March in Limbo

Houses have a stay-in-one-place, rooted quality to them.  Life, on the other hand, is mostly made up of transitions, mood changes, shifts large and small.  Or at least this is how it looks to me from my current perspective.  And my current perspective is no doubt only enhanced by the particular season we’re in now.

Has there ever been a better example of a limbo time than the whole month of March?   Yesterday, the poem of the day on “The Writers Almanac” – Garrison Keillor’s website, was even called “Here in the Time Between.”  We’re in it, there’s no mistaking that it’s firmly the month that it is and no other – not February or April.  And yet there’s this almost palpable feeling that we’re neither here nor there, that we’re in a kind of suspended state. March Madness, indeed.

This is funny, considering that the name of this month is actually a verb (no other month has that distinction) that defines a kind of deliberate, military kind of walking.  As the snow falls again outside — maybe for the last time but probably not — and three-fifths of our family is living under one roof for at least this particular week , I become convinced that we’re not walking to the sounds of a stirring music so much as travelling in a spaceship, hurtling through time even when everything is quiet.  We (some of us) are in the same (as of yet un-sold) house we were in a decade ago, but we know we’re on our way somewhere else – literally and figuratively both.  And we don’t exactly feel in full control.  That’s my particular March, anyway.

My husband — the one who’s been living in a garage apartment while we try to find a place worthy of being called “home” –just got back from a week at the House of Bishops, in North Carolina.  The thing is, there’s not really a house —it’s a way of describing their sense of unity during these regular bi-annual times when they’re all together:  sharing, drawing insights and sustenance, facing common challenges from their work, making decisions about how to go forward.   These are the same activities, when you think about it, that ought to go on within healthy families, in their actual abodes, most every day.

In my English class now, we’re reading Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”   This is actually my first time sinking into it, and so – with my students – I’m finding the strange tale of poor Gregor transformed into a bug (or “vermin” in our translation) both hilarious and terribly sad.  Banished to his bedroom because of his condition, he listens as the lives of his parents and sister go on without him.  This house and family no longer provide him with any comfort or companionship; he might as well be on an island.  He, at least his outer appearance, has changed completely and so – overnight – he becomes isolated in his own skin.

Teenagers know a little something about this phenomenon, it turns out.

Let’s face it:  a house alone does not make everything right for everybody.  Kind of like any vessel, its quality is really determined more by what goes into it than by what it is to begin with.  If we can go back to the metaphorical kind for a moment, putting the bishops and their particular kind of domicile gently aside, we’ll find that there are plenty of pretend houses in the world of sports, too.  There was the House that Ruth Built, in the Bronx of course.  That one provided more memories than could be counted, before it had to be torn down.  Our neighbor and friend feels that visiting the Big House, the gargantuan football stadium at the University of Michigan, is just about the same as going to heaven.  It’s a thrilling place because of its size, sure, but mostly because of the heights of passion that fans rise to when they’re ensconced inside.  The Allman Brothers Band (moving into another realm here) has its own Big House, too, apparently.  It’s now a museum well worth a visit — going on a motorcycle would be best — in Macon, Georgia.  They all used to hang out here, leaving behind fabulous music that rocks into the ages.

As for me, I’d just like a house that’s big enough for all of my loved ones (and maybe some added four-footed ones outside) and has a distinct feeling of home and light and warmth.  It will be the kind of place that can see us through multiple Marches, and Augusts and Novembers, too.   If we really hit the jackpot, it’ll be a place “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”