First things first, we did not buy a bus! The online auction will not be over until tomorrow, but someone came along with a slightly higher bid late tonight, and saved us from ourselves. We always say god looks out for kittens and fools, and there is no shortage of either in Smith Park. So I suppose without the bus, I am less concerned about wiping out our cash reserves in the short term, and also less convinced the man will try to tell me that what he bought isn't an expensive bus, it's a cheap house. I looked over his shoulder this evening, and saw him looking at pictures on the internet again....of houses in that town I said looks like our best option for finding affordable shelter in Colorado. I breathed a big sigh of relief.
Last night at Bonfire, I overheard Mr Smith-Park expressing to the Bonfire leader the same concern I have mentioned several times in this space. What if we do move back there, and two or three years later, that same old rambling itch comes back for both of us? We have moved so often in our lives together, neither of us is sure we could stay in one place for long even if we tried. Even before we ever moved away from Boulder as young adults, we moved from apartment to apartment, living at five different addresses together before we left there, and several individually before we hooked up, all over town. We like to change our space around us too much to leave anything alone. (Even our daughters have inherited that compulsion. When we said "clean your room" to daughter number two, she always heard "pull things out, rearrange, and redecorate for hours.")
We were both creating today. We splurged at the fabric store yesterday, and spent all day today bent over our respective crafts. Let me be more accurate there. I tried to sit and zone out making a no-sew fleece blanket in CU colors. Instead, every few minutes I got up and shooed the angry, cursing man away from the sewing machine, so that I could un-jam the bobbin or re-thread the tension levers. He was sewing on heavy canvas with outdoor thread that was almost as thick as tiger wire. It didn't play nice with the machine, nor with the man. After a very frustrating day, making several attempts at the same seams, he came up with a rather clever shade cloth to go over the corner of the deck closest to the door. It wasn't designed to be a giant covered patio. It was just something to keep the rain from splashing in, and to give the dogs a little bit of shelter while they scratch at the back door to ask to come inside. Once he had finished making it, spent hours hanging it properly and re-stringing the outdoor party lights I had from last summer, and using the highest pressure setting on the hose to wash that corner of the deck, he started proposing structural changes. Maybe some composite decking instead of the wood that needs a new pressure washing. Maybe run the boards perpendicular to the way they go now. Maybe a pergola. It was at this point that I realized, maybe there is a way to make our forever house last forever after all. Never declare it finished. Always give him a project, something to re-design and change. I'll have a whole new home every few years, like a body regenerating its cells over time. They say you have complete cellular turnover every seven years. How long would it take to turnover every room in a house, on a rotating-room basis?
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