“Showing But Not Telling: On Putting Our House Up For Sale,” a new piece by Robin Black (fiction, ’05) is online at Beyond the Margins.
After eighteen years, we are moving, my husband and I, selling the home in which we raised our three children, the home in which we unimaginably slipped from being young to being members of AARP, from having four parents to having two, from believing we would raise four children, to grieving the one who was stillborn. It is the home in which I made birthday cakes decorated as maps of family vacations and designed Halloween costumes to do Martha Stewart proud, the home in which we all punched down the Rosh Hashanah challah dough each year because I, the nonbeliever, believed this was a way for us to pray. It is the home in which I grew panicky as my youngest child failed to crawl, month after month, the home in which I learned the meaning of words like hypotonic and dyspraxia. It is the home in which my husband and I have both lived the longest in our lives, a home in which I’ve heard almost all of my local writer friends read from their work, at one or another of our “salons.” And it is – we believe – a work of art, an eighteen year long collaboration between us, two very different people who share a quirky sensibility and a desire to have a home unlike any other. And so, no two knobs on our kitchen cabinets match, and the walls are dotted with hanging, miniature chairs. And then there is the mess. This is the home in which I have waged an eighteen year battle against my own inability to keep a house clean or anything close, the home in which I have unhappily faced the certainty that my chaos sometimes embarrasses my children in front of their friends...[Keep Reading]…
Robin is the author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This
