My Life As A House – Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The rebuilding – or the initial building, depending upon how you look at it – of my life coincided serendipitously with my first purchase of a real home.  Previously, my living spaces and “home” purchases were strictly utilitarian in nature.  The first apartment I ever rented was on 17^th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska.  My now-husband (then-boyfriend) and I found that place in one weekend.  I can’t remember now what the big rush was all about.  Our next apartment, rented after we were married, was Married Student Housing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  That place was so small that we had to purchase a futon so we could sleep in the living room, the single bedroom was converted into an office/study, and the kitchen was so small and narrow that only one person could occupy the space at a time.  (I remember while I was unpacking all of our stuff, at one point I just sat down on the floor and cried and cried and cried because I simply could not figure out where in the world we were going to put all of the stuff we’d collected in the whopping one year we’d been married.)  Oddly, though, the bathroom in that student housing was huge.  And greeting us each morning with the sticky sweet smell of curry, wafting from the kitchens of the roughly 10 to 15 Indian families, also residing in married student housing very nearby.

We moved from married student housing in Lincoln straight into married student housing in Chicago, where we gone in order for me to attend law school.  It was there I saw my first roach.  Little did I know that when you see a place where roaches are sitting out in the clear light of day, justa sunning themselves out in the open and all, you’ve got a real problem.  Ever in blissful Nebraska ignorance, we rented the place and spent the next several months trying to stem the tide of the roach infestation while I proceeded through the most rigorous academic environment I had yet to experience.  Lesson learned – Combat® Roach Baits really do work wonders.  Unfortunatley, I gleaned fewer worthwhile lessons from the three years and $100,000 I spent matriculating at a Top 10 law school.

Nevertheless, preciously-earned J.D. firmly in hand, I proceeded dutifully to the paradigmatic “large law firm.”  It was there I met some of the most brilliant, hardest-working, and cruelest lawyers I had ever seen.  I spent six long years of hard duty there, developing my craft and crawling so deeply inside myself – finding nothing there but a broken inner compass and mass of confusion – that I never thought I would find my way out again.  It was during this time I lived in a “soft loft” in one of the nearby urban neighborhoods.  It resonated as the type of abode I had coveted since I had watched “Flashdance” as an impressionable teenager – wide open space, industrial-type décor, and wholly unsuitable for the bustling career, house husband, and two small children I acquired while living there.  Great dwelling.  Wrong inhabitants.

So, that just about picks up at where we are now.  After drowning in a sea of indecision and insecurity for nearly a decade, grasping in vain for any lifeline that suggested a better, calmer life, God granted me a pardon (temporarily) from the madness and took my scarred mental and emotional self to a southern town I had never lived in and only visited once or twice.  My parents had retired nearby, and after years of raising children (and trying to raise myself) without them, I had given up.  So we landed in this foreign land and tried to rebuild – or build, I never can remember which – some sort of life for ourselves.  And that’s when the real work began.