Broken Lives Matter

Our house is rapidly transforming itself into a home customized for us. Thanks to wonderful friends and close family we have a ramp extending past the front door and winding its way to the street. There's some furniture from Craigslist, and a splurge on two extremely comfy kitchen chairs from World Market make the perfect places to relax. A weekend excursion to the local Salvation Army yielded a ton of useful (or just plain cute) goodies, including a wire basket for the mail that comes through a door slot and two beautiful lamps. The house is warm, our friends staying there to renovate and help us move have an irresistibly cuddly dog, and now there's even a beautiful new high efficiency washer and dryer set from Sears in the basement! I'm uncommonly proud of this particular addition; it was my choice after much deliberation, and it's a larger size to accept the copious amounts of laundry we always seem to have piling up around us. Of course Mikel and I are a littl...

And now, we are home owners! So many times throughout my life I have been convinced it would never happen. There was even a time when I had accepted that I would probably have to live with my mother the rest of my life. Now the very idea of me spending my entire life in a farmhouse full of rugs to trip over until I finally break a hip seems unfathomable. Talking to Mikel last night, we agreed that the difficulties he faces as a paraplegic make the difficulties I face with my walker seem negligable. And yet somehow, I never would have been able to realize my dream of owning my own home on my own, and neither would he; that makes our partnership that much more ideal. All the fits and starts, all the hardships that preceded the final closing today, all the stress and frustration that crushed down on us like an iron fist so that we've been snapping viciously at each other over trivialities all day long--none of it matters. Together we were able to rise above the pressure that woul...

Who said we wanted to move on the day we had set for our closing?!...oh. We did. Thanks a lot Bureaucracy! Since two days before our closing date, there has been a long, tedious, unbelievably stressful list of delays and magical maneuvers to conjure money we can't really afford to lose, in order to keep and secure the house we thought until a week ago was ours unquestioningly. Although we have since been told things like this happen all the time, especially to first-time home buyers, that doesn't remove the sting. We had plans , time lines for construction, a scheduled cable transfer, even a new telephone number! Apparently dangling carrots are a common thing among the Powers That Be--who frequently drop the guillotine on home buyers even the day of closing. So I guess I should feel...lucky? Sure. Mikel and I both feel like fish grabbed out of the ocean and thrown gasping for air onto a slippery wooden dock. I am colder than I can ever remember being in this apartment, sna...