September 27th, 1975
Saturday morning and I am waiting alone in the house. Carol is moving today and has left with a crowd of high pitched, giggly girls to carry the first load to her new apartment. My mission, apparently, is to ensure that none of our belongings are bothered in the transition. I am guarding the property. So to speak.
A strange new feeling is in the air. We’ve lived here for nearly a month now. Carol has been in Nebraska for three weeks and we sort of moved-in around her. Her presence has been obvious hower– and it’s not until today that I begin to sense the house as ours. So much to be done. We totally uprooted ourselves from the comforts of a suburban house that had taken a year to develop. We have just spent a month living in bare rooms, out of boxes. We have sold our sofas and the few odds and ends of furniture that we do have are scattered, mismatched about the house. This morning I have a sinking low feeling of impossibility. It doesn’t seem as though we’ll ever turn this into a home.
Nevertheless– I remember vividly the empty burnt out aura that had enveloped our lives in Arlington. The drudgery, isolation, and feeling that we had come to a standstill and were beginning to rot in the suburbs. Boredom, it occurs to me, is what I am describing.
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I have made a decision– I am going to become compulsively neat, organized, clear.