Settled On

Alisa and Keith had a very cozy tri-level townhouse in Wheeling with two spare bedrooms and extra bathroom for us. They worked so hard to make us comfortable, and as a married, working couple without kids, the imposition of dilapidated us falling down on them had to have been an imposition, but they never once showed it.

We fell into a routine: My husband and Keith would drive together to the Metra station and take the train together downtown and back every day. Alisa drove around a lot for work at that time, and would often get home before the men in the evening giving us a chance to share our day as we put dinner together. I quickly enrolled Jims in a preschool program run by a long-time friend in my old North Park neighborhood, and otherwise kept my little kids entertained, tried to keep Alisa & Keith’s home intact and clean, shopped for food and put dinner together for all of us each night, and of course worked on finding us permanent residence.

Life obviously doesn’t stand still when you’ve been away for years, so even though the Chicagoland area was familiar to me, things changed. I forgot where things were and had no idea how places had evolved. Where to take sick kids to the doctor? How to begin looking into kindergarten? What did housing cost? Where to buy a car? Where to insure a car? Alisa & Keith helped us navigate all of these things and with their generosity, really took the pressure off making quick decisions in favor of making good decisions.

Finally, we settled on Evanston. It is where I grew up, very convenient to the city, right on the lake which would provide lots of entertainment in the summer, and a true city with neighborhoods and a culture—not a suburb with subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. And we decided to rent at first. Evanston was expensive and also we decided that we weren't in a great place to make a commitment as huge as real-estate purchase. Buying our little Ford Focus and committing to 2-year mobile phone plans seemed like big enough steps. In Latvia, you never had to commit to much of anything.

With a city and community settled on, I began making calls and arranging to look at flats. Like Chicago, Evanston has many flats. High and mid-rise apartment buildings of course exist, but brick buildings with very spacious 2-8 unit apartments are even more prevalent, and that’s where I steered our home search. Chicago flats are very comfortable. I’ve lived in several of them: North Sawyer was a 3-flat, flats were my homes with friends in college and after, and of course, my Great Grandma Lucy’s 2-flat meant love and old-Chicago all rolled together. They are solidly built with brick, oak, and wet plaster. They have enormous windows, vestibules, ancient buzzer systems, always a living room and dining room, gorgeous doors, and back porches. They were efficient but elegant, encouraged community and family, and were simply built to last. I learned to appreciate them, and it was settled.

While Jims was in preschool, I would drive up with my little girl, park and stroll her down the streets I grew up on looking for For Rent signs and assessing the buildings and neighborhoods from the outside. It was very cathartic walking these same sidewalks as the mother instead of the toddler in the stroller, or the little girl trying to avoid the cracks, or the preteen with a dollar in her pocket heading to the bakery for a happy face cookie. There was most certainly a full-circle feeling running through me, and as I found myself in front of Mustard’s Last Stand, next to Dyke Stadium and across the street from the colonial office building my father used to work in (top floor, last window on the left), and with the oak trees in bud and daffodils in bloom, something inside of me--louder than a nudge and quieter than a whack on the head--said there's a story in all of this.  It was about the size of a whisper, but very clear, that one day, when the time is right and the whole circle closed and everything settled on, I would have a story that I would need to write and that this day would be part of it. 

Merry Sunshine

As I wrote before, at age 13, my family moved to North Sawyer Avenue in Chicago. I hated every minute of it. I hated our new home, I hated our tiny back yard, and I hated my new school. As an 8th grader from a proper middle school in Evanston, I did not appreciate this K-8 business at the new school. I did not want to have recess with first graders. Heck, I did not want to have RECESS at all! To add insult to injury, students did not eat lunch at this institution. You walked home for lunch, thus eliminating a big social component. Not that it mattered much because I felt like there wasn’t a single person I could relate to and that they had prejudged me as a stuck up girl from the suburbs anyway. Probably this was a bit true, and honestly, I did my fair share of prejudging as well.

So everything about my little life at that age felt completely out of my control and like one giant step backward. This frustration was of course punctuated by all the daily trekking back and forth four blocks to the stupid school. After about two weeks of my walking pity party, out of nowhere a girl, a fellow 8th grader I hadn’t noticed before, started walking home with me. She talked. I talked back. This continued until we got to my house and I asked this chick where she lived—right next door, a fact she already knew. Alisa and I have been walking together ever since.

