Smoke and the Suite Life

We woke up the next morning thinking it was all a bad dream, but the musty burning smell of smoke followed us everywhere. The guest room at my in-laws where we slept smelled like it, the kid’s pajamas smelled like it, the inside of our cars smelled like it, and even the cats smelled like it. The effects of the fire reached every tiny corner of our lives and I couldn't wash it off my hands.

The next few days were, of course, a crazy blur of activity and it was hard to know who to trust. There are protocols to these things, but when your house doesn’t catch fire every day, it’s a steep learning curve! We thanked God for our wonderful insurance agents on an hourly basis. They were a speed dial on my phone for a year after all this.

The fire department and insurance company launched investigations. Interestingly, the source of the fire was found, but the cause was never determined. The fire department closed the case and the insurance company opened one. With that, they approved restoration companies to take care of our belongings. I’ll never forget the little grandma-lady who showed up the next morning with such authority. She took my hands, apologized for my loss, asked about my kids, and then looked directly into my eyes and said, “I’m going to take your house, turn it upside down and shake it. Every little scrap that falls out I am going to label, pack up, clean, repair and store it for you until your house is ready to move back in. Then I’m going to unpack and arrange it exactly the way you want. Everything will be catalogued and returned like new, I promise.” This seemed like an incredible task, but that’s exactly what she and her team did over the next three days from the biggest piece of furniture to the lost pennies and paperclips found within the cushions. Another company took everything made of fabric—clothing, linens, towels, mattresses, sleeping bags, etc.They told us to put a weeks worth of clothing into special duffle bags and they would have them back to us clean and restored in a few days. They even offered to take the winter coats of our backs (they really smelled). The rest would be ready in few weeks and stored until we were ready to take delivery.  Everyone promised that the stinging smell of smoke would be fullly removed from everything as they hauled it all away in a mountain of carefully labeled and numbered boxes. (By the way, five years later, I’m still clipping the yellow paper tags off the odd table cloth or rarely worn blouse, and peeling the identifying sticker off a serving bowl or picture frame.)

Not only did we need to oversee this incredible task of clean up and move out, but we had to find a place to live. Staying with my inlaws was certainly helpful in the immediate short term, but they didn’t have room for us to live there for any length of time. We needed our own space anyway. The insurance company again was wonderful and just told us to find whatever we needed, a long term hotel, apartment, or whatever, and it would be paid for. That was relieving, but still not easy. We looked at extended stay hotels and apartment complexes with short term leases. None of these things suited our family, and few of them would allow our kitty cats. Then we found the “Suite Life,” a small, very clean apartment complex in Royal Oak, across from the high school, that offered fully furnished apartments available for short term lease. They were marketed for month-to-month corporate use. Not only was this logistically convenient, but they had a two bedroom apartment available, a laundry facility, an in-ground pool that would be opened in the spring, and no problem with our kids or cats. The apartment was completely stocked with bedding, blankets, pots, pans, dishes, gadgets, towels and even a vacuum cleaner--Eureka. I just hoped we wouldn't stink it up.  We signed the lease and paid the first and last month’s rent on Friday night, two days after the fire.

The next day, March 5, marked our 11th wedding anniversary. Grandma and Grandpa kept the kids while my husband and I moved our very few belongings to the Suite Life--we were back to 100 lbs. of home. Then we did something we hadn't done together in years: we went grocery shopping. It was fun, but also pretty obscene. We had to buy everything from toilet paper to salt. The Suite Life had no consumables. After filling three huge carts, we brought everything into the apartment by passing it through a window to save us from hiking back and forth through the parking lot and around the complex. It was comical, but felt good to have some control again.

When it was all put away, we went out for dinner. We drank to our 11 years, our very recent blessing of safety, our resilient kids, and yet another adventure together. Sitting in that restaurant, exhausted, but able to exhale for the first time in three days, we figured that if we could get through this, we could get through anything.  (As if we'd never done anything hard before.) At that I wiped a tear from my eye, but I could still smell the smoke.
 

