Divining Our Future Selves
Looking for a house is like using a divining rod to find water. My soon-to-retire parents were in town for just such an mission this last week: trying to find that spot where projects, friends, dreams and future selves will sprout up naturally from the chosen surroundings. Of course, instead of divining rods they had to use their own hearts to find this future, and so first they had to see into their own hearts.
When I was ten years old I helped my parents build our house. After school each day my little sisters and I were bussed to a hilly strip of land covered in tall, yellowed grasses. We waded over to a muddy hole and filled it with gravel and hope. I remember being cold and tired, watching my moonlight-lit parents shoveling and raking that gravel into place for the cement pouring the next day.
When the Chicago winter really came in force, we huddled inside a room made of 2x4s and wrapped in plastic, a tiny round grey metal space heater just barely keeping our hands warm enough to snap together the next set of legos. Through the translucent plastic we could see our parents hammering or carrying pieces of plumbing pipe and we wondered when we would go home. I’m not sure I really understood, or believed, that this was going to be a home.
When the roof was finally up and the massive solar panel windows installed, we held a German Richtfest and mounted a tiny evergreen tree at the peak of the house. Years later a teenaged Kai installed an eight foot CB radio antenna in the same place, and the tree now stands strong near the house. The massive, healthy green guardian is now at least two stories tall, almost as tall as the house it protects.
When we moved in the place had only paint-splattered plywood floors. As kids, we loved that the scaffolding was still up in the two story living room. We could climb all over it like monkeys every morning until we were called over to the rotting wooden picnic table to eat. A photographic dark room was built in, along with huge handmade oak bookshelves for my librarian mother, who would forever respond to questions with, “well, have you checked one of the encyclopedias?” I went to sleep listening to music blasting from the pipe organ pipes next to my room. The old organ was woven into the house, its arteries snaking through the walls and down into the basement where a massive blower pumped air. My mother sat at a console, also remade in oak, her hands and feet all working together like magic to produce a symphony.
It is this house, with its half acre garden full of fresh tomatoes and passing deer, that they now consider leaving to join their wandering children in the warmer south. My mother has always had flexible jobs as a librarian, piano teacher, and book seller, so it’s as my father passes over the invisible line drawn in days where it becomes OK, and sometimes required, to quit working that they’ve started to think about what kind of life they want to see in their future.
My friend Garreth, with his red hair and square-rimmed artist’s glasses, drove us from place to place in the latest of his fixerup trucks. Each neighborhood forced new questions or realizations to emerge. Driving through a wealthy suburb my dad said, “Wow. This just… isn’t our kind of place.” He’s a physicist, so he wants to have easy access to an airport for conferences, but also needs to, “be able to work on an old rusting John Deere tractor in the back yard.” My mom at some point suddenly realized that she might have to start locking her doors when she left the house. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”
By the end of the tour they were asking tough questions of themselves, questions about how they thought about potential neighbors and whether they were willing to face the ways in which they would have to rank people. They wanted to be near the university so that they could go to cultural events, but my mom asked, “how many have we been to in the past year, where we live close?” The reality of how they actually live came up against how they thought of themselves. My mother wondered if she would still be selling thousands of books out of the house, or trying to find piano students again once they moved here. How much would they actually be interacting with their neighbors anyway?
It also became clear to me for the first time how profoundly differently my parents and I think about friends. To them, no one is as close as family. Despite my mother working with, at one point, 70 piano students a week, they could say with certainty that they wouldn’t miss anyone in our old town. This astounded me. My friends are my chosen family. They are the kinds of people who often spread around the world and back, but despite how close I am to my parents I feel just as much love for many of my friends. My dad did mention flying to see his colleagues often after retirement, but my mother was the one who gave me the genes for social interaction.
Today they are back home outside Chicago, relieved and appreciative of what they have now that it isn’t nearly so cold there. As I stand on the edge of my own current way of life and consider my next leap, I can’t help but try to see a couple of steps forward to the choices they are making now. My youngest sister has already told me that she expects to have to own enough land to build a cabin for her starving artist big brother. I can only hope that there’ll be enough room for my rusting tractor project too.
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