Coming About

Well, it’s happened.  The ship has turned.  I can point my bow (stern?  port?  bow is the front, yes?) towards the future, any future.  It is a coping mechanism, a survival skill finely honed from years of being tugged from one new home to another, and I am particularly good at it.  But it takes time to turn this big old ship.  The older I get, the more I have to carry with me, and the less sprightly I am in my turns.  I have a bigger hold, a more complex network of sails, and it takes a bit of rigging to turn them into a new wind.

Oh, barf.  What a metaphor.

So anyhow, I knew it was ok when my mother said last night in a plaintive voice that she still had hopes that the man who took Patrick’s job, the job we’d hoped for, well mom was just waiting for the phone call that he’d changed his mind, found something better, and they wanted Patrick after all. This job was an hour’s drive from her, hence her attachment (and ours, at least in part.)  When she said this, I thought – blech.  No thanks.  Tiny little town, not even a grocery store, no thank YOU.

I believed, for several weeks – an eternity when so much hangs on one decision – that this would be our new home, and I was finding lots of reasons to love it.  And now I know that it will not, and we’ll probably never go there again, I’ve turned away.  We’re back in limbo, as we’ve been these many years.  But, for The Now, we’re here, in this house, and puzzling out where to slot another baby, hoping they don’t raise the rent on us.  I’ve started thinking about spring, an herb garden.  My gardens never live, but my hope for them never dies.  My husband thinks the money spent on seeds would be better spent on food that we’ll actually get to eat, but I ignore him.  What is a few pennies, for the feel of armfuls of earth, soil to the elbows.  Green shoots in the sun.