Month: September 2018

Home

Our move looms in the distance. One week from today. There seems like an endless supply of quality junk that we don’t really need but poor people are suffering so it seems rude to throw away. Like three tubes of perfectly good Silicone Caulk. Someone could use that and I’m chunking it into a bag like I’m King Midas. “I’ll buy more if I need it.” What an arrogant thing to say but where do you put this stuff? I’m a reasonable hoarder. That’s all I can conclude.

Maybe we won’t use the crystal glassware laser lithography Santa Clause platter but that doesn’t mean you throw it to the curb like some classless trailer whore-man-person. Geez.

Some of the rooms are empty for the first time since we moved here in 2009. I had a vision from the first day we were moving in and Jane was barely older than two. She had a mullet, two from teeth, and overalls with a pink t-shirt. She was the cutest little redneck on the planet. I thought about her standing there today, eleven years old and so tall. Such an independent, hard headed but soft hearted young woman. Time flies.

We were excited to get the home and I have to give props where it is due so Obama, thank you for the first time homebuyer credit. Sure it was a form of welfare but it was for the working man because we had to put the money down before we got it back. That program got us off the mean streets of Bemis. But over the years, our house has grown crowded and we need to spread out.

This is how they are choosing to sleep in our last two weeks at the house. One is actually sleeping in the crack between mattresses. I found her one morning sleeping in the closet.

They say the average amount of time in a home is 10 years. Looks like an accurate number for me. Both of my parents are anomalies, 1987-ish for mom and 1992 for dad. You guys are messing up the average. Time to move.

I hope we get about 40 years in this new home. I hate the uncertainty of moving and the whole dance. Low-ball offers. Arguing over who fixes a crack or ding or bad place in the paint. Home inspections that pick you apart and appraisals that magically go for about what the listing price was. I guess if the sellers get an offer in the ballpark then that must be what the home is worth?

You need lots of paperwork and bank statements too. Lawyer money, title money, closing costs, taxes, insurance, fees earnest money, utility deposits, moving trucks, and eating fast food for three weeks while you pack your house into storage units. Who says renting isn’t better? Pull up the tent stakes and move whenever you want. That sounds kind of awesome.

Our current house and our new house will both close new loans on the same day. We will load up everything we own the night before and hope signing day goes well. Then we will drive to our brand new house and vomit a load of boxes into the largest and closest rooms. The beds and furniture will be set up first and the boxes will dwindle but they will hit a critical mass where I feel that all my important things are out and the cost-reward ratio starts to favor other activities. That is how boxes of old CD’s get lost in an attic and found one hundred years later by a pouty teenage hiding from their parents. Suddenly Ashley Simpson and Jock Jams infects a whole new generation. Vintage. Retro.

So yeah. I’m excited about the house. I’m not as excited about the moving process and settling in to the new lifestyle. But…I am strong and the girls deserve a little more room to stretch their legs.

Typical afternoon shade.

Our new house has a cool history and once we are in I will share more. For now, know that a family built the home in 1965.

Notice the mother has her good southern lady pearls.

There were four children. The oldest was eleven and the youngest was five. The home has never been sold and the youngest sibling has been living in the house while working through the parent’s estate. The stories parallel and I’m not much on things being meant to be but there are some strong coincidences that make my heart happy. The youngest sibling was so excited that a similar family was getting her family home that she insisted that we meet the older sister. We went to visit on a Friday afternoon and brought all four girls to visit. My four girls surrounded Ms. Lynn and took her on a tour of her own childhood home, telling her all the plans that they had for each room and all the wonderful games they could play. She told them all the history that she could squeeze into a thirty minute visit. “This was my room. That was my brother’s. This came from our cabin. This was from a trip to Europe.” After each room was visited and recounted the girls went to play outside on the giant steel swing-set and the older sister joined the group of adults talking in the kitchen. She embraced Supermom and I with tears in her eyes, “I’m so glad you are making my home your home. It needs little girls and playful laughter. That’s what it was built for. I hope you have many happy years just like we did.” It was a really good visit.

Original blueprints were pretty cool.

There is something special to me about a place that was built purposefully and lived in. Made into a home. A safe place of refuge where anything in the world can be wrong but home is still there just as it always has been.

