reaching "oh well"

if someone had told me 10 months ago that i would walk through walls, i could not possibly have understood.

as the new house on that old, solid foundation has risen that is exactly what i have done. many times. at first i was just walking around the foundation, remembering what had been there, and looking backwards. then the framing went up, and with it the possibilities and the promise of things to come.

these days i walk from room to room, literally through the walls, noticing this and that - trying to envision how it will look, how it will feel, how it will come to be. i often say to jacko "i can't imagine that this is going to be our home someday". and that's true. it is so much more than we could have ever dreamed. people have done so much more for us than we could have ever dreamed.

but really, it's already our home - though it's in its infancy. it's a part of us already.

the fact that the foundation is the same is obvious, even to the casual observer. it's the same house, but different. it's familiar, yet new. you know when people describe someone as an "old soul"? i kind of feel that way about the house. there are deep roots under the bright and shiny new structure that is rising.

today i took the day off from work. i decided to start going through some of the bags, bins, and piles in the garage. yes, we actually still have quite a mass of sooty things in our garage and shed. mountains of our things were thrown away at demo time, but i was too attached to my things to let go of all of them back then. "surely, this could be salvaged. somehow. someway." and "how can we possibly get rid of that?" - so to appease me, jack helped fill bags and bins with stinky, sooty, soiled items. i guess it's a good sign that i actually had forgotten about a lot of my "must save" things since i hadn't seen them for a while (a clue that i can, despite my conviction 10 months ago, live without them).

so i was reunited with some of my things as i pulled them out one by one and inspected them. and while overall i felt pretty sad, i found that i reach "oh well" much faster now than i did back then. it's become much much easier to say goodbye to things that before i didn't think i could live without. sentimental things, one-of-a-kind things, precious things. but we're stronger. time has been on our side in that regard. we walk through all kinds of walls now.