The Scene

Girard Avenue was covered in thick ice and flashing lights when I pulled up 20 minutes later, a drive I only remember as white-knuckled and fast, trying not to show panic to my kids. My husband had arrived just ahead of me. We deposited two very nervous kids into the warm and calm arms of Laura and her husband. Laura said that she saw thick, black smoke coming from the soffits of our family room. After calling the fire department (immediately before calling me), she learned that neighbors on the street behind us, more than 350 feet away, had already reported the billowing smoke coming from our house.

I’ll never forget my first approach to our house. Artificial light gave a creepy illumination to soot-covered snow and layers of ice. Strange people were stalking our property with uninvited determination. Our belongings were being haughtily thrown out of the door way and windows. I saw my grandpa’s chair leaning against the fence, completely charred and missing an arm, opposite leg, and half of its back. A clear casualty. The gravity of the situation hit me then.

The firemen were reluctant to spend too much time with us at that moment because they were still working inside. Men were in danger inside our home. We asked if there was any sign of our two cats. There hadn’t been, but we couldn’t believe the quick response they made to find them. Within minutes a fireman produced our shell shocked kitties and said he found them huddled together under our bed. We brought them to Jims & Sis thinking that the four would benefit from some mutual care.

When the all-clear was given, we could assess, but there was still chaos. (Talk about creating tension with black!) Someone shoved a business card in my hand and told us his crew would take care of everything. What? Crew? Who are you? “An emergency construction service. We’ll cover the broken windows and doors and come back and repair your house in the morning.” We seemed to have little choice in the matter. Things were completely out of our control.

My husband went inside to assess the damage, and when he came out, he reported that there was no way we could spend the night here. The fire was very localized as was the firemen’s inflicted but necessary damage, but the smoke damage was very significant and permeated the house. I wanted to see.

When I entered our house through the family room door in the back, with the flashlight, most everything in that room appeared untouched, but the stench was overwhelming and stinging. Nauseating. My slight fear was that I’d forgotten to unplug the iron and that it started this whole mess, but I found the iron on top of the ironing board with the cord and plug wound neatly just as I had apparently left it. (Phew) We found Sissy’s very best friend, a stuffed polar bear named Lacis sitting on the family room couch. She would later cry with relief and reluctantly acquiesce to giving him a bath later that night.

When the scene (and that’s really what it felt like: a dirty crime scene, not my home) shifted from the family room to the dining room and kitchen, I almost couldn’t look. A gaping hole had been hacked in the corner where the fire had originated exposed the outside. Icy water was everywhere; things that once hung proudly on the walls were littered all over the floor and covered in sludge; Winnie’s dining room set was not only amputated of my grandpa’s chair which was left out to die in the driveway, but also was veiled in the white film of water damage and huge gashes among countless lacerations. I moved on quickly to gather essentials in the bedrooms. Furniture in all the bedrooms had been tossed and closet contents flung wide in the firemen’s effort to find the cats. We grabbed my jewelry box, passports and birth certificates, filled a duffle bag with a few clothes, found Jims’ Tiger and fish blanket, and my husband moved his valuable map collection to our neighbor’s house for safe keeping. Beyond that, we could only hope that the contents of our lives wouldn’t be looted over night, and we left to spend the rest of the night at my in-laws.

 

Routine at Stake

 We were waiting for building permits to be approved and for our contractor to wrap up another job before we could get to work on our addition. March 2, 2005 was a Wednesday. As per Routine, we spent Wednesday evenings at church for dinner and family activities. Routine dictated that I took the kids and that my husband met us there directly after work. He hadn’t yet arrived that evening at about 6:30 pm when I got the call.

My next door neighbor and friend, Laura, knew our Routine, so I thought it strange to see her name pop up on the caller ID of my mobile phone. I answered her with a friendly chirp, although it was hard to hear because of all the activity going on around me. She sounded a bit strained and asked if we were at church. Yes. She asked if the kids and my husband were there with me. I explained. Then with very calm and deliberate words, Laura delivered this:

Come home now. Your house is on fire.

Routine was being burned alive.

Build Up

Our life on Girard Avenue was about three years old when we decided it was time to think about putting on an addition, and the plan was ambitious. We wanted to build up and put a second floor on top of Girard’s walls. Routine was about to take a sabbatical, thank the Lord. We sketched and scaled and came up with a plan to add two big bedrooms, a loft area, a kid bathroom and a mechanical room that would not only house the furnace, hot water heater and laundry, but also another full bathroom. It would add about another 1000 square feet.

