Chapter 2

Chapter Two

"I want to take the pre-conceived out from underneath your feet..."

Jack Johnson

I seemed to be moving in slow motion. Each movement, every action I took with my body and hands felt forced, heavy, and almost pretend. It reminded me of the day after surviving the stomach flu. I felt grateful to be out amongst people, but not quite physically up to the task yet. Still, it beat the alternative - laying in bed not moving at all.

“Let’s see now. White flour? Check. Sugar? Check. Vanilla? Check. Lard?  LARD?!  Hmm,"  I said to myself, stopping mid-aisle.  "No wonder I gain seven pounds of butt every year at Christmas time!" I continued, putting my hand on my thirty-five year old mom bottom and turning around to see if I could catch a reflection of it in the metal flashing between the shelves.

I made my way up the aisle looking up and down the shelves, "Do they even sell lard anymore?  Oh...yup.  Here it is.  Wow."

I finished gathering my cookie baking supplies and got in the "ten items or less" line to check out.  I can always gather useful information about what my spiritual barometer is set at by whether or not I count the items of the person ahead of me.  If I count them I'm a little on the spiritually ill side that day.  If I don't count them, notice, or care at all, then I'm in good shape.

"Don't count his items," I said under my breath.  "Don't count them.  Don't count them...one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ELEVEN.  Damn it!  No resistance at all today."  I smiled politely at the man as he walked away carrying his bag of eleven items and then dropped my basket onto the counter with a plop.

I handed my card to the check out clerk. She batted at a few of the buttons on the till with her long, white fingernails tipped off with red sparkles, her dark hair pulled to the top of her head and cascading back down around her neck in long shiny curls, and chewing her gum like it was a violent little glop that deserved it. Boredom dripped out of her dull green eyes and landed on my baking supplies while tiny silver store keys tinkled as she moved, fastened to her arm by what looked like a strip of black telephone cord. She threw my supplies in a sack, handed me the receipt, and dropped me an apathetic, "Have a nice day."

Heaping, fat mounds of winter covered my home town of Billings, Montana on Christmas Eve last year. The cold of it chewed down to the bones of this Montana native as I realized how accustomed I'd become to the warm Arizona sunshine. We'd come home for a holiday visit and were staying with my husband's parents, a blessed retreat from our tract house and tract lives.

As I walked back to my vehicle armed with the thought of baking Christmas cookies, the unforgettable wet soaked into my socks and I found myself longing to thaw out on a piece of hot concrete next to a swimming pool and paint my naked toenails bright red. The discovery that I preferred the heat to the cold caught me by surprise, not unlike the discovery that the skill of scraping my windshield with a credit card came back just as naturally as the art of riding a bike.

It seemed contrived at first, the way the snow lay over the hills in giant white sheets covering up the ground with all these distracting little sparkles and pretending like nothing was frozen underneath it. But as I drove back to my in laws' house I relaxed my back into the heated seats and let myself believe the beauty of the snow. Life as usual was carrying on, even though my life, the one I'd always dreamed of, was gone forever.

The houses seemed strained under the weight of their covered roofs. Brightly colored Santas and reindeer adorned peoples' yards and drew attention away from the stark and frigid tree branches above them, and the bushes were giant snow cones stuck into the ground, their blankets of ice all lit up by the twinkle lights underneath in soft patches of red, blue, green and yellow.

From every direction Christmas cheer was forcing it's way through the sub-zero temperatures and seeping it's way into my awareness. I welcomed the cheer with a quiet desperation, for I had just come out of a long inward slumber. I don't remember a lot about the weeks that preceded. I know that I had learned of my youngest child's autism after only having just learned of my middle child's autism, had found myself in a state of shock so thorough I wasn't sure it wouldn't be permanent, and I had spent several weeks really struggling to get out of bed.  I felt like I had been blind-sided.  Not only was I hit with the fact that my children would never, ever have normal lives, but I also couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it.  How could I have been in that much denial?

