Local Voices: Odd Coincidences

My dear Patch friends,

It’s been a long time since I blogged—not at all the plan I had for weekly posts when I signed up to do this.  Like many of you, I’ve been hanging onto the rear bumper of life by my ragged fingernails while it whips through time at lightning speed.  That’s what having a job, family, and home does to you in the early third millennium.  It seems not at all odd or coincidental that the hurricanes chewing up our coastlines the past few years have been so severe.  They perfectly mirror the pace of life we’re all living.

So what has enabled me to tap this post into my laptop after months of silence?  On my little speck of the patch we’ve been installing radiant heat and a hardwood floor in our family room.  As I type this, I am staring into a wide empty, echo-y chamber that is waiting for furniture and personal effects to migrate back into place.  I’m going to be sad to see it fill up again.  Although we miss the use of the largest room in our home, at the moment it resembles the ballroom of an English manor house – on a slightly less grand scale of course – with its Palladian window and slippery, slidey oak floor.  Turn on a little recorded Mozart and we could hold a contra-dance with three of our closest neighbors.  It’s the perfect space for a seven year old to practice handstands and cartwheels or mumblety-eight year old to put on white tube socks and Ray Bans and rock out to the Roots music in her head while skidding across the floor like a teenaged Tom Cruise.

Here’s where odd coincidence comes in again: clearing the space in our home seems to have cleared some space in our lives.  It’s not that our schedule is suddenly less packed or homework less daunting or the chore list instantly shorter.  All those demands still exist.  Rather, it seems like we have more time for each other, more attention to pay each other.  Perhaps that’s the result of cramming our amusements into one mid-twentieth century-sized living room: television, laptops, cell phones, Barbie dolls, drawing paper and markers.  These things used to be more spread out.  With an eight-food wide opening between the kitchen and family room, we commonly spent our evenings rattling around a 465 square foot space, backs to each other, engrossed in our separate activities.  Since we’re not allowed to eat in the living room – a rule well nigh impossible to enforce in a kitchen/great room – we’ve lately had to gather for our meals at one time, in one place, on one surface, namely the kitchen table.  How foreign!  How odd, this 1950’s lifestyle we’re living! 

It seems we had to empty our family room to find our family.  I’m not a believer in randomness or accident.  To me the parallel is profound.  Profound but not obvious.  Isn’t it amazing how life sends us messages in symbols?  They are right there under your nose every day, waiting for you to look so they can be observed.  Who knew that when you empty a space in your home, you would empty some space in your life?  With some wide openness, important details stand out: the fingerprints on the light switch, the chips in the paintwork, the pile of gorgeous seasonal fruit at the peak of ripeness beckoning to be eaten, the smile in your spouse’s eyes, the joy in your child’s heart, the tiny golden scrap of free time to write a blog entry.

Here’s wishing you some wide open spaces in your life.  May they work their magic on you and your loved ones too.