As soon as the new 2005 got underway, we started interviewing building contractors and found one who not only shared our vision, but had architectural plans drawn up to prove it. We intended to live in the house as the addition was being built, and the prospect of the whole process was exciting. We were reliving something here, and this time, we felt it would be for keeps. So we had a good and planned adventure on our hands! Or so we thought.

Meet Routine

  In the next few years, obviously the Girard house conformed to fit our family. And I wasn’t the only one with projects. My husband built a cool tree house for Jims in the willow with rope rails and a bird’s nest which became a pirate ship, a space ship, an alien planet, and a dreaming place. There was a shed in the middle of the yard, too, which we decided to turn into a play house for Sissy. With Grandpa’s help, they dragged it from one end of the yard to the other, dug a trench from the garage to pull electricity to it, sided it with new T1-11, built a front porch and a Dutch door, and I painted it blue—like our Jaunmarupe house. Inside they laid vinyl flooring and installed tiny double-hung windows. I made frilly curtains in pink and green and we put all the little kitchen furniture and plastic steak and eggs inside. We made ice rinks and had soccer teams practice in the back yard.


Not long after all of that, my husband decided it was time for more space and that it should start in the garage. With little effort and expense, we contracted to add 12’ to the back end of our deep 2-car garage. This allowed room for a work bench and tool chests along with a new “freezer room.” Before the addition, the garage had a little room framed inside with a sliding glass door and indoor-outdoor carpeting. We ended up putting a big chest freezer in there along with items we were storing that we didn’t want exposed to the otherwise dirty elements of the garage. Since our house didn’t have a basement, this clean storage was handy, so we made sure we rebuilt this space with the addition. Even though it was a garage, the extra room was luxurious.

We did all the things one would expect. My husband started graduate school, the kids were involved with school, sports and lessons, and I was heavily obligated (with enjoyment) to church activities. Busyness abounded. We finally had reached that state of un-flux. I was convinced that this kind of consistency was surely the key to building a happy, stable family. No more waiting for the other shoe to drop. No more chasing. It was clean living at its best, for sure, and we had what we wanted and worked so long to attain. So there was no explanation for my restlessness at night. I would try to conjure sleep by praying for forgiveness for wanting more than what had generously been given. I had an ache for richer, not in an ungrateful way, but in an unsatisfied way. This is utopia?

I’ve written a lot about tension. How a little is necessary and too much is chaotic. How for me, the tension of static we always seemed to find ourselves in was usually relieved by cooperating through it, and how that cooperation usually involved a major move or decision which required a great deal of planning. That was the reliable rhythm. It made me feel the most productive, and ironically, I found comfort in it. However, it had been made clear that only a girl with pretty big, selfish issues and unrealistic expectations could be left unfulfilled with the life we’d been given. Routine wasn’t my friend, but I when I would fall asleep night after night in that willowy room that I made up, I begged her to be.

Project Girl

 At this point, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not good at sitting still for very long. If nothing else, I’d never before had that luxury, but here in Royal Oak, that notion of being “settled,” or having “arrived,” or “resting” was becoming a reality. My husband saw almost immediate success and was deemed valuable to his new company, which offers a great deal of security, but also, the kids were making friends, enjoying new kinds of freedom, and we had a wonderful and growing network of family and friends nearby. Two years in the virtual holding pattern marked in Evanston went by in a flash, yet to say we recently moved back from the Former Soviet Union seemed somehow inaccurate now. Regardless, we now had what we wanted: a home that was our own, a community we were enjoying, and no more excuses to not be happy and fulfilled. Strange.

Over time I took on little projects in the Girard house. One night I decided to repaint the small kitchen. I took advantage of others’ mistakes and bought returned gallons at Home Depot for half price. I mixed a new color for the walls which enlivened things immediately, but made the painted cabinets look shabby. So I mixed again and repainted those, too. I came up with a light-value, murky green for the walls and a fresh but very muted yellow for the old cabinets. It all played with all the cobalt blue I had sitting around in canisters, dishes, and little vases.

