Iowadrift

Come Up And See Our Etchings

Our cats like it here.  They can settle into open, sunny windows like pencils into grooves and watch the cardinals on the bird feeders; they can lounge belly-up on the back porch and listen to voles rustling underground; they can make friends and invite them home for snacks.  And it's this last which is worrying me.

TTD and I had just turned out the light on Thursday night when we heard a resounding crash from the kitchen.  "Uh oh," we thought.  "The cats have succeeded in knocking the hamster cage off its perch, or they have dragged fifty pounds of cat food from under the sink, displacing pots and pans as they go, or they have decided to rearrange the furniture."  TTD fulfilled his husbandly duty by heading downstairs in his underwear to check out the scene, and a moment later I heard him call, very softly, "Babe?  I need you down here."

I went down (you have to go slowly down our back stairs, as they are slightly steeper and more dangerous than the Hilary Step atop Everest: we should have belay lines) and found TTD standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a broom and staring across the kitchen.  "Look," he said in a whisper. 

I looked.  Both cats were lying, totally relaxed, bellies a-flop, atop the kitchen table.  Beneath them, on the floor, also totally relaxed with belly a-flop, lay a baby skunk.  A real, right, and proper skunk, black with white stripes and a bushy tail, obviously blissfully at home.

I froze.  What if it sprayed?  We'd have to move out, literally, and get some disaster-restoration firm to detoxify the house.  What if, like a racoon and a skunk captured recently in the neighboring town, it was rabid?  What if it decided to charge us?  DO skunks charge?  And why had our cats invited it in to snack on the cat food?

And snack it did.  As TTD and I watched, motionless (I never did establish exactly what TTD hoped to accomplish with the broom), the skunk waddled over to the cat food, crunched up a whole bowl full, then headed for the kitchen door, which was closed.  Then he (she?) headed for the back door, which was also closed.  He seemed to know exactly where the food and the exits were, and this, combined with the cats' total nonchalance, made us think he'd been visiting several times before.  Finally he lay down beneath the TV in the playroom for a few minutes, then got up and let himself out the playroom door into the shed, a door which Yellow, our smartest cat, often shoves open at night if we forget to lock it.  TTD and I collapsed in a sort of hysterical fit of relief, and the cats just lay there, staring at us.

I am all for wildlife, and I enjoy the coyotes calling in our woods, the crickets and frogs going at it in the summer evenings, the woodchuck munching the asparagus in the garden.  But I draw the line at skunks helping themselves to midnight snacks in our kitchen.  I really do.

All is well, however, because tomorrow we go pick up the Mini, and I am like a little kid on the night before Christmas.  Santa brought me a car!  Santa brought me a car!  Oh boy oh boy oh boy!  (Note to self: put roof up on car at night, so skunks do not go joyriding).

As Time Goes By

Three weeks?  I haven't posted for three weeks?  Even for me, that's a record. 

Usually I love posting.  I look forward to it; it's fun, and easy (as one friend said, the only thing easier than blogging is rolling over and going back to sleep) and I like talking to my friends inside the computer.  But recently, obviously, I've been avoiding it.  I asked myself why: "Self," I said, 'why are you avoiding posting?"  And Self sat back, took a big swig of gin and tonic, crossed its legs comfortably, and said, "Hmmm.  Well may you ask."  "I DO ask," I said plaintively.  "What do you think?"  "I think this," said Self:

The first and most obvious reason is a corollary to the adage, well known in medicine, which holds that the later you stay (at the hospital), the later you stay.  In my case, the more I blog, the more I blog, and vice versa.  So when I get a few days over my usual posting times, I start to get worried and feel guilty, and then I avoid posting, and it mushrooms, and really, can you imagine anything dumber?  Because this is a BLOG we're talking about here, and a tiny blog at that.  So it's not a suitable forum for guilt: it's not a suitable forum for ANYTHING except blogging.  So, there we are: misplaced, overachieving-white-girl guilt.

Then there's the anxiety that I'll lose the already small number of readers I have.  If I don't post, Sitemeter complains, and then I feel like no one's reading anyway and get worried that if I don't post soon I'll lose EVERYONE, and then I avoid thinking about it, which leads to avoiding blogging altogether.  Again: so logical!  See how I am so much with the logic!  I am a ding-dong, really, because what, it comes as news to me that I'm not Dooce?