When either of my parents start talk of selling their homes and moving I understand what Ms. Lynn was feeling. So much has happened between the walls. So many memories and pictures and Christmas mornings and late nights talking the hours away. Waking up to emergencies or camping outside just far enough away to feel the danger of the forest but close enough to retreat inside if you needed to. Moving away is tough for kids, at any age. Our current home is the only one that they really remember. Only Jane has ever lived anywhere else. Lady Bug was born in our bedroom at the foot of my bed. It doesn’t get much more personal than that. We lost Biscuit here. We adopted Chester who ruined the carpet. We tried to buy vinyl hardwood and the cashier rang me up for 5 planks instead of five boxes so I was able to redo my living room floor for about twenty nine dollars. She threatened to call management on me for protesting her error. I was trying to do the right thing and pay correctly and she got so mad at me for implying she was wrong. I felt bad but I wasn’t going to get arrested for being a nice guy so we took the flooring and counted it as a win.

We hid in the master closet on several occasions during tornadoes. We rode out a couple of impressive floods. We fenced the backyard. Adopted a squirrel. Tried our hand at decorating only to find that we are not decorators. I’ll always remember the squeals of the girls when they hear that key turn in the dead bolt on the front door, “Daddys home!”. I will remember forever and ever, a period of about a year when I would put Jane to bed and tell her, “I love you.” She would say, “I love you to Daddy. You’re my best friend.” I choked back tears every single time and replied, “You are my best friend too.” My wife and I adopted the saying for each other at bedtime and Jane doesn’t say it anymore but it is as true for me as it ever was. I hope she reads what I write one day and knows that a girl never has a better ally than a Daddy who loves them.

So… If you ever have packed memories and happy tears into boxes to move on to the next great adventure, this post is for you. You’re welcome. It is hard to look back and forward at the same time. I have a week to say goodbye to this home. It has served us well and is going to a family who needs the same care. I planted some trees that will be just right for a treehouse in a couple of years. Maybe the craziness will continue. Anyway…. On to the next.

-Underdaddy to the rescue.

Driving Thoughts

Me While Driving A Car On A Long Trip:What if everything that appeared in the big bang was actually a mass of something traveling faster than the speed of light and a collision in space-time caused things to change? What if the speed of light is just a boundary in the phases of matter like solids melting to liquids and the reason we think it is a limit is because we don’t have a means to detect anything faster than the speed of light because all of our instruments operate on electricity? We can’t see it because we use light to see. What if the big bang was the breaking of a cosmic iceberg and energy cooled into matter and it is slowly working into one giant black hole where the energy will be consumed by the gravity well and released as x-ray bursts? Heat is just a measure of how fast something is vibrating on a molecular level. Everything on earth is a form of cycle or vibration that gets less intense and more diffuse over time. The universe is dying in a pool of energy homogeneity. That’s what absolute zero is all about the cessation of all vibration. Matter is involved in a war. An epic battle for release of electrons into pure energy like a chemical fight over a lemon seed. Oh shit, I need to write some of this down! I might forget.

Also Me, Sitting In Front of My Computer Ready To Write Something Deep and Profound: Why do my balls itch? What if cats had venom? Why would they need venom? Why wouldn’t they? What if people can hear my thoughts and they all conspired to just never tell me? Oh shit, we have ice cream sandwiches! I almost forgot.

If this happens to you, this post is for you. You’re welcome.

-Underdaddy to the rescue.

Fire On The Mountains

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit my Alma Mater for a series of nerdy engineering meetings. Things had changed on campus and I barely recognized the place. My memories were ghosts that were wound around things like the new apartment complex where a place called Cool Beans used to exist. Memories of Wednesday nights sneaking beers at Campus Pub; now a Holiday Inn Express.

The big monuments were there. The Sun Sphere from the World’s Fair. The Henley Street bridge.

I walked past my old dorms and around the stadium near the engineering building that had just been demolished. It is hard to think about the places that define you and how they are transient themselves. That school I attended was a snapshot in time and exists now in a different way.

I had some free time one of the afternoons so I took a drive up to the Smoky Mountains. Gatlinburg to be exact. In 2016, the mountains caught on fire and raged unexpectedly into the town. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed. Several people lost their lives.

