Welp, we’ve been here a month. I’d say it flew by, but it’s more like I get this weird deja vu sense that we never left. This was inevitable, I suppose, given we have moved back into the same house we used to live in (albeit the upstairs unit instead of the downstairs). On the one hand this re-habitation of the old haunt was a good choice – with all of the changes we’ve all had to process, I appreciate not having to learn a new grid of streets. I know where the grocery stores are, I know a 5 mile route for a run. (I do not recall suffering through this many wee-hours train whistles and ship horns – living right at the port is noisy as heck and I don’t remember that being an issue before.)
On the other hand, it lends our Alabama experience a sort of dream-like quality. Did we ever leave? Was that real?
I learned a lot from our stint in the ‘burbs. Namely, I don’t like the ‘burbs. The distance from town, the distance from neighbors, the access-by-car-only – it all presented too many barriers to getting out and being a part of the broader world. Even without the oft-absent husband we would have struggled to overcome all of the little, subtle traps that keep people isolated from community. (Kids = giant tar pit of death, re: getting out of the house.) I had this sense of being entangled all the time, having to unwind and snip and unstick myself from creeping tendrils, of having to heave boots out of sucking mud, drag a heavy sled everywhere I went. It was too hard to be among other humans. It was very lonesome.
We have hosted more people in our small apartment in New Orleans over the past month than we did in 3.5 years in Alabama. Folks dropping by, folks inviting themselves over for Mardi Gras parade time, the Prof’s birthday, Craig’s birthday . . . our house is often full of people. We have also dropped by at friends’ houses last minute, or been invited to parties or book clubs or wine nights more times than I can count. Once or twice a week, the Prof and/or I single-parent the kids’ bedtime so the other parent can go out and do a thing. It’s the good life, at last.
There are, inevitably, trade-offs. Housing is out of control expensive (a house similar to our AL place, in our current neighborhood, would approach a million). I enjoyed having a yard to tend and plan – we don’t have so much as a blade of grass here. I do miss our trees, our backyard playground, our porches. (This apartment has a nice deep front porch, which is currently occupied by a cushion-less ratty old couch that our landlord promises he will dispose of one of these days . . . I love that guy, he’s a close friend, but his couch has got to go!) And I loved having a house designed for everyday use and entertaining both – our house made sense, where we put stuff was sensible. I don’t find that to be true of our current situation (the dining room is light years away from the kitchen, for example, making dinner require about a mile’s worth of steps back and forth). We live upstairs now, and I find myself constantly hollering at the kids to stop playing lest we disturb the downstairs neighbors.
But in our former home, we would sit on the porch and no one would ever walk by. No one sat with us. Since the Prof was always gone, it was usually just me alone on that porch, waiting forlornly for someone to wander by and talk to me – an impossibility given we were at the end of a court, and all of our older neighbors were always off on trips. We’d send the kids out back to play and they played alone. We tended a yard that no one saw but us. I tried to have a get together once in a while, but we were too far from town for anyone to be able to overcome the inertia and get to us, except for some serious event like a baby shower or birthday party (never “just because”). I’d go out for a walk or a jog, and all of the houses in the subdivision had their blinds drawn, doors closed. What few porch rockers were out were clearly decorative. There was never anyone around.
The farther I get from our Alabama life, the more I shudder at the reminder of how desperately lonely it was. You have to work hard to be lonely here. It’s the opposite of our former life – inertia leads us to connection. And since most of my efforts are spent in my job and keeping my children alive and clean and fed, this is an important distinction. I don’t have a lot leftover, after the job and kids have had their way with me. And I don’t have to have much of any energy left to be among friends here. I just have to step outside the door.
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Mardi Gras is in full swing. We go to 2-4 hours of parades pretty much every day now. The boys worked out a system where Jack holds Liam up – he does not get the top of Liam’s head any farther in elevation than the top of his own head, and yet the float-riders love the spectacle and throw them tons more stuff than they get when they stand alone, or when I hold them up. It’s darn cute. Jack, my little OCD sweetheart, is very serious about it, and gets all in a kerfuffle and starts hollering urgent instructions as a float comes close. And Liam, standoffish and secure and yet secretly hoping to impress big bro, will skitter over to be lifted every time. Craig, meanwhile, will holler and hold his pudgy little hands up, too, and then when he catches something he always throws it back. (Still learning how this works).
I’ll do a separate MG post. For now, I’ll tie this week-long endeavor-of-a-post with this little bow – so glad we left AL. So glad we came back to NOLA.