And then there's the real reason, which is that if I sit down and blog, that means I have to sit down and feel/think/write though this move, and I've not felt up to that.  I have been DOING this move like mad, and since the packers come the 23rd and the truck loads and leaves the 24th (to arrive in MA the 30th, is the theory), this move is definitely a busy thing right now.  But it's busy in our hearts and minds, as well, and since we're still in the taking-everything-apart-and-saying-goodbye-and-leaving phase, not the arriving-and-setting-up-a-new-life phase, I've been even busier trying to just work through and past the waves of emotion instead of sitting down and letting them wash over me.  Is anybody following me after that last sentence?

But with four days left in Iowa, emotion is just washing away, regardless.  The "lasts" come thick and fast: last day of Gorgeous Babysitter, last day of work for me, last day of work for TTD (did you know I gave him a fleece for Christmas with TTD embroidered on the pocket?), last day of preschool for Rabbit, last day of church, last playdates with so many friends, last nights in the house, last and last and last.  It's OK: I've done this so many times before, and I know that if you walk right through it and feel it and mourn as you need to, then you're free to be excited and interested when you move on.  But the thing is, right now?  I'm walking through it.

More, my children are walking with me.  Rabbit is old enough to know exactly what's going on, and to be unsettled and upset, though brave and interested as well.  We've done all the things y'all so wonderfully recommended in the comments a few posts ago: videotapes, postcards, books, talks, making special boxes and having him pack his own toys.  And it helps, and I know deep down he's going to be fine; he's going to flourish, even.  But right now he's teary and difficult and recalcitrant and clingy, and with good reason.  This morning he said, "I don't want to move," and tears began running down his face and dripping on my heart (which is still a little soggy).  I hugged him and squeezed him and held him and talked about how yes, it's hard, and soon he was cheerfully eating grilled cheese and watching Diego (and don't get me started on how much TV we're watching right now!).  But part of me feels guilty for asking him to leave, especially since he has such good friends here now. 

TTD and Urp are hanging in there, with Urp no more tantrum-prone than usual.  Though perhaps even more hilarious; the other day they were watching a penguin video (see about the videos?) and I said, "Can you waddle like a penguing, dude?" and Urp, annoyed, said, "I don't WANT waddle!"  Which is already a watchword in our house.  And TTD is holding his own, amid many good-bye parties at work, and good-byes to family as well.  We sort of take turns holding each other up, and egging each other on with our coping strategies, which right now consist, for both of us, in ignoring the packing and curling up in bed every evening with chocolate and novels. 

Oy, and speaking of packing, I need to go and do some.  And write notes to all the preschool teachers, and help Rabbit make a big card for his class, and bake a cake for same.  Rabbit wants to make green icing, so I have the requisite food coloring.  And sprinkles for the cake, and you name it.  And a mantra, which I keep repeating: this time next week, this time next week, this time next week.  Not to skip over the present/avoid living in the now/etc., but still...this time next week.

I Hope To Be Drinking Gin On This Porch When I'm Eighty

Why are these so blurry?  Somebody help me!  But nevermind: if you click on them they  open a window and clear up.  I am an idiot, but a happy idiot.

What I Did On My Spring Vacation

This:

1)  Closed on the house.  After the predictable last-minute drama (Wait!  It's zoned wrong!  Wait!  No, it's not!) we now own a beautiful 250 year old farmhouse on three acres of land, or rather, the bank does.  We probably own the bathroom or something.

2)  Bleached my hair.  All of it.  Peroxide-blond.  I love it.  Evidently sometimes a girl just has to let out her inner Trailer Trash.

3)  Bought three one-way plane tickets for Boston, departing April 24th.  The fourth member of the entourage, TTD, will be driving the van out, loaded with two turtles, a hamster, and two cats.  The Beloved Babysitter will drive the Subaru.  This all feels very REAL.

4)  Set up visits at three preschools for Rabbit, who is brave but teary about leaving his friends.

5)  Bought Thomas the Tank Engine underwear for Urplet, WHO IS POOPING ON THE TOILET.  Yes!  The 25 month old has begun saying, "Poop in toilet, Mama?"  at the appropriate time.  The first time he did it I thought he was...well, I just didn't register it, because it didn't seem possible.  But damn if he didn't proceed to poop in his diaper.  So the next time I hustled his delectable pink butt into the bathroom when he made his announcement, and whoopee!  After a few preliminary farts, he did the deed, and how!  He's repeated the process twice, and spent two recent mornings diaperless and dutifully piddling in the potty when I sat him on it.  SO FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOUR YEARS I CAN LOOK FORWARD TO A DIAPERLESS EXISTENCE.  This is big.  Hence the capitals.

