Dark early mornings with the smell of candle wax and incense. My cotton T-shirt wet from the cat suckling me. The bistro lamps on the chicken coop out back and the occasional silhouettes of deer passing by, pausing to chew the bare ferns. The sound of the heater and clocks ticking, the radio. The cracking of my toes when I stretch my feet.
When I’m doing neck rolls in yoga the sound it makes is something like bubble wrap. Trapped air pockets. When my knees crackle it’s like an empty bag of potato chips being crumpled. During inversions the blood flow shifts: not requiring the veins to push it back to the heart but rather, giving the veins a break. I used to think you had to hang upside down like a bat to get these benefits but folding forward or putting your legs up the wall (on your back) produces similar effects. Just keep the head below the heart.
I thawed the last of the ham and bean soup from Christmas. Added a mason jar of ham juice from the carving board that oozed out of the glass in a blob. Since I’d slow cooked the ham hocks in the soup the collagen leaked out of the tendons and literally created a ham Jell-O. I hid the jar in the back of the fridge so no one would see. It looked like something from a high school biology lab.
I was going to see a friend I reached out to on New Year’s, a guy from our old neighborhood. I asked our oldest daughter if she had any memories of that first house in West Seattle. She had just two: the hot tub that was made out of a cedar crate barrel and me telling her she could never go in it because it was full of rats. That and a scene from our bedroom, watching dust particles fall in the morning sunlight and imagining it was pixie dust. One for two, good memories-wise. That was the logic I had as a drinker then (rats in the hot tub), no filter. Best to let that one go.
Sixteen years ago this house of ours went on the market and we put an offer on it the first day it was for sale. I’d just gotten a new job at Starbucks corporate, what would be the high and low point of my time there.
We got lucky: we bought when the market was low and sold high, closing on our first house in August of 2008, just weeks before the crash. From 2008 to 2010 we hunkered down at my mother-in-law’s and mom’s house in Germany; ironically they’d both became widows the same year. They helped raise our two girls, then 5 and 2.
My favorite memory of this house is the first day we showed it to our girls and the look on their faces when they first saw the old play set on the edge of the property. That look of pure surprise and joy as they ran with glee to it, racing each other across the grass. I have no better memory than that. The play set is decrepit now and moss covered, abandoned, but I will lock that memory in, scratch it in the pavement.
I turned 40 that year, a fitting age to have what would become our trophy home, two healthy kids, a dog, two cats, a hot tub. Heck we even had a pickle ball court and chicken coop, a three-car garage.
My wife contracted with Microsoft and worked her ass off. I plodded my way through a new job but never really jibed with it. We did all the normal things young families do: soccer leagues in the spring, selling Girl Scout cookies, trick or treating in the rain, church. Then we went off-script and moved to Europe for nine months, came back and got the kids smart phones. And as they entered middle school and the pandemic hit life got weird. Ten years passed. Now sixteen.
After it all I still have this body of mine, and today I did wheel pose for the first time in years. It’s a deep back bend that opens your chest and trunk, and I felt young and strong again in an instant (and then broke the pose before I hurt myself).
My mom has often said with wonder how she doesn’t feel any older inside, as she’s advanced in years. I feel that too. Just don’t look too closely at photos of yourself or spend too much time in the mirror. Your body is like a house and you only get one.
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Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir
Bill Pearse 
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