house of paper lanterns and the sea…

This morning is a turning point after several weeks of the sea.

I have a plan and I hope it will work.  I found a house where I could be happy.

I came back to this one and my dog Blue is going of old age this morning.  Very hard.

I cannot stand the amount of losses I have gone through.  Since the year 2000 and perhaps even before.  Anyway, this little house is like a Victorian doll house in a way in a tiny beach town to the south.  I love it.  It has space for a garden and I can get one of those fat tire bikes with a basket.  The town is small and happy.  I can get a puppy.  Two puppies.  I’m going to get labs — one chocolate and one white lab.  Maybe a golden too.

It has an old double garage I can use for a studio —

The man who lived there passed away and all his things are still there.  It’s so strange to see that.  I have lost so many people in my life since 2000.  Everyone.  I feel that the sea is the answer for me.  Walking that beach.  Making life even simpler.  I’m working on a pretty tough memoir right now — I want to document a lot of things that happened to women in my generation and I need a clear space to write it.  We can live separately.  We have before.

Also.  I have a very powerful love story that I want to help turn into a screenplay.  It could be shot at this house on location very easily.  It’s a true story.  I have all the letters.  It’s like the movie Ask the Dust but from the female POV.  I think that with the country going into this huge Depression a love story is important to see.

The Writer’s Conference is on for 2010, I’m happy to say.

Both of us need space to deal with the grief of the loss of our parents.

He can have their house, and I will have mine — the others can go.

Anyway, the house is a white Victorian — tiny.  In the back yard it rambles up the hill just wildly.  The shrubs are all overgrown — and vines have gone wild.

I just feel that little house is very safe.

And, I know I can write in there, easily.

I spent a lot of time last week doing pastels of the sunsets.

A friend loaned me some books by Marquez.  These two:

The reason I want to ask Walter to help me write that screenplay is because I know he can do it objectively.  He could read the letters and he would know just what to do.  When I was learning about screenplays they are pretty much 98 pages or so long.  It makes me cry to look at the letters.  Very hard.  but, very beautiful…

When I saw the title “Living to tell the tale” — it made sense.

Somehow I have survived.

The losses.

I’m not sure how.

But I have.

When I look at my husband I can see the memories.  I need a clear space because it is too painful right now.

Last week, I felt alive.  I was totally alone and I was fine.  I only feel atttached to this new little house, not the one I am in this morning.  This one is drenched with too many memories.  I want to leave it behind.

I don’t know where we are going.

I got Blue when our old dogs were going.  My dogs Buff and Zoey.  Losing them was so painful — as losing any animal is.  I knew how sad it was going to be for him and so I rescued her for us.  She ended up being his.

He’s like that.  He absorbs things.  Maybe even me?

But alone, I felt alive and like making art again.

Even tackling the garden at that little place didn’t seem daunting.  I was in a bunch of galleries too, looking at shows.  There is just a lot I could do in the arts in that garage.

You know what is sad?

To be in a garage after someone passes.

All of the life a man led — his tools…

It reminded me of my grandfather.  I kept journals but didn’t really write anything last week.  I stayed away from politics and news and just lived.  This little house is two stories high and it has cup hooks all along the porch where paper lanterns could be hung.  And twinkly little lights.  Everything about it reminds me of myself, or myself earlier.

It’s what I would have liked to have lived in, and in the town where I wanted to live, anyway.

That man might have been a writer?

I can tell from the books he had.

It’s as if that little house is waiting for me.

I love it.