7)  Tried to get my head around the rapidity of the change around here.  Didn't manage it, but had fun trying.  Am now surfing the sea of transition and still having fun.

Faxed to Death

First of all, thank you for so many wonderful, Rabbit-helping ideas about the move.  I am already working on a lot of them--the videos and pictures are a great idea, as is the decorating moving boxes and letting him fill them himself; he's very pleased--and just feel better in general with so much sensible, practical, yet imaginative advice to hold on to.  Y'all rock!

And speaking of moves...we are the Salvation Army's new best friend.  Unnervingly phallic McDonald's Happy Meal toys, paperback bodice-rippers aimed at Christian teenage girls (left behind by inlaws), tiny dinosaur slippers with red eyes that flash when you stamp your tiny feet, mugs bearing fake school crests and the legend "Psychotic State,"  approximately 1,000 matchbox cars, a menagerie of stuffed animals tending toward the ursine, and black cotton sheets left over from TTD's bachelor days: all these and more have made their way into the donation bins at the local Army store over the past weeks.  Not a cupboard, not a closet, not a drawer in this house but has been hauled into an interrogation room, strapped to a chair, and subjected to harsh questioning about the fugitives it has been harboring for lo these many years.  We are ruthless and unflaggingly energetic in our pursuit of wayward stuff, so much so that after several weeks all we have to do is fling open a closet door and the mismatched winter boots (size 3), crumpled scarves, and black knit hats which fit nobody just sigh and march themselves resignedly  into the waiting boxes.  "Cheer up," we say.  "You're going to love your new home!"

It's the fun part of moving, this lightening the material load.  We feel wonderfully stripped down, monastically so, even though I don't know which religion provides monks with thirty-gallon turtle tanks (complete with turtles), garages full of tricycles and deflated, lily-pad-shaped swim floats for toddlers, and a deviled-egg dish which can't be thrown away due to its status as a mother-in-law wedding present.  But still, the order!  Is thrilling!

Of course, there are the not-so-fun parts of moving as well, the parts which are chilling rather than thrilling (sorry:irresistable).  The endless faxing: the large amounts of money required every hour on the half hour: the lists.  We are really in the thick of it now, jumping hurdles as fast as we can--or is it jumping through hoops?  Anyway, the new house has undergone an inspection and passed with flying colors, we've gotten a committment letter on the mortgage (pause for cheers and sighs of relief), and theoretically we put the second deposit down tomorrow and sign the purchase-and-sale agreement.  Except that there's some complications with the amount of the deposit, yadayadayada, the lawyer wants to review the P+S but only just got to it on Friday, we have to be out of the house all day tomorrow for the inspection on this end, which of course was scheduled during Urp's nap, and the sellers on the other end are out of town for a funeral. 

SO...I predict a day of driving from recycling to Salvation Army to Mailboxes to bank, ditching STUFF and pestering the lawyer on my cell phone (so I know what the hell to send to whom when as far as money and documents; can you tell this is making me tense?), then printing emails, dragging them and the napless children to TTD's office to make him sign things, herding everyone through Mailboxes to overnight yet another set of documents, wiring money from the bank, and changing diapers along the way.  It will be exciting, the way watching a hamster motor around the room in his little plastic ball and bump into corners is exciting.  Bonk!

But it's worth it.  I am constantly terrified that money won't come through, our house won't pass inspection, the buyer will drop out, a hurricane will push a tree through the roof of our new house, or  [insert random disaster here].  I am kind of chasing my own tail up my own ass with the saying good-bye here while I prepare for the moving there, but honestly? I do better with transition than I do with ordinary day-to-day living, and I love the sense of being on the brink, the feeling of everything about to change.  I am almost forty and I love the idea of a fresh start, even given the "no matter where you go, there you are" factor.  A fresh start and a homecoming at once: I've never had that before.  It's truly lovely to have people waiting for us, ready to love and help and tell us how our new town does its recycling and when storytime is at the new library.  It's a new experience for me to feel I'm moving toward permanence, a permanence I want and welcome.  I will always travel, and I look forward to bringing the boys to Africa for several years in the not-too-distant future, but I feel like we may have found our home base now.  It feels more than good.  Also,it feels like maybe we should get some chickens.  Chickens!  Bawk!  Because what is an old farmhouse without chickens?