Unlikely friends had become best friends very quickly. My bedroom window and her sister’s bedroom window were only separated by the gangway (about six feet) and we would hang out the windows and talk and talk until her sister demanded her room back so that she could blast Madonna’s Holiday. Then we would swipe my brother’s walkie-talkies when our parents (and Alisa’s sister) were irritated at the amount of phone time we spent. We would have secret celebrations in the gangway with Perrier water and full size bagel dogs her Bubby would buy. We were inseparable that year to the point that for a while her dad thought I was passing her drugs through the carefully folded up notes we’d exchange on pretty paper. We weren’t doing anything even remotely questionable, though, just being 13 year old girls talking and analyzing our way through life.

In what seemed like a cruel twist of fate, as quickly as I had been plucked from the suburbs and plopped in Chicago, Alisa was plucked from the city to the suburbs. Just days after our 8th grade graduation, their family moved a million miles away (or about 20) to Buffalo Grove.

It was heartbreaking to think that we would be separated. However, through high school, college, her graduate school, deaths, marriages, births, oceans and way beyond, distance has been the only negative thing ever between us since 1984.

I could never adequately articulate what this relationship or what this woman means to me except to say that one gray day Alisa chose to walk beside me and the glorious, merry sunshine came out. Thank G_D she didn’t run.

Home Again

Chicago and its North Shore is my home. I grew up in Evanston through 7th grade and then we moved to the North Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. But returning to my home was both helpful and disconcerting. Helpful in that I had friends, family and a knowledge base, but disconcerting in that there’s always a self-imposed expectation as to lifestyle. There are no truly fresh starts when you go back home.

My husband was to report to his first day of work almost as soon as we landed, which left the heavy lifting of getting settled pretty much up to me. This move happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to find a place to live, but my most beautiful friend Alisa and her husband St. Keith generously offered to take us in for a few weeks until we could figure it all out.

When we got to their lovely townhouse, Alisa took one look at me (my friends can really read me like a book) and knew there was crisis. A few weeks lasted about four months, and Alisa and Keith gave us so much more than a place to stay. As Alisa has always managed to do with me, she took the scary hurt away making it ok to be home again.

Practicing

We left Latvia with much less ceremony and much more baggage than what we’d arrived with years earlier. A huge container had been loaded up and brought to the Port of Riga ready to cross the Atlantic. It would arrive in New York in about a month's time and then trucked to Chicago a few weeks after that. We moved to Chicago early in January, 2000 with two kids, four suitcases, Sissy’s big German stroller, and a Pack & Play. So much for 100 pounds of home.

I remember sitting in a restaurant at Gatwick airport the day we “moved.” London was our layover and we had many hours to kill. I don’t think I’d slept in days, the kids were antsy and feeding off of my unsure nerves, and all this tension was coming to a head. Gatwick felt like purgatory.

Jims' Godmother, Aunt Lisa (now London Lisa), who had just months before moved from Riga to Chicago herself, met us at O'Hare after we had travelled about 24 hours and scooped us up. Lisa will tell you that she isn't the nurturing type, but she mothered me and the kids perfectly right then (my husband never needed mothering--just ask his mother). She was sympathetic as our comforting link of familiarity from our suddenly-vanished life in Latvia; she had long, tight arms especially for Jims who needed to be around someone happier than I was; and for me she had a sister's searing look of strength mixed with slight irritation that said, "Come on, Maren pull it together...!"

Everything had turned into a frenetic scramble inside me and I was all at once amazed and aggravated that the effects of what we were doing, what we uprooted, didn’t seem to bother my husband one way or another. It didn’t feel right to me, but then nothing did, so as any good designer should do, I began rearranging my black to balance out his pastels and florals. I was practicing, trying to turn my tension into something more interesting and hopefully practical.

Tension as a Tool

This particular part of the story feels very long and drawn out to me. Stupidly, I’m just remembering that this period of time was long and drawn out! This process of moving to the US was tedious, gut wrenching in many ways, and just downright laborious. It was wrought with tension.

