What are we waiting for?

The last year or so has been all about living and dying. It just takes one good friend losing her battle with cancer to shake up all that I thought I understood. One minute here, one minute gone - no chance to catch up, fix mistakes, tackle the bucket list, explain to friends and family how much you love them - the list goes on and on.

Apart from the loss and the grief, and certainly the disbelief that this could have even happened, the side effect, for me, was to tackle everything, try everything, follow my heart. This netted mixed results, certainly. On the one hand, I went back to grad school - again - this time for my MFA. I'm still plugging along on that and should be able to finish up my novel in the next year or so. And it gets me out of the house for residencies, has forced me to meet new people, some of whom will be my friends forever, I'm certain. So good decision or bad, it meant movement.

Slightly less healthy pursuits led to a 20 pound weight gain last year, which - thankfully - I've lost again. No sense in denying one's self dessert, right? Anyway, glad that has evened out again.

And I went a little nuts fixing up the house. The disastrous projects that had been dragging on since fall of 2012, making me depressed, sending me through a seemingly endless series of incompetent or dishonest or unreliable contractors, finally started to come together in the middle of last year when my neighbor, after seeing me distressed in the yard surveying storm damage, gave me contact information for his brother - contractor number five. Actually, number six, since I had a completely different company fix the aforementioned storm damage, but I forget about them since I never met them. All correspondence happened over phone or email and the work was completed while I was at work.

So Anthony, (of Broccolina Brothers Construction, reachable at bbcconstruction@aol.com if you are looking for your own crazy remodel boondoggle), started with crown moulding, and door and window frames, really just wrapping up the loose ends of the previously unfinished work upstairs. He does great work. But, when the custom moulding was installed and I had painted it, I began to get a sense of what my house might look like.  For some context, I had pulled down ugly drop ceilings and removed horrifyingly ugly wall board. The walls underneath were a disaster and I had become used to ladders everywhere, dust, tools, and general clutter. After the first coat of new paint in my bedroom, I fell in love with my house - maybe for the first time. And I think I fell in love with being in love, because I got emotional over EVERYTHING. Love seemed like the opposite of dying. Appreciation was my way of being alive, of not taking anything for granted.

This led to new walls and ceiling in the living room, more moulding, replacement steps, and finally a new bathroom so beautiful, that newly-emotional-wreck me actually teared up over the tile. The tile made me cry. Yes. I have a mini day spa in my house now - at least that's how it makes me feel.

I've been selecting art for the walls. It's not like I can put the same old crap up. I picked up some nice work from Cindy Capehart - you can see her work here - and Alice Mullen, her Etsy site here. Cindy and I went to high school and art school together a million years ago and Alice and I were in one of the craziest, meanest writing workshops ever to be held in the dark woods of Virginia. Both are gifted and shall one day be famous. I'm happy to have gotten started while they are still affordable and talking to me.

And because I've been on a creative bender like I've never experienced before, and I apparently have little fear of failing at monumental level, I've been writing song lyrics - terrible ones - and trying to learn guitar. I may take up piano again. I'm aware that I sound like a lunatic and I'm okay with that.

Where do I go from here? I'm still plugging away with the writing and making some decent progress. I adopted a puppy and she keeps me busy. I'm trying to sort out what's real and what's not, what will be part of my future and what I will leave behind, and whether or not it's time again to break my routine, run away from home again. I need less and I need more. I probably need therapy, but for now, I'll just have to follow my instincts.

The one thing I can say for certain after this year of upheaval is that the risks, the fears, the stumbles, the emotions, as I made my way through have all been the right thing to do. I may have bruised my heart a little, but I used it this year. I felt again. I lived and I loved. I won and I lost. It will be pretty hard to settle for less after that. Don't wait for your own wake up call, go get what you want, love who you need (and tell them, for God's sake!), and stretch yourself too. I promise it will be worth the risk.