It’s been two years since I decided to sell my place. There was getting it ready for selling, stuff sitting in storage for over a year, buying the place in Tennessee, and starting the work. I’m excited that phase one is complete and one room is fully finished and furnished. The 8-year wait for surgery is over, and the shoulder hopefully is on its road to recovery if things keep progressing as well as they have.
When I was going to buy here, I wanted 5 acres in the trees and a new house without renovations. I settled on the opposite; my heart opted for a journey instead of a final destination. As we know, any journey of an old house is one of love, passion, following my heart, and what the house wants. When it comes to a renovation, you will never get your investment back in dollars; only the soul will receive the return on the investment. Mine follows the implied rules of any 201+-year-old house: nothing is straight or level, and few pieces of glass can be replaced as most panes are handmade. It has its quirks and a personality of its own, and you’re sometimes left wondering where that wasp came from or waking up to morning chatter of the Chimney Swift’s echoing through the house.
Mike and Mary with M&M Contracting were my chosen team on this project, as they embodied what was important to me in the contractors. They were local, showcased solid craftsmanship, did their homework before accepting new clients to ensure it was a good pairing, were a small company, and put their family first. When we walked through the project, they had reasonable ideas about dealing with things like the popcorn ceiling and the potential for lead and asbestos, and they were familiar with older houses and their quicks. They conceptualized what I needed to achieve and agreed that hand-staining the floors was the best way to achieve what my soul craved with that “has been here” feeling.
There are these moments when we’ve allowed our imagination to build a strong perspective on what the experience will look like. The creation of a reading room, to feel cozy enough that time stops, had filled my imagination for decades. Growing up, we often had no space; the many years of living in tents, abandoned cabins, and the converted bus with a bedroom that was 2x4x6, had led to cramped shared quarters. Often, life was without indoor plumbing or electricity, and luckily excluded the confines of school or shoes unless absolutely necessary. Think I had/have a love-hate relationship with traditional life where there was a house for a few months, and I had to try to function in a structured environment. I’ve never done well with mainstream life and expected form; to this day, my soul still doesn’t understand why it exists.
In that freedom, I grew up as many of our early ancestors did, but with one luxury, the greatest indulgence of them all: a magical object you could carry anywhere. It held the imagination of millions of others, and you could hear their thoughts as you turned the pages and watched their words unwind before you as if watching a play.
No matter whose work I was reading, I would simply become Alice in those moments, chasing after the white rabbit and falling down the rabbit hole in search of the Mad Hatter and my imagination mixed in the characters of whatever storyline I read. For what use is life without tea parties with chaos abounding?
As a child I always wondered what would cause one to change their perspective and align with the oddest characters that the Red Queen would approve of, those who do things for propriety and personal gain. And we can not have that, can we, tea parties with the Mad Hatter are a must!?! Even as an adult I am missing a piece of the puzzle in understanding life as expected, why sell your soul or authenticity for tangible goods or the opinion of others?
In those moments, I created a world that I needed to survive outside of books, and looking back now, I realize perhaps I built a self-fulfilling prophecy. A life surrounded by books of every type and size, old and new, where there is warmth, peace, and history that speaks for itself and needs no words of introduction. As an added bonus, it comes with a spot for Jacinda to sit in her rocking chair beside a fire, reading her favourite stories about the crazy escapades of a silly group of rabbits.
Life is about moments; often, we forget how to be present and recognize when a moment is there, I’m so guilty of this. I suspect most often it’s that I’m simply restless as I feel an empty spot that I feel the need to be searching for what is missing. But that’s hard to do when you don’t know what’s missing, and we all know when we go to do that, we fill it with inappropriate things to temporarily make it feel filled. These temporary things are often choices that cause the reward receptors to think it’s filled when we get a dose of oxytocin, dopamine, or serotonin, but the brain lies, as it is apt to do as we allow it to as we shift perspective to state what we think we want. Rarely is the choice we make to fill that spot made based on a healthy decision for the long run.
The reading room has stopped that, as it brings this moment, this feeling that I held onto as an anchor for the last 5 decades, ever since I started writing stories at 3(I had an unpaid transcriber at that time). Oddly I find myself just wanting to sit on the couch and do nothing, little jazz in the background. I then catch myself arguing with myself that I should go be productive, then the other half argues go enjoy it, life is not just about productivity. You’d allow yourself to enjoy being at the top of a hill you hiked up. This is the same thing; simply you have less physical inertia extolled on the day it was reached.
So cheers to a quiet evening on a couch by a fire and a small flurry of snowflakes outside, and may your perspective forever appreciate being in the moments that bring you peace.
May Alice always remaining my inner champion in the quest against the evil jaberwockies.
Trix's Trax 