First weeks of June. 85-100 degrees. 99% humidity.

The latest from our Ohio project.

If you were to create a square out of the land and three buildings in our project, until a few weeks ago, you would have seen a fourth structure in the northwest quadrant. A house overcome with weeds climbing into windows, electrical lines clipped, siding rotting away revealing a previous layer of siding it once attempted to cover. The back door window glass shattered. A broken chair. A faux fireplace covered in coal-and-dirt-blackened fake flowers. Small white plastic packets the size of postage stamps scattering the porch amidst the broken glass. A container of cleaning fluid off to the side. Wrought iron posts pushing down through rotting wood.

Entropy at work and winning.

The space between this rotting house and our convent is less than a yard at the point where twin bay windows face off at each other, one from either house. Since no sun can get through to dry the soil, moss grows between them even during the summer months. There is an accompanying stench emanating from the basement or the whole structure, it is hard to tell.

As we clean up the convent, the view and proximity of the rotting house become increasingly accusational. The lack of drainage makes the situation worse.

Our contract was for the church, rectory and convent, which take up about eighty percent of this square.

Vacated in 2013, the rotting house has since built up years of unpaid bills. It appears to have been abandoned in haste. There are curlers in the sink. In April the house went up for Sheriff’s Sale auction. I bid and purchased it for the value of its outstanding taxes and fines.

*

Throughout history, there are countless legends about rites of passage into adulthood that involve a range of experiences proving one’s way out of childhood. When G decided she wanted to take down this rotting house by herself, my first thought was this may be one of those rites.

Her intention: to harvest all of the century-old wood, from joists to studs, to use for the rectory’s re-imagining.

*

She works from dawn to past dark, often covered in coal dust, first-generation insulation, and god knows what else. The piles of lumber outside increase. The rotting house shrinks. Dumpsters come and go—one in front and one in back. Occasionally I help load them. Or hold a larger window as she cuts around it. Or catch the beams and joists as she lowers them on a rope to the back yard. Or cart some flooring into the church for safe keeping.

The little I do takes a few hours. I come inside drenched in perspiration, marveling at the process, watching her progress from my spying posts: through the kitchen window or bathroom window of our rental apartment next door. Suffice it to say, the neighborhood is also watching, somewhat stunned.

*

When I was a young mom, I remember going to an annual physical with my GP who asked me how much exercise I did. “Ummmm….” I said, “I am busy allllll the time. Running here and there – I even run from the parking lot to the grocery store sometimes. I lift my daughter up and down all day….”

She interrupted, “I’m going to put active lifestyle.”

It’s funny how we recall little insignificant moments. Active lifestyle. Yes.

To be blunt, I detest exercise. I have spent most of my life dissociated or only narrowly associated with my body. During any sort of sport or physical activity, I would wonder how much longer, except when on a long flat walk (not a hike) or playing in the pool (not doing laps). Even my early attempts at yoga were misery.

But when G was in college, we lived near an Iyengar yoga studio that was a revelation. Focused on precision of alignment and long holds, it allowed for my weak mind-body connection to complete its dial-up process. I could get it right at my pace, and my mind-body appreciated finding this rightness. There was such pleasure in the knowing and holding. I can’t say I loved every class. I still wanted it to end sometimes. But I was grateful each time. In that little space, I rarely watched myself from afar, and I never broke down in tears like I did at spinning, aerobics, dance and pilates as my body got farther and farther behind and my mind cried slow down! I can’t get it.

In a way, doing construction work reminds me of this Iyengar chapter. I don’t really want to go load a dumpster. I observe myself, but in a different way. It is hot. I do not like it. I don’t mind dumping the easy pieces of siding, but I dislike trying to lift things that are heavy or awkward. I fight it. I don’t want to be told what to do. I just want to be done. I hear myself, and I notice. Past and present. Conscious and unconscious. Often there is a thick layer of anger I have to break through.

I remember this from shoveling endless sidewalks of snow this winter, getting furious at the shovel hitting a break in the sidewalk and interrupting my flow. I noted then how I have anger housed in my body. Easy to ignore when I don’t push myself to do anything physical, but when I do, I hit two brutal walls in succession: resistance, then fury.

Since Little Me was not allowed to express anger, and anger is housed in my body, perhaps it is no surprise I left my body most of the time—and dropping into it like this is an unsettling experience.

I am angry at the demo. But then just as quickly—like the snow shovel resumes its glide—I jump as I heft a pile of materials above my head into the dumpster, and the wind off the river cools the coating of moisture on my body.

For the first time I understand what it is for my body to sweat. Not only why, but how. I am actually cooler after working for a while and letting the breeze hit me than I am when I first start in gloves, cap and overalls. I bless the breeze and then I hear myself doing it.

These are things I am noticing, as if learning in reverse. Finding my physicality, my human-ness.

I get into bed, tired, and notice that I have a body. Also I notice that my anxiety has less of a home when my body is tired. I have less fight left.

But I cannot say I am a complete convert. Here I am writing, happy as can be. Grateful to be taking in the substance of these past few weeks and greater concentric rings of observation. Grateful to have the vantage point of midlife, to see so many more of them. Grateful to have a young adult completing one of many rites of passage of her own design. Grateful that she is free of rites defined by school systems that never fit and the frustrations navigating them while trying to keep her intact.

*

A consequence of G’s rite is there will be room for a lawn next to the convent. I grow increasingly excited about this, somewhat out of proportion to the scope of the overall Ohio project. As the rotting house goes down, the space between the convent and the next house grows.

Like a liberation.

One evening around sunset, I walk into the convent as I tend to do, to check on progress, turn out lights and make sure doors are secured. Looking across at the bay window in the living room now surrounded in drywall and mud, I am startled by the light streaming in through windows that previously squared off against their rotting twins.

A view of rooftops and trees and a promise of more.

I imagine a fence holding the space. Table and chairs. A private place of peace. Planting a forgiveness garden.

*

A few weeks later…

G’s rite of demolition is complete. The foundation awaits back-fill. And then topsoil.  

The square of our home base is complete. With no sharp corners, it is possible to walk it as a circle. Either way, everything feels increasingly whole, albeit still under construction.

I think about the many levels of life in which we are participating. G regularly talks about having found a home and connection she never has felt anywhere else. It is not lost on me that I am addressing my deep-seeded anger in a place where we regularly drive by a sign that says We the People [in Hancock-ian font] are pissed.

Our current life is very much in this grounded, material state of physicality, and yet as such, in its very present-ness, it may be one of the most significant exercises in spiritual and personal reckoning I have experienced to date. I see integrity in so many people; I see how people live when this “land of opportunity” doesn’t include their address; I see how I respond when I am uncomfortable. This is interlaced with an internal landscape of fragile mother/adult-child dynamics (the endless work of non-attachment), the unpredictable nature of midlife/menopause, and our varied reactions to what each day brings.

Are we squaring the circle?

Can we? Will we?

Answers may be just beyond us.

Instead we live the questions. The mission still revealing itself, just as somehow we are being revealed to ourselves.