The Wrecking Ball

The windows were painted in reverse. Too many fingerprints had touched them and they bled with sunlight. The coffee table was covered in beer rings and cigarette burns and the occasional "I can't believe you just did that" carved grafitti...

It was Christian's house....

The psychedelic tub was 3/4 full of tepid water, and we all pretended the fish were still alive. Yeah, a pump would have been helpful....

We drank beer through Deep Purple, dangled skinny legs over the balcony and sang to the moon with Joni Mitchell scratching on the eight track. And then it began. The last dance. David Bowie....

I climbed on the coffee table. Barefooted and bell bottomed and one beer, or five, too many... but I knew the words... And he hummed them.

And swayed.

And I danced....

He grabbed me. Unexpectedly. But not.

And we were there again, the same music, the same shadowed faces, the same Friday night on re~run, but I was full of it. The hissy fit. The "not now", "not again"...

And he held me tighter. ..

You don't always get a second chance...

Dance.....

The Glass House and other fairytales.....

I have to fill in this space where a picture should go with words. I tried to take a photo, of a playing card house.....and they all fell down, aces and twos, jokers and even the box I tried to prop them up with. When I was little I used to build tunnels and covered sidewalks with cards, one box, two,three.... red and blue and black....the houses that Jack built, The Windchester Mansion from abondoned decks, 52 or less, scavenged from the kitchen drawers. Tonight I couldn't even build a tee-pee.....

And that's my picture....

Here's my rant.....

Why is it that people fix up their houses instead of their lives? I took a good hard look at the world around me tonight and decided that while my neighbors might wish I mowed more often, or painted the shutters again, I'd rather be doing what I'm doing than what they're doing. Inside my walls, behind the peeling paint and the leaning mailbox, we're growing, learning, surviving. We have secrets here that we're working on, mending, weaving, trying to build from. Lives that have changed. New lives waiting to be born......

Maybe because I'm a confessor, I think it's okay for my home to be a tattle~tale. To show the wear and tear of being lived in. To age with me, beside me.....

Chilo's house sparkles. You skim over rare stones to gain entrance.....a barefooted queen would wipe her feet before she plodded over tiles of that like. The living room buzzes, and beeps, flashes in neon......cable vision piped in, surround-a-sound music puffing from every elevatorish wall, gadgets everywhere, floating, suspended, vertical, flat screened. A million dollar fantasy. On show. And a mortgage that's choking the hell out of her....

Megan's exhausted. They've been hauling in drywall and "things" for weeks. Updating. Renovating. Out with the old and in with the new. Matching pillows to billowing curtains, painting bird baths to match the conch shells they bought for 15.99 at a roadside stand. Fixing up the fantasy.....the one that's never ever gonna come true......

Who cares?
What parties do you hold here? What people dance under this tent and laugh in your rain? What memories did you make today? Or put on lay-a-way?

My roof is leaking.
I smile.
Sometimes you have to be thankful for the little things in life.....