zero (Fahrenheit) again for a while (apparently eight below is too much for my pipes), so I should be okay. If I remember, the next time I’ll open the cabinet doors under the sink so maybe it won’t get as cold under there as it did last night. That’s assuming, of course, that those are the pipes with a problem.

This is certainly no omen for an unpleasant new year. It’s just typical of the myriad things that need to be taken care of when one owns a house.

It’s funny, now that I think about it. One reason I preferred renting was that when things went wrong, all I had to do was call the landlord, and have him do the work or arrange to have it done. Too many crappy landlords and landladies taught me that this was a naïve view, so I didn’t take the matter into consideration when I had the opportunity to buy. Now, though, I have the best of both worlds. A house of my own, and someone to call.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

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A Toast to Mother

December 10, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. I have thought about her more since I moved here to my new home than in all the years since she died. Sometimes the memories come from nowhere, just the odd thought that I haven’t talked to her for a while and should call to see how she is doing.

Sometimes the memory comes from something of hers I have and use. She used to have a cupboard full of unmatched stemware. I kept those goblets when I cleaned out the house after my father died, and so now I, too, have a cupboard of unmatched stemware.

Sometimes an old memory arises, and I’d like to ask her what that was about. For example, decades ago she told me that when I was a baby, I had casts on my legs. I was under the impression that the casts were to correct leg or hip alignment, though why casts, I don’t know, since my siblings all had braces (a curved metal piece connected to shoes). I read that the current research shows that babies’ legs adjust on their own, so I don’t even know if they use such devices anymore. But I never heard of using casts for that problem, and now I will never know what they were for. It never really mattered, but now my feet seem to be turning in more than they used to, and I wonder if age and use is undoing what the casts did. I’ll never know that now, either.

When I got my first apartment, I asked her for the recipes that I especially liked — things like pierogis, tuna roll with cheese sauce, and hamburger rolls (known to others as Runzas or bierocks). I found it interesting that I was the only one of my siblings who had those recipes, so several years ago, I made each of my siblings a recipe book, which included those recipes as well as a Friday staple of our youth: creamed tuna and peas on toast. (Sounds disgusting but was actually quite tasty.)

I didn’t copy all of her cookie recipes. Neither cherry winks nor date nut pinwheels were favorites of mine when I was young, but a couple of years ago when I suddenly got a taste for those cookies, I thought of calling her and asking for the recipes. Luckily, my sister kept them, thinking that mother’s treat recipes shouldn’t be thrown away so now I’ve collected some of the recipes I didn’t back then. Also, I imagine that at the time I got that first bunch of recipes, I wasn’t considering the distant future when she’d be gone.

Well now, she is.

She wasn’t much of a drinker, though she did love Bailey’s Irish Cream, so in honor of her this day, I offer a toast — Baileys in a Baileys glass that once belonged to her!

Here’s to you, Mom. I hope your new life is what you’ve prayed it would be.

***

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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Inauspicious Day

November 29, 2021 — Pat Bertram

This was another long day at work, and it turned out to be a good thing, not just because of the extra money but because this was not an auspicious day to do much of anything.

For one thing, last night I dreamt that the neighbor’s tree, which creaks horrendously in the wind, fell and destroyed my garage (even though in actuality, if the humongous branch would fall, it would be his garage that would be destroyed, not mine). This morning, before I was fully awake, tree trimmers came and started working. They were trimming a different neighbor’s tree, but I did not like the coincidence of both the dream and the reality.

Even worse, my tarot card today was the ten of swords (called the ten of weapons on this particular deck) followed by the nine of wands (nine of staves.) The ten of swords is not a good card to get because there is nothing remotely cheerful about it, speaking as it does of misfortune on a grand scale. The second card was the nine of staves, a card of great strength and denotes being prepared for any contingency.

My preparation for the looming disaster was simply to go about my day as planned.

One good thing about a tarot reading (beyond the fact that the cards I turn up so often have nothing to do with me) is that the effects last only until the next reading. Which means tomorrow is a whole other story.

Speaking of story . . . when I was at my client’s house, I read an excerpt from a book where the character mentioned that the tale of how she met her husband was different for each person she told it to. I thought something like that — telling the truth, but picking different elements of the truth to focus on each time you told it — would work well in the small-town novel I am thinking of writing. Perhaps each person in town thinks they know the truth, but since they assume everyone knows the same truth, the salient points get buried until our hero (me!) starts asking questions and sees the variations of the truth. I guess it would be sort of like the folk tale from India about blind men “looking” at an elephant. Each person who touched a single part of the elephant found out a truth that reinforced their own belief, but it was only when they put all the concepts together that they came across the greater truth of what an elephant was.

In a way, I suppose, all mysteries are like that, with every character believing they know the whole truth but only knowing part of it, so perhaps it wouldn’t be such an interesting idea after all. And anyway, I am no closer to writing the book now than I was when I first started thinking about it, so I have plenty of time to figure it out.

