I was growing, too. One day, not long after I returned to Seattle, I’d been driving car pool when I heard a story on the radio about life coaches—that was a new thing at the time. The man who was being interviewed was talking about an alternative approach to viewing careers.
“You need to think about the things that bring you satisfaction in your life,” he said. “It doesn’t matter which one earns your money. The trick is to meet as many of those needs as possible.”
It was perhaps not a quantum event, but it altered my life anyway. At the time, I was writing copy for hire, work that paid almost nothing. My own writing had never sold. I did the contract work mostly so I could claim an identity as a writer—but I could feel all those bland sentences slowly leaching the creativity from my words.
When I got home, I made a list of what I loved: my family, writing, cooking, houses. I thought about going to culinary school, but restaurant hours are awful for someone with children. Houses, though—that was an interesting thought. I’d learned a lot during our renovation that I could use to help buyers and sellers. Being a real estate agent could be far more lucrative than writing, and with two houses to support and the kids aiming for college, we needed the money. If I flipped the equation—tried making my living from houses instead—I could take cooking lessons on the side and write without the pressure of publication.
Once again, it was almost astonishing how easily things fell into place. I found I loved real estate—it was as energizing and demanding as the renovation had been, which made my reentry into Seattle life easier. And over the next six years, when I got breaks between clients, I worked on my cooking-school stories. I never expected anyone other than maybe my mother to read them, but writing them made me happy. And during that time, as my children headed out of childhood and I lost my father and dear friends to illness, I learned to listen to life a little better.
Unlike quantum events, irony can, or at least should, be foreseen. After all, irony is irony because all the elements are already there waiting for you. So perhaps I should have foreseen that in the ultimate act of irony, it was the book about the cooking school, the one I wrote only for myself, that finally sold. The contract was for two novels, including one I had yet to write. I didn’t know what the other book would be—all I knew was that I had a year to complete it.
* * *
—
AND THAT IS WHERE the house in Port Townsend came in again. Out of the blue, our renters emailed to say they were leaving in September.
A fantasy bloomed in my mind—I imagined going to Port Townsend a couple days a week, like I used to, but this time I would be writing rather than slinging a sledgehammer. I could hunker down, get words done. It was a long commute for an office, and it would be tight financially, but the idea fizzed in my bloodstream. All that quiet. The space. The house.
“Can I have the house?” I said to Ben. “Just for a year?”
And we leapt, again.
* * *
—
NOW, I WAS ON the ferry, heading toward the house in Port Townsend. I’d waited years for this. There had been times when we’d come close to selling—it would have been the practical thing to do, after all—but we never had. Every time, something had happened that made it possible to hold on to it. A windfall at work, a new and perfect renter just when we needed one. But there was more to it than luck. I’m not the kind of person to have an affair, but at times I longed for that house in a way that felt almost unseemly. I would shove the emotions down, but the house was always in the back of my mind, waiting.
So it should have felt like triumph to be returning to the house, but suddenly it was the furthest thing from it. In the month since our renters had given notice, we had dropped Ry off for his freshman year in college—the first time both he and Kate had been gone. The house in Seattle shook with their absence, and me along with it. I didn’t know what to do without their routines shaping mine, without the warmth of their bodies, the sound of their voices in the house. I was a forty-nine-year-old premenopausal woman, suddenly without children. What I did have was a deadline I didn’t know how to meet and a book I didn’t know if I could write.
Then, two days before I was due to head to the house in Port Townsend, the stock market crashed, spectacularly. This time, we hadn’t cashed out our savings for a trash-filled house. And I’d just quit real estate, the only secure income I’d ever had, to write full-time. We had two kids in college, and we needed both of their parents to be working, hard.
Now, Ben was in the ferry line behind me, driving our camper bus, filled with a folding table, a big chair, a futon mattress, and a few pots and pans—supplies for my writing life. I looked out across the water and saw the mirror ferry coming toward me, and I wondered what the hell I was doing.
* * *
—
IT’S AN ODD THING about the house in Port Townsend. The first time we were ever inside, the smells were horrifying, and until we’d cleaned out the trash and gotten rid of the plaster and lath, I’d spent much of my time in a respirator. But the day we finished the renovation, as I was closing the front door for what I knew would be a long time, I noticed a remarkable scent—a combination of baking bread and sunshine, the most pure and loving fragrance I’d ever encountered.
“Do you smell that?” I asked George, but he just looked at me, puzzled.
I figured it would go away as soon as the renters moved in and cooked their own food, but now as I opened the door to the empty house, there was that scent again.
Ben and I carried in the few pieces of furniture—a strange reversal of our trash clean-out years before. And then Ben left, dashing to catch a ferry and go back to work, and I was standing in the house, alone.
* * *
—
EXPERTS ARE QUICK TO tell you that empty-nest syndrome is not a clinical diagnosis. It is, instead, a “phenomenon”—one they say has upsides as well as down. When I look for synonyms for phenomenon, I find stunner and miracle. I also find paradox, which seems appropriate.