Looking back it all made sense, the developmental delays, the tantrums and self-harming behaviors, the stemming, that incredible distance in their eyes that tore chunks out of my heart when I tried to play with them.  Sometimes I'd shake Cale and scream inside of my head, "WHERE DID MY BABY GO?!"
But I did not want to know what was really going on.  I kept telling myself it was temporary and that they'd grow out of it.  In fact, the worse their behavior got the harder I worked to deny that something was wrong.

Upon getting the autism diagnosis for both Isabel and Cale, I was confronted with all this incredible guilt that I hadn't acted sooner.  Why, why, why, why hadn't I acted sooner?  I'd majored in psychology in college.  I knew a little about autism.  But more importantly, I knew a lot about the power of denial.  I'm afraid I'd come to view the whole subject of unconscious motives as a bit of a joke.  Now I wish I hadn't.  But where had these unconscious motives come from?  Why was I so afraid of autism?  Oh it just made no sense.

After spending several weeks in bed trapped in all of these thoughts, overwhelmed by an ass-kicking bout of self-pity, I had heard from a lost friend which brought me half way back to my senses. My eyes still burned from all the crying and I had begun to wonder if they'd turn a permanent shade blood vessel mauve.

 *

I got back to my in-laws' house and put the kids down for a nap. Alden, who was six and a half years old by then said to me as he laid down, "Big kids don't take naps Mom." I kissed him tenderly and replied, "I love you sweetie, but nap time saves children's lives."

Isabel, who had just turned five, snuggled up to her brother in her stiff, clumsy way and put her thumb in her mouth. Thankfully he tolerated it again. Baby Cale, who was almost three and a half years old and still confined to a crib for his lack of ability to stay in one spot, fell asleep immediately. I'm sure this was due to the strange barometric pressure and the comfort of being surrounded by his grandparents' love.

I began baking Christmas cookies with my mother-in-law that afternoon and didn't cry. I talked about the snow on the ground instead as I cut little stocking shapes out of shortbread cookie dough. My thoughts were trapped in this incessant loop:

"Two of my kids are autistic. And the world hasn't stopped? How can everyone just carry on like nothing's happened? Why, God, would you give me autistic kids? I don't know what to do with autism, I have no experience with it.  Two of my kids are autistic. And the world hasn't stopped? How can everyone just carry on like nothing's happened? Why, God, would you give me autistic kids? I don't know what to do with autism, I have no experience with it."

This loop had gone on for several days and was finally interrupted by an extremely loud thought as I pulled the cookies out of the oven. The familiar smell jolted a load of memories from my childhood all at once like happens when one's life flashes before their eyes just before they die, or happens just before a much needed answer. The cookie recipe was my mom's. She had made the same cookies at Christmas time for as long I could remember.  And the loud thought was this, "You know what to do with autism. You've lived with autism your entire life."

"What?!" I said out loud. 

My mother-in-law answered, "Oh.  I said that everyone's planning to come out to the house in the morning for Christmas day.  That way, you guys can spend this evening at your grandmother's house for Christmas Eve.  Does that sound okay?"

"Oh," I said, realizing that we were still mid-conversation, "Yes, of course.  That sounds fine honey, thanks."

I thought that my head was clearly completely out of control, so I chalked the "loud thought" up to being post inward slumber craziness and went on about the day eating freshly baked cookies and wrapping the children's presents in green paper with tiny little snowmen it. The snowmen had little black scarves and orange, carrot shaped noses that sparkled with glitter. "Hmm," I thought to myself upon noticing the snowmen, "How many times have I noticed sparkles today? Maybe I'm a bit autistic myself. Or maybe it's just Christmas time and sparkles are abundant this time of year."

I completed wrapping the sparkly presents, wrapped the cookies in sparkly tin foil, put sparkly bows on everything, and later that evening walked out to the car with Shane and the kids through layers of sparkly snow. As we finished loading the presents, cookies, and children into the car, Alden said to me, "Mom. The snow is so sparkoly and pretty."

"Hey!" I snapped at him, "You're not autistic."

Shane looked at me with his soft eyes and smiled.  He always gets my strange thinking. Or tries to at least.

"What is aoutissc mean Mom?" he asked.

The tears filled my eyes so fast I couldn't believe it. "Ask me later sweetie," I replied.

