Category Archives: Mesta Park

Who needs an alarm clock?

27 Tuesday Jan 2009

Posted by in Life at Home, Mesta Park, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

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They say our icy weather will not be as bad as last time.  Even so, when I woke up early to the sounds of ice pelting my rooftop, I could not shake off memories of last year’s storm.  So I got out of bed to let my sleep-robbing thoughts out on paper.  Maybe they’ll stop whining.

I tell myself there is nothing to fear, but something is bothering me.  What is it?  I know we weathered last year’s ice storm all right.  Compared to many in the neighborhood, our losses were minor – no heat and power for three days and one old Elm tree gone forever. 

But, as I remember this, I wonder whether the brevity of our suffering was a rare sort of grace given to those in mourning. 

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Two days before the storm hit, we had laid to rest my mother’s body.  And because the ice storm followed mom’s death so closely, I fear I may forever associate them together.

Will I always wake up at night when I hear ice hitting the rooftop? 

Will I always recall that moment of fancy–while living in our dark and cold home during last year’s storm– when I wondered whether slinging around ice was mom’s way of venting anger at death from the grave, in the same way she infrequently resorted to slinging around a pot or pan, or slamming a door or drawer to vent her anger at life when she was alive?

As I write this, I realize mom was not an angry person by nature nor was she angry about dying.  No, that fancy had nothing to do with mom’s anger.  It was all my own.   

Today, I release the anger to go back and live with last year’s storm.  And for this new storm, I choose to remember mom’s life, and the way she absolutely loved to look out her window on falling snow.  And so, in honor of her, I stop and look.  And it’s beautiful.  Then I stop and listen.  And it sounds like hundreds of little bugs are crashing into my windshield. 

Questions answered

24 Saturday Jan 2009

Posted by in Life at Home, Mesta Park

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Life seems to repeat itself until lessons are finally learned.  And so it is with our unanswered questions.  They want answered.  And when they’re not, they persistently raise their hands until they are.   

Within a few months of moving into our Mesta Park home, I began to notice shadows of some of my unanswered questions climb to a higher level of consciousness, to float along side my more recent experiences and thoughts.  They were the same types of questions as before, reflecting a child’s natural fascination about people they do not know, although they had grown lean while lying in the depths of childhood memories.  No longer were they general in nature.  They had become more particular, more focused on the old house we were now living in rather than those other homes of the neighborhood where former lives had resided.  I found myself wondering what interesting stories this old house could tell if it were able.  I tried to imagine what life had been like for the earliest family who lived here – the ones who painted the upstairs bedroom windows a light blue to match the sky, that I uncovered last winter when stripping them in preparation for painting.  I wondered if the family had a maid who lived in the smallish servant’s quarters out back, and if so, what her everyday life was like – especially as our remodel had revealed she would have lived without insulation in the walls to keep her warm.  While I was able to salvage fragments of this family’s story, it seems most is lost to history even though our home was theirs for over forty years.      

Lately, I’ve come to accept that I may not need their specific details to have a sense of their story.  People, then and now, are not so very different, though certainly the roles that are now mine may once have been filled by two or more.  This distinction matters little to me, as collectively I know, that within these walls and across the life span of this house, women have cooked, gardened, mothered, prayed and kept house – all in order to bring comfort to those they cared most about.

Their story is mine as mine is theirs.  I look forward to its unfolding.  

Then and now

23 Friday Jan 2009

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As I look out my window on Mesta Park,  I recall our first meeting from another window long ago.   This one belonged to my parent’s 1956 Chevy, an unstylish clunker of a car, with four doors and a two-tone white and maroonish red body.  But there was nothing clunkerish about the old neighborhood moving past its open window.   Both the Chevy and I were mere babes in comparison to this place that already then was pushing seventy.

But some neighborhoods, like people, wear their age well.  I hear good bones help.  And this one had them, in the form of tall graceful trees, fully decked out in a fringe of summer green leaves.  Like soldiers standing at attention, they lined up protectively on both sides of the street to create a cool and inviting sanctuary, with limbs arching high and across Walker Avenue.   As the Chevy passed under their canopy, I caught a glimpse of the rows of houses anchored upon the hilly side streets.  Some were mansions, kept unpretentious by their next-door neighbors, most of which were comparatively modest two stories.  Built long before cookie cutter homes would fall into fashion, each possessed its own special style.  A few were even decked out in gingerbread trim.  

As the neighborhood fell away from my eyes, my ten-year old mind continued to wonder about the people who lived there.  What were they like?  What kind of jobs did they hold?  Did they have children?  Did they have cooks and maids to help them keep house?  What did their everyday lives look like? 

My dream to live in an old house was born from these unanswered questions.  Even now that I live here with my husband and two dogs — in a sturdy old house in Mesta Park — my everyday life seems like the stuff of childhood dreams, possessing a ‘too-good-to-be-true’ quality about it.  This may sound sappy.  But  truth often is — and as it’s revealed we often appear foolish — which may be why many, including me, have gone great lengths to hide it.   No more.  I’m ready to risk ridicule for truth.  Because the true stories of everyday life are too good not to share. 

So beginning now, from this window, I’ll share bits and pieces of my everyday life and story, even at the risk of looking foolish.