Then, it didn’t take a year before our bedroom carpet was getting to me. It was a creamy-colored cut pile, but it felt rough and itchy under my bare feet even after being cleaned several times. I thought it smelled, too. So I pulled it up to find almost perfect hardwood underneath. After that, a little inspiration hit and I decided to completely redecorate. The walls and closet doors became a willowy green with the textured ceiling (which I loathed) just a shade lighter. I painted the trim in the palest color on the paint chip and the whole room was instantly bathed in the light you’d find sitting under our own willow tree outside the window. I found a long fallen branch in the yard that was about 3” in diameter, stripped the bark, cut it into two and made curtain rods over which I draped cotton fabric with a tight tone-on-tone pattern in a wheaty-beige. I also had wooden blinds made that matched the wood in our furniture. For over our bed, I had blown up to a large poster an old photo my husband had taken of an icy Latvian lake with stark, frozen trees and a few chilly birds flying by. New tawny, wooly flokati rugs balanced the cold in the picture and felt sumptuous underfoot. That room became a very comfortable success.

I mixed more leftover paint for the dining room and came up with a beautiful goldenrod color. It was the perfect backdrop for Winnie’s dining room set. When I reupholstered her chairs with a luscious material of deep raspberry dotted with golden dragonflies, I found several layers of past seat patterns underneath the faded fabric. With an obligatory yet joyful nod to posterity, I cut swatches from each remnant, replaced disintegrating foam and pad, and laid the swatches carefully on top before stretching the dragonflies over and reattaching the seats to the chairs. Winnie was with me that day!

It was fun busying myself with these little tasks in the house. For a while, every time my husband would come home from work or the kids home from school, I had another project going. Project Girl became my name, and sometimes not so affectionately, but it was fun to play, enrich, refurbish, and mark my territory. I wanted to create this environment that would unmistakably feel like our dwelling place, safe place, refuge, founding place, and source. If our environment evoked all of this, surely it would be a true reflection.

Some Permanence

  After all our previous practice, it took no time to move in and commit to our new home. There were many things I wanted to do to make the house more our own, but nothing needed to be done urgently, so we were content to take some time getting to know this house and live together as a family again. With maps, paintings and other objects hung on walls, furniture arranged, drawers, closets and cupboards filled, we declared some permanence finally.

Ok Mar

At this point I could have written a book about the Art of Efficient Moving. Though, with every move we made (this would make nine in eight years) we seemed to collect more stuff. When we moved to Evanston, my father gave me liberal access to the storage unit he kept full of my grandparents' (Carol & Evans) leftovers. From there I picked out a bit of furniture, paintings, knick knack-y stuff that was either handy or sentimental. (Usually both.) We would collect even more on our way to Royal Oak.

Logistically this move took a little thinking. My husband was in Michigan already with one car, the kids and I were in Evanston with another, and we needed a big truck. Josh to the rescue! My brother is a master at manual labor and is particularly skilled in two areas: packing and hauling. He works in dog-like fashion, always eagerly, thoroughly, carefully, and happily. He puts his head down, sets his jaw, demands silence, and digs in. It’s almost scary to watch him in action, but when he’s done, throw him a big meal and he’s all yours again, sweet as a rose. I wouldn’t recommend patting him on the head, though. So when my husband and I concocted a plan to move, it included Josh, who lives about halfway between Evanston and Royal Oak in the fine city of Grand Rapids.

The scheme was that I would arrange for the biggest U-Haul in Grand Rapids one could rent without a trucker’s license, Josh would drive it to Dempster Street after work, load the truck the next morning before we would caravan to his house in Grand Rapids where my husband would get a ride to meet us, then my husband would drive the U-Haul the rest of the way to Royal Oak with me still caravanning behind. We needed some burly helpers, too, because after all, we had all this great old furniture. So I float this plan to Josh along with the request to bring a couple of high school kids he knew, and I get, “Ok Mar.” One doesn’t get much from Josh verbally, so the “Ok Mar” translation was, “Of course! I’d be happy to help you move, and get you there safely, and be very careful with your children and antiques, and rejoice in your new home and lifestyle change!” Good ol’ Josh.

