Tiny Door

When we moved into our present rental home, we had neither time nor resources to facilitate the process. After two moving trucks full of stuff, we were so tired of unpacking that we were just putting boxes in the storage area in the basement and garage and telling each other that we would go through it "first thing next week". Since Jason was still finishing his dissertation, that task got pushed again and again, till we decided that never would be a good time to go through that mess.

Everything found it's place, and we bought a dining room table on craigslist for $50. My only friend in town, a lady with nine children who lived next door to me, abruptly moved away. I was really bummed since I had just recently gotten to be friends with her and discovered that she wasn't involved in a creepy commune or cult. They are christian to the max, but the great kind that are nice to people and don't evangelize every chance they get. She is funny, strong willed, and an incredible task master. Her children are all sweet and smart. Anyway, when she left she pretty much gave me my pick of furnishings from her house. I was so disappointed in her move that I wasn't as jazzed as I normally would have been, but it was really cool to suddenly have an extra bookshelf and an air hockey table.

I also signed up for the local free cycle list serve and have gotten rid of items which we haven't had use for. The snowmen dishes, the size XL scrubs that mysteriously appeared in my sewing stuff, the footboard of the bed frame that the children obliterated with their incessant jumping; all taken.

Fantastically, I have an entire room specifically for sewing and painting, and have been working lots. When I initially started moving my things into the room I remember noticing a tiny door in the corner of the room and wondering about it. It was teeny like the door in Being John Malchovitch, and I entertained a host of scenarios regarding the mystical properties of the door, and somehow, I never opened it. As curious as it was, I was happy wondering and concocting stories and ideas.

Finally one day, Jason was in the room and he noticed the door. He opened it and it was full of laundry. Pre-teen laundry, to be exact. I had noticed the chute in the upstairs bathroom and considered it, but the door made a really excellent platform for my gigantic jade plant, so it has been closed since our arrival. At first glance you could see a lime green bandanna, something Hannah Montana print, and the tiniest, underwire bra I've ever seen. I asked him to close it and just leave the stuff there, since it wasn't hurting anything.

Again, I ignored the door for some time. Looking around my sewing room, I thought about items that could fit into the door; things that would be really funny to store there. My daughter has a fuzzy hair troll doll in a Hawaiian shirt that would be hilarious in the chute. It would be a good place to store my eleven pairs of scissors and five pin cushions since the kids can't seem to resist them. I imagined shoving baby dolls into the doorway till they filled the chute all the way up to the bathroom. If I decided to do this I would certainly wait till Fox was in the upstairs bathroom because, besides myself, he would appreciate a doll geyser more than anyone in the family. I'd have to move the Jade plant, but it would be worth it. Another great use of the chute would be to suspend someone's cell phone halfway down to drive them crazy.

Last week my other neighbor asked me if I was interested in looking through some hand me down clothes. She runs a home-based daycare, plus she has four kids, so when the neighborhood yardsale weekend came, a few of the parents of the kids in her daycare brought things for her to sell. Her oldest daughter is in the fifth grade and full of sass. She waits for the bus with Fox in the morning and I have talked to her a number of times. She is really cute and funny, and every time I talk to her she reminds me that her friend used to live in my house.

After picking through the immense amount of hand me downs while mentally patting myself on the back for never making the mistake of having a home based daycare, I settled on two large bags of little girl clothes, and started to head back across the street. My neighbor volunteered her daughter to help me with the bags since I also had my daughter and a stroller. She walked beside us and started to tell me about her friend, Janayah (rhymes with papaya) who lived in the house.

"Her room was the one at the top of the stairs beside the bathroom. And her sister and brothers shared the big one with the two huge closets. For a while one of them lived in the closet! The downstairs bedroom was Janayah's mom's room. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? THERE WAS A LAUNDRY CHUTE FROM THE BATHROOM TO HER MOTHER'S ROOM! IT WAS SO COOL!"

I remembered the stuff behind the tiny door and I invited her in to see what the house was like now. She followed us in and went straight to the tiny door. She looked at it, then looked at me and my daughter.

"Go ahead and open it" I permitted.

She reached over my drafting table and opened the door, then gasped.

I opened my eyes really wide and asked her if she thought that was Janayah's stuff.

"I BET IT IS!! I'M SURE IT IS!! I REMEMBER THAT BANDANNA!"

"Maybe you could take it to Janayah." I proposed; "Do you think she would still want that stuff?"

The girl believed that Janayah would be really excited to have her things back, and, quite frankly, I was really happy to free up that secret space for other ventures.

While Fox gave her a tour of the rest of the house I put the laundry into a plastic grocery bag for Janayah. They came stampeding down the steps and she wanted to get another look at the chute.

"I can't believe you don't use the laundry chute" she said in disbelief, shaking her head. "It's just SO COOL"

"Well, I guess if the downstairs room wasn't my sewing room, we might. But I really don't want the entire family's dirty clothes coming out that tiny door onto my drafting table."

"Maybe you could move your bedroom down here and put your sewing room upstairs" she suggested.

I told her that I'd think about it and that it was kind of a shame not using the chute.

Hello Kitty's house on fire

This afternoon as my daughter was waking from her nap, my son pondered aloud; "I wonder what Rainer dreams about?".

We considered the possibilities; dreaming of flying, running, playing ball, climbing on rocks... Then it occurred to him; "I think Rainer was dreaming about Hello Kitty and her friend and they were playing at Hello Kitty's house and it caught on fire."

"Uh-oh" I replied, surprised at the sinister twist, imagining bubbling pink plastic and noxious, green flames engulfing Hello Kitty. Billowing black smoke. Melting sugar...Faces dripping in flaming globs... "Hopefully no one was hurt in her dream" I said, wrapping up my own daydream.