* 

We arrived at my grandmother's house and I finally started to warm up.  Her house is always a warm, steady 80 degrees year round.  Everyone got up, talking to and hugging each of us as we came through the door.  I dove head first into the particular sounds of my family, all smiling and talking to each other at the same time.  I wish I could describe these sounds to you, but they're indescribable.  I devoured the love and filled my homesick spot with all the love and attention from my family.

Stockings from the sixties that belonged to my mother and aunt when they were kids hung above the gas fire that was burning artificially behind the glass. My grandparents used to have a real fireplace that burned real fire at Christmas time. And, for the first time ever, I found myself feeling grateful for modern household technology because of Cale and his complete inability to stay away from dangerous things. He went straight over to the fire and put both hands on the glass. And I didn't have to worry.

The best thing about my Grandma's house has always been that things don't change quickly there. Everything is always in the exact same spot and the holiday traditions are always in the exact same order. It can be counted on. The house has always been decorated fifteen years behind it's time. In the late eighties, it boasted an array of orange and brown flowers. They were everywhere. On the couch upholstery, the curtains, and sticking out of wavy shaped, green glass bowls. Now a days, the house has the late eighties, overstuffed, Lazy Boy furniture that looks like someone flicked at it with a paintbrush full of mauve, blue, and hunter green.

The forty five year old Christmas ornaments dangled faithfully from the branches of the new Christmas tree, their faded chrome not half as shiny as the new glass balls beside them. And the little wooden manger with only a few shreds of straw left on it's miniature roof sat under the tree on a cotton tree skirt that was covered in red and green sparkles.

Baby Jesus and his parents had the misfortune of having their bottoms glued to the floor of the manger by my grandmother a least thirty years ago, which is probably the reason they weren't stolen and discovered years later in the heating vent of my parents house along with Legos, tiny farm animals, and other forgotten items that were once treasured possessions of my brother and me. It took my kids approximately thirty seconds to discover the manger and try to free the figures from their super glued perches. I didn't worry. No one has ever been able to free baby Jesus.

Everyone was there already with one exception.  My brother, only sibling, and best friend during childhood, was late.

"Hopefully your brother's coming," my grandma said to me, "I called him and he said he'd be here, but you know how that goes sometimes."  Her smile was genuine but the crinkle between her eyes suggested that she was worried about him.

"He's okay," I told her, "He's probably doing his Christmas shopping right now."

Everyone looked at me and chuckled so I chuckled too.  But I wasn't kidding, nor was I making fun of my brother.

Believe it or not there are multiple layers of social understanding to present buying and every other thing we humans do or don't do.  And there are multiple subtle, unspoken social "rules" based on each and every single layer of social understanding.  These layers are learned by most of us intuitively, not cognitively.  In other words, we learn them without having to think about it.

However, if a person has a deficit in picking up on the subtleties of social cues, then they must learn these layers cognitively instead of intuitively.  This is a slower, more tedious process and is often heavily influenced by all kinds of internal and external variables.  So, that person might live their whole life completely missing whole chunks of common, unspoken social "rules."   

The first and most blatant "rule" about present buying is that you don't buy presents at the last minute because it's not only strategically difficult and might make you late, but it's also not very thoughtful and might even be perceived as outright inconsiderate.  It's not only inconsiderate of other peoples' time (if you're late), but it's also inconsiderate because it shows that you didn't think of the people until it was time to actually see them.  People like to think they're thought of before Christmas actually comes.  It makes them feel loved.

The second "rule" is that if you do buy presents at the last minute (which most of us actually do at some point in our lives), you don't tell the people you bought their presents at the last minute.  To actually tell them you bought their gifts at the last minute would be perceived as inappropriate, and might even be perceived as not caring about the peoples' feelings.

Even if you do buy a gift for someone at the last minute and don't tell them about it, there are still all these tiny little clues as to when the gift was purchased.  When one has procrastinated, that person might buy a bigger and fancier the gift than they would've ordinarily because of guilt or simply because they were out of time.  Or they might buy something that's not extravagant enough.  So, the more or less extravagant the gift (the determining of which has it's own set of social "rules" separate from this one that have more to do with thought and effort than timing), the more likely it was bought at the last minute.  The timing can also be revealed by how well the gift fits the personality of the person and by how or if the gift was wrapped.

