Stagnant

This morning, I woke up and rolled over and pulled Freeda into my arms, and she snuggled close, then stretched her funny Bully dog stretch and yawned her funny Bully dog yawn, and my first thought of the day, once again, was how she is more my wife than my dog. There hasn’t been a man in my bed in years now... and yes, it makes me cry sometimes. I mean, I may be crippled and widowed, but I am still only 47. But, my Freeda, my whole pack of animals really, keeps me from feeling completely alone… most of the time. Coco and Dixie sensed me awake and came to life faster than Freeda and I. They wiggled and shook the bed until they forced me out of it, even though I wouldn’t have minded laying in the cool breeze from the open windows a little longer. But, bladders grew in urgency, so we made our way down the stairs, to the tune of my ducks loudly greeting us with a quacky, flappy good morning. I opened their pen and let them waddle along with the dogs out the back door. It delights me that they have learned to do this so well. I ran to the bathroom and tended my own bladder, and brushed out my hair, kinda marveling that it has reached my waist again already, and decided to let it stay down today for awhile longer. Then, I went back out and just stood on the step, waking up, and looking out over my yard trying to decide what chores I would try to tackle today. Its promising to be a beautiful day in Green Mountain... one of those wonderful warm and cool, sunny and windy and green spring days that Iowa does so well. One of those days that makes you want to mow and plant and lay in the grass doing nothing at all; the meteorological equivalent of meandering down a two lane road on an old Harley. After a moment of watching my animals play and contemplating my day, I came in and started the coffee pot and pulled on a cardigan over my dress, then went back out again, to ride my bicycle barefoot with long hair flying, down the little gravel road. I rode my bicycle down the gravel road and around the windmill, just because, feeling like a ten year old me riding barefoot around my dad’s shop..... and then I rode back up the gravel road, anxious for coffee and a Camel now, pumping the bike petals up and down in the brisk early wind, focusing on the strength in my legs and ignoring the niggling pain in my body and soaking up the exercise. As I rode along, I thought about all the early mornings I got up and went to various jobs, or put on make up and designer clothes and shoes and loaded up a Harley or in a Mustang or a Challenger to travel coast to coast… and I think of how I traded all of those highways and bylines for a little dirt road, the whole wide world for my little snowglobe life in my little snowglobe home, because I thought there was love waiting for me here. I was, as we so often are in love, mistaken. As I rolled my bicycle to a stop beside my magnificent flower beds and messy house, with my ducks and dogs greeting me at the fence with happy noise, I sort of asked myself which one was my best life.. and its not a question I can readily answer. I can’t tell you my best right now… but I will tell you my truth. I will open a literary vein, and let you see inside.

Most days I am okay with sitting sequestered in my house in Iowa with my dogs… but sometimes, I feel the siren’s call of the highways and byways and nooks and crannies of this, my America. I long for hotel sheets and card keys. I want to climb out of a pool smelling of chlorine and step into a freezing cold room with Law and Order on the tv. I want to sit up all night smoking cigarettes in my car. I want to see a Texas sunset and have a hamburger in San Antonio, or a Texas sunrise and eggs benedict in Austin. I want to drive through the Black Hills with classic rock music on my stereo. I want to smoke a joint and get in a bar room brawl. The gypsy in my soul howls to feel the wind on my face and the purr of my Harley between my legs. I dream of once again crossing the River Bridge in Little Rock and the Hewey P. Long in New Orleans. I want to eat boiled peanuts on Bourbon Street and bar b que ribs on Beale. I want to drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains on a rainy foggy morning and I want lay on a beach in Florida and ride in a pink limousine. I want to once again stand looking up at the Washington Monument, and looking down into the Grand Canyon and thinking about diving in. I want to walk the streets of Manhattan barefoot at 3 am with my high heels in my hand. But, every day, I just wipe my tears, and go out into my backyard and look at the setting sun… and find my version of peace until the gypsy howls again.

