Kingston Retrofit

For a time I considered calling this blog "Kingston Retrofit," and focusing on our slow and careful process of remaking our 19th-century Victorian house into a 21st-century sustainable refuge. I decided instead to blog about whatever interested me on any given day, but as I look back over the years writing this blog, which is mostly about my children's youth, our field trips and holidays and dreams, our unschooling experiences, and our aspirations toward living more sustainably, what I've blogged about has always circled around the house. It's the column that's supported our life for seven years, and like any good column, it shifts with the movements of the earth, it's sturdy yet flexible. "My staircase, my spine," as I called an early post.

My husband and I have loved living in an old house, and all it has to offer: the craft involved in the building and all its details, from mouldings to plaster to stone; the great ventilation that makes an absurdity of an idea like air conditioning; the pride of preservation. We've had a great life here, and it's ending a little sooner than we thought it would. Halfway to adulthood, our children find their parents looking for a new place to raise them, when we thought it would be here, just here.

Speaking as one of millions of people putting their homes on the market right now, I have to say the hard part is dealing with change and uncertainty. We don't know where we're going, if we'll buy again, whether we can keep some bigger things like our piano. All we know is: smaller place, lower expenses. I'm having to get used to not knowing, and not forcing the issue before its time.

Meditating helps. Contemplating impermanence helps. But what triggers anxiety about impermanence and change more than the loss of home? The word "home" is a promise of stability, reliability. Home is a repository of memory; without the home, where are the memories? Home represents the meeting of all the other basic needs: home is shelter, food, warmth. This is why homelessness, and a country that doesn't address homelessness, is such a core issue of justice and compassion, why "foreclosure" sounds like "murder" to many of us.

So right now I'm scraping and painting, sifting and weeding and ecycling, raking and edging and planting, making nicey-nice and staging. I'm finishing household projects (for someone else) begun years ago (for me). I'm re-reading books about feng shui and hoping the chi starts bum-rushing this place soon. How do you like the red front door, by the way? I can feel the pumped-up chi traffic already.

I'll blog the journey, knowing it's one a lot of us are making these days.