It's April 2013, and just as I have in many an April past, since I've lived in the exotic desert climate in one of California's hottest deserts, in the Coachella Valley, I hear tonight the chirping, mid-night mating song of a lone bird, known as a Common Poorwill, indigenous to this part of the desert.
There's one here in my neighborhood - just one in this desert block,
which seems right on the mark, since this is a bird that claims a wide
territory, room for only one bird, and it's not clear to me if its a
female or male. It's been one year exactly since I heard the midnight
April song of this very same species of bird, the song of another
long-flyer making its dark, cheerful song, one year since I moved out
of my house on California Drive in the Palm Desert Country Club, a nice,
open ceiling, tile-floored house I owned for ten years. And it sort of
feels like I got a divorce, or like I'm reminiscing over the bittersweet
territory of a lost, long-term love relationship, with all is good and
bad components entwined.
Last April, at this exact time, before the dogs and cat and I were learning to negotiate life in the much-smaller, one bedroom duplex that we are living in now, I was spending every minute of my week-long spring break from my teaching job, as well as a few extra days on either side of that week, packing, sorting, renting a Uhaul, gathering moving help, doing the hard physical work of lifting, loading, unloading and cleaning, and generally wondering if I had completely lost my mind, or if I was making the wise passage into a new, lightweight and creatively transformational phase of my life (i.e., carving out more time to write, something I'd been dreaming of for years; freeing myself from the financial burden of a steep monthly mortgage payment; making a clean break with a tricky and fairly troubling chapter of my life, and so forth.)
Most people I mentioned this house-selling thing to weren't exactly enthused. Most grew quiet, and I could see the look of sympathy cross their brows, even if they smiled and said "what a wonderful change!" Many came right out and asked if I was in foreclosure; I could tell that most assumed, even when I assured them otherwise, that this was an unfortunate thing; that it probably had to do with me not being able to afford the house anymore. Not the truth. It was never cheap, it was never easy, but it wasn't cheap. Owning a house! The American Dream! And for a single-parent, single woman! Almost a miracle!
So why did I sell my house, and was it the right thing to do?
My house. It wasn't my dream house, but it was my house, as good as any and the pleasant place of many good hours of sleep. Most of all, it was my sense of security: the satisfaction of making a commitment to my first long-time home; the safety of knowing, until the whole world changed, that I had a terrific financial investment I could draw on when the time was right, my back-up plan, should all else fail. the problem with this American Dream is that it did fail, and it failed hard. Not only once, but several times, in a slow-sequence, slow-rewind type of repeat, something I'd never dreamed was possible, until it was in my face. Like so many others, I lost my investment - although grateful and fortunate that I hadn't invested a down payment in the home -, and sadly had to accept that the considerable nest egg I had relied on in my mind could no longer sustain my sense of financial security into old age.
I also had to face the facts: for far too long, I'd been sinking far too much money into a high monthly mortgage, an investment that now had no viable return for what I was putting in out of my hard-earned wages. I'd done everything right: I could afford it, and my interest rate was fixed at a terrific low rate, but it was still squeezing far too much money out of my earnings, even as I was losing side work I'd relied on, teaching workshops and other side gigs in addition to my full time job as a professor, due to a tight economy. In addition, the house needed work. I'd bought it almost brand new, but after ten years, it was time for costly repairs. It seemed like I was always consumed by something or other: removing the spent-out dishwasher, and living with a gutted-out-hole under the counter for a year, after deciding I didn't want to invest $500 on a new one; fixing a broken drawer; and replacing the front gate to the tune of $700 when the old wooden one finally caved in. I even ended up cutting down (with expensive, hired help of course), the three giant, needle-armed palo verde trees in my front yard. One split in half one night and fell across the driveway; another blew over in a rogue windstorm; the third was felled by a termite infestation. As a single woman, struggling to keep home ownership together by myself, financially and physically, it all just got to be too much.
There were also other factors. I went through a string of wild-eyed, completely enthralling and then debilitating love relationships in that house, that left me depleted and more alone than I ever could have imagined I'd be. My only child grew up, got married, and moved away. More loneliness and a sense of abandoned grief. I endured, for more than five years, vicious, hating, harassing neighbors from across the street who took every opportunity they could to yell at me, scream *fuck you*, call the police on my barking dogs and many other imagined things, and even throw eggs at my car, and friends' cars, when left in the driveway. California Drive was also a busy street, a sort of thruway cutting through a neighborhood between busy avenues, and the constant traffic, as well as the heavy traffic noise from a nearby 6-lane boulevard, always made me feel a bit on edge. Right before I put the house up for sale, too, there was a drive-by shooting in the street in front of my house. Increasingly, it felt like a scary place to live, especially by myself.