Even all of this is actually quite easy to cover up with, "The mall has been so crazy the last few weeks!  I do hope you like what I got for you," which gives the implication you searched for weeks for an appropriate gift, but alas had to settle for something too extravagant, not extravagant enough, or something which doesn't quite fit the person's personality.  And a gift bag is today's easy way around the wrapping thing.  Your implication may not be totally honest, but it is better than the truth.  Sometimes peoples' feelings are more important than the truth, and sometimes the truth is more important than their feelings.  There are more "rules" for determining which is which for this too.  

This brings me to the final "rule" which is that people (especially older family members) probably don't actually care that much what it is you get for them.  And they probably don't care whether or not you thought of them "weeks" before.  But they do want to think that you at least put some thought into their gift.  Of course it's ideal if you actually thought of them weeks before and put thought into their gift.  But, let's face it.  There are times that it just doesn't happen.  And when it doesn't happen, you should at the very least pretend it did.  I should also mention that each family may have different ways with these "rules."

Once you put all of these "rules" together, you must make educated guesses about when to buy each person's present.  Because there are no guidelines for this.  After years of experience in trying to buy presents at just the right time, sending cards at the perfect moment taking mail time into consideration, etc., you can then joke about it when you or someone else messes it up.

We're not supposed to buy gifts at the last minute, but it's common knowledge that everyone does it sometimes.  And that's why we have the "rule" about not telling them that, and the one about pretending we'd put some thought into them and their gift even if we didn't.  So when someone makes a comment about someone else screwing up the "rules", it's viewed as making fun of them.  A harmless little jab extrapolated from a slightly inappropriate social situation.  That's why my comment was funny.  That's why everyone chuckled.

These things take years of experience to learn and confuse most people to some degree because each family is different, each person is different, and each Christmas is different.  Now, imagine how hopelessly confusing these layers would be to a person who couldn't even comprehend the basic understandings underlying the very first social "rule" about present buying within the context of his/her own family.

Not only does my brother see nothing wrong with buying Christmas presents at the last possible minute leaving the whole family waiting for him on Christmas Eve., but it honestly makes no sense to him why one would do it any sooner.  After all, when exactly is the appropriate time to buy Christmas presents?  No one can really say.  And what does present purchase timing have to do with love anyways?  Also, if some people at some times don't follow the first "rule" then why is it a "rule" at all?  Obviously, it's not something people really take seriously so why should he?  And if the "rule" really is that important and everyone followed it all the time then there would be no need for the complicated second and third "rules" and the world would just make a hell of a lot more sense.

If one could get him to believe that it actually is more considerate (and that perceived consideration is important) and that present purchase timing really is one of multiple thousands of ways that people determine how loved they feel, and if that same someone would tell him exactly when to buy Christmas presents each year, I have no doubt that he would buy the presents at exactly that time every year like clockwork.  Because he loves his family very much.  But, he doesn't understand the subtle variations of consideration, the variations between "loved" and "more loved."  He understands these variations to some extent cognitively, but he doesn't understand them intuitively, experientially, or emotionally.  He just doesn't think that way.

I'd tell him about the "rules" regarding Christmas present purchasing (and have made countless attempts at such things during our childhood together), except that it would resemble someone who was a master of painting landscapes trying to take a physics test without studying first.  Having to learn these thing cognitively would require memorization, time, and lots and lots of practice.  For every single layer of every single social understanding that makes up each unspoken social "rule."

It's got to feel hopeless to try to learn all these "rules," within which there are more "rules" that sometimes people follow and sometimes they don't.  Why take any of them seriously?  How is one supposed to guess what they are, when to follow them and when not to, and why do they exist anyways?  And why do people laugh at you or get mad when you can't figure it out?

I'm afraid that my brother has no idea about the first "rule" regarding present purchase timing, let alone the second or third.  And I think he gave up on understanding most such things a very long time ago.

We started in on the massive array of holiday appetizers my grandma had prepared.  Crackers of every kind, cheese balls, mixed nuts, cookies, and coffee.  We never eat dinner on Christmas Eve.  We just munch on finger food and open presents, the best part of the holidays in my opinion. 

