I Think We’re Alone Now

This idea that I’m going to blog again would go a lot smoother if hackers would stop hacking me. Three months after a devastating attack that severely fucked up my various websites, either another hack occurred or a sleeper cell buried deep in a .php file woke up and said, hey, let’s fuck up this inconsequential personal website for someone who has neither money nor inclination to pay someone to handle these hacks and will thus have to spend several days, again, getting everything back into shape. And so I did. Did we get it all this time? Hope so. Time will tell.

Anyhoodle (yes, I say that unironically, I’m sorry to report. Side effect of having recently watched the surprisingly excellent “Brockmire” series. If you like your depravity out there and yet oddly touching that’s your jam), around the house the past couple of months, things have changed.

We went into the pandemic with our younger child having finished college (thank goodness – students today have nothing but my sympathy for the weird experience they’re going through) and living with us for a spell as they worked out their next steps. Then, of course, came the lockdown, and they were out of a retail job that they kinda liked (and which was eventually called essential, but living with the immunocompromised, they made the difficult decision not to return there). That led them to yeast growing, sourdough baking, much experimentation in gluten-free baking and cooking, and gardening for many months, until they picked up a new job right in town as a baker – hugely cool, but baker’s hours are something else, and they were walking to work sometimes just as the bars were closing. That went on a bit more than a year, and then they suddenly rolled up a huge amount of determination and work, were able to find a job in their intended field (or at least field-adjacent), got a driver’s license and a car, found an apartment in a lovely little town much closer to where they would be working, and spent the month of December transferring their things from the third floor of our house to a third floor apartment 20 miles away, and then . . . they were gone.

I’m sure they would have preferred not to have lived with their parents after college, and to have been able to jump right into their career. Despite all the difficulties it presented, I was grateful for the extra time. Our older one went to college just minutes away from home, so I felt like we had a few extra years with her around, even though she wasn’t living with us. When Roz was a high school senior, I was spending a year working mostly away from home, setting us up for our next act, which definitely took away from time I’d have liked to have spent with them; it just didn’t work out that way. And then their college was anywhere between 5 and 7 hours away, depending on how the traffic went that day, so we were a long way apart in those years.

So now, we have to rearrange. When we moved to this house, they were just about to start college and we didn’t really envision them living here for a long time, and we were right, until we weren’t. They came back “home” to a place they’d never lived before that first summer after freshman year, and after that they stayed in Worcester. But, we kept the attic room they used mostly set up as a bedroom, and while there was some storage up there, we never used it. Basically the biggest room in a small house, and we weren’t putting it to use. That worked out fine when they ended up having an extended stay up there, but now we get that room back, and more, and we’re in a flurry of reorganizing.

When we moved, we did an amazing job of paring our possessions down to just what we needed, what we actually wanted to keep, and were able to cast off decades of things that had either just collected or had been foisted upon us by well-meaning relatives who think everything Aunt Fanny sat on is precious. When Lee’s father was moved down here in 2019, more of that legacy stuff came down with him, and we had to put most of it in storage. With his passing last summer, we had to go through that whole process again, with some strong resistance from sentimental family members who think every possession is precious, whereas we take the view that if it’s not useful, it’s junk. We’re just at the end of that process, with boxes cluttering up our tiny living room as we sort through what’s going up into the attic room and what’s going out. One more trip to the storage unit and we’ll finally be out of there, three years later.

So right now, the house is a disaster. We’re rearranging the kitchen, figuring out the attic and my studio space. Boxes of comic books that had been hiding in storage are now begging for me to read them before they go back into a closet somewhere.

It’s also a little less lively. There’s no one to come home and tell us stories of what they saw on their walk from work or on the hike through a local ravine, or to leave a found treasure on the table. But they’re close enough we still get to see them regularly (we shan’t speak of what the pandemic has done to our ability to see our other child). We thought we’d emptied the nest years back. Now it looks like we really have.

On to our period of ornamental parenting.