The aftermath was a burned hell-scape where concrete and steel were destroyed along with the forest and all was left in a scattering of grey ashes. We only saw the damage on the news. For two years we hadn’t made the trip to see the mountain.

I rode through the town on the way to the National Forest and everything was as busy and commercialized as I remembered. The entrance to the National Forest seemed the same and after starting up the mountain I pulled in a gravel shoulder to walk a well-worn trail to the Little Pigeon stream.

It looked as pristine and beautiful as I remembered. Had it been my first visit to the park I might not have thought to look around for signs of the fire from two years before.

Charred logs were underneath the brown and green. Moss was reforming and the charcoal was well on its way to being reclaimed by nature. The scars were there but life has started the endless rebound.

Higher up on the mountain, the vista told a clearer story.

The old tree trunks of the dead forest poked out like quills from a giant porcupine. The green blanket covering the ground was starting the job of rebuilding a forest. All of the plants on that hillside came from another plant as a seed. The fire was terrible and destructive but it allowed them room to grow and become every bit as great as the forest they are working to replace.

I drove back down the mountain and continued on with life.

The next weekend we had an unexpected loss of a beloved farm pet. Jane’s favorite goat Mallory fell ill and within twelve hours was dead. This goat was the smallest of triplets and since a momma goat only has two teats, she had to be bottle fed. Mallory imprinted to Jane and seemed to count the minutes between her visits. She was a loving goat and a friend to a child who has definitely needed one in the last few months.

We gathered at the farm and dug a hole in a shady spot on the hill. Everyone stood in a circle around Mallory and watched through our tears as Jane shoveled dirt onto her friend.

There is therapy in the funeral traditions and the effort of ceremony. Doing something to say goodbye and honor a friend is good for the soul. I’m proud of the strength I saw in Jane that day.

I dare say that I know where she got it.

This morning, Supermom’s grandmother passed away after a long battle with cancer. The common phrase, “Battle with Cancer”, is often just lip service to a slow spiral. This woman battled.

We visited her several times in the last few months and each time we had a tearful goodbye because we thought, “Well… this is it.” She flat-out ignored death to take care of her ailing husband who passed away a few weeks ago. She wanted to make it long enough to attend his service and see his burial.

She did.

We sat and talked with her after Pop’s funeral and it was clear to me that her mind was better than my own. I was in awe of her selflessness. Here was a woman who had always carried a healthy weight and had been reduced to maybe eighty pounds. Maybe less. Cancer was in her joints, bones, and multiple organs. It was pressing on her nerves and causing vision issues. She was continuously attached to an oxygen tank and overwhelmed with a routine of pain meds and nutritional shakes. Earlier in the day she had seen her husband of more than forty year lying in a casket. She knew he was being buried the next day.

She will totally haunt me for posting this but I like the peacefulness of it.

Despite all this, she was concerned if her grandchildren needed a drink or something to eat. I never heard her complain. She used her time to ask for details about our lives and how the great-grandchildren were doing. She delighted in giving away precious pictures and memories to family who wanted them. If there is any advantage to a prolonged illness it would have to be the gift of saying goodbye.

There was a picture hanging on her wall of her at an early age; twelve I think. The link to my wife and my second child hit me hard and it brought tears to my eyes. I could see a visual tie to a woman who shaped some of the things I love most in life. The beauty that I see around me every day. The caring that takes care of me when I don’t deserve it. The constant crafting and creativity that consumes every nook and cranny of our house. The gentle personality and sense of humor. The strength to say goodbye to the ones you love and lay them to rest.

She always had a goal and a focus. Her last goal was to die on a Sunday and despite all logic she made it happen.

Its easy in life to stand around and feel despair as your beautiful mountains are burning to the ground. Its hard to see how the world will recover when such wonderful things are lost. But we carry on. We put down better roots, turn our leaves to the sun, and hope to one day be the mighty trees.

If you are working to survive the fires of life, this post is for you. You’re welcome. Anytime you lose someone named Granny it is a true loss. Granny isn’t a term that is handed out lightly. She had my vote from the very first time I met her. She hid a bowl of homemade ice cream for me in the freezer because I couldn’t make it to the campground as early as everyone else. That is pretty special.

-Underdaddy to the rescue.