I picked up one of the shortbread cookies I'd made and asked, "Did you realize your cookies have lard in them Mom?"

"Sshhh!" she answered.

We waited about forty five minutes and just when we started talking about opening presents without my brother, the bell rang and he came through the door walking in his stiff, clumsy way.  He had an arm load of gift bags and three unwrapped boxes for my kids which he set down under the tree so that he could politely tolerate hugs from each family member.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, "The mall was crazy."

Harmony Lane (maybe) - chapter 1

I wanted to buy our house because it's on a street called Harmony Lane.  Such a sweet name for a street isn't it?  At the time we bought the house we had pieces falling off from all around the edges of our comfortable life. A life, an illusion actually, that I was still trying desperately to keep in alignment with everything that I'd ever thought was good and happy and full of the things it was supposed to be full of.  I thought our immediate problem was that we didn't have a home of our own.  I didn't know yet what was actually wrong, why the pieces kept falling off, or that the illusion was about to come to an end. All I knew was that living in on Harmony Lane might just make everything all right.

The realtor that helped us buy our house was a grandmother. I remember this because she talked happily and at length about her grand-children and didn't seem at all impatient with my kids the couple of times we dared taking them to look at houses with us. She was in beautiful shape in spite of the grandmother label and wore sleeveless white button down shirts, jewelry that sparkled against her tan skin, and a soft, patient smile.  I had become intensely discouraged after searching the entire city of Phoenix, Arizona for an old house in a neighborhood that we could actually afford.

I was born and raised in Billings, Montana.  A place that up until we moved to Phoenix four years ago, I had never intended to leave.  Billings was my home.  I knew everything about it.  I knew every nook and cranny of every public building, every side street, alleyway, restaurant and place of business.  I've spent time doing a variety of naughty things in every single cave of the one interesting geological feature in the entire area known by locals as the Rimocks. I knew each tree in every local park, each curve on the patch of the Yellowstone River that goes by town, and how to locate every single hole on the bottom of the one remaining public swimming pool.

I always thought I would live in Billings forever.  I never even particularly liked traveling and would feel an empty spot drilling into the bottom of my stomach, a longing for home, whether I was traipsing though magnificent places like the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London or simply taking a day trip to the nearby town of Bozeman for a visit with an old friend.  Upon getting back to Billings, my homesick eyes would always devour the familiar and drop it into that spot in my stomach, leaving me filled once again with a deep sense that I was right where I belonged.  "It's nice to be home,' I'd say, trying not to seem too dramatic and hiding the fact I'd almost starved to death from the lack of familiar things.

Old houses were a dime a dozen in Billings.  I had owned three of them during my lifetime before I had kids, every one of them built in 1917.  I had never once even considered owning a new house.  The reason for this is very simple.  I wanted to listen to the creaking sounds of sunny hardwood floors as my future children played hide and seek while I did laundry in the basement.  They'd hide behind old oak doors framed in warm wood moldings covered with a patina it takes almost a hundred years to achieve.  Soft, muted colors on old plaster walls, white hexagon shaped tile and the old claw foot in the bathroom, and the smell of freshly baked whole wheat bread would feel normal. 

They'd walk home from school on autumn afternoons and crunch with their feet the leaves on sidewalks in front of houses built in a variety of architectural styles.  Craftsmen Bungalows, Victorians, Tudor revivals, Southern Plantation revivals, Dutch Colonials, etc.  They'd know each house on their block for their unique colors and the unique people who lived in them.  They'd be afraid of crotchety old Mr. Helmspot and his walking cane for it's flight through the air at them the times they mistakenly walked on his tulips.  But they'd love Mrs. Helmspot for her chocolate chip cookies and that look in her eyes that they didn't yet understand to be the longing for visits from her own grandchildren.

They'd live in the same old house on the same old block for the entirety of their childhoods, and when they came back during adulthood at Christmas time from all different places in the world with their wives and my grandchildren, their old bedrooms would be exactly as they'd left them.  And they'd have a deep sense that they had come back to the safest and most wonderfully familiar place in the world.  Home.

