Peg, do you want that sent out on the prayer chain then? Let me know OK?

Boy have I been in your shoes. A lifetime renting, from kid years to now, and so many homes lost with 30 days' notice or less... lost to someone else's decisions. Apartments... One house demolished before my eyes... the year after I dug out all the underbrush, uncovered and thinned the riotous stand of peonies under the flowering crabs, restored the lilac shrubbery to unselfconscious lovely abandon, planted groundcovers... and a couple hundred dollars worth of bulbs in a raised bed I shoveled in by hand... all made rubble, poured into the house's gaping basement. The mighty oak in the corner of the lot died in embarrrassment and root outrage after the large lot was forced to hold two suburban execrations.

Most, though, I still see and miss the exquisite view framed by the bedroom window where I rocked my babychild... the same window where, in high school, my best friend would whistle a Hawkeye-from-MASH whistle in the middle of the night. (And climb in the window, not because my mom would mind a visitor at that hour but just BECAUSE...) Off we'd go on an all-night ramble-- on foot, by car, or just in our minds-- as we talked till we could sleep.

Well. If sympathy helps any, there ya go, darlin'. Other than that... all you can do is make home wherever you are, I guess. Now I live among people whose roots run so deep they can barely stir.

~S~