I am fortunate, to have experienced so many things, and to have a little home of my own. But, I am lonely… and not lonely like a fleeting boredom, but lonely like a screaming, hair pulling, solitary confinement torture that is so heinous even suicide seems like a peaceful blissful escape. In truth. I am alone, and unloved, uncherished, unlaid, unhappy. I want to go home… but I don’t know where home even is. I cling to my animals like they are humans, because they are the only ones there for me. I am tired of Iowa, tired of this place, tired of the world… I am tired of the Army holding me in some medieval purgatory that says I can’t be in a real relationship until i am 57 years old, if i want to keep my widow’s pension and my insurance. Perhaps you think I am being negative, but the truth is I have felt this way for about a year. I try to be positive. I try to fill my life with flowers and animals and pretend I am okay with only nature as companions. I try to be content, but the truth is, I am miserable. I am a wife without a husband. Inside, I am screaming to be set free. I send out texts that say ‘checking on you’… but I rarely get texts back saying, someone is checking on me. I write my friends and ask them if they want to be roommates or if they would help me move back down South, but I get no real answers. I dream of selling everything and leaving, but my body doesn’t even have enough energy to water my flowers most days, much less sell a house, buy a house, and pack and move again. I have no help, no love, nobody. I honestly cook two meals a day for a man who doesn’t care if I am here or not.. he is just my neighbor, an old friend who doesn’t really need me at all. While he has been a nice companion since my husband died, I am tired of that grey existence. I am ready to go home… to once again exist on the soil of my ancestors… I need the South.

But there is no one.. there is no home for me there. Truth is at some point of every day, I sit in my own personal hell, alone and crying. So, I just wake up every morning and stare at the gun on the end table, somewhere between talking myself out of it and wishing I had the courage to leave my dogs without me. I won’t, of course. This is a side effect of my Lupus… I have heard this nasty idea whispered in my ear for nearly two decades on those days when I am in unbearable pain. I know better than to listen to her. But, you know something? I also know if I really did it, I would suddenly have people scrambling to say my name. Hundreds of people would gasp and moan and mourn and post photos of me and talk about how much they miss me and loved me, how wonderful they thought I was, how hard I fought to survive two decades of Lupus, how I was their favorite writer.. but honestly? I am uncertain if a single one of them cares enough to help me escape the insanity in my mind, and find my peace. Every day on social media, I see dozens of people copy and paste vapid reused old posts about ‘my door is always open’.. living by the biker code’… ‘suicide awareness’… ‘we take care of our vets and survivors…’ Sorry, but I think I call bullshit. They don’t see through my flowers and animals and jokes. They don’t see my pain. They don’t see that I have sunk so far, I can’t leave my house and haven’t been able to in years. They don’t see me struggling not to let go every single day. They don’t see that I need a reason to live.

Because of this inner turmoil, I spend a lot of time trolling real estate websites, seeking out houses for sale in the South, my heart and mind searching for where I am really supposed to be. A few weeks ago, I was doing this, and I found the love of my life… and found out what true heartbreaking desperation feels like.

This house I fell so hard for? Its not a house that most people would ever look twice at. Sprawling antebellum Victorians aren’t exactly en vogue anymore. But, neither am I. I am a dinosaur of a journalist, these days. Long gone are my days of chasing biker rallies and stories coast to coast. Now I am a bit of a wisp… doddering around my old house full of dark old antique furniture and doilies and china dishes. I know I am not anyone’s idea of modern, either. I am as antique and worn as the hardwood floors and meandering staircase in that old house in Texas. My heart screams for those wrap around porches. My soul fills with joy at the thought of putting my outdated belongings on the outdated fireplaces. My weeds are taking over my yard and my furniture grows dusty, as I spend every waking moment imagining me living in that big ol house, sitting in my rocker on that veranda with Freeda by my side. I imagine the squeak of the screen door opening on a warm Southern night and finding my friends on the doorstep, or a Christmas tree by the fireplace, surrounded by presents and illuminating my Mama’s glowing smile.