I realized when we moved to Arizona that I might have to give some of this up.  At first I thought I could create the same type of childhood for my kids here in Phoenix.  I might be homesick, but my kids wouldn't know the difference.  It might be a little hotter and so much for the autumn leaves, but it would feel like spring all the time and maybe we'd have a pool.  Mr. and Mrs. Helmspot would surely be there in some form.  They'd probably be Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales instead, but I'd always wanted to learn Spanish.  So I told the realtor that I wanted a house that represented "who I am."  Preferably an old Victorian with oak floors, painted cupboards in the kitchen, and odd little nooks where I could hide plates of cookies and then listen for the kids to giggle in delight upon finding them.  So we looked for houses in downtown Phoenix.

Unfortunately, most of the Victorians in Phoenix fell down prematurely because they had been built on sandstone foundations.  So right away we started looking for different kinds of old houses.  As we searched we found out that it was just too hot here before the invention of air-conditioning for much to have been built before the 1950s, so all of the early twentieth century houses, the Bungalows, English Tudors, and Spanish Revivals were rare, tiny, and incredibly expensive.

They were also the homes of people that didn't support their neighborhood school.  Instead, these people shipped their children north to nearby, neighboring districts (Phoenix had an open enrollment policy in which you could send your child to any public school you'd like) or they put them into private schools.  I did some research on the neighborhood school and found out that it was one of the best public schools in the city in a variety of ways.  So I asked a lot of the people at the open houses why they didn't send their children to that beautiful brick A++ school with the three story Greek columns out front, that was two blocks away.  I heard quite a list of half conceived, spur of the moment excuses like, "It's a rough school."

"Really?"  I would ask, "How so?"

"It just is," they'd answer.  No one could actually think of anything bad that had ever happened at that school, nor could they think of any justification for such a definite answer.  And no one actually said it was because its student population was 90% Hispanic.

I finally called the school personally and had a long talk with a lovely woman who discussed statistics with me in relation to the school's safety.  It was a safe place.  Now, I'm not stupid.  Of course there would be some problems as my children look like chubby little ghosts with the whitest blond you've ever seen and gray blue eyes.  But in a safe place, these kinds of problems can teach valuable life lessons.  

Suddenly, my dreams of our children walking home from school on sunny afternoons with their friends included the possibly of them learning Spanish in the process.  Even though this excited me, we still couldn't find a house in that neighborhood that we could afford.  There were a few ugly brick ranches from the 1940's that we could barely afford, but nothing else.  And I just couldn't bring myself to feel good about paying that much money for a tiny, sort of old house in a neighborhood that didn't support their neighborhood school.  I began to wonder what something like that might teach my kids.  Oh I agonized over that decision.

The tract houses in the suburbs were a lot less expensive, the population still mixed enough that I kept the hope of them learning Spanish while walking home from school, and most of the people supported their neighborhood schools.  So, we started looking at them.  Later on I would discover all of this to be pointless anyways.  I would find all three of my children in different schools, two of them miles away from my house and requiring bus transportation to get back and forth, and I'd have but a glimmer of hope left that they'd all learn English let alone Spanish.  I would also have accidentally, or miraculously depending on whether or not you believe in miracles, found my family in one of the best school districts for children with autism.  But, I'll get to that later.

Anyways after finally agreeing to to buy a cheap tract house in the burbs, I was a colossal baby about it.

"They all look the same!" I'd complain incessantly, "It's a good thing we don't drink!  Because all these houses are practically identical and if one ever fell into drunken stupor, they could easily mis-judge which house was theirs and end up in bed with some hairy neighbor.  Or his hot wife.  Hmm.  I guess I'm lucky Shane is fully present most of the time these days!  I suppose we can just check the address numbers each and every single time we come home before we go in." 

My patient realtor would form a crinkle right between her eyes and smile politely.  At the next one I would ask her, "Why do they put cheap, white metal windows on dark tan colored houses with no trim?  Nothing else is white on that entire house!  Could those windows possibly stick out any worse?"

She'd form the same crinkle and look up at the house like she'd never thought of that particular detail before.  When we'd go inside I'd continue my tantrum with,

"God these tract houses feel like the insides of hospitals don't they?  Metal and beige and white and blah.  What ever happened to good, old fashioned wood and a little color?  Oh that's right, we're in the burbs.  We don't care about architecture out here."

