Not the Joneses

Learning to live a vibrant life as... is.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” was a once popular phrase, that refers to the pressure to “keep up” with your neighbors, social status, wealth, or popularity.

My husband Carl and I live in a split-level condominium surrounded by woods, green grass (in the summer), and a pond out back. We bought our home from a Master Gardner who took great pride and much care to surround our unit with stunning beauty. Each spring we are surprised and amazed by the perennials that pop-up seemingly random. Bright flowers with exotic, mysterious names like Queen of the Prairie, Dianthus, Garden Phlox, Sedum, and Irises, in colors such as bubble gum pink, majestic purple, cornflower blue, and passionate tangerine surround the front and sides of our unit. Fragrant lilacs and Lillies-of-the-Valley invade our olfactory senses triggering memories that often give a therapeutic sense of relief from anxiety and loneliness that (sometimes) surfaces from days gone by.

2023 Surprise from the former Master Gardner

Glancing in from the two main intersecting roads that surround us, one might mistake our little neighborhood for an active assisted living community.

The speed limit on our .6 mile long paved street is 15 mph. We don’t have speed bumps. Yet.

If someone wanted to do a drive-by it would be hard to do without taking down the elderly with walkers, scooters, slow and steady biker riders, or the (occasional) women who stand in their driveways ready to shuffle out into the middle of the road and wave frantic arms signaling to slow down when a random pass-through decides to do a shortcut doing 16 mph through the neighborhood. There is one woman on each end of the street.

We live with video surveillance and well-intentioned neighbors who know everyone’s business. And if they don’t know, they ask.

We live on the west end of the street, where our unit is older (circa 2000). The greenery has matured and lent itself to song birds, deer, squirrels, raccoons, turkeys, geese, and a lone bunny.

Bunny, my friend who comes in daily… sometimes he stops by the inside of the garage for gourmet greens.

I like it here because it’s quiet and safe. I feel secure. But feeling secure isn’t always comfortable. My therapist reminds me of this in our sessions. Our emotions and feelings are dictated and impressionable while we’re young. And many times we bring them along into adulthood and cope irrationally, such as the case with me. Another story for another day.

Did I forget to mention we are HOA (Home Owners Association) regulated?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I forgot to mention that. It’s a detail I like to (selectively) forget exists, here in our idyllic surroundings.

But that isn’t part of the story, either.

A small glimpse of green.

When the doorbell rings I tend to freeze up in shame.

A couple days ago around mid-morning the doorbell rang. I froze and quickly looked around to see if anything needed straightened or picked up off the floor. I glanced at the kitchen sink. No dirty dishes. I looked around as I bounded down the stairs and noted there were no dirty boots or old sneakers blocking the front door. I was out of my pajamas and dressed for the day. Safe to open the door.

It wasn’t Amazon (my husband’s preferred method of shopping) or a FedEx delivery (my preferred method of consignment). And it wasn’t a police raid (like I used to panic about long ago when I lived with my ex-boyfriend, the bookmaker), or the shared apartment with the bell hop who moonlighted as a stripper and often times came home with freaks in tow. She always drove her own car because she didn’t trust riding with strangers. Her dates were directed to follow her home in the pre-dawn hours, at around the time I was getting ready for bed. Between the time she walked in the door to pee and the time it took her change clothes the nut jobs stood impatiently outside banging on the doorbell to signal their arrival.

But, who could it be today? I wasn’t worried about having to ask anyone inside. That always triggers a surge of anxiety and feelings of shame.

I opened the door with a little apprehension. It was my neighbor Jan, one of the ladies from the bookclub I’d recently joined.

Delight replaced dread as I recognized Jan standing there with a book in hand and her dog Nala, a little strawberry blonde who stood (leashed) eagerly wagging her tail beside her mistress.

“Hi, I brought you a new book to read. You’re gonna love it,” she said.

“Thank you!! Come on in,” I said, inviting her into the foyer, not really thinking further ahead, more reacting in the moment.

Instantly panic and shame started settling over me.

She is only the 9th person to step inside the front door in almost 3 years, including repairmen and cable guy.

A Little History is in Order…

“I’m not going into too much about Michigan, except that I returned to my home state expecting not to settle down and grow old.

