My front yard has become weirdly important, ever since someone suggested it as a way to deal with fear. When fear is such a big part of you and your life, honor it; do the things you reasonably can to be more safe. Then after you've tried that, after you've given yourself that chance, choose the compromises you want, if you decide on the trade-off for more time and freedom.

As far as the outside of the house goes, the idea is "show no weakness"; don't look like a victim. Don't look like a target. It's become a very tiny, personal crusade. I find myself watching all the time--which houses seem like easy marks, like places where you could get away with it? Which ones don't? More tangibly, what are the details that make that difference? My goal is: just from looking, it will be clear that someone cares enough about the people in this house not to let things slide. Just from looking, it will be obvious that we who live here are well taken care of.

It's an enlightening study. Learning to do is hard, but so is learning to see, and suddenly there's the obvious connection that I've never made; to make things so clean and tidy and neat like that, to make a space that emanates strength, you have to be aware of your surroundings. You have to notice little details. It's a natural connection, so much more than just learning to bother--which is important enough on its own.

Somehow this is more important to me than everything else I should be working on. It's a slow building; half a step, stand back, consider--what can I do, with the tools I have? With the strength I have? How many more days will it take to finish weeding around the driveway? What other tools would be good for the job? Is there any way I might take that stump out by myself? Will it make a difference to sweep away that dirt, does that edge need to be straightened? Is there a solution to the weeds next to the house without buying pavers? My imagination is on walkabout; this will be a showplace, beautiful, clean, bountiful, precise, liveable. Just keep working every day, thousands of baby steps.

Stages and details of maintaining an everyday life are so new to me. What I'm probably best at, in fact, is keeping it nominally together after everything has gone to shit--and assuming that it's always going to be that way. I am scraping a different life from weeds and black clay, handful by handful.

Humans need each other; independence isn't about pretending we don't. Independence is having some measure of control over your relationships.* I imagine there are healthier and less healthy ways to go about this. Maybe healthy independence means being able to maintain a standard of how you will interact with others--how you will deal with needing and being needed--and being able to walk away from relationships that insist on violating that standard.

Of course, by definition it also must mean building relationships, of some kind--and keeping them. Because humans, we need each other.


*Credit for this insight goes to Tyrel.

Maybe morning should be my blogging time; it seems to be when I'm feeling suitably melodramatic.

Today for the first time I wonder if it might have been a mistake to buy the house. Like me, it wants for so much fixing. We are both high maintenance, leaky, cracked, jerry-rigged but still beautiful, needy if we're being honest with ourselves, and I wonder if there's really room in this life for the both of us; there don't seem to be enough resources to sustain us.

For the first time I remember, I've started craving sunshine so much I can't enjoy rain. I miss the overwhelming, careless plant growth that happens everywhere back east. I'm hungry for blues and browns and greens, for ultramarine and scarlet, for distilled malachite and skies so bright you can barely see. I'm hungry for wet heat that slams into you like a wall when you walk out of the air conditioning at the airport, wide lazy rivers that are barely cool at all, and the lush, dense forest that asserts itself when water is no object--where nothing chokes out life but other life.

This is better, probably--it's a different kind of sadness than what I'm used to. The old things are still present, but this is here also--carrot, tantalizing, painful but drawing me from my rut. I hope.

1) depression. Woke this morning and imagined an enormous pallet load of red bricks falling from above as a packed mass, bones crunching, blood spatters everywhere.

2) deleting facebook and some other online accounts in hopes of focusing on real friendships.

3) Had dinner with some friends, and it was wonderful! Pale blue damask on the coffee table, crystal stemware, leg cramps, spicy chickpeas, and low-stress interesting conversation that made me wonder about gregorian chants and Wittgenstien and music school. Let me take this moment to reveal how much I sometimes love being a grown-up.

4) love--contemplating feeling unloved. . . which I do, almost all the time. Wah wah. This will be another post.

5) happy would look like light, and color, and music--and love. Thinking of how to go about it.

also safe.

Confession: what I have been thinking about is fashion. Part of this taking-care-of-myself nonsense. How very women's magazine.

History? Armchair fashionista, all longing and anger and doom.

I started without a chance, no money, sacks of old hand-me-downs many times picked over, two blocks from the public library. I can tell you about the Dior dress. I can tell you about thread count, and rayon viscosity, and the de-constructed genius of Chanel. I can identify silk and cashmere from their synthetic counterparts by touch, from walking down the aisles of value village and examining every piece, from stealing into banana republic for moments at a time only to fondle and gape.

I wear enormous men's wool hiking socks under four year old sauconys, layers of plain threadbare t-shirts, black thrift-store jeans, sometimes hats.

I resent my passion, because this is what's expected of me, as a woman. I resent it because it at first was fueled so entirely by expectations of others which I would ABSOLUTELY NEVER be able to meet. But--there are things you need. Clothes to wear, for example; to sleep in and hike in, to work or work out or go grocery shopping.

I resent it also because it is most commonly followed with such vapid, brainless persistence. There's nothing say with clothes if your entire world is clothes, nothing but self-referential circles to chew off your tail in. It is social appropriateness; it could be art.

I definitely don't have this clothing and gender stuff figured out. It helps that my closest guy friend is an artist and dresses well--equality, or at least a taste--what would the world be like if everyone would dress well? Prettier, for sure. More expressive. Aesthetic preferences say something about your soul.

I've been coming together about it in pieces. Slowly.