Faced with a hollow house, parents are encouraged to fill it with plans of their own. As I stood in our living room in Port Townsend, I thought perhaps I had taken that advice a bit too literally. The house was the emptiest of nests. The walls were white, and all the trappings of family were nonexistent—no photographs on the fridge, no couch that kids had sprawled on, no dishes in the sink, no smells of Ry’s late-night macaroni-and-cheese feasts. The floors were bare, and the sound of my feet echoed without the muffling effect of their lives. All I had were plans.
I set my writing chair in front of the dining room window that looked out over the orchard, to the water. The scent of the house lingered around me. I opened my laptop.
There is another synonym for phenomenon: one for the books.
“Okay,” I said, and started to type.
* * *
—
AFTER YEARS OF FITTING my writing into the nooks and crannies of my life, suddenly I had an astonishing expanse of time. It rolled out before me like the view from the window. I fell into a predictable routine—I would get up early, make a cup of coffee, take a seat by the big window, and wait for the characters to come. One by one, they claimed their stories—parallel universes made of words. Perhaps it was because the space was so exactly empty that the characters came so easily, without the hooks of to-do lists or even the internet to get caught on as they found their way to me.
On the days of the week when I was in Port Townsend, I was a writer, and only that. When I was in Seattle, I did the rest of my life. Before, I had always felt guilty that I was writing when there were errands to run or dishes to wash, and the reverse was also true. Now, cued by geography, I did one role at a time and my productivity skyrocketed.
* * *
—
THERE WERE, OF COURSE, times when I did get stuck, when I couldn’t see or hear where a character should go next. I learned quickly enough that forcing the words only wrote me into a corner—in
my desire to hit a daily word count, I was shoving my characters into plot points they could never live inside. They would grumble, go sideways, go silent.
When that happened, I learned to put the laptop down and head out for a walk, letting the sound of the waves and the motion of my feet jostle the ideas around in my head. Outside, it was easier to let go of the control, to listen and allow the characters to figure out where they wanted to be.
I began to carry a small notebook with me so I could write down ideas when they arrived. Gradually, over the months and miles, it got to the point where walking was as much a part of writing as moving my fingers across the keys.
* * *
—
I’M NOT THE FIRST writer to be a walker, not by a long shot. It’s been said that William Wordsworth walked almost 175,000 miles in his life. Aristotle used to give his lectures on foot (and Steve Jobs did the same with his meetings). Charles Dickens maintained the same writing schedule I did—writing in the morning and walking in the afternoon, although his walks were said to be in the twenty-to-thirty-mile category. I can’t imagine.
There are scientific reasons behind our desire for movement. Walking is particularly helpful for what is called “divergent thinking,” the brainstorming kind, which aims for many possible solutions rather than one answer. In a 2014 Stanford University experiment, participants were asked to come up with new and novel uses for a known object. Their creative output was raised by 60 percent when they were walking as opposed to sitting. In another experiment, where participants were tasked with generating complex analogies, 100 percent of the participants who walked outside could come up with at least one, as opposed to 50 percent of those seated inside.
The theory here is that walking allows the brain to focus on something it already knows how to do, which gives the rest of your mind free rein to wander. Which is all to say that if you are stuck in the middle of writing a book or trying to figure out your life, perhaps the best thing you can do is walk.
And so I did. Mile after mile after mile. Port Townsend is tailor-made for pedestrians, woven together by paths that meander over hills and around the town. There is a sense of mystery as you enter one of these trails for the first time; you’re never quite sure where you’ll come out. I made a pact with myself—any time there was a path, I took it. If I got lost, all the better.
Walking became second nature, and I got used to parking my car when I arrived and not touching it again until it was time to leave. Anything I needed was within a mile or two, and the streets of Port Townsend seemed to belong to people more than cars, anyway. As I walked, I got stronger and happier—and the words flowed.
* * *
—
WRITERS AREN’T THE ONLY ones who are made better by living in a walkable city. Studies done using data from Walk Score, a company that determines the walkability of US cities, have shown that if you reside in a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, your likelihood of becoming obese drops by 25 percent. General satisfaction with your life trends upward, as well; in survey after survey, walkable cities slamdunk the ones where the inhabitants are reliant on cars. It’s easy to see why. It’s estimated that today, a cyclist in London will move faster than most drivers—who will also each spend 106 days of their lives searching for parking spots. In Seattle, which in 2017 was ranked second in the nation for evening rush-hour congestion, a driver with a one-hour commute will waste an extra 148 hours per year just trying to get home.
But there’s another, less quantifiable benefit to walking. On those afternoons exploring Port Townsend, I gained a feeling for the terrain and the community in a way I had never experienced driving around Seattle. While a GPS system relieves a driver of having to pay attention to the route, and a car speeds us past the details of shopwindows and people’s faces and the weather, walking gives us an intimacy with our environment that sinks in deep. In Port Townsend, my walks were navigated by sensory details: a fence decorated with brightly colored coffee mugs, the feel of damp earth beneath my shoes, the smell from the local bakery early in the morning. My senses woke up and reached out, connecting me physically to that small part of the world.