Meanwhile, I missed all the commotion of the tree trimming even though the woodchipper was parked in front of my house because I left to go to work. Luckily, the tree was trimmed without any damage to my property except for a few small twigs in my rocks that did not get swept up. I’m back at home now, safe from whatever dangers lurked out there for me. And tomorrow is a new day . . .

***

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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Raking Up the News

November 27, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I didn’t watered my grass for a couple of days — the first day was too cold, the second day was very warm but I had to work all day. Even though I didn’t notice any difference in the grass, I gave it a good watering today, letting the hose run while I raked up leaves. Odd how I have no trees except a couple of babies, and yet I get a yard full of leaves from all the neighbors’ trees. In previous years, I never paid attention to the leaves, but I need to make sure they don’t damage my sod, so I did the work. I considered giving the leaves back to the neighbors, but despite my blisters, I was glad to get the leaves. I dumped them among some bushes, thinking they will help rejuvenate the soil when the leaves break down. As someone once said to me, “Compost happens.”

I had to unfortunate task of laying off a handyman who was working at the house I’m taking care of. He was in such a panic over the loss of income, that I hired him to do a couple of small paint jobs the contractor has been putting off. I was kind of surprised (but just kind of) when he never showed up, so even though I’d paid twice for those jobs, I ended up doing them myself. At least the raw wood surfaces are protected now.

A friend had some good news today — my contractor is going to work on her house, which was left unfinished when her husband died. It’s a huge job, and they are both glad to be connected — she needs the work done, and he needs to keep his employees busy. I’m not sure what it will mean for me, though I tend to think my jobs as always will be delayed. I’m not really sure I care, at least not all that much and not all the time, because the undone work gives me a sort of lien on his time. When I have an emergency, he comes right over or sends one of his guys. If all the work around my house was finished, perhaps he wouldn’t be as conscientious about taking care of my problems. On the other hand, he probably would especially now that I recommended him for that big job. And anyway, he does try to look after me when he can.

I asked my friend if she minded if I mentioned her and her unique situation, and she said okay. She was born in Malaysia of Chinese parents, and educated by Irish nuns. She has three sisters — one lives in Malaysia, one in Singapore, one in Australia, and she, of course, lives in the United States. Talk about a far-flung family! Luckily, there is Skype. The sisters talk every weekend, which is more than I do with my own siblings, and they live here in this country.

She would make a great character for my book, though I’m not sure how her story would contribute to whatever story I come up with. For now, I’m just collecting interesting characters and waiting to see if they want to engage with one another, literarily speaking.

Well, that’s about all the news I can rake up for you. I hope you had a more exciting — and blister-free — day than I did.

***

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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Eternal Good Luck

November 17, 2021 — Pat Bertram

1000 origami cranes is called a senbazuru, which translates as “1000 cranes.” Legend says the crane lives for 1000 years, and from that legend arose the mystique behind the senbazuru. Paper cranes have come to be a symbol of peace. Before that, they meant healing. Before that, a person who folded a 1000 paper cranes was said to have one special dream come true. Originally (at least I think it was originally — the legend has become so entwined with the story of Sadako and Hiroshima that it’s hard to find the original meaning), folding 1000 paper cranes gave a person longevity and happiness — one crane per year for a thousand years — as well as eternal good luck. (Which is why the cranes are often associated with weddings.) Further, the cranes must all be folded within a year. 

I had no special wish when I started folding my 1000 cranes at the beginning of this year, though I was taken with the idea of good luck forever.

I’m not sure my 1000 crane project is strictly a senbazuru because from what I can gather, a senbazuru has come to mean 1000 cranes strung together and mine are in plastic bags, 10 cranes per sandwich bag, ten sandwich bags per gallon bag. That was the easiest way for me to keep track of how many I had folded, and now that I am finished and my good fortune stowed so neatly, I see no reason to string them. (Though I did string some other origami birds and hung them in my garage so I know where to stop when I pull into the garage.)

Whatever the name — “senbazuru” or simply “1000 paper cranes” — I just finished folding my origami cranes, well within the required time frame. So now it’s a matter of waiting to see what will happen.

Even if the cranes came with a guarantee of eternal good luck, I don’t expect my life to change all that much. I used to think I was bedeviled by bad luck, but over the years I have come to see that I have more good luck than perhaps I deserve. So often, I don’t get what I want (becoming a better selling author, for example) but more often, I get what I need (a temporary job, for example,) Even better, I sometimes don’t get what I neither want nor need (the Bob, for example. I didn’t want it, didn’t need it, and didn’t get it even though I was definitely exposed to the virus).

The biggest example of more luck than I deserve comes in the form of my house and even perhaps my yard, which, with a little more luck will one day be breathtakingly beautiful as well as safe for an aging woman to navigate.

Whatever the future holds, I know I did my part by folding 1000 origami cranes this year.

***

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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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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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.

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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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