Bless every square inch of that woman's heart for putting up with me.

I really wanted one of these houses to jump out and grab me.  But in surrendering to buying a tract house, to the sameness, the lack of interesting details, the death of anything unique, and to becoming one of the boring many among the boring many, I'd discovered that none of these houses was going to JUMP or GRAB.  Instead I'd have to search, scour, and want to find something something special, some tiny detail that sung to me and made it mine. 

My love, dearest friend, and beautiful husband, Shane, went with her first to look at houses the afternoon we found our house, and I stayed behind to watch Alden, Isabel, and Cale.  Our children had become too difficult to take looking because they tended to run around and shatter the valued belongings of the people who still lived in these houses.  Alden was five, Isabel three and a half, and Cale was two, yet I was still patiently waiting for them to grow up a little and become normal children.

Shane and the realtor came back rather quickly to tell me that they'd found a house that had the perfect amount of space for us.  Four bedrooms upstairs and one down for the office.  He was actually semi-excited.  As excited as one could get anyways about a tract house.  So I went with her to see it while Shane watched the kids.

I was still trying to get used to Phoenix at the time.  In Billings, most of the streets are on a nice little grid going north, south, east, or west.  They can be trusted.  If you go straight for long enough on one street, nine times out of ten you can reach your destination.  There's one area of town in which the grid shifts angles slightly.  The street dividing the two areas is even called Division Ave., but it still throws people off.  The Phoenix valley hosts a giant grid as well, but only with it's major cross-streets.  The streets in between these cross-streets cannot be trusted for one second to do what you think they're going to do.

Each house in the Phoenix valley suburbs is sided with stucco, painted some shade of desert tan, and given a tile roof.  They go on for miles and miles these roofs, wavy seas of dark, pinkish tile in the middle of the desert.  Occasionally, one might come across an older area where the houses are this odd shade of salmon color, but they still have the same roofs.

Now, I've never been a person who easily loses her sense of direction.  I can find anything in any city any time.  But the monotony of the all the tan stucco occasionally turns even me around.  It's a bit like getting lost in the desert.   You look in one direction and it looks identical to the other, making it awfully easy to lose which direction you're facing.  It would be terrifying if it weren't for the air-conditioned vehicle and giant bottle of mountain spring water. 

You tend to get mesmerized by the sameness of the houses and fail to realize that the street is changing as you're driving.  One street lined with tan stucco houses slowly turns into another street lined with tan stucco houses as you go around a long bend.  The name of the street might actually change several times before you notice.  Once you notice you're on the wrong street, you are tempted to try to go back the way you think you came.  But unfortunately, because of all the tan stucco, you're not really sure if you're going back the way you came.  Suddenly you're saying things like,

"Did we go past that gray truck?"

"I'm not sure.  Did you see that black dog before?"

"Well, that's a poodle and I thought the one I saw was a lab.  That tree looks familiar."

"Honey, that's a Ficus.  Those are on every block."

"OOH!  A red bicycle!  I saw that before, did you?"

"I did.  Great.  Now we know for sure we're going in circles.  Did we get turned around just after the red bicycle or before?"

"Hmm."

This alone can take a long time.  If you are lucky enough to find your desired street again, it might end unexpectedly leaving you to again meander your way back through the complicated maze of tan colored sameness.  After some serious recalculation and finding you're way back to the main cross-street, you might think that the desired street continues somewhere on the other side of the cross-street.  So you plummet through the chaotic cross-street hoping not to get taken out by the pissed off Phoenix drivers who are sick of the fact that's it's been over 105 degrees for three straight months and who really want to just get home.

Once you're on the other side you first have to find a street in which to enter the block, then hope it takes you around a bend to your desired street.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.  But if you don't panic and turn around again, you might find your street and start to feel a little more comfortable.  And this, of course, leaves you at risk of once again becoming mesmerized.

