A new Hum album and a new Don DeLillo novel. What a day! It’s like walking outside to a surprise solar eclipse: two gifts from creative titans I hadn’t expected to see around the neighborhood anytime soon. It’s been a joy. I’ve got the day off, spent the morning listening to Hum, bought a new bookshelf, (assembled same successfully), and then bae and I had friends over for a fine backyard barbecue dinner and a walk through the park with dog (ours) and young boy (theirs).
Well, and that’s the real backdrop here, the deeper thing beyond the new music and the new book. We bought a house in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and we’ll be giving the homeowner life a real shot in these strange times. This week, we’ve been immersing ourselves. It’s a thrill, a nice blend of peaceful arrival and sensory overload.
I read a chapter of Little, Big in the backyard with Forrest this morning. Picked it up again in the afternoon and finished it in the basement, surrounded by the inklings of our new life. The ending of that book was a real knockout! What was it Auberon kept saying about the universe? “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”
And so we’re learning the terrain of our house, inside and out, stumbling on small rooms and sprawling meadows that weren’t listed on the survey, finding hallways that connect here with there and all points oddly between.
Down the road, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park splays fuzzy around the edges of our neighborhood map. Great washes of tree and pond. Mysterious trails racing inward, planes getting larger all the time. I feel a sense of rootedness already, and maybe that’s just the excitement of the deal, but I feel committed to my domain here. I feel ruddy just looking out the window of our house. Like, what stories will we spin today? What endings will we turn into beginnings again?
Sandy 