One foot is in one world, the other is in the next. Maintaining balance in such a stance is a challenge and an awakening.
This week my friends and I moved a number of boxes from here, my home of three decades, to the new place in a seniors apartment block a few minutes away. Half of my room seems torn away, a gaping hole with a few bits of detritus left in it, and a whole lot of antique dust. The other half of the room, ignoring a few boxes and an unusual untidiness on surfaces, remains as normal. The quiet continues. The trees stand in lush leaf as before. It remains my home.
Not far away, another room is coalescing, shaping itself out of bare walls and empty cabinets. An oak sideboard, scouted out in New Westminster long ago with a friend beside me, and an upright dresser that belonged to my neighbours Grace and Bill in the last home I lost to developers, now conspire to create the first margin of my coming home, both comforting and disconcerting me. Boxes of dishes and doodads have been lifted from here--towers I squeezed past for days--and lie open there, awaiting my attentions. Most of my books are already there on shelves. I feel the urge to bring more home here. What is a room without its weight in books?
Here, I have been nurtured by darkness, living on the ground floor in the corner of an L-shaped structure, with only slivers of sunlight piercing the window at daybreak at certain times of year, not entering more than a few inches into the room. In summer, it is cooler here than anywhere else. In winter, the trees shed their leaves and the grey light moves close for several hours a day, mountains peeking out from between their ravelled branches.
I am close to earth here. I have planted the land outside my windows, and the smell of rain-wet soil brings pleasure on a dark winter day. I have spent many hours with cats in every corner of this yard, and met my neighbour skunks and raccoons and insects, and the flitting populations of birds that pass through this close embrace of dwelling and land. Sky has little to do with my home here. A tinge of gold on distant trees on special evenings, a glimpse of cloud if I crane my neck.
The new home is high. Highest. It is the top floor of the building--will I hear rain on the roof for the first time in years?--and earth is far below, and far off in the form of ball fields and mountains. Buildings, bridges, motorways dominate the view, with a busyness unremembered in my old place. Balconies and windows spread out below me, people busy on or next to them, men in hard-hats toil there every day. Above them the mountains hang, changing colour and distinctness with the shifting haze, and above them an ocean of sky, rippling with cloud or mist or stark with sunshine and Brandeis blue. There is a vastness of sky there. I will have no garden, no balcony, no little place outside to call my own.
There, the cotton wool of my urban woodland is torn away. The soft, familiar view is thrown wide to a frantic people and wild sky. Light floods in--still from the northern exposure, but bright, bright enough to light the farthest wall. When I sit on the loo with the door open, instead of a chair with books of poetry I look out at world and sky.
What will this shifting viewpoint do to me? Will I crawl out from under my cozy rock and hurl myself into the world? Will I draw the drapes and hide from the overstimulation all around? Will my writing change? Will my energy change? Who will I be when my environment is so transformed?
I am lucky. Lucky that I have found a home that appears safe and stable, that I can afford because of a government subsidy, that despite a loss of space and all that that implies, appeals to me. Lucky to have a building manager who likes me, and says so. Lucky to have neighbours who smile. Lucky to have friends who will carry boxes and furniture when I am in too much pain to do it. Lucky, so lucky, to have a friend who offered to pay an extra month's rent in my old home so I could move at a pace that lessens every kind of shock that leaving a well-loved home, leaving against my will, and packing and moving and figuring out and then being somewhere new can entail.
This way, I get slowly used to that foreign space. I make its acquaintance, make, perhaps, friends with it. I have time to see what I need to ask, get, change, what I can bring, what I must store, what I pass on. And time to move things over at a pace that allows me to unpack and integrate and order a bit at a time instead of landing with a crash in a tiny apartment filled to the ceiling with stuff.
I am lucky I get to stay almost in my neighbourhood--a short walk away--where I have friends, shopkeepers I am fond of, roots, my friend, roots.
Dark, light, low, high; change, change, change. With enough warning, two agonizing years, to have assimilated the worst of the shock, to know what I want and what I am willing to sacrifice, to be as ready as I can be for this turning in my life.
Where the changes take me, I do not know. Sad though I am, mad though I am, I am also happy, curious, ready--almost--to go.
That last look out at the yard will be a painful one. It has been my greatest solace through some awfully difficult times. But there is another vista waiting, with promises unrevealed.
Low. High. Dark. Light.
Change.
Change.
Change.
Image: "Bleeding Heart and Swordfern," Casey June Wolf (2018).
