Home In The Dark

Most of my life, I agreed with the proverb writer who said, "give me neither poverty nor riches, but just enough to satisfy my needs" (30:8). Too poor and one is overwhelmed by the body's needs, but too rich and one is obsessed with watching over possessions. Neither allow access to a sense of the divine.

Objects have one, very intense desire: to disintegrate and come to rest in complete disorder. That's why it takes such volumes of human energy just to keep them from falling apart. It is their nature to weather, compost, change, be recycled. I hate pouring my life into that loosing proposition. So why at 57 did I leap onto the American Dream of home ownership (in a still-rapidly-declining housing market, no less)? Why did I imagine I could do this?

The issue has never arisen before because I've never had sufficient income.

So here I am a first-time home owner at 57 - after an exhausting home search, and an even more exhausting remodel of a foreclosure - with some not-so-good results, and one, ten thousand dollar mistake. That mistake cost more than half my year's salary.

Whoa! you say. If you're in such a low income bracket, how can you get a house?

We-e-e-e-l-l-l-l... It's the reason I'm doing this in the first place. I didn't pay for most of it. My uncle did.

Ever since he moved to Wisconsin and into a retirement community to be near his younger brother (my dad), he's been asking if we could live together. "I don't have a house," I said, "And besides, you are better off here with all the activities and the friends you've made." And he was better off - first in an apartment, then in assisted living.

The nursing home was another story. Despite being one of the best in the area, it was... a nursing home. Skilled and caring as the staff were, they had lots of folks to look after, and there was just an institutional coldness to it all.

So I finally said, "Yes."

I'm no altruist. My uncle is one of the nicest people out there - even now with the creeping dementia and slow, physical, downward slide of Parkinson's. I wouldn't have done it if we didn't get along very, very well.

Yet I wake each morning crying, "I can't do this. Why did I think I could?"

But then I sit with my uncle, and he is so sweet and relaxed - not at all the guarded, lost person he was in the nursing home, and I think, "I've got to find a way."