Pausing

It was snowing here, this morning.  I was sitting in my room, in a chair watching the flakes drift down outside. The wind blew around and then stopped.  The sun wasn't up yet. The light outside was bluish and gray, and white where the snow was on the ground.  There was no sound, in the house or outside.  There is something very cozy about that time of the early morning in winter.  There is also something isolating about that time, too. 

I don't know why but it made me think of the time we had moved down south.  A job transfer had taken us there.  The children were small, my daughter wasn't even a year old.  We still had our house up north to sell.  The market was slow at the time, so we packed what we needed, and left the rest in the house.  Family and friends checked on the house while we were gone.  Strangers had been walked through.  We had been gone for three months, when I flew back with my son and daughter to take them for their check ups (A good way to spend time with my mom and grandmother, too).  I remember us driving to the house after we had been to the doctor's.  Driving up to it, it stood there in the evening light, silent and still.  Windows sporadically lit by the timers attached to the lamps.  I remember walking into the house. It was cold.  Quiet.  Our furniture and a few pictures were still up.  Some clothes were still hanging in the closets.  The house hadn't sold. It was still ours, but in a way, it wasn't ours.  We had started a new life down south, and were only visiting this life we had  left.  There was a loneliness about it.  Even when the heat came on, and all of the lights were lit, and food was simmering on the stove, it still felt as though we had broken into someone else's home.  It made me sad.  I loved that house (even when I have dreams about 'going home' it is that house that I find myself in). 

My life feels like that to me now; like I'm wandering through rooms and spaces that I still own, but aren't really mine, anymore.  We were on a path, not a smooth path, but we had plans as a family.  My daughter had plans. And then this stranger called Addiction, set up house, and now I don't feel at home anymore.  The life I was participating in, is not my life anymore.  There are days were I do feel like packing up and moving; That new surroundings and people may help me to feel at home or 'right' again.  I did call a realtor last summer, but when I walked around the house looking at all of the packing I would have to do, and being kind of sad and foggy in the head to begin with, I dropped the idea; though I have started going room by room and downsizing, so I'm not totally through with the idea of moving.  But I'm kind of resentful that I even have to think of something like that.  I'm  just tired of feeling 'not like me'. 

I'm really not whining.  I do try to make the best of a situation, you know, 'bloom where I'm planted.'   I've done a pretty good job of it.  It's just that I miss the plan that was in place before this; life would be so much different now, if all of this hadn't happened. Anyway, that was what I was thinking of as I rambled around in my 'old house' this morning, while the snow was falling and for a few muffled moments, I paused between the past and present.