So Josh and two strapping lads arrived in this ginormous U-Haul way after dark on the planned day, and I just expected to keep them fed and warm until morning. I was wrong. In his military fashion, Josh had the whole truck packed that night, or rather by the wee hours of the next morning. They would have made great burglars because of how quickly and quietly they emptied the flat. They even emptied the kids’ bedrooms while they were sleeping! You can imagine the panic when Jims and Sis woke up the next morning to find the whole flat except for their beds totally empty! Of course, before the kids could even gulp their oatmeal down, Josh had their beds disassembled and loaded on the truck, too. So off we went without time to muse over it.

By lunchtime we arrived at Josh’s house and met my husband and his father who had driven him to GR. There we picked up more furniture which had somehow found its way to my brother’s after Winnie died and Bill downsized. (Come to think of it, I think another U-Haul was involved…) Among other keepsakes, I was the lucky recipient of Winnie’s dining room set. It is crafted of gorgeous, rich mahogany and my guess is that it was made in the 1930s. The heavy buffet, sourced separately by Winnie, has seen as many Christmas smorgasbords on its top, and heavy silver, fine china and candles within than any in Gamelstan as has the large expanding table with five graceful chairs and my grandpa’s matching captain’s chair. Every time I look at it, I see my grandmother rubbing a smudge off the surface or my grandpa in his chair enjoying his pipe after a big meal. (Sometimes, like now, when I’m sitting at the table I can even smell the Captain Black.) Winnie was very proud of her things and took good care of them. She loved this dining room set. It was a wonderful gift to me from my grandfather, and I was tickled to be able to use it in my new house.

Carefully all this was loaded onto Josh’s artistically packed truck. With a hug and an “Ok Mar,” which I knew meant more, we left Josh and drove to yet another new home, this time on Girard Avenue in Royal Oak.
 

Girard

While we were getting somewhere in the house hunting department as far as localizing an area, there was a tiny bit of disagreement as to the type of house. We ruled out the Detroit ranches with the tiny bedrooms and high, little windows (I couldn’t see out of them), and any Detroit bungalows had to impress us with a finished second floors and a slightly bigger yard. These styles of houses had been built mid-century when the auto industry was sprawling out all over. I favored the wood-framed houses with porches, separate dining rooms and lots of moldings, but there were issues in those homes we were shown that my husband couldn’t get over. His criteria were a basement and a garage. My criteria included at least three bedrooms and windows I could reach.

One big old white-framed farm house with green shutters I especially loved was on Crooks Road. This has the traffic equivalent of Dempster Street and Valdemara iela. Our kids riding bikes on this street made us nervous, but it was a great old house with a big front living room with a little den off to the side, a separate dining room, lots of exposed, old oak woodwork with actual 10” boards and not nominal 10” boards, three cozy bedrooms, a bathroom that needed love, and an unusually shaped lot. There were two big negatives for my husband the busy street sealed it: The unfinished basement was shallow and the garage was racked. Oh, but that house had such good JuJu! Even now, whenever I walk my Lucy-dog and pass that house I get such a happy feeling! Someone replaced the garage…

Anyway, we were shown a house built in the mid-1940s on Girard Avenue. It had a gravel road and no curbs. I hated that part immediately, but my husband was a little excited because he knew the street. His parents lived on the corner when they first moved to the area in 1974, and they had become friends with a family on the street—who still live on the street. My husband had great memories of playing in their huge back yard. He was hoping this house would have the same type of yard. It did. The lot was huge. Extra wide and triple deep--extremely rare in a community like this. Set back from a nice-sized front lawn with a perfectly shaped, mature sugar maple plunked in the middle, was a ranch. This was not a typical Detroit cookie-cutter ranch, though. It wasn’t like any other house we’d been in (not that was good or bad—just different). The three bedrooms and a bath were tucked on one side of the house with a long living room in front, a dining room sandwiched in the middle, and the kitchen on the opposite side. The back end boasted a huge family room with a cathedral ceiling and equally huge picture windows and door wall that looked out onto a cedar deck the football field-sized back yard. Arborvitaes and tall privet offered privacy from next door neighbors, and at the very end of this expanse stood the biggest, most majestic willow tree we had ever seen. And the forsythia had just blossomed. I remember the yellow that lined the yard.

