My Right Hand

In eighth grade gym class we were all lined up out on the field practicing the long jump. I was a little shorter than my peers, but had powerful legs from years spent as a center midfielder in soccer. I didn't have breasts and my hair never feathered right, but by golly, I could run fast and jump hard. I was in the full glory of my longest long jump ever, arms windmilling, loving every second of it when I realized someone had left the rake at the back of the pit. There's really no way to stop jumping when you've gone that far. I put my hand down to steady my descent and landed with the heel of my hand, followed by the full force of my body in flight, on the rake. I took a second, pulled my hand off of the rake, sat and looked at the giant puncture wound filling with blood and yellow gristle from inside my hand and promptly walked back across the field, into the school to the nurse's office. The nurse took one look and called my dad to take me to the emergency room for a tetanus shot and a butterfly bandage.

At my first post-college job, I worked as an event planner for a catering company. When I got tired of listening to brides and socialites quibble over cash bars or table linens, I would seek comfort in the bustle of the kitchen. The crass and rude chefs would let me help them cook because I wasn't afraid to get dirty and I would do things like roll 2000 raw scallops in bacon. (Do you even know what your hands smell like after that?!) It was my meditation. I could get sweaty and filthy and reek of seafood and grease and not have to mind my manners or sell anything or worry that the china service was all wrong. One day I was pulling a tray of spinach and feta triangles out of the oven and touched the base of my thumb to the oven rack. My rubber glove melted and burned onto my hand. I didn't want the chefs to think I was a wimp, and we had an event to get out the door, so I finished loading up the food before I went to the bathroom to peel off the glove and a layer or two of my skin.

A few years ago while we were camping, I went to retrieve a kite from our giant old Volvo station wagon while my family frolicked in the field several yards away. I watched them wrestle and run and play in the sunshine, completely overtaken in a moment of pure and blessed perfection. I slammed the door on my pinky. Unbelieving, I just yanked my finger out of the door instead of opening it. As I looked at the inside of the tip of my pinky, it occurred to me that I might be hurt, so I did what any rational person would do. I shoved the end of my finger back in place and went to go fly kites with my family. The Chief Lou noticed that I was grayish in the face and that there was blood dripping off my hand and insisted that probably the kite flying could wait.

courtesy of morguefile.com

While I am generally ambidextrous, I favor my right hand. It's my primary writing hand, and its the one I unconsciously turn to in a crisis. It is the hand that's always out there in the forefront of whatever I'm doing. I have a large lumpy scar on the butt of my right hand right where my life and fate lines intersect. I have a dark purple line across the base of my right thumb. I have a Franken-nail on the pinky of my right hand. I have these and countless other scars on my right hand from where it has taken the heat, stopped my fall, and run interference for me when I've operated beyond my limits. My kids like to look at my hand and trace the scars, to hear the stories and to squeal with horror and awe. This hand of mine that's battered and worn will never be used to advertise diamond rings or Palmolive. But it's my primary writing hand. It tells stories. It speaks in twisted lines and singular silhouettes of times I have flown farther, jumped longer, worked harder, and lost myself in the moment like never before. It's my right hand.

Twenty-Five Bucks in Trinkets and Beads

Tomorrow, I will become a woman. I met with my very first real estate agent last week to begin the process of finding, and then purchasing, our very first house. I very nearly died.

Neither my husband nor I have ever bought a house. We decided to mortgage our educations instead. We did not follow the proscribed steps to adulthood with which we were raised: go to college, get married, get a job, buy a house, have kids, buy a bigger house, buy a mini van and so on. Our route looked something like this: get married, go to college some, move across country, go to college some more, move to another state, go to college some more, have kid #1, finish college, move across the country again, get a job, move across country again, have kid #2, pay on student loans forever.

Since I am the one with the most time on my hands, it has been tasked to me to do that which frightens the tar out of me. Tomorrow our real estate agent with very expensive hair is picking me up. I will ride around town in her moderately expensive car hoping I don't smell like last night's cheeseburger and look at houses. This makes me so nervous I feel like I might vomit said cheeseburger in the footwell of said car.

This is roughly what we can afford in our current neighborhood.
Photo courtesy of The Morgue File

Remember when there was a housing crash? Well, Seattle doesn't. Sure, the houses went from astronomically overpriced to appallingly overpriced a few years ago, but the Chief Lou put it best when he said: "It seems a little strange to think of a quarter million dollars as an incredible steal."  And that is precisely what we are looking for: an incredible steal. You see, we have these kids. They like their schools. I like their schools. The PTA has grown accustomed to my face. The fact that we are renting in a neighborhood that is really populated with more well-to-do (or at least more fiscally organized) people than we are never really occurred to us when the jBird took her first gleeful steps up the hill to kindergarten at our neighborhood school. We're "live in the moment" kind of people. This moment is distinctly uncomfortable for me.

I am a vagabond at heart. The six years we've lived in Seattle is the longest I've lived anywhere since I was 13 years old. I have no hometown. There is no house with my childhood bedroom still intact somewhere. Home, to me, has always just been whatever structure contained the people I loved. Like the early Native Americans, the notion of owning land is somewhat foreign and preposterous to me. I am hoping to run into a like-minded soul who will sell me some prime real estate for twenty-five bucks' worth of trinkets and beads. I probably have that much saved up in my couch. Yet, in spite of my protestations, I long for paint colors that I picked out. I want to be able to rip up carpet if it smells like a dog. I want to build a chicken coop and raised garden beds. I want to change out an ugly faucet if my heart desires it. I want to settle. My vagabond heart will always want to wander, no matter where I live, but my traveling shoes are wearing thin. I have these kids, you see. They like their lives. I like their lives.

So for them. Tomorrow I will put on my grown up pants - the ones without holes, the ones that don't fall down as much, the ones that feel a bit stiff and uncomfortable - and I will choke back the rising gorge of cheeseburger and fear and I will look at houses. I will look at houses so that they can have a home.