The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Here comes Christmas and there it went, with snow and brandy and strangers.

But I am getting ahead of myself, or behind myself. I seem not to really know anymore, these last few months a confusion of dates, a befuddlement of week days and spent hours, dovetailing straight into the cloak of darkness that is night here.

Has it really been a week and a day since I got the keys to my house?

We drank champagne, and I poured a ceremonial cup out on the porch, and thus la maison des reves qui arrives des fois et la peine qui suive certainement was christened. call me a fatalist, but I am still holding my breath.

In the days that have lapsed, there was christmas, there were the movers at eight o'clock in the morning when it was splendidly cold, there was my misfit possessions trying to assimilate to these new walls, there was christmas eve spent amongst all kinds of lovely and welcoming strangers.

And in the in between I have been haunting the house, running things through the dishwasher because it is novel and because it is mine, I lurk in rooms, a little unsure of what I should be doing. One night in a flurry of wine fueled mania, I unpacked all the boxes, short of my books (10 stupid, heavy boxes worth) and then sort of took stock in a dazed state, three parts ownership to two parts holy shit, then I sat on my front porch and listened for a good long while to the rain singing from the eaves. Then I returned to my brother's house and held tight to the dog. The dog loves being held tight to and she's most compliant, I thought for half a second, that is, I wished for half a second for someone more male and less hirsute, but then I realized I didn't want to talk at all, I just wanted to cling to the dog and get really fucking into Bourne the third.

So there it is. I got what I wanted. I have a house, and I can't quite express the terror and the glee. In a way, well, in the way that is just like life, no stars fell from heaven, and I didn't rise a suddenly, majestically fully formed adult. I am just an aspiring lady with a mortgage and a strong desire to make out with someone, short of that buy something shiny to commemorate the occasion, or a vacuum cleaner - - I must have left the old one on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. How much you want to wager that the vacuum cleaner trumps the shiny, because, of course, I am still not gainfully employed. Then just as strongly there is the urge to run, which begs the question, where on earth to?

best stick here for awhile, get acquainted with paint and Home Despot, furnishings and lathe and plaster, best to wait out the winter to see how my rhododendron blooms, wait to conspire with the boy on the bus, watch closely the river, heed the ebb and the flow. Things work out, they always do.

I've got my hats and my gloves and my fortitude to weather the winter. I have got my steadfastness to carry me through the bleak of winter, short of that there is liquor and tanning beds, short of rectitude there is always an escape to puerto vallarta. And in my life, I am fortunate enough to state that there is no shortage of promise to cobble from underneath the long neglected cushions, in forgotten pockets and reservoirs of confidence I'd thought I had left behind, from nights long past, turns out the duality of momentum has been with me all along.