The yard was pretty even in the soggy early spring, but all I saw was work. My husband saw LAND! The yard scared me to death, and house I wasn’t in love with, either. Its drawbacks: the dirt road, the old kitchen, the pink and black bathroom, one of the bedrooms was without windows because of the way the family room addition was constructed, and (get this) it had no basement. My husband was eager to sacrifice the basement because of blinding visions of building a workshop in the yard,  He told me the dirt road just meant people would drive slower, and then said we should consider building a second floor addition later on as the kids grew. He wanted this house and he was convincing me I wanted it, too. What I wanted was to live as a family again (we were apart for about four months), I wanted to move a truck to Michigan the day after school let out for summer, and I wanted to move said truck into a permanent residence. Time was not on my side any longer! We bought the house.

I’ll tell the story of moving next, but I’ll end this by telling you that we closed and obtained possession of this Girard house about a week before we moved. The kids and I were there in Michigan just for the weekend. On that closing day, though, after playing around and learning about our new dwelling, the four of us camped out in the living room on the thick curly carpet. All in sleeping bags and blankets in the empty house, we snuggled together on the floor and spent the night. For me it harkened the first days in the Big Empty Flat in Aluksne before we had a bed and before kids expanded us. It was a really happy day, and by then I was totally convinced I wanted it, too. 

Getting Somewhere

We started looking for houses. Obviously, being a city girl at heart, my first instinct was to consider actually living in Detroit. That notion was quickly dispelled, and we started looking in the Farmington Hills area because of a much more logical reason: church was there. We knew that we wanted to become involved in the same church my husband had grown up in, where his parents are active members and where we had many friends. Roots were what we needed.

Mind you, in this time, we hadn’t actually moved to Michigan yet. My husband started his new job early in the spring when snow was still on the ground, but we still had commitments in Evanston—namely, my son was in 1st grade and moving him mid-year wasn’t an option in my book. It was offered that my husband shack up with his parents for a few months until school let out. This bought us some time to find a house and then move once and for all into a permanent place. My husband would come to Evanston on the weekends, but often we would travel there to look, get the lay of the land and figure out where to live.

After being shown many houses in the Farmington/Novi/Wixom/etc., they all ran together. Every home we looked at was composed of late 1980s-early 1990s construction on streets that lead to nowhere and a held lot of beige and brass. Beige and brass, as we know, can easily be overcome, as can stained oak cabinets and hollow core doors, but nothing really felt right. I never knew what direction I was facing and whenever I asked where the nearest grocery store or post office would be, I always seemed to get an answer like, “out of the sub, turn left and you‘ll see a stop sign. Don’t go through it, but turn down the side street right before the sign and cut through the other sub, make a Detroit left, and the strip mall is on the right.” Huh? For all the subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, there were plenty of trees and little lakes, but these areas somehow seemed to play around with being in the country without actually being in the country. Ironically, this culture was way too foreign to us.

In a way, I felt like I had no right to be picky, but in another way, we were about to make an investment, so it at least had to feel a little right. Sensing my unease, and I think having a bit of his own, my husband wanted to see a few houses in the area where he grew up, further east in Royal Oak. Royal Oak and its surrounding suburbs are closer to the city of Detroit and by definition are more established communities. He wanted to know what the same money would buy in these areas with real brick houses (not brick façade), in neighborhoods (not “subs”), and in a city with its own public services (not townships with a volunteer fire department). So our agent started showing us homes in Royal Oak.

When my husband and I met and started dating in 1990, I swore I would never live in Royal Oak. Don’t ask me why, I’m not really sure. I was a snotty little kitten who slept on a cushy down pillow on the North Shore and had not yet scrubbed Levi’s in the bathtub or haggled for the only bottle of Heinz ketchup in the shop, but when we started going through houses in Royal Oak 12 years later, boy did my tune change! It was refreshing to be in such establishment, such as it is. (In Latvia we’d lived in communities established in the Dark Ages. Royal Oak was established in 1891.) Not only did the brick and mortar of each dwelling place feel more sustainable to us, but the whole community did. It even felt a little like Evanston without my precious lake.  We could build a life within these city limits that by Metro Detroit standards were pretty ancient. Now we were getting somewhere.  

