Doesn't Get Better Than This

It's 10:00 AM on Saturday, and I’m standing in the bathroom, in my pajamas, brushing my teeth.  I hear a commotion in the living room.  Two of my sisters are coming through the front door (they have their own keys.)  They want me to go shopping with them.

Husband and I are in the backyard enjoying our work-in-progress outdoor space.  I hear noises filtering through the screen from the kitchen.  Sounds like the cats have learned how to speak English.  My sister and her husband have dropped by to see how “the patient” is doing (one of our cats had surgery last week.)  Husband takes BIL inside to watch the basketball finals.  Sister and I pour a glass of wine and light a fire in the outdoor fire pit.  Sister #2 stops by to join us for a glass of wine before bed.

This.  THIS is “home.”  This is what I have been yearning for, for 20 years.  Since Dad passed away and our family...dispersed.

It doesn’t get better than this.

It just doesn’t.

Slide Show

 I’m streaming Pandora through my 54-inch tv connected to my laptop…and my slide show screensaver is flickering past on the big screen.  I'm vacuuming.  I catch a picture or two out of the corner of my eye.  Soon, I'm rooted in front of the screen, alternating between wide smiles, pursed-lipped chagrin, and...mists of tears.  Tears of nostalgia...of longing.  Emotions that I never would have associated with my lonely life in the wilds of the PDX exurbs...

It’s funny how, now that I’m not there anymore, Scappoose has taken on a whole different character. 

While I was there, especially in the last few years, it felt like a heavy weight that I couldn’t scrape off…like a place I couldn’t wait to put behind me.  It felt like I was trudging, one foot in front of the other, straining toward the day I could be free of it.

Now, I look at those pictures…pictures of my home, my yard, my birds, my walks, my drives, the Island, my holiday decorations, almost two decades worth…

And Scappoose has become a happy-sad place.  A place where I had things I loved because I HAD TO.  The loneliness and isolation drove me, to create pockets of beauty and peace and comfortable solitude.  And to go out into the natural world and let it soothe and comfort me.   

I loved those little bits of life in Scappoose.  And that was part of the problem…nobody else did.  They were mine alone.  But they WERE beautiful.  And I will miss them.  

D Day

If You Should Comment...

I'll be doing my internet thing here at "Coming to Terms" from now on.  

I had some friends tell me last week that they had tried to leave comments, but the comments had "disappeared."

Just to clear that up...I have "comment moderation" activated on the blog.  This means that any comments left more than five days after a piece is posted are emailed to me first, so that I can approve them and allow them to post.  This is not because I want to censor my friends...  It's because there is (or was, anyway) a phenomenon here on blogger where stupid spam "comments," advertising porn sites and the like, would descend on older posts, and I would then have to go through and delete them.  

So, rest assured that if you DO comment, I will see it...and so will everyone else once I "approve" it.

Home

Four months ago, our realtor told us this was the room that was going to sell our house.  

  

I'll admit, I loved that room.  It was the heart of our house...an ever-changing gallery.  A place to display so many pretty things that I loved.  It was warm, it was comfortable, it was beautiful.  It was...home.  

 

But we had to leave that home behind.  For so many good reasons.  For all that it was home, it was far away from...everything.  And lonely. And big and dusty and...just too much.  Too much for two old farts to hold together any more.  

So we said hello to this:

And goodbye to this:

We had to lose literally half our stuff, since the new house is half the size of the old.  There was SO much stuff that "no longer served," so it was relatively easy to send away.  But also, a lot of stuff I did love, but knew there would be no place for in the tiny home; that was not so easy. 

I had in mind to make a completely fresh start.  To create new spaces for the new home, with new and different arrangements of the stuff I had left.  I unpacked, and I arranged, and I re-arranged...  And in the end, the arrangements that I settled upon looked SO much like smaller versions of my old rooms.  Which was okay.  Because with each addition of some familiar piece I had been able to keep, or been unable to lose... 

The house felt more...

...like mine.  

MY house.

Filled with MY stuff.

MY magic. MY comfort.  MY sanctuary.

I am home.