Find Stillness, She Says

I was doing my yoga this morning, and though I've done this particular tape many times before, this morning I noticed the instructor admonishing me, as I twisted one leg, like, behind my ear, to "find stillness."  You know, because it's just that simple. Stillness, stillness...now where did I put that stillness?  I know I had it a minute ago: aha!  There it is!  Over by the toilet brush where the little boys left it.  Hey, stillness, over here!  I need you!

I mock, but actually I have been in search of stillness lately, or at least, I have been trying to remember that stillness exists, because it has not been much in evidence around here.  Though its absence has been all to the good, because the amazing rush of activity which has kept me blogless for what feels like weeks has led to 1) a four day, boyless househunting trip to MA, during which TTD and I discovered that hey, we really like hanging out together, 2) a purchase agreement on the house of our dreams (we'd been going around saying, "Why doesn't someone build the perfect house and sell it to us," and lo and behold, 250 years ago, someone DID build us the perfect house!  More on that later...) and 3) a purchase agreement on our house here in Iowa.  Yes: in the course of 48 hours we bought one house and sold another.  That sound you hear is my brain trying to wrap itself around the idea.  Whooooeeee.

There are, of course, many many hoops through which we must jump, both as buyers and as sellers, before this whole thing is over.  TTD still has to get his MA license--he's in the throes of the beauracracy now--and we still have to move.  There are schools to find, jobs to get (for me), a million details to arrange (I have this feeling I'm going to neglect something major like, say, utilities, and arrive to a lightless house.)  But a lot of big steps have been taken: we decided to move, TTD has a job contract, TTD passed his boards (everyone write a comment and congratulate him, because reboarding is no small feat; he studied for A YEAR), we found a house so wonderful I am scared to write about it, and a buyer for our Iowa house.  TTD and I both feel this probably means we're heading in the right direction...or for a major fall if it doesn't work out.  You do the math.

So, here we go.  The plan right now is to move between TTD's last day of work, on April 20th, and his first day at the new job, on April 30th.   More than that, I really don't know.  I am trying to be OK with that, to just get done what needs to get done in each day and let the emotions--anticipation, loss, excitement, apprehension, more excitement, desire for chocolate and wine--swirl around and slosh away and make a big old mess as they will, that's fine, I'm used to messes, I'll clean it up later.

My little boys, though, are not used to mess, and here's where you come in.  Urperooni is too young to really get what's going on, but Rabbit is able to comprehend it, and while he is very excited and pleased at the prospect of new house and ocean and grandparents, he is teary at the prospect of leaving his friends, and I can just sense the apprehension in his little voice as he asks, "Are we going to take all the knives and forks along when we go?"  So, advice?  Have you moved with your children, or when you were a child?  What helped?  What hurt?  What can a Mama do that's comforting and good, and realistic and brave-making, for a little boy of four years who's leaving a lot he knows behind?  I'm doing all the usual stuff, reassuring him that everything's coming with (and TTD has taken him on box-hunting expeditions so he has boxes to pack his toys in; that helped), holding him when he worries about missing his friends, telling him about the new house and showing pictures, talking about the things in the area he already knows and likes, etc.  But what else?  You guys have always come through for me on questions--I still re-read the notes you gave me on growing up in the sixties and seventies--so please, come through on this too.

I'm hoping that the next few weeks will slow down a little before the final box-filled moving days,because I have lots of posts in my head, including a birthday post for Urp, whose birthday it is today, and Happy Birthday miraculous, adorable blond boy of mine!  I think I'll tell his birth story next time, since I haven't done that yet for either boy and it would be nice to have a break from obsessing about the details of moving.  And I'll tell about the new house, too, when I get over the feeling I'm going to jinx things by talking about it.  As soon as we close, I'll post photos (March 22, is the plan.)

Oy.  I just read over this post and it sounds very self-pitying and frightened, which is not at all how I feel.  I feel so excited and happy about this move, so right and good.  For twenty years I've been moving around, by my own choice, and it's been wonderful, but now I'm going home, and it's a whole new delight.  Home!  I'm finally, for the first time, moving toward what I know and not away from it! 

It's a wonderful feeling.  Now if I can just get the inspection done on the new house by March 2nd.....