Change, of Course

Unemployment always throws you off, but this timing was so unfortunate. I was just starting to feel like stability in America was taking hold so our family could be still long enough for some fulfillment and satisfaction to settle in. Truly, we had been in this odd limbo since day one, always changing course, planning, moving, resting for five minutes, and then doing it all over again. It was kind of like Groundhog’s Day. Granted it was exciting at times, we had the benefit of experience many people only dream about, we had to trust each other and work together to make things happen, and our kids are still excellent at adjusting to all new things, but it was beginning to feel like one stressful situation after another and a whole lot of overcompensating--but for what, I wasn’t completely certain.

When the job search in Chicago was coming up empty, we decided to change course again. Detroit: The place where my husband grew up, where his parents still live, and where we had many really good friends. This felt right. God knows why because I honestly don’t remember. (Impatience?) But, in the end of course, God did indeed know why and he (my husband, not God) landed a great job that still keeps him happy. Or at least relatively happy as I understand it. I had very well learned by then that a husband who is happy with his work means a much happier environment at home, so I was eager to get over my impatience, embrace this latest change of course, plan and move.  

Impatience

My dear friend Lindsey, about whom I’ve previously written, yesterday shared on her blog a passage from Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and author of many books on spiritual life. Just before reading it, I was thinking about how to express the next phase of this story which is all about grappling with patience. Of course, there are no true coincidences, and I had to insert his words here:

"Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later and somewhere else."

Even though this message might just be the most singular theme in my process of living from the inside out, I wouldn’t have believed these words nine years ago on Dempster Street however true they were. My middle name was Impatience.
 

Flux

At the end of the day, there isn’t a lot to say about our time in Evanston now. My little boy started kindergarten that fall and my girl was in a 2 year old preschool program. I just wanted to live quietly and get used to it all. I could handle what was in front of me and the adjustment was easing.

The plan was to stay on Dempster Street for a year and then find something to buy, but the company that moved us back to the States ended up going out of business and letting my husband go not quite a year later.

After months of being out of a job, my husband finally was offered something exciting with a newer company in a western suburb. He really enjoyed the opportunity, but it meant a very long driving commute and that we would need a second car. Naturally, we decided to start looking for homes in suburbs closer to his work.

These were exactly the types of places I could never see myself living in, but again, I was trying to dispel my preconceived notions about “home” and be supportive, so I tried to reason my way through this and get excited about it, too. I would have very much missed the lake and established neighborhoods with sidewalks and trees and the city at my fingertips, so thank God it didn’t work.

This new company folded less than six months into his employment and we decided to stay on Dempster Street for another year. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice! Telecom was a bitch back then and there again was more flux.
 

Exactly the Same

We left Alisa & Keith in April that year for the first floor of a two-flat on Dempster Street. Now here is a great example of how it’s hard to go home and fall into an expectation of a lifestyle: I grew up on the far north end of Evanston. As I remembered it, this flat we rented was in an undesireable neighborhood in south Evanston, but things do change! I had to loosen my prejudice and follow my instinct a bit to realize that this part of town had morphed into a very eclectic, gutsy and somewhat creative area. The surroundings seemed to fit what we had grown accustomed to in Riga with interesting people all going about their days in varying, interesting and off-beat ways. There was a rich marrow that filled the crevices there which told me there was space to move in, grow, and ripen. The way Riga was.

Furthermore, any Evanstoninan (or other suburbanite) would tell you that it’s completely undesirable to live on busy Dempster Street, but for us it was a lot like being back on Valdemara iela minus the cabled busses. The traffic and street noise was a bit comforting. Another plus was that we were three blocks from the train and six blocks from the beach. Laundry and some storage were included, Washington School was a quick stroll through the neighborhood, and three bedrooms, a big living room, separate dining room and decent sized kitchen made it all easy to settle in.

After having our belongings in storage for so long (remember I had no sooner unpacked everything in Jaunmarupe only to pack it up again to move overseas), the semi carrying the huge container was unloaded on the street and I had everything arranged and hung in about two days. I was anxious for us to feel like participants in life again instead of a vagabonding family. Arranging a home was the only way I knew how to create some stability and balance.

Fortunately, too, the Dempster Street flat had been freshly painted with warm neutrals which, coupled with the old oak floors and thick woodwork, allowed our strange collection of things to slip in naturally. I was afraid that my version of “home” for our family would never feel like what I had conjured up in Latvia. I was afraid that America would erase it all, but in the end Dempster Street felt exactly the same.