Morning fog clings to the trees, encloses the black figures of houses, telephone wires, bare limbs in a gentle grip of clouds. We have lost our house. It happened so suddenly. One morning we're negotiating the price with the landlord, our excitement tempered by cautious restraint. A night later he calls to tell us that a couple from Seattle has offered him twenty grand more than we could ever afford, in cash. After two years of taking care of the house as though it were ours, believing in our hearts that it was, instantly it was not. I fought for a day, scrambling with mortgage brokers to see what we could summon to match the offer. But it was hopeless: a day of death throes.
And now
the house is a ghost house, a house of shifting greys. The ideas and
visions we had imbued the rooms with have been spirited away.
Everything appears flat, lifeless, like a wall scraped of it's mural.
I look away from views that once charmed me, rooms that tempted me
with dreams of us living here, Ada growing up here. Or rather, I
can't look into them the way I once did – the way you can't
look into the eyes of someone who's betrayed you. A jolt of fate, or
crude circumstance? Yellow stalks in the garden we planted last May;
the leaf-strewn mounds sleeping until spring. Fog curls away from the
warming earth; our souls pull away from this place.
As we
ate breakfast, a great-horned owl swooped down from the trees, a
shadow gliding out of the fog, to perch in the sycamore tree before
us. He saw and didn't see us. The V of his intense eyes; the agile
rotating head atop a lordly mass of feathers. He perceives
everything, he sees through everything, the apparitions of
this world. He is a lesson to us. An admonition not to be fooled by
figures in the mist.
