In another life

In the spring and early summer—before my big transcontinental move—a lot of people, whether students or friends, wanted me to make plans for October. I sounded like a broken record, repeating over and over, “I have no idea what my life is going to look like in October.”

After twelve years of being all too sure what the next season or two would bring, it was a good—if also terrifying—feeling. There were far too many things I couldn’t predict.

Now, the reality reminds me of that saying about things one might have done “in another country, in another life.” Here I am and it is very different.

I used to wake up to dawn light and a view of my verdant garden. Now I struggle out of thick pillows and comforters in darkness when the alarm on my phone plays.

Image by Arie Farnam

I used to have to go out early and hike up a hill to feed chickens and tend to large greenhouses. Now I have to open curtains to just barely see out of tiny basement windows and I only have to tend to hydroponic plants under artificial lights and fish that make plant food.

I used to eat yogurt with huckleberry preserves delivered by a local farmer for breakfast. Now I eat my mother’s homegrown eggs and whole-wheat English muffins from Safeway.

I used to tutor students in the evenings. Now late morning is my work time because that is when their evening falls. I used to spend most days alone battling depression and isolation and practical survival for my kids and myself. I also used to have a little time to write, not much but some. Now I spend almost every day on the phone with doctor’s offices and bureaucracies or helping with the crises of multiple high-needs family members. I haven’t had time to even feel guilty for not writing.

I used to eat a lot of meals alone. Now I only rarely eat alone. The cooking schedule has changed and expanded. There are a lot more mouths to feed at random times. Half of the raw ingredients are partly or completely different. I used to be able to easily order a very limited selection of groceries online. It was easy but that was all I could ever get. Now, I can get anything I can dream of, if I can get to the store which is once a week at best. There is no online shopping anymore and only very sketchy public transportation.

I used to have the time and floor-space to do a significant exercise routine every day to stay healthy. Here the ceilings are so low that I can't stretch my hands above my head or accommodate an elliptical machine, and my body never did good with the jarring of jogging on pavement. But I do get to go to the mountains on weekends and climb the steep rugged path to the windswept ridge top for stunning views and a bit of exercise.

I used to have to deal with hostility and overt discrimination every time I left the house. Now, I’m bewildered with the number of people who offer to be helpful and kind in small ways and all I really have to do is remember the exact steps of various processes to get what I need to survive.

My biggest worries used to be about my son getting beat up at school or endlessly sitting in classrooms while teachers marked test papers and showed cartoons instead of teaching. Now my worries are about my son riding his bike with his gang of instant friends and not locking it when he throws it down on this or that lawn to run in to various houses for a snack.

But now I also have to worry about my daughter’s medical appointments, which we didn’t have to worry about before because none were possible and she just went without. I worry about my mother who is helping with my daughter and her many struggles. I worry about my grandmother with dementia who thinks I stole her couch. I worry about more here but less of what I worry about is hopeless.

My neighbors used to be openly judgmental and unfriendly but economically comfortable and mostly shut behind big walls with loud dogs. Now my neighborhood is friendly and gregarious with scruffy, unfenced yards and half-joking warnings to watch out for this or that druggie or thief on the corner. My son used to not get invited to even his best friend’s birthday party or sleep-over because of interethnic bigotry. Now, there are plenty of sleepover possibilities and I try not to worry about my son bringing home bedbugs or witnessing the kind of run-of-the-mill domestic violence I witnessed at friends’ houses in low-income places like this when I was a kid.

I used to take weekends to go to my father-in-law’s farm in the flat marshes of South Bohemia, where the skies are always gray and the huge stone farmhouse is empty and sad. Now I go to my folks’ place up on the pine-covered ridge, where the sky is almost always crisp blue and the log cabin is so full of kids, chickens, dogs and a kitten that you end up stepping on them.

I used to struggle to find enough people to invite to a holiday dinner and I had to cook everything all by myself and play the perfect hostess if anyone came. Now, I have more than enough guests and some of them bring food. My mother is also in the thick of it with me.

People ask me how I’m doing and if I like it better here. And they are a bit disconcerted when I am not enthusiastic one way or the other. I have to stop and think: Well, how IS it going this week?

The answer is that it is very different and I am just barely getting my feet under me. The answer is that in the balance, yes, it’s better. And in the important matters of mental health care for my kids and safety at school it is way better. But it also isn’t easy. I’m tired, overwhelmed and even confused most of the time.

Autumn sunlight sparkles off of the Czech cut-crystal decanter and vase I bought across the ocean. They do nicely to collect and refract the light that filters into my recessed window. Bits of light dance over the autumn tomatoes ripening on the wide sill, and just outside I can see brightly colored leaves in the dirt beyond the screen.

I slip out into the yard to uncover the few remaining tomato plants that I covered last night to protect them from frost. Wind chimes tinkle from the branches of the yard’s only “tree,” which is actually a lilac bush shaped to look like a small tree. It has lost most of its leaves without much show of color, but a tree in the back alley is neon yellow and further down I glimpse ruddy orange.

I can find beauty and nature anywhere, even in a basement. I am growing plants under grow-lights too, though mostly they are still small and weak. I do miss my garden, the rolling terraces of green, the oak, fir and linden trees, the plums, cherries, blackberries, raspberries and currants… I miss the herb beds and the greenhouses and even the smelly chickens and the daily chores they required of me. As the nights grow cold, I miss the sauna we built beside the root cellar.

But even as that life had some good things in it, they were there because that was all I had. I had years of time to build up that garden because outside the garden, there was hostility and closed doors. Here I don’t even know what is outside beyond the frantic pace of family life, but some of the things I thought might only be possible “in another life” whisper to me.

If the pace ever slows, there might be writing or studying or teaching or community. I feel too old or at least too sick and too tired to be starting all over again, but there is still something in a new place and a new chance that sparks long-buried curiosity.