They say the old house doesn’t qualify for a VA loan or FHA.. its too old fashioned and stagnant. That’s okay… that’s what they say about my credit too. Its like the house is an architectural embodiment of me, who, I am, how I feel inside, and I need her and she needs me, so that we can save each other… and I just don’t know how to get there from here. I know I need a reason to get in a vehicle, put on a bra or real shoes, wear makeup, interact with other humans… escape the agoraphobic hell I live in now… but I don’t know where to get the $89,000 needed to save her, and me. My little farmhouse in Iowa wouldn’t sell for enough to buy her. I don’t qualify for a loan with my pension I live on, and I don’t have a sugar daddy. My mind wanders through ideas, some good, some bad, some insane.

I joined Vocal, and am entering their writing contests to try to win prize money. I have written everyone I know who may want to help or invest. I have begged the realtor for ideas. I have watched a rerun of Dolly Parton try to save the Chicken Ranch and even considered THAT. This is facetious, of course. I mean, after all.. my written stories are making $11 a week, so I know my broken down old body wouldn’t do much better in the way of earning $89,000, if I actually could drop my morals and my drawers and sink that far. Making a gofundme might work, but I am afraid it would feel a whole lot like the Chicken Ranch thing to just ask for donations.

I try to imagine if I know 89 people who would give me $1,000.. or 890 people who would give me $100. I daydream of Donald Trump buying it for me because I am an Army widow. I offer to give my Harley to people in exchange for a cosign. I know in my heart these are pipe dreams.. that I will probably never lay my head down in my own bed, or plant yellow roses in my other beds, at my own beautiful old mansion under the big Texas sky.

Nobody but I, understands how much it would mean to me, to walk down that old staircase… to nap in my chair on that big ol porch… to live two hours from my mom and almost everyone I know on earth… nobody really knows I sit here and cry for an old house that no one loves, because I know how that feels. Only my memories understand that the house was built by someone with my Daddy’s maternal family’s last name, and the ghosts of my ancestors are screaming at me to save the house that bears their name. I could look out the upstairs window and see the funny old courthouse my Dad took me to see as a child, the Texarkana courthouse that stands in two states. I may be the only person in America who would die to live on the Arkansas Texas line, with motorcycles and a Confederate statue and several old churches as my view.

I once felt this way, about the house I live in now. I actually still do.. it would kill me to sell it, I would prefer to keep it for summers when the Texas heat would be so hard on my health, but I think I could let it go. After my husband and my Dad passed away days apart, I moved here from Arkansas, and just poured my heart and soul and grief and my all, into this old Iowa farmhouse. It would break my heart to sell it. But, I know now, that I have a widow’s gift, of breathing life into old forgotten houses. It touches my soul to make an old home into a place filled with life… to plant flowers and paint baseboards and throw open the windows and feel the breeze moving like a heartbeat through halls and walls that hold so, so many memories. You see, I am a memory keeper. I hoard the things left behind by old folks, the things no one else wants. Old armchairs and yellowed doilies… mountains of books and random teacups and vases… things that you can see in a papery gnarled old hand of your great great grandmother. These old houses? I have empathetic attachments to the lives that have occurred within their walls. I love the scars in their floors and the creak of their doors and that old church and library scent like musty books that lingers in their corners. Restoring an old house restores my soul. And, as I have mentioned, I am an Army widow to a Vietnam Veteran. Its another ten years before the Army allows me to be a wife again, and still have pension and insurance. In the same way my dog, feels like my wife, during my purgatory, an old house feels like my soulmate and confidante.. my invisible friend.

So, I write this story, and enter this challenge, not to describe my joy, but to describe where my joy is hidden. I write it, to tell people my truths. The challenge asks why people should support my dream… I am not sure if my dream would matter to anyone else at all. But, it matters to me. I would prefer people leave me tips here, and pay me what they think this wretched story is worth, than ask for donations. The reason I think they should support this dream? Because there is no place like home… and sometimes you find your home where you never expected to find it at all.