For Sale

Whoa.  The realtor came by Thursday and put up the For Sale sign in front of the house, and we've had three showings already.  We are On The Market, and how.

It's the oddest feeling!  Suddenly, of course, I love everything about the house and appreciate its every mood and whim, excluding the upstairs bathroom's fluorescent light, which is having a sort of nervous breakdown and is forever getting stuck mid-flicker, leaving me to shower in the semi-darkness, which is not at all romantic the way taking a candlelit bath would be.  But apart from that, and the ratty screen porch on the back which makes us look like we should have a few cars on blocks in the yard, and maybe a washing machine or two, the house seems perfection itself.  The hardwood floors, the lovely big windows, the south-facing sunroom off the kitchen, the small-yet-liveable, non-McMansionyness of it all.  The steep red roof which TTD reshingled, all by himself, armed only with a hammer and a climbing rope (which I made him use to belay himself off the chimney, because that roof is STEEP, man, and it took him three months to do it and by the time he was finishing he was working in a snowstorm).  And, I kid you not, the picket fence which TTD put up two summers ago.

It's not just the house, of course, though it is a terrific little place.  It's the fact that we moved here when Rabbit was six months old.  It's the fact it was our first house.  Urplet was made here; I left this house on a cold February day to have him, and returned two days later with him in his little baby carrier seat.  This is the house where both my children learned to walk and talk.  The house where they became people.  The house where Miss Iowa the cat is buried in the backyard.  The house where I wrote four drafts of one still-unpublished novel.  The house where I sat on my bed one night almost two years ago and started a blog.  The house where we became a family, and I became (am becoming) a mother, and TTD became a Daddy.  It's the house of no sleep, of tantrums and poop and vomit and crying and bonking over the head with toys.  All of the children's birthdays have been here.  There have been a lot of baby showers, and a lot of parties with everyone ending up drinking wine in the kitchen.  There has been vicious PPD, and there has been healing.  This house has given shelter to it all.

And now there's a sign out front, and people come through while we're not here and decide if they like it.  There's a strange sense that we've entered the public domain, and that this little sphere of us-ness has become part of the bigger world, no longer our exclusive circle.  We are starting to have to let go. One of these days soon (Inshallah...oh, how I hope it sells), we will walk through the house and our footsteps will echo, and the memories will be just that, memories; the house will be in our hearts, but no longer part of our daily life.  It will go from being our address to being, "When we lived in Iowa."

This is not a bad thing.  But it's an intense thing, and I want to feel the feelings and not avoid them as we go through this transition.  And if that means a dreadful earnest-ness pervades the blog, then so be it.  It helps to write it all down (she said, with stunning originality) and sit with the mix of loss and hope and excitement and anticipation and dread and anxiety which is aswirl in me these days. 

And of course, it's all in service of my new goal, suggested by Best Friend (aka The Most Intelligent Woman In The World): I am going to become the Boddhisattva of Real Estate.  Om mani padme om...om mani padme om....om mani new house om....om mani 2.5 acres and detached garage om...om mani master bath om...

Good and Faithful Servant

Wow.  Another phone call.  The Jesuit priest who married TTD and me, a man who worked on the Reservation for twenty years, who was my confessor, who received me and many others into the Catholic Church, a man who in himself was a place of strength and hope for many people in the darkness of the Rez....he died suddenly, with no warning: just had a massive heart attack as he got ready to go for his daily run.  He was in his fifties.

This blog is turning into one long eulogy, but this man, this man, oh, he deserves the best, because he was the best.  He was one of those people who performed years of long, hard service not only without complaint, but with incandescent joy.  He was a source of great and compassionate wisdom for me and many people, yet just as quirky and human and cackling-with-laughter as he could be.  When I went to confession, he would walk with me through the whole scalding process, always finishing with a blessing, then stand up and say, "Now...how about a root beer float?"  Then we'd go along to the kitchen in the Jesuit residence across from the church (this was at a hundred-year-old mission on the Rez) and make, yes, a proper ice-cream float.  He nourished the body and soul of his charges; he knew how to bring the times for dancing and weeping together.