* * *
—
I SPENT THE BETTER part of twelve months in Port Townsend writing that second novel. Once again, the house had become my place to figure out who I was. It provided both an empty nest and a perch, refuge and prospect as I looked toward what came next. Because in reality I was doing a lot more than writing a book. I was being on my own, in many ways for the first time in my life. I had grown up surrounded by siblings, then a husband, then children—always observed, always observing. But this was different. In that empty space, I was just myself. I made my own context. I learned to ride the waves of my changing hormones and welcome what the bright and dark moods could bring to my writing. I practiced having opinions dependent upon no one else’s needs. I would stay up until two in the morning if the writing was going well, or get up at four and write into the light.
You might think that all this was a recipe for divorce—and indeed, some of our friends thought Ben and I were attempting a trial separation, given the logistics of the situation. But in fact, the opposite was true. Allowed the space to be a writer, I was a better wife. I was more likely to take the initiative, to do things that made me happy, and to state my needs, rather than wait, frustrated, for Ben to intuit what I wanted. He’d been asking for those things for years. And if my being away meant he got a few evenings on his own to indulge his cravings for junk food, well, that was just a bonus.
* * *
—
AT THE END OF that year, I finished the book and put up the FOR RENT sign once again. The latter almost broke my heart, but the economic depression was still in full force. We’d managed for the year, but we still needed Ben’s job in the city, and we couldn’t sell our Seattle house until the market recovered again. Port Townsend would have to wait, one more time.
The one thing I didn’t have to wait for was a renter. Fifteen minutes after I put up the sign, just as I was collecting my things to leave, a sweet young couple came to the front door. Standing on the porch, they told me they almost never took this route on their afternoon walk, but on impulse they’d gone a different way that day and seen the sign. When I invited them in to look at the house, the woman stopped in the entry, marveling.
“What’s that beautiful smell?” she asked.
Her husband gazed about, puzzled.
I smiled. “I think this is yours,” I told her, and held up the key.
LEAVING HOME
The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.
—Marie Kondo
ONE YEAR, TWO, THREE. Finally, all the pieces were coming together. Both kids were truly fledged, with jobs and apartments of their own. The economy was finding its footing as well, and our backyard neighbors in Seattle asked if they could buy our house. They were a young couple with two kids, who wanted to stay in the neighborhood but needed more space. It all felt right; it was time to move.
But first—in an instance of perfect and ironic symmetry—we had to clean out our house.
* * *
—
BACK WHEN WE WERE clearing out the trash in the house in Port Townsend, we had set some things aside for a garage sale, although the logic of our choices had been haphazard at best. As a result, the event had had a Salvador Dalí–esque quality—the lavender padded toilet seat lined up next to fourteen fishing rods, twenty-five bowling balls, thirty-two pairs of size thirteen wing-tip shoes, a huge box of avocado-colored dishware, and another of ancient 78s, music from another time crumbling out of the vinyl.
It hadn’t seemed to matter to the people who arrived and plowed through our questionable merchandise with the excitement of Black Friday shoppers. Maybe it was the thrill of finally getting inside the mystery house, or maybe it really was what we were selling, but the mood was frenzied, to put it mildly. In the midst of it all, rat numbe
r thirteen crawled out of the dining room wall. Weaving in a poisoned stupor between the feet of the crowd, it had managed to make it to the exact center of the room, where it seized up, shivered, and died, slowly, the La Bohème of rodent opera.
There was not even a pause in the bargaining.
After that, I’d returned to Seattle and started going through our own things with a vengeance. I even organized an annual neighborhood garage sale. Ours lacked the flair of the one in Port Townsend, but at the end of the day, the stuff was gone, which was all I’d cared about. What surprised me was how I could fill the entire front lawn, year after year. Every January, I would start at the top of our house and work my way down, a room a month, the cast-asides collecting in a corner of the basement until the sale in September. Plastic baseball bats for children long grown up. Flannel shirts from a phase of mine in college. Wedding gifts we’d never used. Six giant bottles of window cleaner. All those Legos. I’d thought I was organized, completely different from the hoarder whose life I’d so intimately touched. But every year, the front yard filled, and every year I would dig a bit deeper into the closets and the drawers. But it seemed that no matter how deep I went, there was always another layer or two or ten.
* * *
—
MARIE KONDO, WHOSE BOOK The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has become an international phenomenon, would say my problem was that I was doing my winnowing all wrong. Kondo does not follow the traditional wisdom that sorting can be done an object a day, or a room a month. She believes in an all-out one-time purge—the kind that makes such a visual impact that you are forever changed, unwilling to backslide into clutter.
House Lessons Page 17