My house. At 76530 California Drive. It was a house built of stucco, a house with a red tile roof, a house with a wall around the back and side yards and most of the front, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a two-car garage, a nice patio and a pool. It was my house, and now it's not. In a short, six-month period, the first half of the year 2012, I went into an all-too-familiar downward de-mobilizing of living circumstances and business status, like millions of other Americans have also done since the stock market crashed in September, 2008. It was something I'd never imagined; like all others such as I from the tail end of the Baby Boom/leading edge of Generation X crowd (born in the early to mid 1960's), I'd only ever known the sharp, ever-steady curve of upward mobility my entire life, and jumping blithely into owning my first home at age 38 had seemed so easy. Agonizing about whether to sell or not to sell, during a three-year period, and finally deciding on doing a short sale, was anything but easygoing. It cost me many tears, many sleepless nights, and lots of pages of what I see now as completely unnerved and on-the-edge poetry that I wrote during this time.
This year, I often find myself missing what still feels like my home. As oppressive as owning that house had become - the list of repairs and problems is endless - the carpets were thrashed and needed replacing; the pool pump was shot and the hot tub heater was broken; I had been enduring a horrific citrus rat invasion that I couldn't curb, no matter how many instant-zapper traps I set out during that last summer that I lived there (22 rats dead in three months, and more still coming!) it was still my home, and a part of my is in deep mourning for what I willingly parsed away. Another part of me is in a sense of all-too-buoyant relief - the kind of relief you get when you've been carrying a heavy backpack uphill on a hike, and put the pack down, and almost spring out of your socks from the release of the weight. it's a sense of freedom, lightness, but it's almost too much to bear, like staying out in the sun at the beach far too long, knowing you're getting sunburned, far more than the tan you thought you deserved.
I miss a lot of things. Things that I'll never get back. Loss, and losing things, was the reason I sold the house, made a run for it - as fast as a person can do, when negotiating what to do with ten years of accumulated things that had added up between my daughter and I....I miss my daughter, of course. It was the house she grew up as a teenager and young adult in. I miss the pool parties, I miss the citrus trees and palm trees that I nurtured and watered; I miss the garden I cultivated. I sometimes think about the Christmas tree that I planted outside the living room window after the holiday season in 2004; it was only five feet high and easily managed when I planted it, and over 30 feet high and still covered with my loving decoration of permanent outdoor ornaments by the time I moved. I miss the bare-boned palappa, a wooden-framed structure over my old patio, which had at one time been completely covered with palm fronds; with every big windstorm, a few more fronds had blown off. By the time I moved, there were only three withered fronds left.
I miss the *fuck you* that I scratched into a bedroom wall one night in an angry-at-a-missing-lover rage, and I miss the holes I kicked into the stucco walls the few times I had bad news I couldn't bear. Like the time my partner, who was living with me for a good two years out of that latter ten, committed suicide, leaving one day with a gun, never to return. Like the time my daughter told me she'd had been date raped by a boyfriend, months after it happened and the perpetrator long gone. Like the time a man who romanced me and asked me to marry him (I said yes, in a loving blaze) disappeared on me without a trace. I had a stalker for several years, necessitating a restraining order and a good measure of fear, as well. But I lived life in that house, and I lived it long and hard, I lived it with people, with lovers and family and friends, I lived it in quiet peace and in raging arguments, I lived it alone in tears and overwhelming feelings of abandonment, I lived it in the giddy uplift of a poem well written, of a book edited, published, and praised, and no one can ever take that away. Even though it often felt, and still feels, like ghosts now haunt me down, the way they rabidly search for the spoils of Halloween, there is something firmly rooted in my memories of the house on California Drive, good times, loving times, hopeful times, and all of the stuff in between, the stuffing and bits and pieces that life is actually, and richly, made of. Sort of like an awkward, but tenacious and tough, bird's nest, the place where the tired songbird goes to rest at dawn, after a full-throated night.
Now, I'm in a small place, a very nice part of town, paying half the monthly payment in rent as I was straining to pay on my former mortgage. I'm in a much quieter neighborhood than where I was before. I'm still not used to it. Half of my things have been in storage for the past year, including my extensive collection of books, which is becoming more difficult to do without. It feels so strange to have to call and negotiate with a landlord when I need something fixed, although a relief. Before I moved here last September - to a part of Palm Desert I lived in when I first moved here in 1999, prior to buying my house -, I spent several months living first in a one-room studio, and then a month staying at my parents' condo, dogs and cat and all, while they were traveling in Europe; during all that time, I basically lived out of a few suitcases. The thing is, it felt good to live like that, and I had a sense of adventure and forward momentum I hadn't experienced in a long time.
This feeling has faded, and I admit it's been a rather strange past seven months. It's April 2013, one year exactly after I moved out of my house on California Drive in the Palm Desert Country Club, a house I owned for ten years. I still don't feel grounded, and I still don't feel settled in and packed. I still don't see as much money saved as I had hoped for, and I'm feeling restless and even isolated here; I still miss my daughter, who is in Washington and expecting a baby now, a wonderful bit of news that makes me feel even more restless, dislocated, and on edge with anticipation and the depth of the many miles between us now.
And while the Common Poorwill of this neighborhood sings its heart out in the desert tonight, a new April, behind my new, temporary home, sounding identical to the one I listened to last April at my former house, I'm still in a holding pattern, and still don't know where home is, but while I continue in my mid-life drift, my memories of my ten years in the house on California Drive endure, and no one can ever take that away from me. I'm rooted there, just as that place is rooted forever and firmly within me.
