At Rest
Hazel sits at the front door with the morning sun on her face. This is a fine house for a cat, lots of windows with deep window sills, and lots of birds to watch. We’ve moved up to the main level of the house, and unpacking has kept me too busy or tired to write. But now much of the artwork is in place, nearly all the boxes are unpacked, and everything except the last half of the countertops is done. I will look back on the countertop fiasco as nothing more than a funny part of the history of our beautiful home, but today it’s still an irritant, partly because of the actual inconvenience, and partly because of the infuriating unresponsiveness of Lowes and their installation vendor.
But the countertop delay is dwarfed by the pleasures of this new home. Everyone loves the space we’ve created here, but only a few people know the before and after of it. The place I’m sitting now in the open great room was a weird triangular bathroom off a bedroom we eliminated. That was Aviva’s stroke of genius, eliminating that bedroom and bathroom which we didn’t need, and opening the whole front half of the house into one big space with the kitchen in the center. Our realtor, Nancy, contributed another great idea, turning a small, awkward den into a wonderful mudroom with storage space and room for the washer/dryer, the freezer, and the water heater. And under Jay and Mike’s supervision, with the work of some committed labor and some talented craftsmen, those ideas have become this delightful reality.
The house is everything I had hoped for, and more. And now we have our first house guests. Tamar and Ryder are up for the weekend, and Jay has cooked his first meal for company to eat at the perfectly refinished dining table. I bought that table when I did the remodel of Thomas Drive the year after Joe died. The table saw the blending of my family and Jay’s. It weathered six grandchildren, burger nights, Passovers, Break the Fasts, Birthdays and other happy occasions. It was battered in a cross country move and in moves into and out of storage. It had the scars from all of that. Shawn sanded it down to bare wood and did a beautiful job of refinishing it and its equally battered eight dining chairs. He’s gradually working his way through all of our much used furniture and restoring everything to good as new. We’re happy to have these dear pieces looking revived again.
The house is filled with things we love – furniture, art, books, dishes, kitchen tools, and dozens and dozens of framed family photos, still just piled in stacks. There are things we each brought to our blended household and things we’ve added in our nearly 16 years together. There are things Joe and I bought together, things that Nancy and Jay bought together, things from my parents and from Jay’s. The artwork especially is full of memories for each of us and for us together. The work of blending a family, merging our histories, shows up in the harmony of this home we have built together. After six years of wandering from Palo Alto to Hartwick, to Pleasant Hill, briefly back to Hartwick, to the lower level of 37 Averill – with at least some of our possessions packed during all that time – it’s lovely to have everything in one place, in the last place we intend to live independently. The day may come when we’ll fit ourselves into a room in the Thanksgiving Home just down the road. But as long as we can live on our own, we think it will be right here. Jay and I know as well as anyone how uncertain life can be. But it’s in our nature to imagine the future, and the future we imagine is here in this comfortable house, surrounded by trees, just five minutes from everything we care about in the Village.
I’ve spent so much time in the last month dealing with our possessions, but of course what really matters is our health and our relationships – with each other, with our dear aging Charlie, with curious Hazel, and with family and friends near and far. There has been plenty to think about on that score as well. Jay has been dealing with prostate issues for over four months, now successfully resolved. The delays in diagnosis and treatment have been much more serious than the delays in our kitchen countertops, but they are behind us. He had a huge but benign mass removed and should have no lasting negative consequences, but it has been quite a journey. Through it all, through uncertainty and our challenging medical system, Jay has stayed on an even keel and just focused on what was next. And in the end, what was next was an excellent surgeon and a very good outcome.
With all of that going on, with remodeling, moving and health concerns, we’ve been busy settling in to our Cooperstown community, me through the gym, the senior center, and the League of Women Voters, and Jay through the Democratic party, the Historic Preservation And Architectural Review Board, and the Planning Commission for the Town of Otsego. We’re defining retirement for ourselves, individually and together. With Jay not ready for long distance travel we’ve missed a planned trip to California to share in the celebration of Blythe and Hanju’s wedding, which was a big disappointment. But with Tamar and Ryder here this weekend I got a big dose of sister time including some six games of scrabble and a lovely dinner to finish the celebration of our baby sister Aviva’s seventieth birthday.
The sun is long set now, and Hazel sits staring out into the country dark. I think she slept through the parade of turkeys across the road this afternoon. But Charlie and I saw the usual group of deer and the Swatling’s chickens out enjoying the sun. We saw Louise’s cat out on the prowl, and I saw a New York squirrel with its bushy tail backlit by the morning light. Sunday. A day to enjoy home and family. A day to not unpack boxes or figure out where to store things. A day with no health challenges. A day of rest.