The Wormlips Scrapbook

I got home from Boston a few hours ago.

The logistics of this whole transformation are overwhelming enough, but the heartbreak I’ve started to feel at the goodbyes is hardest to manage. I was homesick in Vermont, and I’m even more homesick since I got home, in anticipation of the Real Thing that’s just around the corner now.

A couple weeks ago I got to spend a lovely 24 hours with my friend M. As the last hours fled by I felt the gloom roll in. When I hugged him goodbye, I went into teary meltdown. Guys don’t seem to get that. I had a hard time thinking this was the last time I’d see him for a year. He was probably thinking about what to cook for dinner.

As I drove off toward the freeway I looked like one of those illustrated women on the cover of True Confessions, with welled-up eyes hiding behind splayed fingers.

Back to the present, these past four days in Vermont have been agonizing, in limbo between a screwed up past and an inexplicable future. My mantra: What was I thinking.

On my way back to Boston my old friend Yinyer and I had a wonderful visit, even though she got a deer tick on our walk through the woods. I met her kids who are, not surprisingly, delightful characters at 18 and 20. I heard about last year’s ice storm in northern Massachusetts. Several times. She is very, very funny. She and my sister are really close friends, and the two of them together are hysterical.

We used to sign our names exactly alike, but time has changed all that.

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Here are a few pix of Yinyer and Yinna, taken by a tolerant David.

In that last picture, I turned to look at Ginger and found her puckered lips just millimeters from my face.

Just before I drove off, I documented a scene of domestic bliss.

After spending 48 hours in Vermont thunderstorms, I’ve recognized yet another corny metaphor for my emotional condition. As I lay curled into a tight ball around my pillow in my dismal motel room, wracked by full-blown terror (of my plans, of my brain), I noticed the similarities to the weather as its ferocity mounted, abated, and blasted in again. The weather has the advantage of not feeling all that stuff; I have the advantage of being able to pop a pill.

I learned today that there’s a huge mental hospital in town, founded in 1834 as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane and now euphemistically called Brattleboro Retreat. It stands on 1000 acres of woods filled with hiking trails that are open to the public. I’ll probably go exploring, but prefer to stay outside the buildings.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve crossed two covered bridges (I’ll have to find out why bridges need roofs), seen a bunch of rivers (or maybe the same one a bunch of times), met a lot of helpful people, eaten hippie food from the Co-op, and looked at close to a dozen living situations. I turned down the invitation (actually, it was begging) from a lonely, elderly woman to come live with her.

No place was perfect, but I picked my favorite this afternoon. It’s a rustic apartment in a renovated 1850s barn, owned by a sweet couple in their sixties or maybe older.

Mine is in the far right corner of this picture. You can see its chimney. However, I didn’t see the inside because the occupants were busy, so I saw the one next to it. That tenant had left the place ready for viewing with a six-pack of fresh condoms on her bed. It made me sad; in my wildest dreams I can’t envision a future in Vermont that requires condoms. No wonder I feel so lonely.

This’ll give you an idea of what the downstairs of my apartment will be like:

The pros and cons of this apartment are the same: it’s three miles into the country out a washboarded, potholed dirt road. So it’s remote and pretty, with the West River a mile away and tons of woods and streams and flowers. But winter snow and spring mud will, by all accounts, be nightmarish.

The place is furnished so that’ll save me a lot of trouble. It has exposed beams (one of which I will hit my head on many times) and pine floors: funky and countrified, with nothing but shades of green out each window.

So I’ve signed the contract and paid the deposit and called back all the people whose places I visited and didn’t pick.

By this time next year, I’ll be able to say I used to live in Dummerston, Vermont.

For all this good stuff, I’m overwhelmingly sad.  So I wonder: why, when I have such a hard time with loneliness and separation, am I leaving behind my beloved daughters and friends, just so I can make new friends and leave them in a year?

My friend A-L, apparently divining from afar my tattered psyche, wrote today:

“Remember that it doesn’t help to wonder why. Think Iris [Dement: 'Let the mystery be'].”

Now that my Nepali valium is kicking in, I can try.

[But really, friends: why am I doing this?]

I just ate a whole box of zesty lemon Vermont button cookies. Before that I called my elementary school friend Yinyer and I get to see her tomorrow, where she lives outside of Boston!

This is the first question everyone asks me when I tell them I’m moving here. Today I heard another: “Did anyone tell you about spring mud in Vermont?” That was new to me.

These considerations affect every aspect of my house-hunting while I’m here: How far away is the place from the school, are the roads plowed, how steep are the driveway and roads nearby, are heating costs included in the rental fee, is there an off-street place to park (otherwise you car gets plowed away): all of which are incongruent questions in sunny Cal.

Initially I thought I should live on campus because of these weather problems, but I didn’t like the dorm I saw. Walking through this alien land of youth-draped sofas I felt like as conspicuous as if I were wearing giant nappies and sucking on a pacifier.

So far I haven’t found a place that didn’t make me depressed. Actually, there was a pretty spot in the country in New Hampshire but it seems a little far to me. It’s a minuscule efficiency apartment that comprises the top of a two-story house. Here are two pix. The first is the house, and the second the view I ‘d see from my deck.

Tomorrow I have several more showings scheduled: two house-shares, a converted barn on a 2-mile dirt road, and two small places in town, one right next to the river. Wish me luck.