In October, 2019 I reconnected with my childhood love, Carl for the first time in 45 years.

I’d relocated and rented a small (fully furnished summer cottage) on a lake located remotely from the closest town, nearly ten miles away and planned on staying there through the winter. I was working through a life-change and then once transformed, moving back out-of-state and returning to civilization by spring.

It was also where I spent the first seventeen years of my life growing up somewhat normal 45 years ago. What I considered the last time I was metaphorically normal. I knew Carl in our mid and late teens. We spent summers together, mostly on the golf course or behind the cart shack in the woods nearby, making out.

But that was long ago before years of making poor decisions and a series of wrong relationships that dictated where my mindset led to in the present moment, and what had manifested into what I perceived as a dead end. It was time to make a break-through and find a different direction and in order to do that I decided to go back to where I started from. I knew I couldn’t get a do-over at life but it felt right to start back at the beginning in my search for closure and a new beginning.

I was (also) practicing Mel Robbin’s mindset reset program to cleanse and heal from a recent break-up of 19-year relationship that had gone from bad to worse, to intolerable.

The break-up was the catalyst to the move to Western Michigan that September, 2019, resulting in changing jobs and therapists, and a decision to use the move as a launching pad to reignite and turn my life completely around.

Carl and I re-found one another shortly after my move. We dated, rekindled our passion, and after a short engagement, we married the following September, 2020. We bought our first home together, my husband’s third, my first, during Covid craze when the new normal was upside down and turned inside out.

Let that sink in.

I married at 62 for the first time and bought a home with intentions of planting and growing roots during a time when the world was experiencing nothing remotely resembling the way I’d been living for 62 years.

In simple terms I was fucking nuts. And I was crazy in love.

That crazy, magical year was the marker that defined my before and after to the end and beginning to the world as I knew it, in a good way, but good (even great) can be scary and uncomfortable too.

Uncomfortable vulnerability can breed anxiety and depression.

For most it might be normal to marry, buy a home, have children, settle down, and root, maybe divorce, remarry, reroot, but not me.

Let me preface this by saying my normal is not the normal by Middle-America or the Joneses standard of living.

At last count I moved 41 times in 63 years. The perpetual moving started in 1968 and never stopped until 2020.

Moving became a mantra. I learned early on to rent apartments, hotel rooms, or condominiums, most times fully furnished (including dishes, silverware, linens, cleaning products and a vacuum cleaner) with short-term leases located in fashionable resort areas where the action stayed hot and the people were mostly transient, except for the few locals who’d typically been entrenched there from generations prior, and property passed down… still affordable, in other words, but untouchable to the less than wealthy.

“To be successful keep looking tanned, live in an elegant building (even if you’re in the cellar), be seen in smart restaurants (even if you only nurse one drink), and if you borrow, borrow big.” — Aristotle Onassis, 1906-1975, Greek Shopping Tycoon

I read the above quote in Parade magazine when I was 10 years old. I cut it out and taped it to the back of my bedroom door along with my postcard collection from my grandmother, whose (final) mission in life was to visit all 48 lower states by Greyhound Bus. Sadly, she missed by two states. She died at 89 in transit on her final destination to Oregon and Washington.

Photo by Jean-Luc Benazet Miami Beach locale, where the author left a piece of her heart in a place she once referred to “as home.”

Not all locations I moved to were tourist destinations. But I didn’t stay in those places long, either. I learned quickly that small, local, and mostly Middle America scenes weren’t my jam.

This move (back) to Michigan was (and still is) an entirely new experience, one I’m still adjusting to.

Social graces not withstanding…

It was the polite and neighborly thing to do. Invite my neighbor in for coffee or a cold drink. Show her around our house.

I couldn’t. I was too ashamed to invite her in to look at the barren walls and emerald green carpet, with mostly uncovered windows

We live minimalist in today’s idiom, sparsely furnished is a more accurate description.

We have a formal dining room table, 4 chairs, 2 semi-furnished bedrooms, and a red oversized exercise ball. We have a couple of inherited vintage drop-leaf tables that are essentially useless because I keep banging my shins on the legs, and the (absolute) probability of my spilling a drink on the unmarred, smooth surfaces is inevitable. We have an old steamer trunk from Carl’s great grandmother which I’m currently using to display my newly acquired hobby of collecting plants, an important component in making a house into a home.

