Wait! Please, wait…my eldest sister urged….I was an emerging college senior. It was all the rage of the bold, vogue and hipsters amongst my college to flee the rule of dorm mothers and share a local apartment on the periphery of our small East Tennessee campus. Please wait, my sister urged. You will have plenty of time after you graduate to live in an apartment. I know it seems like a fun thing to do now, but you will one day get tired of living in apartments. Stay in a dorm. One more year! I listened and lived out my senior year in Swann dorm, an old turn of (last) century antebellum with enormous white columns and upper and lower porches. Inside, our rooms were small, we had no air conditioning–in a time when global warming was not torching us yet, but the heat was still never scarce–but we enjoyed community.
Some of that community was lost when I, a year later rented my first apartment in Nashville. Nearly two years later, I'd leave that cozy second floor that looked out onto a pond, and move into a sweet, small garage apartment in a tony part of town. And then, I'd leave that and move to a garden apartment shared with a friend in Atlanta. A year later I owned my first home, a two-story condo. Three years later I'd share it with the wuzband. We were jammed into its quarters for two years until it sold and we purchased a nearby home. We said goodbye to that lil' New England Cape Cod-style abode in too short of time before it was back to Nashville or Bust. Another apartment provided us home while my belly swelled and we built the home we'd share for the next 10 years, give or take before we divorced. I remained there with our only child. Seventeen years, all told. Until, I moved into a new home with Husband 2.0, where my tenure in our really cool digs only lasted a year.
And then nearly a year-and-a-half ago I landed back in a condo, this time a rental. I settled these last 14 months into a place that is all of my own, just Grace and I, no before or after story attached. There is something sacred about living in a home that is created from scratch–at least the insides. The furniture is all mine. Not mine and some of "his," or "his parents." All mine. Mine and my family's. The family that had an interior decorator as the matriarch. And an aunt that was an English antiques dealer. So, although the contents of this new condo has been all mine, it is filled with family energy. The good kind. As I moved my belongings into it June of last year, I began to realize the treasure of gifts my parents had bestowed on me–some of them only received a year earlier as my mother's estate was dispersed. Every piece of furniture came with a story. Either a New England roadside antiques find, something from Aunt Lois' renown Upstate South Carolina's Spinning Wheel antiques, something rescued and rehabed from eccentric old Aunt Frances' shed, an old pine chest or table brought to mother by our favorite nutty neighbor-junk man and then lovingly refinished, or something Shaker-style that mother designed herself from 100-year-old family barn wood and commissioned its' make.
I noticed the energy one Sunday morning as I lain on the oldest of the orientals. The one that's patchy-thread-bare in parts–increasing it's value, Aunt Lois used to say. Mother and Daddy are gone, but they have left me and my sisters with a legacy of love all around us, love in the form of wood, fabric and design. We cannot touch them in the flesh any longer, but we can remember how much they loved us and wanted for us to be independent, own our own homes and furnish them aesthetically. These were VERY important goals to them. And now we see them, those two. I see them all around me now.
Thank you, Mother and Daddy. Now that it's just me. Even now that you are both gone, I can see you clearly now. I feel your love in the energy of this new place. Called: Home.
Stay tuned: more change on the horizon. The good kind. The more permanent kind. (And, the filters I used gave my dining room table this finish!)
