The hollyhocks are blooming in multiple colors in my new yard right now, and I find that rather minorly miraculous. By the time I put my home of 40 years on the market, I was ready to leave that dwelling.
I was not ready to leave every part of my yard. So I dug up about a dozen of those flowers, whose seeds had been shared with me by dear friends, including one friend who has passed.
When the flowers bloomed each summer-tall and proud and some so deep a purple it would appear black- I always thought of JoAnne. She had a whole garden of tall, bright hollyhocks at her ranch on the river.
I dug up some lavender too. When I shut the door the last time of the then-empty house, I had fully accepted it was no longer my home. But the tear I shed was for my sweet yard, decades in the making. It was more my home than the space inside. And during Covid, it was where I lived.
Well-meaning friends told me that hollyhocks don’t transplant well, especially in the summer. I nodded, knew the odds, and dug them up anyway.
When they started to bloom this week, my joy was disproportionate to the action. I have one of those dark blooms right at my front porch and some hot pink ones along the fence posts in the new giant backyard.
I dug up lavender also, and it made the transition just fine. It looks different out of the rock garden and under the canopy of the massive evergreen. I journeyed to the new version of the cherished Park City nursery and picked up starts for a new herb garden.
The deer seem to know, as they did three doors down and around the corner, that they can share in the birdseed bounty if they leave the flowering things alone.
This new home is closer to the creek. We call it McLeod Creek now, but it was Kid’s Creek when I first moved to town. It was the place where kids learned to fish before we became so gentrified that a paved bike trail replaced the dirt path along the water.
I can hear sandhill cranes that frequent the creek often, but I have yet to see one.
The chipmunks came as a surprise- their incessant chatter- I have not found charming. So I have been explaining to them that when I take my morning tea outside on the giant wraparound porch, we can get along if they won’t be noisy idiots. There will be consistent seed and fruit offerings – if they dial back the high pitch twitter.
This is a work in progress.
Inside the house, it is an entirely different story. The lifetime of carefully curated antiques doesn’t translate here. Or perhaps I am weary of carrying so much of my past. Because my life has never followed any kind of normal trajectory, I owned my first home when I was 16.
There was an unexpected inheritance when a bunch of people I barely knew on my father’s side, including my estranged father, all died in rapid succession in a span of three years.
All of my homes after that were all decisions made by men. This is the first time in my long life I am starting with a blank slate. And I am surprised at how liberating it all feels.
I don’t look at a room and say this is so and so’s room because those children grew up and now have young adults of their own. I picked my new bedroom -out of the three- not for the size ( it is the tiniest) but for the views and the light that starts with lavender dawns and opens to stars when the darkness settles.
The master suite is, instead- the study. It is where The Work gets done, sure, but it has my easiest chair there and more great views of mountains and sky.
For the first time ever, for my own use anyway, I unfurled my grandmother’s Oriental rug on the floor. And not to sound all Lewbowski-like, but the rug really does pull the room altogether.
Unpacking and placing the books “just so” in there will take, well, a very long time.
That rug had no place in my home when I inherited it a dozen years ago. But we used it several times when we had performers who wanted to sing outdoors, on the stage, barefoot.
Joss Stone was the first, and we explained to her the Deer Valley “stage” was just splintered plywood. She explained, in her newly emancipated voice at 18, she would be singing barefoot. So I countered with a rug.
A few years later, when Melissa Etheridge said she would be performing sans shoes, we were ready with The Rug. But really, it has spent more than a decade, mostly in storage.
It looks pretty damn regal now in that room.
As for the virtual pallets’ worth of framed stuff that made the move- much of that will move on. The faded posters from, say, the San Francisco Ballet Company Nutcracker in the 70’s- hold no heart tugs for my children or theirs.
All announcements of ski events and music stuff…too tired. And I am learning- oh so slowly, the freedom that comes with walking/ living lighter.
The house already feels home even though the unpacking will be -I have accepted-months in the doing. But my life now is fully on a time frame of my own making.
I run all my curatorial decisions past…no one. When the new committee gathers each morning, we acknowledge each other respectfully (okay, not yet with the bratty chipmunks ), and we honor the start of each day.
Moving into this chapter in the fullness of summer, knowing fall and winter follow, is a gift I didn’t see coming. And I have such gratitude I am staying here in a deeper part of my hood to celebrate all these precious Sundays in the Park…