My husband was a Peace Corps Volunteer. At a close of service conference he attended after two years in Latvia, the volunteers were told to be prepared for culture shock when moving back home. They spewed off a statistic that said something like, for every six months you’ve spent in the field, expect it to take one month to readjust to life in America. For us at that point, this readjustment time amounted to about a year. At first I didn’t buy it—I’m not someone who lets a lot of grass grow under my feet (another gift from Winnie), but I had this terrible anxiety at my growing task list and growing “unknowns” list, and I was beginning to get the point. An inner tension prevailed and was getting stronger by the day.

The thing about tension is this: I think a little is a very good thing. Nothing worthwhile I’ve ever done seems to come without a dose of it, and I come to expect it—often even welcome it—when I work at something that’s important to me. It’s the thing that shows contrast. It’s the thing that makes the mundane or the tedium all of a sudden a bit more interesting. A little is a very good thing.

I liken it to putting a room together—there needs to be some tension as a stabilizer or a grounding. It actually makes a space feel more comfortable. Think of when you would visit your old Aunt Florence (I had two of them, I know…). You would likely enter her living room and be stared at by generations of photographs in glimmering silver frames sitting atop a round piece of glass which tacked down a piece of floral chintz. Then a petite settee in another fancy pattern of matching tones would beckon you to come keep the needlepoint pillow company. These are the same flavor as the curtains, as the lampshade, as the rug, as the Florentine foot on the sofa table, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this, the coordination evokes softness, peacefulness, bygone eras, and Aunt Florence’s folly, yet it’s UNCOMFORTABLE!

Enter blessed TENSION! Throw some BLACK mats under those silver picture frames! Replace the mauve throw draped over the chair with a vibrant PURPLE one! Toss the chintz doily and let the glass top rest DIRECTLY on the rich mahogany round side table. Break it up! Add some TENSION and suddenly, flowers and pastels are actually appealing. Everything is more interesting when given room to breathe.

I often find the same irritation when entering the ladies room in nice hotels and restaurants. The overworked décor is simply agitating. It’s all very pretty and serene, but I can’t hike up my tights fast enough to get out of there! It needs an infusion of the unexpected. Tension equals relief.

…Until there’s too much. Then there’s chaos.

The Life Chronological

I will note my absence from posting by letting you know that all these events happened exactly ten years ago this December. It’s a lot for me to take in, and realize, and write about! In the last entry I wrote about not knowing what had hit me, and this is true, but I was reacting to a sense of duty and didn’t have time to be dogmatic or even thoughtful about it.

Wallace Stegner, in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Angle of Repose, tells the story of a grandmother’s remarkable life as explained by her grown and physically impaired grandson. When I first read it while living in Latvia, everything resonated with me, and if you know the book, the reasons why are obvious. Stegner writes,

“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making the new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”

This is exactly how I sold this lifestyle change to myself—that it was my generational and marital duty to pull up my skirts and get on with the business of moving forward.

The care that I took creating a home out of nothing in these Latvian flats was all to be left behind. The heart and work I put into building the Jaunmarupe house—designing my first kitchen, engineering the layout of gorgeous Villeroy & Boch tiles, standing over the guy with mortar and glass block making sure he built a shower wall exactly to my specifications, painting every single room myself, measuring and creating a design with the hundreds of balusters in the loft so little people wouldn’t slip through (although little Sissy did manage to get her head stuck during Thanksgiving dinner…), arranging our precious few belongings including our gorgeous antiques I’ve described within the walls built specifically to fit them—all to leave behind. Who can afford to believe in the “life existential” anyway.

Leaving

Now that we’ve segued through Thanksgiving, on with the story: I don’t think it ever really HIT me that we were leaving Latvia. We just built this house, our lives were comfortable, we knew how to manage living there, and life there seemed to just get better and better. It all happened so fast, though, and there was so much to do, I never really had time to process it.

We had a month before my husband started his new job in Chicago, and we were still on vacation in Florida! He had to resign from his current job, we had to figure out how to get a shipping container to move from Latvia to Chicago, figure out where we were going to live in Chicago, figure out what to do with our house and car and other things we couldn’t/didn’t want to take with us, get medical records and vital documents in order, I had to tie up loose ends of projects I was involved in, say our goodbyes, the list went on and on and there simply wasn’t time to ponder anything. We just had to do it.

That month was one of the scariest, busiest and most surreal times in my life. Nothing about it felt right, but there was little I could do to argue the plan. The String of Tension had apparently thickened its hold again, and cooperation and infallible union seemed to me to be the only remedy for easing it.