Starting Over

When life leaves you no choice but to begin again

I had to start over. It was the only way. Simply looking out the window, driving my neighbourhood or into town gave me emotional angst.

We moved from the House of Doom abruptly. In fact, I made the shift while my partner was away at sea. He didn’t even get to see the first rented place in a new town before we moved in.

That’s not the house that saved me though. It was the one we lived in after that. The place we only got to live in for a year because it was actually for sale although the owners had said it was not. It did sell and we had to move on. But by then I was OK. Not great, not at my best, but moving back into the light.

It was a gift to live in this house, such a gift. A small acreage that sloped down to the ocean. Our own beach. Well, not really our own but hardly anyone bothered to drive to our neighbourhood to take the trail that lead there. A rope swing hung from a tree, the tide came in and out. The view from our windows was of boats passing, and once a pod of whales.

There was a field of wild daisies that came up in the spring and in the fall a small orchard of apple trees dropped bounty for us to pick.

The house had raised a family of eight kids, grown with children of their own. It now housed seven of us and three dogs, and for a time a couple of exchange students.

A big stone fireplace helped with heat and the living room was long with space at the other end for our big dining room table that could seat twelve with no problem and even more with the leaf that fit in the middle.

In the House of Doom we had enjoyed many happy family dinners with extended family seated around it before the troubles began. But there were rats that found their way in and I think they sensed the impending disaster.

Could you live with rats? The human kind and those that creep in the night and stare at you from on top of the fridge in the morning, or gnaw through your flour drawer and leave droppings? We had both. I despise living with rats.

Human rats include those that many of us might fear, who sometimes commit crimes against people. Actions that disturb much as the rodents do but obviously in different and significantly more unacceptable ways. Humans are capable of so much.

They both also know how to resist traps and are smart and manipulative. So many similarities between the two kinds of rats. And I am sorry, maybe this comparison is not really fair to the rodents. I don’t think they intend to be as disturbing as they are. Mostly I think they just want in from the cold and a free meal. Understandable. Unlike the human version.

The borrowed and temporary house of salvation had no rats of any kind. No doom whatsoever. All left behind. It became a house of healing. The memory of the rats who no longer lived with us became more distant. The house was old but we nestled in it’s spaces and rebuilt ourselves. Well I did. It was truly my chance to start over. No one in my new community knew me, or any of the things that had happened in my past life. I could pick what I shared. There were no hints and memories of people or places I should avoid. They were literally miles away.

I can’t talk much about the House of Doom, or the troubles that haunted me there. Maybe one day.

I can say that starting over was the right thing. There was financial and emotional cost involved for sure. The House of Doom was once a home I hoped to spend my whole life in; I loved it. So much loss.

It is ten years later now. A long time. Happiness is fleeting, but I have found it. I am sure. Because starting over is sometimes all there is left to do.

“When your world is completely flattened, you have no choice but to start over from the ground up. It can take over a decade. Anyone that watched from afar would call this a tragic catastrophe. I now know one of life’s greatest secrets; destruction breeds growth.” — Kristen Michelle Elizabeth