Closing the (Face)Book on a Chapter of My Life

So I’ve gone and done it. 

I deactivated my Facebook account. 

I don’t know why I had never seriously entertained the notion before.  I’ve been less than impressed with FB for a long time.  But the addiction to that online connection made it impossible for me to even consider living without it.  Or that living without it might even be a good thing.

Online connection has been a vital part of my life for almost 16 years.  I discovered infant social media in 2003, at a time when I was desperate for connection to ANYONE.  When I look at the whole experience in my rearview mirror, I realize that it was only during maybe the first five of those years that the connection was real and strong and vital, challenging and alive.  The rest of the time has been spent wondering what happened to the connection, and trying every which way to get it back. 

After the demise of AOL J-land, Facebook seemed the place where everybody went.  So I went there, too.  And rode the gradual metamorphosis of social media from what it was to what it is now.  Unfortunately, I have been all too willing to cling to the aspects that most closely resembled the cherished early days of innocent, intense internet interactions.  It took me a loooong time to finally understand that those days, and those interactions, are gone for good and all.  What’s left is the shells of those relationships disappeared under the heaps of mundanity and inanity we now “share” with our internet “friends”—who are not really that (friends) anymore. 

But it was only in the past few months that the Universe started giving me signs that Facebook was no longer a place for me to be.  When “friends” and pages began to delete conversations I had been part of, or at the very least, my comments from a thread, I realized I no longer had a place in that community….or, I no longer had a community in that place.  I had to seriously examine my presence there.

And then, there was the Nancy Pelosi video.  The straw that broke the camel’s back.  The video is purposely altered to make the Speaker of the House appear drunk, or somehow altered/incompetent.  And was introduced to and perpetuated on social media by none other than our illustrious toddler-in-chief.

When pressed on the subject by ACTUAL news media, Facebook representatives claimed the video would not be banned, and that FB would allow people to “make up their own minds.”

Facebook knows, anybody with a brain knows, certainly the masterminds of the right wing propaganda machine know, that social media have invited—forced, even—way too many people to do WAAAY t0o much “making up their own minds.”  So much so that FB is now easily weaponized by any entity—politician, preacher, criminal, enemy-of-the-state—wishing to attack or destroy someone or something.  Yes, Facebook is primarily a weapon.  A weapon that no one knows how to control, but everyone knows how to manipulate.  An extremely lethal weapon, dropped into the hands of anyone with an internet connection and a keyboard.

And because there is a goldmine of money involved in the trafficking of this weapon, insignificant details like its threat to human life, society and the survival of our nation are sidestepped, downplayed and ignored. 

This was when I realized I couldn’t be a part of it anymore.  Any more than I can be a part of “religious” practices that are no more than codified ways to control large populations of humans beings through fear and violence.  Power in the hands of the few to control the many.  

When I stated my intention to leave Facebook, I was told that one person leaving was not going to make any difference to FB…was not going to inspire them to change their policies and clean up their act.  I agree…it will not.

But my decision isn’t about that.  It’s about standing up for what I believe.  It’s about being able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I have not compromised my beliefs, not lowered my standards; that I will not go on sidestepping and excusing inexcusable policy because refusing to do so might cause me to let go of something I have held on to so hard for so long.  Something that, when you take a close look at it, is not worth holding on to quite that hard, nor for any longer than...yesterday.  

I won't say it wasn't a difficult step to take...I know there are folks I "met" 16 years ago on AOL journals that I will probably never hear from again.  People that have been a part of my life; people that I have cared about.  That is hard...that makes me sad.  But, in the end, I think it was time to make that move. 

So, yeah…this is only my second day without Facebook.  And I’m already noticing how much more time I have.  I’ve been wondering lately why I never seem to have enough time to get all the things done I need to do.  I thought it was a function of growing older and slower.  But, no…  It appears that wasting one or two or three hours every day "checking in" on social media definitely puts a dent in one’s productivity. 

I have WAY too much to do right now to waste time dicking around on the internet.  And now, I have a couple more hours a day to accomplish the real life things that need doing.

So I’d say, so far, this is a win.  We'll see how it goes from here on.