Once we finally found the neighborhood we were trying to get to, we drove by a green park, past a sparkling water fall, and through rows of trees and bushes all sprouting red, pink, purple, and yellow flowers.  It was a beautiful day.  We came around a bend and went by a huge gray box school that held it's park, playgrounds, and sports areas right up under it's protective eye on a massive expanse of green lawn.  Children could play basketball, tennis, baseball, or plain old Frisbee right there in the heart of the neighborhood community surrounded by people who actually send their children to that school.  I noticed that it said K-8 on the sign out front.  "That would be nice," I mentioned to the realtor, who seemed slightly taken back that I'd actually said something nice.

We took a left but I didn't notice the name of the street as we pulled onto it because my eyeballs had rolled into the back of my head from all the tan stucco.  As we pulled into the driveway she explained to me that the house was a foreclosure.  We got out of her car looking up at the house and I realized it was the same layout as three others we'd seen before.  But I kept my mouth shut.

I entered my house and saw sunny yellow walls.  Shane was right to have gotten semi-excited.  It was the same basic layout as the others we'd seen but with one additional bedroom and a three car garage.  It was the perfect amount of space with three separate bedrooms all right across the hall from the master bedroom upstairs (a fact I would grow to seriously appreciate in the months to come), and an additional bedroom on the main floor for the office.

As I wandered around I put the fact that it had been foreclosed on together with the traces of children I found, pink paint in one bedroom, a little plastic doll with green pants on, brightly colored beads in the carpet, and came to the conclusion that this house had lost it's family.  Now I had viewed a lot of foreclosures, houses that had lost their families.  And many of these had been stripped down to their bones.  Whole kitchens had been removed where all that was left were missing expanses of tile where kitchen cabinets used to rest.  Bathroom fixtures were missing, carpeting had been rolled up and hauled away, and holes were left lining the sheet rock by people who had taken the copper wiring with them.  But my house had been valued.

It had been cleaned, the kitchen and bathrooms left intact, and the garage door openers and mailbox keys left on the counter with a note explaining how to work them.  The closet doors were all on their sliders, there was not one hole in all of the walls, and the cans of paint lining the shelves in the garage were lovingly labeled with which room each color matched.  "Maddie's room" was on the pink can.  This house had been cared for.  And it's emptiness consumed more than it's physical space.  This alone made me seriously consider purchasing the house.

Later that evening after I'd been trying for fifteen minutes to get my three and a half year old daughter to locate her nose, and she'd finally poked herself in the eye, Shane said to me laughing,

"Wouldn't it be funny to live on a street called Harmony Lane?  It's like a take-off of Elm Street."

Completely ignoring his analogy I sprung to full attention.  "Harmony Lane?  Which house is on Harmony Lane?" I asked looking up at him with wide eyes.

"The one we saw today.  You didn't notice?" he continued.

"No," I replied, "I was mesmerized by the stucco again." 

With a smile growing slowly and brightly on my face I continued with, "The street is called Harmony Lane?  That's sweet isn't it?  I think that might be the tiny detail."

"Huh?  asked Shane.

"Buying a house on Harmony Lane might just make everything all right," I answered.

So we called the realtor, had the offer in by the following morning, and I sighed with heavy relief that the struggle was finally over.  But obviously, it wasn't over.

Not only was buying our house on Harmony Lane not the solution for what was going on in our lives, but the whole experience of it completely foreshadowed the next couple years of my life.  I didn't realize it yet, but "who I am" had been built on a sandstone foundation.  And over the next couple of years I would find myself in the midst of a crisis that would not only break my heart, but would completely destroy the very structure of who I'd always been.

These experiences would hurl every deeply ingrained belief, every dearly held idea, each hope, dream, thought, and conviction, shatter each mid-air in fierce loud explosions, and then slam the leftovers into the ground.  I would find myself frantic and running around, desperately seeking survivors.  I would flip over each dying piece, every detail of who I thought I was, and check them all for vital signs.  Not one would survive.  And I would wake up one day to find that I was left with absolutely nothing that I had ever recognized about myself.

The glorious thing about self-destruction is that a new kind of person can be built out of the debris.  I not only have a different kind of house than I'd always envisioned, but I also have a different kind of family, a different kind of life than I'd always envisioned.  This is the story of my storm, the resulting awakening, and the birth of a whole new kind of life here on Harmony Lane.