"Well Rainer and Hello Kitty were ok but their friend got a little bit hurt. She was running away and fell on the carpet and got a little burned. Hello Kitty fell down the stairs, but Rainer was ok." Fox assured.

"So Hello Kitty fell, but was ok?" I asked.

Fox shook his head and looked downward. and walked out of the room. Maybe the friend, but Hello Kitty? Essentially that's what an unnamed friend is for. Raw!

Having a hilarious child is truly one of life's blessings. Despite having zero non-relative friends here, I manage to laugh and have a good time.

Yes, it rates good on a completely different scale of good times, but currently, everything is relative to that same scale.

If I were using another good time scale, say, for instance, that from my college days, my present good times would rate much lower. Probably a 1.5 or 2 out of 10. According to the scale from pregnancy, my current state would rate very high if either A. I lived in Asheville, or B. I had friends here in Illinois, but still would score a solid 5, maybe 6. If I were contrasting my experience with the scale I used between the years of 2002 and 2005, my rating would automatically sound alarms and sirens. Strobe lights hardwired to the infer structure would illuminate, and emergency party patrol officials would deploy.

Honestly I am trying not to whine and complain too much. Everyday is busy and I'm able to go outside, exercise, eat decent food and sit down if I feel like it. To continue my path towards contentment, I have been working on a few paintings and drawings. Some are landscapes, and some are general expressions of positivity. According to me, of course, so I'm not sure if they will come off particularly "happy", but the themes therein are uplifting or somehow inspiring to me. I wonder what other people without friends do? Especially people without children to eat up all their otherwise idle time. My guess is computers.

We moved far away

Things are changing. It's springtime, it costs a bajillion dollars to fill up my gas tank, and we have moved to central Illinois. From the casual reader's end I guess this sounds sudden; brash maybe, but it was planned, sorta. And we weighed our options, briefly. It was in our favor to move and get on with the damn show, we decided during the course of the six weeks prior to the move. Opportunities like this one have been in short supply the past few years, and when a reasonable one presented itself to my husband, he had no trouble seizing it, punching it in the face repeatedly, then dragging it back to his cave where he feasted upon it's meaty carcass.

Other than the obvious inconveniences, our move has been bucolic. We found a picturesque rental property that's dignified without being overly imposing; nothing beyond the realm of what we could repair, erase, or otherwise reverse. Our children behave as if they had always lived in Illinois; discussions of Abraham Lincoln's superior leadership and the disappearing prairie landscape are as natural as the rising sun. Our son arrived into his new school and immediately had new friends, new mentors, and a new bus number. There were virtually no glitches.

The home we own in Knoxville was successfully rented to a professional couple. A couple who had hosted a departmental party a number of years ago at their previous residence, which my family and I attended. The home was tidy and their furnishings were thoughtful. We were thrilled to have them in our home and hoped they would be comfortable there, comfortable even after they inevitably met their new neighbor, Lee. We weren't close friends with the pair; Jason was acquainted with them through the university, so we don't communicate with them outside of rental details and queries. We are both consumed with curiosity regarding their unavoidable relationship with Lee.

Life in the midwest is contrastive by function. Living in a town of 1200 people 15 miles from the metropolis dictates much of our daily activity. Our village has the absolute bottom line of commercial enterprise, including an insurance sales office, a local bank branch, a hair salon, a saloon which serves bar fare, a tanning salon, a furniture refinishing place that doesn't have store hours, a store that sells random items that doesn't have regular hours, a local post office, a small library*, a gas/ convenience station, and finally, during the months of April through September, a homemade ice cream stand. Each day I walk to the post office to check my mail, go to the park, then go on a long walk from one end of the town to the other. Generally I walk south and cross the railroad track, then turn left until I get to the next county road, then turn left again to Main street as it turns back in to a county road at the east end of town. This is where the corn fields begin to the east. My daughter in a stroller, I then walk west on Main a mile till the sidewalk ends at more cornfields. Sometimes we then walk north to a stream where there are trees and reeds, sometimes we walk south past the corn processing place and water processing plant. The water tower bearing the town's name overhead, we watch the trains fly by.

Having neither friends nor options to recreate in a social, non-church environment has created a strange and unfamiliar dynamic in my life. The acquaintances I have made have been through these few establishments; the postmistress, the librarian, the young woman who owns the tanning salon... We are all somehow busy in this trace of a town. Even if I actively took the opportunity to make friends out of these casual encounters, I'm not sure it would be possible to contrive. The librarian has three children ranging in age from 2 to 19. The postmistress is retired, then gone back to work. The neighbor immediately next to me has 9 children with another on the way AND she home schools, AND they are bible translators. Across the street is a lady who has a home day care and her house is crammed with children of all ages, and cars come in and out so much her lawn looks like a parking lot. Anyone can see that these people are busy, and none of them want any more kids around, I speculate. All of this makes me think of my old neighbor, Lee, and I remember how annoying he was. Annoying, but friendly, and almost always available to chat. When we left Knoxville and said goodbye to Lee, I cried like an exhausted baby. Here is his goodbye letter.

Anyway. I'm certain this place will eventually feel like home. Sometimes I'll see a fat man in overalls cruise by on a moped, or a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of garbage and I think I wonder if there is another "Lee" in this town?.

*Library Hours Monday, 9:00 a.m. - 12 noon, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, 9:00 a.m. - 12 noon, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Thursday, 9:00 a.m. - 12 noon, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 12 noon, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Saturday, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon