Beth's Journal

I think I need to focus more on the good things in my life, as opposed to the bad things - since there's so much unpleasantness in the world today, we all need to find a little light in the darkness to help us keep going.

So, for the next week or so, I'm going to try to post daily about the things that bring a little light to my life. I'll start out with something inspired by a photo I took yesterday.

At first glance, this looks like a rather cozy little farmhouse in a quiet rural area, surrounded by trees, lightly sprinkled with snow. The front porch has neatly stacked firewood, and there's smoke coming from the chimney (likely from a toasty warm fire). There's a garden in the front yard, and a chicken coop, and if you zoom in really close you can even see chickens running around in the yard. There's a dilapidated old barn, and a tiny little shed next to it.

To me, it's home. The back window on the second floor belongs to my room. The blue car in the driveway is Lapis, my much-loved Subaru. The shed next to the barn holds my scooter and my bicycle. I affectionately refer to the chickens in the yard as "the chicken ladies", and if the weather's nice, they typically come out to say hi when I come back from a run.

After living here since March, it finally feels like it's my home. When coming home from a run last night, and seeing the house from the road, I felt warmth and happiness and a sense of... belonging, I guess. I've been struggling with feeling like this is home since May, when it turned out this was now where I was living permanently. For the past four years, this was just someplace I came to visit - sometimes I'd stay the weekend, and I even had a drawer for some extra clothes on the off chance I needed them, but otherwise? It was J and Kasi's house. It was a safe space for me, sure, but it wasn't my house. Rana and I had a house, and that was where I lived.

Now, though, this feels more like home. Sure, there are times when I'm walking through the house downstairs and my brain still processes things as "I'm just visiting", but that's happening less and less lately. I've started to make some space for myself in the house (outside of my room, anyway) - it's just little things, like claiming a spot on the top shelf of the shoe rack for my box of running accessories, or having a spot in the gallery upstairs where I sit and crochet and read in Rana's old glider chair that nobody else tends to use. (Except the kittens, anyway - they love napping in the glider.)

So here's today's light in the darkness: looking at the house I live in, and it finally feeling like home.

I'm not sure this post has much of a direction besides the fact that for the first time in a very long time, I have lived someplace longer than three or four months. It's actually been almost a year since Bryan and I moved into our apartment, and while he just moved back and forth between school and home for all of his college career, I've... been everywhere, I guess.

It started in 2000- my mom kicked me out a few months shy of my high school graduation. I lived with Joe the Jackass (who will get his own post later on when I have the heart to relive all that crap again) at his mom's house. We shared his room, with a curtain down the middle so he didn't peep while I changed clothes. (But that didn't stop him from trying.)

Anyway, I lived there for four months, then went back to Mom's for three, and then to college. A dorm room shouldn't really count as a permanent home, but since all my worldly belongings were stuffed into one half a dorm room... I guess Bowman Hall 2012 (and later 3011) was home to me. 2012 was my home for fall 2000, and 3011 was home for spring '01. (Three months in each place, pretty much, with couch surfing inbetween semesters) Summer '01 was spent in a crappy two room apartment in a scary part of Malone, a town an hour away from here. Then back to Potsdam, and I went through three different dorm rooms in one building during the course of the school year (thanks to two psycho roommates). More of the same once I flunked out in '02- Mom's for the summer, another crappy apartment in Malone for 5 months, a less crappy apartment after that for another five months.

This brings us up to fall of 2003, which starts us on a rollercoaster of different living situations. September was the last month I spent in Malone, in my little two story apartment on Webster St., which I still miss. October had me moving in with Joe the Jackass. Mid-November, half starved and sexually abused, I moved into a women's shelter. Stayed there for a month, then moved to my friend Sarah's for three weeks, then in January it was off to California to get away from Joe. (I was in a really bad state, and needed to get as far away from the problem as I could. I figured it'd be too much effort for Joe to follow me across the country.) I spent a month and a half in Antioch with Mikey, another month in San Jose with Mikey, and then a month or so at Sarah and Blain's in Santa Clara. Around April, Mom got worried about me and had dad buy me a ticket home. Spent May at Mom's, June at Keri's, July and August at Camp Talooli, and September through December in Van Housen Hall at college again.

So that's... 12 different places in just one year! You can see where I'm thrilled about being in one place for more than a few months.

Granted, after I started college again, I didn't move around so much - mostly between dorm buildings, and I did spend one summer in Geneva, NY - which was interesting, to say the least. But other than that, I've just bounced from apartment to apartment to dorm room to apartment up here in Potsdam, and noplace has ever really felt like home. I hadn't had chances to put down roots in any specific living situation before they were ripped up and planted someplace else.

It's very nice to know that it's May and I don't have to hunt down all the boxes I can possibly find, and scramble to pack during the next week. It's nice to have a finals week where I don't have to hunt through trash bags full of clothes to find something to wear. It's wonderful to be able to plod to my own bathroom in the middle of the night without worrying about running into skeezy people (either in the shared apartment like on Bay St., when sketchy guy Nick lived there, or when living in the dorms) and without worrying about the bathroom being gross. It's amazing to know that I can have another summer with my little back porch and the little flower patch in the backyard.

I know I probably won't live here forever, but good lord it's nice to have someplace to call home.