GUTTED - An Excerpt
Chapter One - I love sharing these glimpses with you from my recently published book: Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me
The day we came to see the house that would become our home, it was a hot summer Sunday afternoon in July 2004. The sky was so intensely blue that it hurt my eyes. Pulling the visor down to shield myself from the throbbing sun-light, we exited the expressway with thirty miles still to go. The two-lane road we traveled through a country-side lined with wooden fences and blank faced cows, was enough of a difference from the pulse of an energetic city life, for me to feel the early signs of an anxiety talon creeping into my initial excitement.
We were considering moving away from the city, where all four of my daughters had been born and raised, our female souls tethered to thick traffic, street lights and tight neighborhoods. We stood on a precipice, facing a decision we knew would change our lives. Would we jump or reel backwards, back to the city we knew, or did my husband’s innocent desire bear consideration? This moment originated from a simple moment of husbandly compulsion.
“Will we never live somewhere different?” Andy asked one evening. I bridled at this startling question. My husband is a quiet man, unobtrusive, an uncomplaining soul. He rarely registers dissatisfaction, and I wondered how long he had been thinking about this.
“What? Where?”
His gentle suggestion that we could perhaps move to Montana prompted me to answer that I would cry every day. I imagined a lonely existence that would require manual labor, something I am not averse to, hauling debris out of multiple remodeling projects, but I did worry about the unknown aspect of how we would carve out a life for ourselves in the vacant west.
“Why do you want to move away from our life?” A slight tremor in my voice as I asked the question pestering me.
“Is this a new revelation for you? How long have you wanted to move?”
“As long as I can remember. I hate living in the city, always have.”
I was stunned by Andy’s response. We had fallen in love in the city where he lived when I met him, we had married in the city, and lived with my daughters in a small house in the city. It never occurred to me that he held such a fervent and negative opinion of Chicago. This new and disturbing fact drove me to solve this problem, forgetting that I loved city life, and shoving the truth about my own urban personality into a mental suitcase and slamming it shut. I could not bear though, the isolation that would come from moving out west. Also, I could not imagine my girls having the lives they dreamed of with such a drastic eruption of life-style.
Marrying a second time for both of us, Andy had embraced my life of girls times four, and I felt it was only fair that I tamp down my city dreams and embrace his. Abandoning the Montana suggestion, our compromise was to look northwest, to the rural outskirts’ of Chicago.
On this sunshine day, we had been followed to Woodstock, a small town seventy miles northwest of Chicago, by friends from the city who could not believe we were considering moving so far away.
“You are going to the edge of the world!” cried Maria, my cohort in child raising. Accompanied by her husband Kurt, he trailed behind us as Maria moaned her protest.
I met Maria when we were both newly-weds and did not have a scratch nickel between us. We made important decisions, like having a baby, the way we then made most of our decisions at that time; with minimal consideration.
“I think I’m pregnant.” I spoke these words as we sat together sipping coffee. I had a murky realization that my life was about to change.
“Cool!”
“We can push strollers together,” I offered.
“Cool! Kurt?”
“Huh? Uh, okay.” The same lack of crispness from Maria’s husband spoke volumes about our innocent attitude about parenting.
We soon found ourselves raising nine children between us. The bond that comes from being young and not realizing that you are quite poor while at the same time being quite idealistic, runs deep and wide. We gather a sense of ownership to the friendships that erupt from early, shared life experiences. Learning how to raise a family, be a wife, cook meals, fix broken appliances, read bed-time stories, and fold mountains of laundry, all while displaying personal vantage points that are idiosyncratic enough to make me cringe in self-discovery, was shared with a few women doing the same thing at the same time. We were finding out who we were as women, what we thought about life, and we talked about it. We discussed evolution, creationism, classic literature, Greek mythology, new math, hair removal, and chore charts. As we planned home schooling lesson plans to be shared amongst our children, we were putting down deep roots of friendship, anchoring us to the city. We could walk everywhere we needed to go, and neighborhoods were tight and small, making them easy to navigate with clutching children and wobbly wheeled strollers. The energy of city life blended well with our nearly electric grab at life each day. We were busy, filled with energy and ideas. Sidewalks gave paths to our days and street lights pointed us toward each other at night. It was unimaginable that I could give this up for pastures, fields of corn and cows.