Dedicated space to my new found plant hobby. They’re still living. It’s a sign.

For now, this is all I’m comfortable committing to. It’s been almost 3 years.

The living room

I haven’t had a place I called home since my mother died in 2010.

It was the last place my baby book was stored, old photos displayed, and our oil paintings still hung on the walls. Her little apartment was respite from a bad day, a place to take an impromptu vacation, celebrate a win with martini or two, or take refuge (from) the sometimes cold, lonely world that often threatens to envelope when we’re sometimes at our most vulnerable.

Before then, home was always where I once lived still innocent, and comforted, loved and nurtured as a child, the last house our family shared in 1975.

Oh it isn’t as sad as it sounds. I lived with friends, shared apartments, and even houses, had long-term relationships where we shared residence, but there was always something missing. I was always a guest.

Today I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t know how to furnish a house, let alone a home. And more importantly l can’t, well I won’t because I don’t trust or know myself well enough to know what I like.

“We’re a work in progress,” my husband says to console me, after the heating and cooling guy recently came in to do some work and asked if we’d just moved in.

Carl has been more than patient, empathetic, and shown great compassion while watching me as I struggle, trying to fit my square-ass self into a newly drilled round hole.

Remember this was a reset, albeit a dream come true, reconnecting and marrying my childhood love.

As for the rest, I’ll strive for progress, and not perfection.

Anyway, a few weeks earlier, before Jan came to my door with her dog and the book, she invited me and our neighbor and friend, Elaine, over for early morning coffee.

I was still half asleep when I stepped through Jan’s front door and into what my imagination had always hazily defined as home.

Jan’s Sunroom where we shared coffee, cake and good cheer.

Elaine and I toured the place and marveled at the antiques, furniture, wall hangings, and the seemingly small details that felt like they came right out of a “Better Home and Gardens” magazine whose motto was “We power your passion to live a better, more beautiful, and colorful life.”

I was inspired, intimidated, and made woefully aware I didn’t have a clue even where to start in my own house to make it a home.

What the tour made me realize was this. Maybe I wouldn’t create a showplace but I could fill in small details in my own house and go from there. Again, progress and not perfection.

Jan and her husband John’s place is a labor of love.

If I’m confessing the unabridged truth, much of our (own) time at home is spent at the dining room table playing cards, dice, and board games after Carl’s worked long and strenuous hours as an over-the-road trucker. We spend our hours (together) over games, while discussing our future plans, what it might be like to both be retired, where we want to travel, his golf game, my projects and ongoing quest to explore jobs or experiment with side hustles, and the stuff normal couples talk about, or so I supposed, since this is my first time being married.

We rarely talk about furniture or decorating except if I get an urge to make our house a home an want to buy a lamp or a wall hanging, which the one we acquired still hasn’t been hung because I can’t decide where to put it.

In truth we have a home. It’s filled with cherished moments spent together. We love, we laugh, we cry, and we share intimacy as lovers and best friends. It’s not the lack of furniture, uncovered windows, or bare walls but its the spiritual glue of our love and commitment to each other that makes our house a home.

Epilogue.

I didn’t invite Jan in for coffee and cake that day. But the next time an opportunity comes around I’ll welcome with open arms and offer my hospitality in the best way I know how, with gratitude for where I live and doors opened wide to the place I now call home.

June’s Printable giveaway is a set of date night (challenge) cards and a Tips sheet to help with ideas to plan a day or night out with your husband/wife or significant other.

The newly subscribed who did not receive May’s give-away please reach out and I’ll send you the the link in an email. It’s a sleep tracker/diary for those who have difficulty sleeping and/or living with insomnia. It’s a tool that can be used to recognize patterns (good and bad), and (what works and what doesn’t). I filled mine out and took it to my doctor. It helped him decide what meds he wanted to put me on, but more importantly he’s agreed I likely needed a sleep study, something he’d never taken seriously in the past.

As a reminder. The Printables created each month for subscriber’s are free for personal use and to give away to family and friends.