The shuffle

End of this month and time to shuffle my things once again. Moving into a real house where I'm going to commit to being in one place for one year and pay a deposit and loll around on clean vintage couches and stretch on gleaming hardwood floors. There is a garden and there are bulk grains to share and a casual dinner making rotation. Step one to being a real person is a real place to live. Looking for real life all the time, and ready for a closet/bed/kitchen/garden. What luxuries. Although I do hate the moving shuffle because it reminds me how ornery I'm getting in my old age.

Take chai?

Tea heavy with cardamom, milk and honey. It is summertime in Oakland, and this neighborhood is covered in roses that bloom in exaggeration of themselves. I'm selling blueberries for a living again, loading up the little rabbit with all the business of the farmers' market and entertaining visions of blueberry fairies for children and their parents.

Warehouse

This time it’s a warehouse in East Oakland. Between the BART train and the cargo train, there are old tracks as a physical memory of how this place used to turn out steam trains and they run right through my kitchen. This time I knew from the beginning I couldn’t make it work, that seven blocks from the BART at midnight was too many and too deserted for me and my handbag to be walking. I knew that the roads would yield too many flat tires for my bike and found the kitchen’s as dirty as the house I escaped in January. I am filled with tears three nights in a row breaking at the same time, falling into bed with my lover who asks me what is wrong and knows at the same time and a refrain that does not please me, “Is there something I can do for you?”

I want, desperately, I say, to live with Travis and Sunshine and it is light at the end of the tunnel possible and now it is established, we will move at the end of the month. It is a year commitment that I am more than ready to commit to it is a year of settling that I am looking forward to. I want to have a garden where I get to see plants I planted grow.