There used to be--I'm sure there still are--a lot of bad car wrecks on the Rez, and we would get the victims in the hospital ER, usually three or four of them.  Literally hundreds of people would follow sometimes: huge extended families driving up behind the ambulance and milling rabidly around the halls and entrances while the medical staff, called away from the day's scheduled work, struggled to triage and stabilize patients for transport by ground and helicopter to the big hospital two hours away in Rapid City.  TTD was always there, and so was this priest--who's name, eerily, was Bill.  I remember several times looking up from my own panicked chaos as I worked on a patient and seeing Father Bill's face across the ER, and knowing that peace was out there, somewhere, even if it wasn't available to me.  Back when I used to live on a commune (what, I haven't told you about that?) my hippy friends used to talk about, "holding the space" for someone in distress.  Father Bill held the space of peace and hope for us on the Rez.

But not in a sanctimonious way, oh no.  I remember once, after a horrible summer of accidents and suicides and drownings and tribal infighting, I asked him how he and the other priests did it: wake after wake, funeral after funeral, and hardly ever a wedding or baptism.  "Well," he said, "you do all the usual things.  You pray, and say Mass, and run, and read, and talk to your friends, and try to get away from here sometimes."  He paused, considering.  "And," he added, "you do have to remember that this place is just fucked."

Well, he's not there anymore.  He's not here.  And while I will miss him--how my heart breaks that he never got to meet my kids!--I am delighted to know that for him, school got out a little early; for him, Christmas is here, and Easter with it.  And I'm not being maudlin, just honest, because I really believe this.  The grief he leaves behind him is real, but so is the hope.

And because he loved poetry, I'll end with this, by Gerard Manley Hopkins--also, incidentally, a Jesuit.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things'
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I Had A Farm In Africa

The other day my brother sent me a link to a blog he thought I'd like: The Flame Tree.  I zoomed on over and lo, it's the most beautiful thing, written by an American woman who lives in Nairobi with her husband and two tiny children.  Go on over and read: go on, I'll wait.

Hi.  Glad you're back.  Thought maybe you'd just decided to stay there, and I wouldn't blame you one bit.  I myself stayed and read all the archives last night, and it was the oddest experience, because this blog pulled together so many strands of my life, then yanked on them.  Hard.  I told you she was a good writer.

There's the Kenya part, which really makes me ache, because I knew when I was there, at 22, that I'd found somewhere important for me.  Not in a romantic sense--though of course living on the equator and buzzing off to the Indian Ocean for vacation was excellent--but in Isaak Dinesen's sense: "Here I am, where I want to be."  I wanted to be there because I wanted to grapple with immediate problems--AIDS, hunger--and even though I knew my response would always be inadequate, I still wanted to be in there trying rather than watching from a living room in, oh, Iowa.  I wanted to be there because I love learning languages, and living in places which force me to think about what I'm doing when I so much as run for a bus.  I wanted to be there because I liked living in an international community.  And because I loved it--irrationally, nonsensically, but I did.

There's the mothering-small-children part, which makes me ache too, but because it is so familiar.  And because it reminds me that yes, I can daydream away about where I might rather be, but small people are incessant on every continent, and the particular problems I'm dealing with right now--the basic, mundane problems of exhaustion and irritability and how to parcel out the trains today--are not going to go away with a change of locale.  Salutary realization!

And then there's the missing-friends-and-family part, which, granted, is not as intense when you're 2,000 miles from your parents, not 10,000, but which exists, nonetheless.  Loneliness is loneliness, you know?  And hey, my folks are in Vienna for the semester, so I just realized I have dibs on the excellent-sounding 10,000 miles thing too!  Cool.

And, since we aim for scathing honesty here at Iowadrift, there's the matter of my pride.  The seamy underbelly of my love for travel is my love of sounding cool: "Just got back from Bangkok, now I'm off to Rangoon," sounds so much better than, "Just in from Cedar Rapids; heading for Des Moines tomorrow."  I have to swallow hard every time I tell someone I live in Iowa, just like I have to stamp on my vanity when I correct people, "No, I'm not a doctor, I'm an NP."  I always thought I'd end up overseas, married to a polyglot European aid worker: I always wanted to have the best address in the class directory for college reunions.  In the event, um...no.  Iowa City, Iowa, people.  Part-time NP.  Unpublished fiction writer.  Yeah!

So I confess, when I discovered The Flame Tree my first reaction was to run for cover, because ouch!  So close to the bone!  But I kept reading, mostly because it's damn good, but also because I am trying to learn to, as my wise spiritual director said, sit with being sad instead of going out and getting mad.  I am trying to learn to just be still and let hurt, or confusion, or (and!) doubt, or guilt, or regret just eddy around and settle down again.  Because then I can kind of get up and keep going, rather than wasting too much time fighting reality (and dammit, reality always kicks my ass: what is that?).  And the reality is: I'm here, it's hard, I'm blessed, I need to get over myself.

Kathleen Norris once defined detatchment as, "The ability to live at peace with the reality of whatever happens."  I am thinking that shouldn't be too hard to achieve, right?  Only eighty or ninety years, maybe?  In the meantime, I'm going to go read blogs.

PS.  Speaking of which, I need to put some new blogs on my blogroll (hi, The Family Thumbscre.ws! Hi Imperfect Life, which doesn't want to let the link work for some reason!).  They'll be there soon.

The Downtown Business Section of Hell (Hotter Than)

Thank you for all the advice--seriously, it really helped crystallize my thinking, which tends to be smeary with procrastination and sloth.  We are indeed going to take what interviews we can get, and try to bunch them together so we don't have to shuttle back and forth to the East Coast too much (not that we wouldn't love that, but a) my folks will be in Austria all fall and b) work tends to frown on sudden disappearences from clinic/ER).  Then I guess we'll take it from there.  We already have a wonderful realtor out in MA emailing us stuff from the areas we could live in, and another good realtor here who's ready to move on selling the house when we give the word.  So I guess that's all we can do right now.  Next fun part: breaking the news to our respective bosses.  Because, of course, we are completely irreplaceable and they will never find another MD or NP able to do our jobs. 

In other news, it is hot as downtown hell here.  The heat index has been 110 degrees for the past few days: the boys and I spent the morning sitting in the lake, submerged to our chins, and are now sitting in our blessedly air conditioned house beneath the fans, drinking ice water.  Actually, Rabbit and I are sitting, and Urplet is asleep upstairs, because running around up to your chin in a lake for 2 hours takes a lot out of a guy, especially when a guy has to tote around thighs so deliciously fat and squashy.

It's all very well for us, with our A/C and our ice and our swimming pools, but this weather is bringing me right straight back to India, where there were no such things and where the actual temperature, not the heat index, was 105-110 every day for months.  With 90% humidity and no breeze ever.  I had never encountered anything like it before, except for a short time in Bangkok, and I am here to tell you with no pride whatsoever that I decompensated.  Everyone around me functioned just fine: they wore saris, which are incredibly hot because of all that material (five meters of cloth over a full-length heavy cotton petticoat), and some of the nuns even wore veils, and though everyone dripped sweat all the time, nobody complained.  Everyone was greasy with dusty dirt and grimy sweat 24 hours a day for months, and that was just the way life was.  Except that I couldn't really get my head around it, which was embarrassing.  Never before or since has my physical discomfort ruled me so completely, except maybe in the last stages of pregnancy and the extremities of newborn sleeplessness, and I was mortified to discover how fast I folded.  I mean, I was CROSS.

Nevertheless, I learned to live with it.  At the hospital and in the residences on the compound, big old ceiling fans whizzed around incessantly--except when the electricity went out, which was every fifteen minutes, and I learned very quickly to listen for the "click" of the hospital generator coming on, which meant the blessed fan was about to start turning again.   Like everyone else, I moved my desk in the nursing tutors' office beneath one of the fans, and held all my loose papers down with rocks.  I walked very slowly from point A to point B.  I went up onto the roof of the nursing hostel at night to catch what breeze there was off the Ganges.  I drank nimbupani (lemon water) constantly, and took three or four cold showers a day.  And once a week I went with Father Jack, Jesuit extraordinaire, and the other American nurses down to the basement of the Notre Dame convent next door, where Sister Mary Anne had a video training center and let us watch American movies on her equipment.  Did I mention the basement was air-conditioned? 

When the year was over I flew back to New York (Mumbai-Bangkok-Taipei-Los Angeles-NYC: not the fastest route by a long shot) in December.  I got off the plane at six in the morning, and my parents took me to my brother's apartment, where I showered and changed into jeans.  Then we went out for breakfast.  I still remember the streets, so empty and clean, and the sky, so clear and blue, and the air, so chilled.  It's the only time I've ever breathed deeply and found the NYC air sweet and clean..and that day, damn, did I.

This post seems to have ended up in a different place than it started, but what the hell.  I guess the gist of it is, it's hot and we're job hunting, and I used to live somewhere hotter.  Whooo hoooo---my life makes riveting reading, no?